Historical Dynamism and the Power of Song and Dance in the Preservation of Indigenous Knowledge and Cultural Heritage among the Pre-Colonial Gusii of South Western Kenya (PDF)

Academic Paper from the year 2021 in the subject Art - History of Art, grade: 1, , course: Historical Knowledge, language: English, abstract: This paper presents an overview exposition and critical reflection on the role played by oral arts and performance throught history as far as the preservation of African indigenous knowledge and moral ethics is concerned.This study takes songs and dances among the Gusii of south-western Kenya as its unit of study . It seeks to address fundamental issues that are in the verge of being forgotten especially by the youth of this generation. It argues that music and dance among the Gusii have traditional roots and serves as a source of understanding the cultural history of the community as part of indigenous knowledge moral and societal ethics. Indeed, without knowledge of a community's cultural history, the historical destiny, indigenous knowledge and moral education cannot be easily comprehended. This history makes it one of the most essential genres that the Gusii community employs to explore the past indigenous education through musical and dance generic forms. This paper proceeds from the premise that, in the pre-colonial times, the Gusii had evolved elaborate music and dance forms conditioned by their social and natural environments. It can also established in this discussion that African music and dance, as practised by the Gusii nurtured, enhanced, preserved and brought up emotionally, psychologically, ethically, socially stable and a unitary indigenous community. The theories employed to explain the phenomenon of the functionality of among the Gusii pre-colonial music and dance indigenous knowledge preservation and moral education were, Evolution, Diffusion, functionalism and theories of dance. The Study methodology into historical enquiry of the pre-colonial music and dance was carried out in three major phases as follows; employing data collection techniques on a systematic basis beginning with secondary sources in libraries, the marshalling of primary source materials in the Kenya National Archives, and the gathering of data through oral interviews and observations in the research field. In this study, respondents were selected through snowball and purposive sampling techniques in order to obtain key custodians of the Gusii cultural history. Oral interviews were conducted between 1996 and 1998.Respondents included sixty elderly men and women from Gusii land thought to be knowledgeable on the community's cultural history.