Ubuntu

The photo on the left is a shot of a property in the mountains of KwaZulu-Natal, near King Shaka's family origins. The white flag flying high indicates that the young man of the house has found a bride. The students cheered, sang and ululated when they saw it. One of my guides explained to me that in Zulu culture, everyone celebrates birth, marriage and success, and everyone mourns deaths. I have begun to realize that this might make people very busy, if they observe all the celebrations and life events. Just being invited to share in an occasional event has kept me quite busy. The mountains in the scene are metaphorically the elders in a song called "Inkhombela". In the song, an old man points to a young girl to indicate that he wishes to marry her. The lyrics to the song are the words to the internal dialog that the girl expresses upon realizing that there will be this arranged marriage. Roughly translated, she says "You are older, the mountain of the Zulus. Please forgive me, but I am so young, I wish I could have had a chance...."

I enjoyed an official visit to the U.S. Consulate General in Durban, accompanied by Gugu Gule, the International Linkages Director at the University of Zululand, and more importantly - my dear friend. I have grown accustomed to surrendering my bags at the doors of stores and having the car's trunk searched on the way out of the university gates at the end of work days. So, I was not phased by having to lock my cell phone and camera into a safe and surrendering my passport at the consulate security station. The only sad part is that there is a truly magnificent view of the port of Durban on the Indian Ocean from the 30th floor window in the building where the consulate is housed. I would love to have taken a picture. Durban is the busiest port in Africa, and like so many other industries in South Africa, it operates under the near constant threat and recent fiscal effects of workers' strikes.

At the consulate, I was presented with a beautiful Ubuntu pin that has American and South African flags and the word Ubuntu featured. The idea of that word is "I am because you are" - and encourages living and acting with humanity. Ubuntu is associated with Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and the renaissance that many South Africans are working hard to create. Ubuntu symbolizes interrelatedness that many Africans experience and the need for community in order to be human. I love it, because I have come to love South Africa as I love my own country, and I absolutely could not exist without the support and humanity of an absolute plethora of Americans and South Africans.

One of the South Africans who has been demonstrating Ubuntu is a choral director (and another dear friend) named Mrs. Nelly Nxumalo. Nelly has created a list of phrases that I might find useful in my work and life, which is translated into the correct isiZulu wording. English is so different that word-to-word translations do not usually work out and I have a difficult time finding phrases in my Zulu dictionaries that pertain to my own situation. So now, I can tell you what I want you to do if you are in the choir (sit down, stand, go back to the beginning, etc.) and interestingly, Nelly included the phrase "you have beautiful legs" in my list. Should I be saying that more often?

Outside of formal choral settings, I have discovered that the song "Shosholoza" has become quite popular among the university students and they will break into singing it upon request or even without requesting. I heard it on the field trip bus, and when I was introduced to my students on Friday by their regular instructor, she mentioned that they would be happy to sing it for me. They laughed loudly when I began to sing it to them. It is a happy coincidence for me, since my research is very much about the songs like "Shosholoza" that were once sung for protests and civil rights that are now sung with different context and different meanings for those who sing them. I would have to say that it seems like the spirit of the songs has remained, but the manifestations have changed. Most all of my informants agree that while context is critical to understanding South African singing, the contexts change, so the meanings change too.

Do Re Mi

I have spent this week in choral rehearsals with Zulu choirs and in preparation for my university class, which begins tomorrow. I’ll be teaching second year Education majors a course in Arts and Culture for grades one through eleven. My part is called a “module” as a course usually implies an entire year in this four-term per year system. I rented a car, and have been learning my way around from the university to the township to Empangeni, the small town where I live. The choral rehearsals are community and church choir practices, and the University of Zululand Choral Society is the choir in which I will regularly sing while I’m here. We are hosting a choral festival in September, which will provide the opportunity for Dennis’ photo shoot and the videorecording for my book, as there will be choirs from near and far, singing in most of the 11 languages assembled in one place.

Tonic sol-fa is the notation of choice for music readers in Zululand. (By the way, Zululand is a municipality, something like a large county.) The system was invented by John Curwen – the same fellow responsible for the sol-feg hand signs that music teachers use. Black music education never included western notation until recently, and even now, tonic sol-fa is more used than western notation. If I’m speaking Greek to you, take a look at this example.

http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~mudws/notes/solfa.html

Speaking and singing in a foreign language, and reading a new musical notation system and driving on the left side of the road has been challenging this week. I find myself exhausted at the end of the day, and don’t even ask me about the stick shift car in our very hilly area. It’s all fine, until I have to stop while going up a hill. What is that smell?

I took a field trip with a freshman Education Foundations class to the site of King Shaka’s grandfather’s grave. The site was two hours away from here, and the students sang the entire way. At the grave site, a small group of elders appeared in traditional Zulu garb and we were told that they were Shaka’s relatives. Being the white American professor, I was seated with the elders as they recounted the stories about Shaka’s mother and his being ostracized and shunned from the rest of the family as a child. A praise singer canted the heritage link from one generation to the next as the 80 of us and a hundred or so school children stood around watching and listening. The landscape was mountainous and the (stick shift) bus almost didn’t make it up some of the mountains. My interpreter Zama was quite impressed that I didn’t appear to be scared when we seemed to be slipping backwards down a hill with no guard rails or seat belts to protect us. I must admit, that what scared me was when the singing stopped, but once the students resumed their resounding and repetitive choruses, I went back to my picture taking.

Since classes have not started, I took a day off and made a pilgrimage to Durban to purchase some teaching materials (a guitar and accessories). I’m now the proud owner of a Cort guitar and can commence to singing and playing. If you are a guitarist and you are reading this, you probably know that I am not exactly adept at changing guitar strings, and all songs have to be placed in the keys of D or G for me to succeed at playing and singing at the same time, with reliance on the capo for the occasional in-between keys. So it was a minor bummer that I didn’t care for the strings that came on the guitar, especially since the terms “light gauge” and “medium-light” had to be substituted with “11” and “12” etc. - - what????? and also the store was out of capos. Who knew that guitar strings had numbers?

On Saturday, I attended a beautiful 25th wedding anniversary service at St. Patrick Catholic Church in Empangeni. We viewed a video of the wedding and the bridal party dancing down the aisle back in 1985, and a few dance scenes from the reception. Of course, there was a shot of the cattle that had been respectfully negotiated as well. I was pondering all that, when the bridal party appeared and danced down the aisle for real, just before the bride and groom did the same. It was a moving and musical 5 HOUR ceremony, complete with a mass and long speeches and everything. Offering was collected twice, which is an active part of church services around here. You dance down the aisle and put your money in the plate, or in this case, some people brought wedding gifts instead on the first round. Then the bridal party dances their way out at the end. We were all invited to the couple’s home for a delicious meal. At the time I left in the evening, the “after party” was just getting going.

Goodbye, Xhosa friends, Hello Zulus

The man in the photo with me is the South African Ethnomusicologist Dr. Andrew Tracey, Professor Emeritus, Rhodes University. He is from a family of well known musicians and moved the International Library of African Music from Johannesburg to Grahamstown several years ago, becoming it's second director, after the first director, his father Dr. Hugh Tracey. He shared some pointers about working as a researcher in South Africa and told me to "mind my vowels". Minding one's vowels is not as easy as it sounds, when one was born and raised in Kentucky. Dipthongs must all be eradicated if I am to succeed.

My first words to him were "I am not an Ethnomusicologist...." and his reply was "You are an Ethnomusicologist by virtue of the work you have begun." How about that! Everyone in this line of work (multicultural music specialists like me, reseachers, educators, etc.) has issues with terminology and I just wanted to get any out on the table, and was surprised at his response! In addition to Dr. Tracey, I had the good fortune of meeting with a few other local musicians and educators, including Mrs. Penny Whitford, Marimba director at the Cathedral and Mrs. Mandy Carver, Music Educator in Grahamstown and Dr. Diane Thram, Director of the International Library of African Music at Rhodes U. These colleagues provided me with some insights from the point of view of music teaching and directing in South Africa, along with some great hospitality and warmth, very characteristic of the Grahamstown crowd.

On the way back to Port Elizabeth, there were no donkeys to dodge, but a lonely baboon on the road that I was lucky not to have hit. Because I was trying to fly into Durban on the day of the semi-final between Germany and Spain, I was at the airport for several hours before successfully reaching Durban near midnight. Gugu was there waiting for me, as only a true friend would do - since we still had to drive the two hours back to Zululand, where I woke up this morning and took the day off.

Art for Art's Sake

I have been in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape for the past three days, having arrived along with many enthusiastic fans into the airport in Port Elizabeth to the sounds and sights of enthusiastic South African hosts playing and singing and of course, blowing vuvuzelas. I rented a car at the airport to drive the 2 hours to Grahamstown, where another world wide event was concluding, which is the annual National Arts Festival. It is advertised as the second largest in the world, second to the Edinburgh festival. I was challenged by driving the rental car out of the airport and through Port Elizabeth, since the steering wheel is on the right and the driving path is on the left of the road. The surrounding neighborhood looked much like the Hillandale subdivision where I grew up in Kentucky, but something was different....oh yeah, it was the donkeys. The view of the Indian Ocean beyond Port Elizabeth was breathtaking and I tried hard to concentrate on driving while simultaneously enjoying the ocean alongside the highway.

This part of the country was the home of many famous South Africans, including the activist Steve Biko, Enoch Sontanga, composer of Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika - the national anthem, President Nelson Mandela, and all the British settlers who came here in 1820 changing history forever. As part of the renaming scheme across all of South Africa, this area will now be called Nelson Mandela Bay.

Rhodes University is the main festival site, and the entire town stages plays, concerts and art exhibits during the festival. Today was the final day of the festival, where the multitude of tents and food vendors reminded me of Jazz Fest in New Orlean. I bought some small coffee cups for Dennis for my visual art fix and I spent this morning at the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. George where the mass was set to marimba and steel drum music. The mass was part of a celebration paralell to the festival called "Spiritfest". We sang familiar hymns in English and less familiar (to me) choruses in isiXhosa, the language of the black South Africans in this region. It is similiar to isiZulu, though the basic "hello" is a different word and the related conversational words are slight variations.

I am working in the archives of the International Library of African Music at Rhodes University. The ILAM is a unique library of traditional music of South Africa and houses dissertations that are nearly impossible to access on topics of interest in my Freedom Songs project. The Kipman family from whom I'm renting housing are a family of Rhodes scholars and have provided a great perspective on the local scene as well as fabulous hospitality. I have a nice cottage with my own television and kitchen, set in a beautiful neighborhood near campus. The town is a little like Boone, only flatter and more international. The ever present donkeys downtown have continued to remind me that I am not in Kansas, and we are all pretty excited around here that the looming threat of a blackout due to striking power company workers seems to have been resolved.