This past Friday, I went on a trip with my ethnomusicology class to a music festival near Keiskammahoek... that is all I knew about it before we left. Well, our teacher also said that we would be leaving at 7am. Should I have known that it was a straight up lie? After all, this is Africa (I have been hearing that all the time recently...) Our professor arranged for a 21 person van to drive us (it was a little under 2 hours away) and told me that one of my American friends, M.E., could come with us if there was extra room in the van. She is interested in cultural stuff, and none of the people I knew from my ethno class were coming, so I figured it would be fun for her, and I would have a buddy for the day. We showed up at 7:05 after a mad dash to turn in our Zoo prac assignments, (they were due before we were supposed to get back, so we planned on sliding them under the secretary's door, but of course the outer door to the department was locked... so stressful!) only to find that we were some of the first people there, and the professor hadn't even arrived where we were supposed to meet. Thus began a very African adventure...
I have no idea what I was expecting when our professor said we were going to a music festival, but it was not what we actually found. The last bit of our trip was a 10-15 drive down a dirt road into the middle of nowhere, which eventually led to the most confusing building I have ever randomly found in the wilderness. I was this immense cement thing shooting up in the air and curving around so that I thought we were driving towards some sort of colosseum. We weren't, the building was just curved like a semicircle (as well as curving upwards, it was just a very odd design).
(This is a building. I promise.
Also, I know that it looks like it stretches straight across in the first picture, but it actually curves inward.)
When we pulled through the gate, we found this odd building, some people milling around, and a lot of grass. It turned out that despite leaving almost an hour after we were supposed to, they were just setting up. This actually worked out for the best, because we had a long time to wander around exploring and figuring out what was happening. It turned out that we were at a Heritage Festival, which suddenly made sense, because Saturday was National Heritage Day. There was a population of Xhosa-speaking people living in a village somewhere nearby (they called it a village; I never actually saw it so I am using their descriptor) and the local people had an annual weekend festival to celebrate. So we were basically crashing their party, but they didn't seem to mind. We also learned that the site we were at was a big deal... it had been a very important battle ground in a series of battles during the Frontier Wars that took place before Europeans consolidated control of the country. The huge weird building had been built by some important colonial commissioner/offical, who used it when meeting with chiefs and representatives of the people. Also, the burial site of Chief Maqoma, a famous Xhosa chief who played an important role during the Frontier Wars, was within walking distance to the place were the festival was taking place.
I apologize if any of that information is confusing (or incorrect), but since the entire festival was in Xhosa, I was at a bit of a disadvantage as far as understanding what was going on. There was a translator, but it was hilarious, because the master of ceremonies would talk for literally 15 minutes, and then the translator would come up and say something along the lines of “He just explained the history of the location and the events that are taking place today.” A few of the details were unfortunately lost in translation… It was a shame, because it sounded really interesting, and as I have a tenuous grasp on the history during that time period because of my South African history class, I would have loved to fully understand the importance of the place where we were. I also would have liked to visit Maqoma’s grave, but this was a ceremony that was reserved for the men near the beginning of the festivities, while the women and the boys hung out and waited for them to trek to wherever they were going and back.
I didn’t really mind hanging out with the women though, because I got to hear them sing! Actually, I got to sing with them, which was awesome despite the fact that I don’t speak Xhosa (I have always been pretty good at faking lyrics that I don’t know, anyway) and I absolutely could not master the steps they were doing (despite my best efforts and those of my teachers’). The best part of going on a trip with ethnomusicology students is that the whole point of ethnomusicology is to go find music from other culture and study it, which meant that my tendency to go exploring/take pictures/record video was totally normal. A few of us happened upon some women, who were singing for fun, and we stopped to observe them for awhile (yay ethnomusicology!), but music is much more of a communal activity here than that of performer and audience, so when one of the women caught my eye and motioned for me to join in, I did. It was really fun, even though I couldn’t really speak to the women (it was one of the few situations I have been in here where the older adults only speak Xhosa). It was also awesome from an ethno perspective, because I have learned about traditional Xhosa music, and it was super cool to see some of the aspects of the music in real life. I was totally geeking out over the polyrhythms and polyharmonies, and it was really cool to see the way that hand-clapping, rather than a melody line, formed the basis of the song that everyone conformed to. It was also cool to experience (although not properly execute) the connection between body movement and music… in the Xhosa musical tradition, the strong beat is connected to an upward movement (of the feet, usually) rather than a downward movement that you find in western music. I really couldn’t get the hang of it, although the several very sweet mamas (a term of address used for women who are older than you… as opposed to sisi/sister when you are talking to someone your age or younger) very patiently tried to teach me the correct rhythms.
The improv music session was actually my favorite part of the day, although I enjoyed all of the actual performances during the festival, especially those of the poet. There is a musical tradition of “praise-singing” that is common in many parts of Southern Africa, where the poet/griot/praise-singer performs something like spoken-word with or without musical accompaniment. Either way, there is much more attention paid to sounds—of the words themselves and of the rhythm—and it is considered to be music. This poet was really good; I was totally enthralled even though he was speaking in Xhosa, and he also happened to be a really good djembe and mbira player as well. As much as I love drums, I think the mbira is probably my favorite African instrument (but you will have to look it up for yourself, because I didn’t get any good video, and this is already too long for me to go off on an mbira tangent…)
Anyway, it was a really awesome experience… I enjoyed the performances (including a choir singing in 8-part harmony that reminded me of my beloved GCC) and it was a good day, even if I might have forgot to put sunscreen on before I left that morning. In the middle of the afternoon, one of the Xhosa guys came up to me and said, “Excuse me, I don’t mean to be rude, but do you have sunscreen on? Maybe you should sit in the shade. Our skin can handle it, but yours can’t.” I thought it was hilarious, because I didn’t burn nearly as much as the other white people I was with. In fact, it was really more of an obnoxious sunglasses tan than anything else, and that is fading now. Anyway, the moral of the story is that it was a day well spent, and M.E. and I had a lovely adventure.
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