Ikenna Emmanuel Onwuegbuna

The Instructional Value of African Popular Music: Its Application in Nigerian Music Education Ikenna Emmanuel Onwuegbuna

African popular music of today refers to the corpus of sounds, songs, and dance music crafted by African professional and non-professional musicians, at home and in the Diaspora, in response to the political, economic, spiritual, and social needs of the burgeoning modernity that started in the late nineteenth century, and is still in being. Scholarly attention to the pedagogic possibilities in the area of African popular music has been few and far between. The alibi that such music types are products of cultural syncretism and stylistic diffusion which deserve only a cursory or no scholarly attention, since they also are devoid of teaching materials, have not helped matters at all. An educational research that proposes a curriculum content, course descriptions, effective implementation, and a system of evaluation of results will, therefore serve the noble purpose of rescuing the African continent from the economic, socio-cultural, and intellectual loss. Such a loss is as a result of the neglect of teaching African popular music in the Nigerian tertiary institutions.