African Stars: Studies in Black South African Performance (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology Series)

Rating:
Summary: Talented, under oppression
Review: Written in the twilight years of apartheid, this book conveys some of the spirit of black South Africans as they struggled against a cruel dictatorship. Erlmann surveys the field from 1890 to 1990.

In going through his descriptions of the people, one has to wonder. In a different and better period, some of the musicians and actors might have become world famous. The comparison to African-American singers is inevitable. Yet for most of the performers that Erlmann mentions, only fragments of memory and aging photos and LPs remain.