South African cultural traditions collided head on with modern sensibilities recently when a choirmaster in the Eastern Cape region had teenage schoolgirls give a seminude traditional performance that was widely shared on social media.

The choirmaster defended the performance as a cultural tribute to the Xhosa ethnic group, but it drew the ire of the minister of basic education, who described it as exploitation. Others called for the choirmaster to be fired.

The tempest exposed the ambiguous treatment of gender issues in a country whose Constitution guarantees wide-ranging equalities that conflict with a high rate of rape and other violence against women.

And it coincided with a broader debate about the way history is taught in South Africa’s often-troubled state schools — where cultural issues have often assumed political importance — and with a push to make the subject compulsory.