The symphonic poem Fatše La Heso (My Country) is Moerane's only extant orchestral work. As an orchestral composition by a black South African that makes extensive use of traditional music, it remains unique. The preconditions for the work to exist are unusual and it stands in quite sharp contrast to the orchestral work produced, for example, by African Americans William Grant Still, William Levi Dawson and Florence Price. The 1930s and 1940s in the United States were ‘a time of rebirth in the Black literary arts known as “The Harlem Renaissance”’, when ‘Black artists of all mediums – writers, poets, painters, and musicians – were encouraged by black leaders to draw upon their own African cultural heritage and events of recent black history […] for inspiration in their own respective artistic media.’ Many black South African writers and artists were inspired by the Harlem Renaissance to reconcile modernity with the preservation of black cultural traditions, and it is highly likely that Moerane was too, when he set about reconciling orchestral writing with traditional music from Lesotho.

The inspiration behind his symphonic poem was not only the Harlem Renaissance; there were many factors at play in the genesis of the work, including musical influences. A number of African-American and African composers admired Dvořák (1841–1904): not only had he helped to shape the genre of the symphonic poem as an expression of nineteenth-century nationalism, but through his promotion of ‘the wealth of American material found in the melodies and harmonies’ of spirituals, he had inspired Grant Still, Price, Levi Dawson and others to incorporate styles such as the spiritual into their classical compositions. Dvořák had lived for a while in the United States and worked closely with the famous black collector of folk songs and spirituals, Harry T Burleigh (Henry Thacker Burleigh), some of whose arrangements Moerane knew (see Chapter 7). Notwithstanding the racialised world in which African-American composers in the 1930s and 1940s operated, it was still possible for them to study at university and to contemplate symphonic writing. For Moerane, it was almost unthinkable, given the ‘parallel streams’ of music production and reception in South Africa described in earlier chapters.