Moerane was born into a family of teachers who ‘irradiated’ education throughout southern Africa ‘and beyond’:

The enormous pride expressed here is fully justified. Yet teachers at these few elite schools for African scholars worked against all odds. Moerane spent most of his teaching life in the Cape Colony working in the environment of mission education during the poverty-gripped colonial late-1920s and throughout the 1930s; then in a climate of increasing state repression in black schools during the 1940s and 1950s, as apartheid took control of every aspect of life. Even in his final years in Lesotho, he operated in a country rife with political interference and economic impoverishment. Not only that, but by the time he was fully educated and musically trained, and had produced an orchestral work that belongs firmly within the orchestral culture of the Western metropolis, Moerane was obliged to teach only in rural schools, which were largely without resources, and without a formal music curriculum. This while negotiating a national educational ideology that separated schooling from urban life and dictated that students aspire to be little more than agricultural or industrial labourers. That he not only survived these odds, but did such a huge amount of good as a teacher is clear from the evidence presented in this book. But first we must ask: how did the odds become so stacked against such an achievement?

In the landmark 1984 publication, Apartheid and Education: The Education of Black South Africans, one author after another documents policies that had remained unchanged for a hundred years prior to that, and were, in the 1980s, still excluding the black majority from any aspirations.