Michael Mosoeu Moerane (20 September 1904 – 27 January 1980) was a choral music composer and the first black South African to write a symphonic poem, in 1941.

[2][1] Moerane was a member of the Bafokeng, specifically the Mahoona clan – traditional healers whose longer history can be traced back several centuries through the lineage of the Bakwena royal family.

[4] He was one of seven children born to Eleazar Jakane Moerane and his wife Sofi Majara, whose grandparents were disciples of Moshoeshoe I and were among the first Basotho converts to Christianity.

[5] The two most celebrated are his younger brother, Manasseh Tebatso Moerane, the educationist, cultural activist and journalist who became an Editor of The World newspaper, and his younger sister, Epainette Mbeki, one of the first women to join the Communist Party of South Africa, a stalwart community activist and promoter of women's development, and mother to a future President of South Africa, Dr. Thabo Mbeki.

[11] The Rhodes University Calendars for these years add more detail to the subjects that Moerane was expected to study, by himself, at home, which include aural training, dictation, writing in open score, melody harmonization, phrasing and form, analysis, history of western music from 1700 to 1900 and elements of acoustics.

Moerane officially taught History, Latin, Mathematics, Sesotho, Commercial Arithmetic or English, depending on the position he held, since Music was not a subject in most African schools.

After he retired, Moerane helped with the establishment of the Department of Music at the new National Teachers Training College in Maseru, capital of the (then) newly independent sovereign state of Lesotho.

Moerane's position in Queenstown was jeopardised by his "deep non-racialist" beliefs and his involvement with CATA, so that he became "a thorn in the flesh of the Education Department who decided to force him to retire prematurely".

At Peka, where Moerane "talked openly about his support for the BCP",[18] he left an indelible impression on his students, among whom was the novelist Zakes Mda.

[19] The manuscript score of his symphonic poem, Fatše La Heso (My Country), survived largely because of the efforts by Percival Kirby to have it donated to Rhodes University Library.

This, together with the fragility of the manuscripts, the tonic sol-fa notation, and the fact that Moerane used indigenous African languages, Sesotho and isiXhosa for most of his lyrics, prompted the publication in 2020 of a complete edition of his music under the auspices of the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation at Stellenbosch University, with lyrics translated and choral scores transcribed into staff notation.

Approximately eight works are written in the style of church hymns, anthems or sacred songs: these includeTsatsi La Pallo (Judgement Day), Ruri!

Songs based on the latter's poems – Mohokare (The Caledon River), Ngeloi La Me (My Angel), Paka-Mahlomola (Creator of Sorrow), and Satane A Tšeha (The Devil Laughed) – are full of references to the hardship of migrant labour.

In Paka-Mahlomola, for example, written for female voices in a sombre homophonic style, almost like a lament, the river symbolises the damage people suffered as a result of crossing it to seek work on the mines, far from family and community.

[25] The lyrics of Della are adapted from an isiXhosa poem by Sampson Mputa for which Moerane provides some of his richest and most stately contrapuntal writing.

About 10 minutes long, it is scored for strings, wind, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, bass drum, timpani, cymbals, triangle, piano and harp, and is based on what Moerane calls "thematic material derived from genuine African songs".

[28] Moerane successfully maintains the diatonic African character of the first three themes within an overarching tonal and orchestral texture whose chromaticism and shifting key centres bespeak a decidedly late Romantic style, owing no doubt to the influence of his teacher, Friedrich Hartmann, who had been a student in Vienna of Alexander von Zemlinsky, brother-in-law of Arnold Schoenberg.

[31] Through the Council on African Affairs, it was performed in New York in 1950, at a concert conducted by Dean Dixon that also included works by Fela Sowande, Amadeo Roldán, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Ulysses Kay, Ingram Fox, and William Grant Still.

[32] The work was performed and broadcast in 1973 by the National Symphony Orchestra of the SABC conducted by Edgar Cree, a recording released on CD in 1991.