Transmission of Cultural Heritage and Identity through Traditional Music and Storytelling with a Focus on Bapedi Children’s Musical Arts

The oral acts of Bapedi people are rich and varied, and remain a living tradition that is transferred from generation to generation. In the Bapedi society, the context of festival music making is a natural way of combining enjoyment with education. Early childhood music education is a multifaceted discipline, involving myriad strands of knowledge, and children learn through discovery as opposed to being bombarded with hard facts. The purpose of this ethnographic study was to investigate how traditional music and storytelling serve as an instrument of transmitting cultural heritage and identity within Bapedi people’s cultural context, with a focus on children’s musical arts. The primary sources for data collection were informal interviews, observations and recordings. Secondary sources include publications and records. Two interrelated research questions therefore guided this study; 1) How do children in the Bapedi society learn their culture through traditional music and storytelling? and; 2) What are the moral lessons behind traditional Bapedi music and storytelling? The results have shown that in early childhood, it is play that underlies almost all informal learning. The results have also demonstrated that some songs are taught by parents during storytelling evenings and are supposedly sung by certain characters in a story.