The African Choir:
1891 Re-imagined

The African Choir
Drawn from various mission stations and church choirs in the Eastern Cape, including graduates from Lovedale College, the original sixteen-member ensemble included seven men and seven women, plus two children. They toured Britain and the USA between 1891- 93, ostensibly raising funds to build a technical college.

Their concert repertoire was divided into two halves: one comprised Christian hymns sung in English together with popular operatic arias; the other consisted of African songs, including by South African composers John Bokwe and the Rev. Tiyo Soga. In line with the division in repertoire, the choir appeared for the first half of their performance in ‘traditional’ African costumes, before changing into contemporary Victorian dress for the second half.

They performed to great acclaim to large audiences, and before Queen Victoria in the summer of 1891. Choir members such as Charlotte Maxeke, her sister Katie Makanya (both née Manye), and Paul Xiniwe later became leading social activists and reformers in South Africa.

The Sound
The choir’s performances on tour were never recorded, however written documentation has survived. This has given freedom for the composers to reimagine the repertoire from a present-day perspective. Working with fifteen young singers in a series of improvised and collaborative workshops in Cape Town in 2015, Miller and Sibisi have recreated the original repertoire based on surviving concert programme notes.

The Photographs
The visual component features twenty framed photographic portraits, enlarged as modern silver gelatin prints from vintage nineteenth-century glass plates. Photographed in July 1891 by the London Stereoscopic Company, these glass plates were re-discovered by Autograph ABP at the Hulton Archive (a division of Getty Images) after 125 years and first exhibited to critical acclaim in 2014. Based on research to date, they represent the most comprehensive body of portraits depicting Africans in Victorian London.

The African Choir 1891 Re-Imagined connects the composers Philip Miller and Thuthuka Sibisi with the curatorial research led by Renée Mussai as part of Autograph ABP’s ongoing Black Chronicles/The Missing Chapter archive research programme. Together, they form an artistic representation that humanises and gives voice to an important episode in both British and South African history long overlooked - intimately linked to wider politics of empire, expansion and imperial narratives.