Amen, We Praise Your Name

This Sunday in worship we will sing a song the kids learned at Vacation Bible School this year, “Amen Siakudumisa.” The VBS mission project this year was to create prayer postcards for children in Tanzania. Singing a song from Africa helped kids continue that connection to a new culture in an exciting way! The kids learned the song both in Xhosa and in English. Today we’ll ask the congregation to begin learning this song in English! The Xhosa text “Amen Siakudumisa” means “Amen praise the name of the Lord.”

We know this composition by Stephen Cuthbert Molefe (1917-1987) through the work of David Dargie (b. 1937), one of South Africa’s most influential ethnomusicologists. A Roman Catholic priest for many years, Fr. Dargie observed that many priests resorted to using European or North American melodies they knew and ignored the rich heritage of South African music, especially the music of the Xhosa and Zulu peoples. For example, the venerable Latin chant “Tantum Ergo Sacramentum” (a communion hymn attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas), was sung in one parish to “My Darling Clementine”!

For Fr. Dargie, a white South African of Scots-Irish lineage, part of the liberation of black South Africans from the political oppression of apartheid was to encourage them to sing their Christian faith with their own music rather than in the musical idioms of their colonial oppressors. In the decades immediately following the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), Fr. Dargie was among many who encouraged Africans to find their own voice in congregational singing. He sponsored workshops throughout southern Africa with indigenous musicians, giving them specific texts from the Mass and asking them to compose music to fit the melodic contour and rhythmic structure of the words. Since most African languages are tonal, a melodic shape emerges directly from speaking the text.

Stephen Molefe was among the first South African musicians that Fr. Dargie worked with in these workshops. Molefe was born of Sotho descent in the Transkei area of the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. A choirmaster at the Catholic Church, he was not only a skilled musician but also fluent in a variety of South African languages including Sotho, Xhosa, Zulu, Tswana, Afrikaans and English. Fr. Dargie met Molefe in 1977 at a composition workshop and transcribed a number of his works into staff notation. They include a wide variety of musical styles, “Amen Siakudumisa” being among the simplest. Designed to be sung as the “Amen” at the conclusion of the Great Thanksgiving (the Eucharist liturgy), it was an instant hit, with the whole parish singing it at Holy Week services. “Amen, Siakudumisa” is included very often in Western hymnal collections alongside famous South African freedom songs like “Siyahamba (We are Marching in the Light of God).” In 1978, Molefe was attacked, robbed and struck with a brick to the head. He started to go blind after that, and was unable to work again. Molefe died in 1987.¹

1. Hawn, C. Michael. “HISTORY OF HYMNS: Hymn expresses rhythm, harmony of African legacy.” The United Methodist Reporter website: http://www.umportal.org/article.asp?id=2583 Site visited June 26, 2012.

“Amen siyakudumisa. (Amen, we praise your name)
Amen, Bawo; Amen Bawo; (Amen Father)
Amen siyakudumisa. (Amen, we praise your name)”