Visionary Architect of African Music Education 7 December 1932 – 21 April 2025

BA History (Hood College), MA Education (Syracuse University), B.Mus (Eastman School of Music), BA Hons Music History (UNISA), PhD (UKZN)

Revered as a pioneering activist in the field of Music Education, Dr. Elizabeth “Betsy” Oehrle died peacefully in Durban on 21 April 2025, aged 92. As a member of the Music staff at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, she revolutionised music pedagogy across Africa and helped dismantle apartheid’s cultural barriers through institutional innovation. The American-born academic, who became South Africa’s most influential advocate for decolonial music education, dedicated her life to creating educational frameworks that used scholarly rigour and artistic practice to empower marginalised communities.

Her transformative journey began in 1962 during a holiday in Durban, where she then chose to settle permanently. A defining moment occurred shortly after her arrival: hearing a maskandi (a Zulu migrant-worker musician) playing his guitar outside her home, she rushed into the street to learn his techniques. Neighbours later expressed astonishment—such spontaneous, cross-racial collaboration was rare at the time. This encounter ignited her life’s mission: helping, through education, to secure the academic legitimacy of African musical traditions.

Academic Foundations and Radical Pedagogy

Appointed Senior Lecturer in Music Education at the University of Natal (later UKZN) in 1975, Oehrle directed the University Choir for twenty years, pioneering collaborative concerts with the University of Zululand during apartheid’s peak. Her career was defined by confronting systemic exclusion. Discovering that music educators were segregated into racial associations, she resolved to create spaces for shared scholarship.

At UKZN in 1975, she launched the Creative Music Classes for Children (aged 4 to 6), adapting Carl Orff’s principles for African contexts. The initiative became legendary. “Children composed songs using indigenous percussion and Zulu folktales,” noted ethnomusicologist colleague Dr. Patricia Opondo. This work informed Oehrle’s 1985 masterstroke: founding the South African Music Educators Society (SAMES)—South Africa’s first non-racial music-education association. Its inaugural conference united 120 Black, white, Indian, and Coloured music educators. Professor Khabi Mngoma, SAMES’s first chair, observed: “Delegates discussed mbira techniques alongside Baroque counterpoint—a previously impossible dialogue.”

Institutional Legacy: Education as Liberation

Oehrle converted her idealism into enduring institutions. When Shell Petroleum withdrew funding from her township arts initiative in 1987, she secured Swedish International Development Agency support to establish UKUSA (“dawn”). Based in the University’s Department of Music, this nonprofit became South Africa’s premier university-linked community music initiative—a model unmatched in scope and longevity. Operating for the last 38 years from both Universitiy and township satellites, UKUSA has provided structured training in music, dance, and drama to over 25,000 economically disadvantaged youth. “We build cognitive resilience,” Oehrle asserted. “A child composing a song about their street learns to rewrite their future.” Its current director (UKZN music lecturer) Debbie Mari agrees: “Betsy’s pedagogical triad—creativity, identity, agency—remains foundational. We serve 600-plus students annually, with many pursuing tertiary education.”

Concurrently, she set up global scholarly networks. In 1991, she founded The Talking Drum, a biannual newsletter distributing classroom resources to 45 countries. Digitised and accessible via www.disa.ukzn.ac.za, its lessons (e.g., “Mapping Polyrhythms Through Gumboot Dance”) reflected her pragmatism. Artist Dina Cormick, her lifelong partner and collaborator, illustrated each issue: “Betsy insisted images show African children using notation—so learners saw themselves as knowledge-makers.”

A crowning achievement came in 1996 when she drove an initiative to persuade the University to establish South Africa’s first dedicated lectureship in African Music and Dance (AMD). After securing seed funding, she helped oversee the appointment of Dr. Patricia Opondo. She continued to support AMD and its activities (even through her later retirement), never missing Lunch-Hour Concerts and the annual African Cultural Calabash Festival. “Before this,” Opondo states, “universities treated African traditions as folklore. Betsy forced them to ask: ‘Why teach Bach’s counterpoint but not isicathamiya harmonies?’” The programme now attracts global doctoral candidates.

Global Scholar, Continental Architect

Her 1986 proposal that the International Society for Music Education (ISME) create a World Music Panel gained unanimous endorsement. Leading ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl acknowledged: “Betsy’s blueprint centred African voices in global discourse.” As chair of ISME’s Community Music Activity Commission (1997), she convened sixty educators from eighteen African nations in Durban. This meeting birthed the Pan-African Society for Music Educators (PASMAE), which was then formally proposed with a draft constitution at the 1998 ISME Conference in Pretoria..

PASMAE’s 2000 launch in Zimbabwe fulfilled her decades-long vision, as delegates from twenty-one nations adopted the view that, to build post-colonial identities, music education had to reflect Africa’s soundscapes. At a later PASMAE conference, Oehrle traced PASMAE’s roots to SAMES: “We proved shared musics could help dissolve apartheid. Now we scale this truth continent-wide”

Later Scholarship and Enduring Impact

Oehrle’s retirement from UKZN in 1997 redirected rather than slowed her work. She served as Music Professor aboard the University of Pittsburgh’s “Semester at Sea” (1998), lecturing on African diasporic traditions across twelve countries. From 2000–2005, she coordinated UKZN’s Swedish Exchange Programme, facilitating research on Nordic-Sámi and Zulu musical synergies. Concurrently (2001–2008), as Academic Liaison Officer for the University of California’s Education Abroad Programme at

UKZN, she designed immersion experiences where American students studied maskandi with local masters.

Among her most important publications was her book, A New Direction for South African Music Education (1989). The revised edition – Creative Musicking: African, Indian and Western Musics (2010) – provided frameworks for “polycultural pedagogy.” In it, she argued that “Western staff notation is one dialect. To teach only that is linguistic imperialism.”

The book is still available in print and digital formats via major retailers.

Legacy

Dr. Oehrle came to be widely seen as South Africa’s moral and scholarly conscience in music education—a discipline she reshaped through unwavering principle. Her legacy lives on in various ways: for instance via the models and standards she created for music education in Africa, the UKUSA alumni who teach in township schools and elsewhere, the PASMAE scholars who lead cultural initiatives, and the graduates of the African Music and Dance degree programme she helped establish at UKZN.

As she declared in her final PASMAE address: “When we honour each other’s songs, we build the world anew.”

She is survived by her partner, artist Dina Cormick.

[Memorial donations may be made to UKUSA Arts Programme, UKZN, Durban. This obtuary was compiled by UKZN music colleagues and associates.]