In times of political and social turmoil, the arts have the power to express dissent, unite people under a common goal and sometimes even bring about change. One student well versed in this special quality of the arts is Nathaniel May, a Music, Theatre & Dance senior who spent a year in South Africa exploring the role of jazz and improvisational music during apartheid and the political recovery thereafter. May will be giving a lecture Thursday night in the Anderson room of the Michigan Union as part of the Examining Ubuntu conference taking place this week.

May explained how the tone behind much of local South African music shifted drastically with the end of apartheid.

“Often, it was an attitude of aggression and anger during apartheid, during the struggle, because you have a specific goal in mind, which is freedom,” May said.

“After that it’s a process of healing," he added, "and that word ‘healing’ was brought up a lot as a way of coming to terms with one’s past and one’s identity, and how it has changed.”

But May emphasized that this healing process has come with several questions, not the least of which is the extent to which freedom has actually been attained.

“Basically, people had this long history of oppression, and then all of a sudden it was said that they now have freedom,” May said. “But to a lot of people, it was little more than words. It was some political changes, but then a lot of promises that were never kept. People are still coming to terms with ‘This is what freedom looks like.’ "

“They’re re-investigating their past, which had been sort of created or dictated for them by the government.”

Part of this government-created history, May said, was an emphasis on tribalism. And using this idea, government rhetoric was widespread, declaring which kinds of art were appropriate for the black South African population to experience.

“One of the primary tenets of apartheid was this tribalism where all black people are tribal,” May said. “So even city-dwellers, they should be listening to tribal music, traditional music, because you know, that’s their nature.”

While this view of black South Africans is obviously degrading, the appropriate artistic response was not so clear. May explained that there was some disagreement among black musicians at the time regarding what sorts of music they ought to be making.

"(There was an) interesting dialogue and struggle at the time between black South Africans wanting to make Western music to prove their worth, versus people who want to include their traditional music, but at the risk of seeming that they’re pandering to the apartheid’s perspective of what they should be doing,” May said.

And now that the rhetoric of apartheid is dissipated, musicians are facing the artistic choices they made and seeing the identities they’ve established.

“Now that the government doesn’t say ‘This is what you should be listening to,’ they’ve got to come to terms with ‘OK, this is the music that we’ve made, for these reasons, and who are we because of it?’ ” May said.

Nowadays South African identity in music is much harder to come by, May said. American and European music has taken over the airwaves, and local music is struggling for survival.

“In the places where really ancient music still exists, it’s either because it’s specifically trying to be preserved, or it’s in a place that’s remote enough that western music hasn’t entirely taken over," May said. "I think those places are very rare these days.”

While he found traditional music to be rare, May found an opportunity to work closely with it for the duration of his time in South Africa. He spent the year with a group called Khoi Khonnexion, helping the band record its first album.

The Khoisan people are the true indigenous South African population, who were in South Africa before the Bantu-speaking majority.