Malawian hymnody

The ethnomusicologist and missionary, A. M. Jones, states that African Christian music was first used in worship by the Church of Scotland in the late 1800s among the Ngoni people of what was then Nyasaland (now Malawi), as an exceptional occurrence. While he provides no details, his observation indicates the possibility of attempts to produce indigenous hymnody that preceded most other places in Africa with the exception of the hymns of the Xhosa prophet Ntsikana* in South Africa (Jones, 39). Christian hymnody in southern Africa, like other parts of Africa, was strongly influenced by missionaries. Indigenous forms of music, like other African customs and rituals, were generally regarded as...