Critique internationale 2008- 1 (n° 38)| ISSN 1290-7839 | ISSN numérique : en cours | ISBN : 978-2-7246-3124-1 | page 91 à 110 Distribution électronique Cairn pour les éditions De Boeck Université. © De Boeck Université. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. Il est interdit, sauf accord préalable et écrit de l’éditeur, de reproduire (notamment par photocopie) partiellement ou totalement le présent article, de le stocker dans une banque de données ou de le communiquer au public sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit.

ABSTRACT — The history of music, and especially that of jazz and the popular music styles it spawned, was from the start a story of blends and creations out of these blends. Music thus constantly provides a demonstration that the ideologies positing non-Europeans as inferior and segregation policies never had any foundation. From the mid-19th century, Afro-American music styles, first as a borrowing form of Blackface Minstrel songs, then under the name of jazz, took part in these creative mixes. Jazz helped to conceive and symbolically express an identitarian complex at the same time asserting that blacks are human beings like any other and that they have a specific contribution to make to human culture. South African endeavors to appropriate jazz and its local stylistic evolutions thus became closely tied into the political events that marked South African in the 20th century and the successive ideological reformulations of the fight against racism.