Aesthetics from the Swazi perspective: The case of the Swazi umhlanga/reed dance

ABSTRACT

The concept of an African aesthetics has been the object of intense and ongoing debate among scholars and critics of the arts in Africa. There are some eminent Western scholars who still doubt the very existence of African arts and who argue that there is no such a thing as traditional African critical criteria for evaluating a work of art. Using the Swazi umhlanga/reed dance as case study, this paper sets out to make an emphatic statement that, contrary to unexamined assumptions of some Western scholars, Africans do have their own verbal and non-verbal traditional criteria for evaluating art; that African aesthetics is socially and culturally conditioned and, as a result, is different from others in several ways. Finally, African aesthetic values can best be deduced from actual performance.

Keywords:

• aesthetics
• arts
• performance
• reed dance
• songs