Where the traditional methods do not work, or where they are not accessible to student and teacher, the Africans should not shy away from experimentation.The traditional teaching method leans heavily on the premise that all sound can be captured in 12 tones before the cycle resumes at the top of the bottom end.

Once that premise has been established, systems of scales will be built, the most widely used, in eight tones. There is a way in which the major scale will be constructed in every one of the 12 tones before the process is repeated up there, or below here.

Much of the credit of creating this system is granted to the Europeans, who then proceeded to codify the scales on the stave reflecting the treble and the bass clefs.

The stave then becomes a useful instrument for the association of the sound that the ear hears and the picture that the eye sees.

There are many advantages to the early association of the picture with the sound in the practice of teaching and learning music.

But then what happens when there is no paper on which the stave is drawn? What happens if the teachers do not have access to the theory and practice of teaching and learning which goes together with that system of writing down sound?

Far more importantly, there are considerations of culture. How do the African teachers and learners communicate with each other in a system of writing out sound that assumes an infrastructure of technology, philosophy of life and economic livelihood that will be available in Europe and America, but not in Africa?

I propose that teaching of music should, right from the very onset, recognise the existence of African instruments. Further, it should recognise that there have always been practices by which information about how those instruments are played, was communicated to successive generations.

And because those systems were very close to the environment in which the teacher and the student lived, they came much more naturally to both.

I would start my students off with playing the drum, preferably using the hands so that the students should develop a physical relationship with the instrument they were playing, and the sound that they were creating.

That would also build pitch and sound in general into the eardrum of the learner, whilst also keeping the teacher sensitised to the manner in which the individual students make that sound.

This experiment pivots on the assumption - a very reasonable one at that - that rhythm is the most fundamental of all aspects of music. The drum delivers melody, harmony and beat all at once.

The drum has been most central to African music of all types, everywhere, over centuries. The teacher will soon recognise that the African will tend to favour rhythms that come in sets of three, in contrast to the Europeans who seem to insist on rhythmic patterns of four when the think about music, and when they write it.

I laughed when one musician friend of mine who spends quiet a lot of time abroad, attempted to persuade me that, most 'hits' are written or expressed in four beat time, or four over four. I had to laugh, because even though he was partly correct, he had not realised that those 'hits' are shaped in the western industrialised countries, by Europeans to suit themselves.

The Africans are then coerced into listening to the hits repeatedly until they convince themselves that this is the right way to hear sound. Implicit in that conviction, is the nullification of the natural African experience.

It is almost like abandoning Setswana to speak English. The speaker then achieves the perfect royal English accent, and then speaks Setswana with the inflection of a European learning an African language.

The final product is a hybrid concoction; neither African nor English, and like a mule, it is genetically guaranteed to fail to reproduce itself.

This proposal suggests that the African child should be left to play his 'natural' rhythm in six strokes that group themselves into two groups of three or 6/8 time in the European way of writing music. The effect will be 1. two, three, 2. five, six.

Having laid that foundation, it will then be possible to further expand the sensitivity of the ear to wider tone. Rather than adopt the 'European' eight-tone scale from the very beginning, it might suit the African student to build upon the more familiar five to scale to the pentatonic reflecting Doh, Re, Mi, Soh, and La.

That should be done in the key of 'C' and repeated in the next natural place where the ear of the student will travel, to the sub-dominant at 'F'. The process will continue to the dominant 'G' where the same process is repeated.

Before you know it, all the notes in the C Major scale will have been revealed. The student shall have started with 'CDEGA', proceeding to 'FGACD' and then to 'GABDE'.

From those notes the student and the teacher will be able to build the major scale: CDEFGABC, inside a rhythmic pattern, embellished with a harmonic progression. First course done!