Since the advent of democracy in 1994, music scholarship in South Africa has taken an editorial turn as more and more scholars such as Christine Lucia, Stephanus Muller and now Hilde Roos, focus on the neglected area of a particular kind of musical style regimented by the racist politics of colonialism and apartheid. In just about all music styles, from Western classical music through pop and traditional music, apartheid sought to organise respective population groups around specific music genres. Thus it was that certain styles of music, such as opera, in the case of Roos’ book, were reserved for white people, or, as they said during apartheid, “Europeans.” The focus of her book, The Eoan Group based in Cape Town, was established by Helen Southern-Holt in District Six in 1933. The Eoan Group focused on areas such as social work, ballet, and drama, but it was opera which set the stage for a great many encounters which speak to the personal, the historical, and the musicological. Under the leadership of Joseph Manca, who joined the music section of The Eoan Group as choral conductor in 1943, the first opera production was staged on 10 March 1956.

The Eoan Group consisted of members of a population group identified as “coloured” by the apartheid government. Members were mostly blue-collar workers who had a passion for performing European operas and American musicals. Among them were Sophia Andrews and Vera Gow who excelled even as they were denied training by the best possible teachers in Cape Town. Performances by The Eoan Group received either praise or derision. Their class and “race” made it easy to invite comments such as them being musical despite adequate training or being able to thrive despite their “lack of education.” They were either caught in the apartheid projections of its henchmen, such as Manca, or, in perceptions of their fortuitous relationship with the apartheid government and “white money.” The book describes how most performers of The Eoan Group lived with these essentialist norms while negotiating the restrictions imposed around the production and reception of a music style, opera.

Roos’ book addresses the issue of musical performance which unfolded, developed, and eventually perished as a result of apartheid policies and the resistance by some of the oppressed to these policies. Using Verdi’s opera, “La Traviata,” as the basis for her extrapolation on music and race during apartheid, Roos produces a rich narrative which draws on archival holdings and interviews with members of The Eoan Group. Roos unpicks with meticulous care the nuances of the realities and lives of “coloured” people in Cape Town during apartheid. She describes the challenges they endured in the community, as many in the coloured community, especially of the “educated” class, spurned The Eoan Group and considered it as complying with the goals of the apartheid government. One of its leading administrators, Alethea Jansen, stands out as she had a prominent position in the apartheid government’s Coloured Representative Council (CRC). The CRC was part of the government’s strategy to divide the black oppressed of South Africa by offering coloureds a nominal sense of the franchise.

The book, which is based on documents obtained from The Eoan Group’s archives which are now housed at DOMUS (Documentary Centre for Music at Stellenbosch University), the South African National Library, and interviews, provided the author with a substantial amount of information on how the members of the group managed their everyday and musical lives. The book is a testimony to the value of music archives in South Africa in as far as so much of what they contain had not yet been studied and brought to light for everyday consumption. There could have been more discussion around archives and their roles in shaping a post-apartheid or decolonial dispensation in music scholarship. Roos has, however, made a noble effort in bringing this information to public attention. The attention to detail and the piecing together of a narrative based on many loose threads is a remarkable feat and a lesson to many among us on how archival deposits can form the basis of such a rich discourse around musical performance.

The book demonstrates that in apartheid South Africa, certainly, music was anything but neutral. Structures of the apartheid government such as the media and universities, entrenched the idea that certain musics were reserved for certain population groups only. In the 1980s, at one particular university, which still considers itself as the representative of all that is South African “music,” one risked being at the receiving end of blind racism, in cases where those deemed not “European” proved themselves as equal or better than those to whom the music allegedly belonged. The insidious relationship between the university and apartheid is palpable in this book. Many of the current and older practitioners at these music institutions in South Africa, including academics, musicians and composers, wittingly encouraged discrimination in their classroom and spewed forth racist vitriol whenever they could. It is therefore apposite for Roos to flay open the racist ideas of Gregoria Fiasconaro, who served as the Dean of the South African College of Music at the University of Cape Town in the early 1980s. His successor, Brian Priestman, continued in his footsteps and was emboldened by the militarisation of the university campus. Using classical music as their weapon of choice, these individuals at the University of Cape Town exercised their racial privilege with impunity. This brings me to a final comment: it is telling that the stories of music under apartheid are being written by those who generally benefited so much from it. Non-white scholars should be more active in this field as I am sure they will speak from direct experience instead of relying too heavily on manicured holdings in an archive. The author could also have been more critical about the transgression in as far as those deemed not “European” nonetheless took on the challenge of performing a music style not deemed “their own.”