More than 80 years ago Hugh Tracey made his first recordings of African music and earned himself a reputation as a madman who sallied into the bush with people playing drums.
That was in 1929, today his unique archives have been digitalized and used as teaching aids in two new school textbooks, realizing his life dream of preventing the music from dying out.
The International Library of African Music (ILAM) is made of up recordings on 78 rpm discs and magnetic tape. Its contents amount to a running time of six months, gathered from what is now Zimbabwe throughout southern and eastern Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Tracey collection is housed at the Rhodes University campus at Grahamstown in South Africa and is the most important archive of its sort in Africa.
The thousands of hours of music include village ensembles, royal court music, drumming, voices of great beauty; all saved from almost certain disappearance during expeditions carried out until the 1960s in scarcely imaginable circumstances.
“There was dust, there were mosquitoes that would go under the tape,” recalled Tracey’s son Andrew, who has continued his father’s pioneering work by preserving and transcribing the collection.
“He traveled around with three vehicles and used a diesel generator which was noisy and that had to be put 100 meters (yards) apart,” said Andrew Tracey, himself an ethnomusicologist and teacher.
Now 78, he has passed on the work to Diane Thram, an American who looks after the archive, entirely digitalized since this year, and the 8,000 photographs of the collection.
The public can have access to more than 260 CDs (www.ilam.ru.ac.za), classified by region, instrument, decade — among them royal music from Uganda, string ensembles from Kenya, Pygmy spiritual chants, miners’ dances, or colonial big bands to name but a few.
Hugh Tracey, who was born in 1903 and died in 1977, was a collector of genius, curious enough to record early jazz or guitar music hits in the 1950s, a decisive decade when Africa started undergoing the changes of a rapid urbanization. To listen to “Forest Music,” recorded in northern DR Congo, is to realize that the field is not only for specialists.
Tracey can be heard giving a drum lesson, an absorbing explanation in which he shows how the sharp or flat sound of the instrument echoes the language’s tonal system and makes possible communication over several kilometers (miles).
The latest products of the digitalization are two school handbooks published by the ILAM.
The first, “Understanding African Music,” is aimed at high school students and was presented at a world conference of music teachers. The second will target younger children.
Between them they form an introduction to African music, the rules and aesthetics of which are still little known, in spite of the success of World Music. “African music has never been fashionable,” Andrew Tracey said.
“My father was regarded as an eccentric in the 1920s. People thought that Africans had no culture and they were despised. Even today, the African music that gets money, is Westernized.”
The fact is, he said, that “you don’t appreciate it if you hear too little. So you have to make Westerners very patient.
“African music is circular, it repeats short musical phrases of sound and every time you hear it, it gets deeper.”
Treasure trove of African music gets digitalized
Treasure trove of African music gets digitalized
As an uncertain 2026 begins, virtual journeys back to 2016 become a trend
- Over the past few weeks, millions have been sharing throwback photos to that time on social media, kicking off one of the first viral trends of the year
LONDON: The year is 2016. Somehow it feels carefree, driven by Internet culture. Everyone is wearing over-the-top makeup.
At least, that’s how Maren Nævdal, 27, remembers it — and has seen it on her social feeds in recent days.
For Njeri Allen, also 27, the year was defined by the artists topping the charts that year, from Beyonce to Drake to Rihanna’s last music releases. She also remembers the Snapchat stories and an unforgettable summer with her loved ones. “Everything felt new, different, interesting and fun,” Allen says.
Many people, particularly those in their 20s and 30s, are thinking about 2016 these days. Over the past few weeks, millions have been sharing throwback photos to that time on social media, kicking off one of the first viral trends of the year — the year 2026, that is.
With it have come the memes about how various factors — the sepia hues over Instagram photos, the dog filters on Snapchat and the music — made even 2016’s worst day feel like the best of times.
Part of the look-back trend’s popularity has come from the realization that 2016 was already a decade ago – a time when Nævdal says she felt like people were doing “fun, unserious things” before having to grow up.
But experts point to 2016 as a year when the world was on the edge of the social, political and technological developments that make up our lives today. Those same advances — such as developments under US President Donald Trump and the rise of AI — have increased a yearning for even the recent past, and made it easier to get there.
2016 marked a year of transition
Nostalgia is often driven by a generation coming of age — and its members realizing they miss what childhood and adolescence felt like. That’s certainly true here. But some of those indulging in the online journeys through time say something more is at play as well.
It has to do with the state of the world — then and now.
By the end of 2016, people would be looking ahead to moments like Trump’s first presidential term and repercussions of the United Kingdom leaving the EU after the Brexit referendum. A few years after that, the COVID-19 pandemic would send most of the world into lockdown and upend life for nearly two years.
Janelle Wilson, a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, says the world was “on the cusp of things, but not fully thrown into the dark days that were to come.”
“The nostalgia being expressed now, for 2016, is due in large part to what has transpired since then,” she says, also referencing the rise of populism and increased polarization. “For there to be nostalgia for 2016 in the present,” she added, “I still think those kinds of transitions are significant.”
For Nævdal, 2016 “was before a lot of the things we’re dealing with now.” She loved seeing “how embarrassing everyone was, not just me,” in the photos people have shared.
“It felt more authentic in some ways,” she says. Today, Nævdal says, “the world is going downhill.”
Nina van Volkinburg, a professor of strategic fashion marketing at University of the Arts, London, says 2016 marked the beginning of “a new world order” and of “fractured trust in institutions and the establishment.” She says it also represented a time of possibility — and, on social media, “the maximalism of it all.”
This was represented in the bohemian fashion popularized in Coachella that year, the “cut crease” makeup Nævdal loved and the dance music Allen remembers.
“People were new to platforms and online trends, so were having fun with their identity,” van Volkinburg says. “There was authenticity around that.”
And 2016 was also the year of the “boss babe” and the popularity of millennial pink, van Volkinburg says, indications of young people coming into adulthood in a year that felt hopeful.
Allen remembers that as the summer she and her friends came of age as high school graduates. She says they all knew then that they would remember 2016 forever.
Ten years on, having moved again to Taiwan, she said “unprecedented things are happening” in the world. “Both of my homes are not safe,” she said of the US and Taiwan, “it’s easier to go back to a time that’s more comfortable and that you felt safe in.”
Feelings of nostalgia are speeding up
In the last few days, Nævdal decided to hide the social media apps on her phone. AI was a big part of that decision. “It freaks me out that you can’t tell what’s real anymore,” she said.
“When I’ve come off of social media, I feel that at least now I know the things I’m seeing are real,” she added, “which is quite terrifying.”
The revival of vinyl record collections, letter writing and a fresh focus on the aesthetics of yesterday point to nostalgia continuing to dominate trends and culture. Wilson says the feeling has increased as technology makes nostalgia more accessible.
“We can so readily access the past or, at least, versions of it,” she said. “We’re to the point where we can say, ‘Remember last week when we were doing XYZ? That was such a good time!’”
Both Nævdal and Allen described themselves as nostalgic people. Nævdal said she enjoys looking back to old photos – especially when they show up as “On This Day” updates on her phone, She sends them to friends and family when their photos come up.
Allen wished that she documented more of her 2016 and younger years overall, to reflect on how much she has evolved and experienced since.
“I didn’t know what life could be,” she said of that time. “I would love to be able to capture my thought process and my feelings, just to know how much I have grown.”
