Drummers, Inc. and Misguided Adventures

Given that my past couple posts have been largely about the work I'm doing, I decided to focus this one on the Senegalese culture and my place observing it and participating in it. The first entry is a transcription of a journal entry I wrote on January 4th, but decided some people might find interesting, and the second story is a description of some of the things I've experienced over the past few days. Enjoy!


Drummers, Inc. January 4, 2008

On January 3rd I wrote that I had heard drums playing from across the village while I lay in bed, but hadn't had the motivation to get up and explore.

They say patience is a virtue. I'm back at the writing block tonight because I need to write about what I saw. After putting down the pen as Pops arrived at the fire, more and more people came out of the dark and we had our regular, peanut-cracking bonfire party. They asked if I had heard the drums the night before, which I obviously had. Pops told me that they'd be playing again tonight and that we could go over there later on. Soooo I stuck around past my normal 9:00 hut-time and talked with Sira a little. Just as I began to wonder if I had misunderstood Pops, a few faint bass beats drifted across the chilly village into our compound.

Pops and I went over there together - he with the hood of his windbreaker up, I in a small white T-shirt. The drums, which had picked up in pace and volume, were all the way on the other side of the village. Somebody explained to me that these two drummers go from village to village playing as their form of livelihood.

We entered the compound to find a group made exclusively of women - save the two men drumming - and a small group of young boys. They stood in a circle clapping and singing while one or two women at a time jumped into the middle to dance.

I felt lost between cultures. The women were mostly attired in traditional dresses of bright colors and intricate patterns with shauls to match, and they sang Malinke songs. One woman would sing a line and the others would reply (but not repeat) in song. To that extent I found myself in a cliché African drum circle. But they weren't lit by fire or torch light, the spot light that illuminated the middle dancers came in the form a flash light held by Pops, powered by D batteries.

The drummers themselves were a cultural paradox. They played nearly impossible African beats on hand-made drums, but wore knock-off Golce&Gabbana jeans and lit up a cigarette in the middle of a song.

The display of rhythmic independence and adapation amazed me. I couldn't find a common beat between the singing and the playing but there must have been because both drummers and singers continued without falter in their own rhythms despite each other. Perhaps there was a common rhythm and my sluggish ear couldn't hear it.

Sometimes a dancer would march up into the face of the drummers and almost challenge them to a battle. Herein lies the rhythmic adaptation. Once in a while the drummers would change beats unexpectedly (at least to me) but one beat later the dancer would be right with them. I was slightly impressed by that, but not surprised. Good dancers can always follow the music. My surprise came when a dancer spit her own change of beat right back at the drummers, who both adapted - perfectly in sync - as the entire package continued through the night.

The group of little boys behaved as any group of boys does at a dance. I think this is universal: They would dare each other to go dance until one finally got up the courage to jump in the middle, where he would shake his body for three beats before running out embarrassed.

Senegalese dancing seems to be all about the footwork. They will try to fool you with large and distracting arm movements, but I think those are for balance. The real dancing goes on at ground level, where the black bare feet chatter and stomp, occasionally kicking up behind to reveal their pale, calloused underside in a small cloud of dust.

As I write this I can still hear the unrelenting beat and unison singing. Pondala can be so romantic.


Misguided Adventures

An area known as 'Basari Country' lies about 80km west of Kedougou. It is named for the minority ethnic group, the Basaris, who inhabit it. The Basari people are comprised mostly of animists, meaning their religion is based more around nature and the soul of every object rather than one supreme being (I think). About 25% of Basaris are Christian converts.

Every year in May the Basaris hold an elaborate initiation festival, complete with masks, ritualistic dancing, and one-on-one combat. I had seen pictures of the ceremony in books and it definitely seemed like everything you'd hope for from a tribal African ceremony. They keep the date of the ceremony a secret until a few weeks before, but it's always a Sunday in May. Our sources told us this year that it would be May 10th and 11th.

A few friends and I decided to bike out to the Basari festival and to visit a few villages along the way to make a small vacation out of it. First we visited my friend Jordan in his village and looked at some of the work he did. We spent the night there and then went to my friend Amy's old village (she had to change her site after a few months of service because the water situation in this village was so dire).

In the second village we decided to put together a skit in Malinke for the village people about the importance of bug net usage in the prevention of malaria. Many of the women in the village came after dinner and really got into it and laughed at all the jokes. When the skit was finished we sarcastically told the women that they had to put together a piece of theater for us. However, they took us seriously and threw something together in moments: a skit, complete with props, about women going out fishing with nets and the difficulty of catching fish. After the skits, we sang for each other in English and Malinke. Later the young girls in the village played a game for us similar to Red Rover that involved a beautiful call-and-response song. The game quickly evolved into a dance circle similar to the one I described in my journal entry, but this time there were no drums, only clapping and singing, and six rhythmically incapable Americans were trying to participate.

One of the other volunteers asked me to beat box a little to provide some music for the dancing. So we told them all to stop clapping, because now it was time for some "musiko Americain." The little girls loved it and danced away. Later, one of the grown women came and asked me to give her another beat because she really liked dancing to the American music, so we got it going again and it quickly turned into a dance party with everyone dancing at the same time. Nobody had their cameras out for that night, but I'm content to have these memories saved in my head. Sometimes cameras change everything.

The next night we biked to Salemata, the big town near the Basari initiation festival village, brining our biking total to about 85km. Upon arrival, we saw a driver that we knew and asked him if he knew of anywhere that we could pay to wash up a little, as we were disgusting from the ride. "Of course not," he said, "My friends house is right over here, you can wash up for free there." So we sat down in this stranger's house and washed and sat in the shade and ate mangoes. We asked his friend if there were a small restaurant around where we could buy lunch, "There is," he said, "But they don't know how to cook. My wife is a much better cook. We'll cook for you." So we bought a bunch of food and had an amazing Senegalese meal for lunch.

After lunch we locked all of our bikes up in one of his huts, because the path up to the village is so narrow you can't even push a bike along it. The hike is about 6km through mountains. Despite the lack of rain over the past 5 months, some of the views were absolutely breath-taking. I'll be sure to go back in the rainy season. The driver's friend walked with us for a while to show us the path, and then went back to Salemata. Suddenly we found ourselves hiking through the African mountains, miles away from cell phone reception, on the assumption that we had been shown the right direction.

The path split a couple times and we luckily found a couple random people in the mountains that we could ask for directions. As time dragged on and we couldn't hear the chanting of the ceremony, we grew suspicious that we were on the right track. We found a young boy and asked him if he knew where Eshelo was. "Are you going to the campement there (collection of huts that makes up a rustic hotel)?"

"Eventually we want to go there to sleep tonight. But right now we want to go straight to the ceremony."

"That's impossible, the ceremony is next weekend."

So after a three-day trip and and a hike over a mountain, we learned that our sources had given us the wrong date. Discouraged, but not defeated, we followed the boy to the village, where we found our friends who had decided not to bike and took a car (up a different, much wider but much longer path). Now we numbered sixteen. The villagers confirmed that we had come on the wrong weekend, but invited us to drink home-made palm wine with them. We accepted the invitation, brought our luggage to the campement and returned to the village center with empty water bottles to be filled from the buckets wine. I have never consumed a drop of alcohol with a villager because almost all Malinkes, Wolofs, and Pulaars are Muslim and so are forbidden to drink.

We integrated ourselves well into the group of villagers and talked to them in our respective languages. While we were a long way from Malinke country, I did find a few men who spoke at least enough to communicate. We saw a man smoking home-grown tabacco from a pipe he had wittled and asked if he had any more to sell. He brought one up and told us we could buy it for about a dollar. Two of us were interested in it and started to play paper-rock-scissors for who got to buy it. When the man realized what was happening he immediately offered his own pipe for sale, so we both left happy.

As the sun disappeared and the villagers worked up an appetite, they started to disperse to their homes for dinner, and we returned to the campement, where the cook had prepared a large chicken dinner. The next day the owner of the campement gave us a small information session about the Basari festival, in lieu of actually observing the festival itself. Later we hiked down the mountain where a car waited to drive us and our bikes down to Kedougou.

While I'm disappointed that we missed the festival, and definitely don't have time to return this weekend, I will remember the weekend for the rest of my life. Tourists go out to watch the initation every year, but I'm assuming few ever go out just to socialize with the villagers. The journey there proved to be a much more interesting destination - one without an information session to accompany it.


Malinke Lesson of the Day

The woman who asked me to beat box again told me she liked it by saying, "Boubacar la sigo diyata!" 'A diyata' is a versatile phrase used in Malinke to say that you like something. It can be used for food, cities, or even songs. We really don't have a direct traslation in English.