Saturday, October 24, 2009

Common Entertainment

Gracious Secondary students may not be the countries’ most academically talented students, but they are truly enthusiastic performers. Throughout the school year there have been numerous events during which the students can show off their creative prowess to their peers and parents. In addition to weekly assemblies every Monday morning, we have had an Open Day for parents and the Gracious Graduation and MANEB Exams Dedication (prayers for the students’ success on upcoming national exams).

During each of these events, the sheer number of students vying to perform astonished me. Whenever there is a school function, the one hour reserved for student performances consistently stretches to 2-3 times that length. No one other than Jesse’s and my growling stomachs seemed to mind the delayed program though. Entertainment, regardless of the quality, is a valued commodity and no one is anxious for it to end.

Most of the performances are groups of students singing religious songs. Foremost and favorite amongst the student body and myself are the Chronicles, who write remarkably creative gospel/rap songs in English and Chichewa, with vocal stylings reminiscent of a middle-school boy band. The Anglican Choir usually makes several appearances, singing choral favorites like Lowani, The Blood of Jesus, and Yende Pita Patsogola. The choir has an absolutely heart-warming and cohesive sound, but I always have to laugh a little to myself at the image of Allen Makwinja (a form three student) towering two-feet over the other 15 young men and women who sing the back-up to his booming bass. SCOM (the Christian students group of Malawi) also often sings, but the best part of their performances is the semi-synchronized overly-enthusiastic dancing that accompanies each rafter-rattling song. The Muslim Students Association also usually contributes a piece, though the nasally modulated Arabic lyrics are underappreciated by the audience, especially when following directly after the gospel enthusiasm of the Christian groups.

In addition to a multitude of singing groups, Gracious also has it own theatre troupe, The Malambe (Baobab) Drama Group. The themes of their plays never stray from the merits of being a good student and dangers of boyfriends, alcohol, marijuana, etc, and the group loves to include taboos, such as witch doctor telling a father that he is supposed to have sex with his daughter to cure his money problems. Regardless, or probably because of this, the student body always welcomes any drama offering with loud cheers, which grow loudest whenever drugs, alcohol, or sex are mentioned. As for myself, I usually find the plots tedious and the two skits presented during the graduation ceremony made me slink down in my chair with embarrassment for the students onstage who had obviously neglected to rehearse even once. However, when the students actually rehearse, the performance can be quite good. The group presented one play during Open Day which began with a funeral and then traveled back through time to the events which had led to the funeral (which of course was back to the usual theme of good student/bad student). It was so well performed that parents would run up on stage in the middle of the play to give the actors money to show their appreciation, which led to loud cheers drowning out the dialogue of the play. But, audience participation was all part of the entertainment.


In addition to the singing and acting, the other main component of student performances is dancing. A dance is called a ‘gule’ in Chichewa and dancing is a hefty part of Malawian culture. The first dance I saw was during the Open Day performance and began with two young men rapidly beating wood-and-hide drums as the girls slowly came singing, stamping and clapping out toward the audience in a line. The girls knelt in a semi circle as one girl took her place in the center and began to cock her hips from side to side to the rapid beat. At this point the roar of the audience crescendoed and mothers came dancing out to present the dancers with money. The dance dissolved into a melee of running shouting and laughing to the asyncopated and rapidly deteriorating drum rhythm before the emcee finally called a halt and proceeded with the next performance.

The second dance I observed was not of the formal cultural variety, but a teenage disco thrown for the students following the graduation ceremony. Jesse helped set up the speakers, Peter (the computer studies teacher) DJed, and I wandered the room searching for and confiscating sachets of alcohol. Aside from the ear-splitting music echoing in a confined space and the giggly boy-girl dramatics, the scene could have come from any high school in the United States. Well, perhaps more boys were out in the middle of the dance floor rather than huddled around the sides. For me it was fun to see the girls free from their uniform blue and all decked out in their most colorful fashions. Even though each girl probably owned only one nice outfit, they all shared and swapped clothes around, mixing and (not-quite)-matching, until each girl had a sexy and unique outfit to wear to the dance. Their excitement was adorable and just goes to prove that teenage girls are teenage girls everywhere.

Malawi has a great fondness for dancing. Children dance, grandmothers dance, everyone dances: in the villages, in discos, in school, and even in the middle of the road at night. If I were to make an out-sider’s culturally-ignorant guess, I would say it stems from a time when the only entertainment to be had was the kind people could produce with their own voices and drums. Unlike most developed nations, that time does not exist only in nostalgia. In rural Malawi, when the electricity goes out and the sun sets, people still pass the dark hours before sleep in song and dance.

Since we arrived at the hut at MCV, the electricity has gone out from 6pm-7pm approximately 4 nights every week, sometimes more, sometimes less. We joke that it’s because that’s when the day-shift workers at the electrical plant change over to the night-shift, but probably has more to do with redistributing the power so the Blantyre never goes without. On most nights that the power goes out, the girls who board at MCV sit outside the hostel (just 40 meters from our hut) and sing. About a month ago, I finally went over to investigate.

As my eyes adjusted to the sheer dark, I found about half of the girls seated in a semi-circle and the others up and dancing. One girl was leading the song, the others singing along while two played drums. The girls did not remain in their places for long, sometimes one would jump up and start a new dance, and other would go sit back down or pull another less-enthusiastic girls up to participate. Frequently one girl would start leading a new song in the middle of another one and everyone would just join in on the new song, leaving a brief moment when both melodies hung clashing before one was absorbed into the other. Songs would break in the middle as one drummer would impatiently tell the other to switch rhythms (no, do it like, bum bum bah buh), but it didn’t matter because this was not a performance. It was for pleasure and not perfection.

Most of the songs seemed to follow a pattern that every girl automatically knew by heart, but individual lyrics seemed highly ad-libbed by the one leading the song. She would mention individuals by name and extol the virtues of boarding students over day-scholars. Sometimes she would even switch to English if there was a lyric she wanted me to hear. One song, sung entirely in English, repeated the chorus, “Choose-a, choose-a, the best of all…” and then went on to list names of students and teachers.

Many of the songs had specific ways of dancing that went along with them. One of which was about ‘katundu’ meaning luggage or load. The girls bobbed around to the beat of the drum singing a catchy and repetitive lyric while giggling and passing a bundle from head to head. Only after a few minutes into the song when I too had wiggled my butt around the circle while clasping the bundle to the top of my head, did one of the girls come up and tell me that the song was saying that I had lots of sins on my head and had to pass them off. Evidently ‘katundu’ also means sins.

The sheer number of songs that the girls knew was astonishing to me. But, perhaps it is not quite so remarkable considering that they have been surrounded by these songs since they were born. Music and dancing are simply a fact of living in Malawi in the same way that supermarkets are an inescapable fact of living in America. It will be a little sad to leave Malawi where entertainment is performed by everyone and return to the West where we leave our amusement in the hands of professionals.

1 comment:

  1. Yet another wonderful post. Thank you, Jes.

    BTW, what is the etymology of Gracious Secondary School? Is it a biblical allusion, or is its eponym someone named Gracious?

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