The music life of the African Continent is as rich as it is diverse. Innumerable traditions of indigenous music co-exist with musics imported both from the West and the East, from Europe and Asia. The impact of African music on that of the West is equally undeniable. Filtered through the United States, the music of Black Africa entered indelibly into the western musical consciousness, spawning such diverse progeny as the music of Tin Pan Alley, the jazz and ragtime-influenced works of Gershwin, Ravel and Stravinsky, and the whole of today’s popular music scene.

In the past 30 years, the creative exploration of African indigenous music has gone far beyond its exploitation as mere local colour. The drumming music of sub-Saharan Africa has even provided the prime impetus for the minimalist aesthetic that has proven one of the most successful artistic movements of the past decades, and has in turn linked up with ‘popular’ genres of more distant African ancestry. African music has thus helped to bridge the gap between the ‘avant-garde’ and the ‘popular’ in a manner that has arguably not occurred in the West for some two hundred years.

And yet: the music of Africa itself remains poorly documented, with only a small number of its composers finding their way into the reference works that most commonly found in the libraries of the world. The present ‘Dictionary of African composers’ aims to fill that gap. The Dictionary will, of course, be continually updated and expanded. Additions, corrections and suggestions are always welcome, and should be sent to Alexander Johnson.

This dictionary was a research project of the Music Department of the University of Pretoria, and was funded jointly by the Research Development Office of the University of Pretoria, the Mmino South Africa and Norwegian Education and Music Programme, and the National Research Foundation of South Africa.