The South African choir that performed for Queen Victoria

An unearthed cache of century-old photographs of a South African choir that had performed in Victorian Britain inspired a choreographer to reimagine what they went through as they toured the country.

Gregory Maqoma remembers going into his favourite space in the Apartheid Museum in South Africa’s main city, Johannesburg, five years ago.

It is a room in the round - with only one way in and out and gently curving walls that, he says, fills him with a sense of serenity and privacy.

The South African choreographer was drawn to the centre of the room by the sound of music and singing voices.

It was a sound installation by composers Thuthuka Sibisi and Philip Miller. They had worked with contemporary singers to reinterpret the performances of a 19th Century South African choir - based on songs listed on a surviving concert programme.

Captivated, Maqoma danced for 40 minutes - before he sensed another presence.

Looking down on him from around the room was a series of 20 photographic portraits of the members of the original choir, a group of young, black intellectuals who had toured England, Scotland and Ireland between 1891 and 1893 under the name of the African Native Choir.

“The intensity of how they were looking at me dancing made me start asking questions about ‘the gaze’ - how we are looking at each other and how people had looked at them at the time,” Maqoma says.

A series of images show the two young members of the choir playing around in the studio

The photographs were taken by the London Stereoscopic Company, but they had laid unseen for over 100 years until

2014.

Autograph ABP - a London gallery that was researching the presence of black people in Britain before 1948 - unearthed the original glass plates wrapped in parchment paper in the Hulton Archives in London, now part of Getty Images.

There are more than 30 individual and group photographs of 16 choir members - seven women and seven men and two young choir boys.

Some images are expressive close-ups, some are playful - especially with the two young boys, Albert Jonas and John Xiniwe.

In one photo one of them relaxes, smiling, in front of the camera while the other stands behind it posing as the photographer.

But most of the photographs conform to Victorian stereotypes and expectations of people from Africa as “traditional” and “tribal”.

In one group photo, the choir are wrapped in animal skins, some with feather and bead headdresses.

And they have been seated in front of a tiger skin - despite there being no tigers anywhere in Africa and despite the choir members coming from urban areas such as Kimberley, and having been educated at missions including Lovedale in what is now the Eastern Cape.

“That tiger - well, that was just very odd,” Maqoma says.

This image in the archive appears to show the group chatting to each other as an alternative to the more formal portrait (at the top of the page)

His first encounter with the portraits also sparked a feeling in him that he was the “carrier of their spirits”.

“I wanted to answer so many questions: what happened to them travelling from South Africa by boat to arrive in the UK, in a country of the coloniser? How were they received?”

And so he went to composer Sibisi, and together they created a piece of work that reimagines the physical and spiritual journey of the African Choir.

Broken Chord is a 60-minute production, in which Maqoma is the central dancer alongside four soloists and a chorus.

It is a highly physical, deeply emotional performance, which combines Xhosa and contemporary dance styles, musical harmonies from South Africa and Western classical traditions, English and Xhosa languages along with atmospheric sounds and smells.

On the face of it, the trip of the African Choir was a triumph.

One British newspaper, the Standard, described it in 1891 as a “unique performance, and the audience followed the various items in the programme, some of which were sung in the native tongue, and others in almost faultless English, with warm tokens of interest and approval”.

Queen Victoria asked them to perform for her at Osborne House, the Royal residence on the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England.

But years later - in a memoir of her life, including describing her work in medicine and nursing - one of the singers, Katie Manye, recalled how after that performance on 24 July, a granddaughter, accompanying the Queen, made a comment using a derogatory term about how she did not like people from Africa.

It was not an isolated experience.

Manye also recounts how the choir members objected to the use of another derogatory and contemptuous word to describe them.

Her memoir says the tour manager Mr Howells ignored their objections saying: “That’s what you are - the English... will be curious to hear you sing.”

Overall, the trip was difficult.