This woman was my favorite one in the competition, probably because she was the only woman competing (which makes her awesome!). Here she is kneeling to show respect to the chief before she begins to dance.
A man spinning. The shirt he is wearing is the standard Dagbani-style men's shirt, although it is bigger than any I have seen outside of the dance competition. I have also seen (non-dancing) men twirling their better-fitting shirts to show celebration.
Gongong players
A couple of days ago, we were invited to attend a dance competition at the chief's palace in Tamale. We found out about it right as we were leaving to take Peter to see another doctor, so we decided we would stop by for a few minutes before we left.
Although I was expecting the dancing to be the key part of the competition, what I enjoyed most was the music. African drumming is absolutely incredible. I can't really explain how it feels to listen to it live, so loud and totally engrossing. This group of men I'm sure had never rehearsed, and yet their performance was flawless. They all started and stopped at the same time, their rhythms all matched perfectly, the single flute that played with them knew just when to start and stop.
The drums that they hold under their arms are called gongongs, and they talk. Everyone (well all Africans anyway) understands what they say, and so the performance had lyrics even though it didn't for us. I tried to ask somebody how you know what they say, but I think learning the drum language would be really difficult unless you were learning it from somebody who "speaks" it, not just who hears it.
The dancing was actually not very impressive. Everybody got on the stage and did almost exactly the same steps. They would march around a little bit, and maybe twirl or whip their little fly whip. It got old pretty quickly. I found it much more interesting to look at the clothes they were wearing. They were all dressed as if they were chiefs with their wide twirly shirts, incredibly baggy pants, chief hats, etc. I have a bunch of pictures of the more interesting costumes that I can probably post when we get home.
Yesterday, we were invited to attend a goat party. I thought it would be like a luau, with the goat buried in the ground and roasted whole, or maybe we would see the goat roasting on a spit and I would get a good picture of an African goat being cooked. However, a goat party apparently only means that every dish that is served has some goat meat in it. We were served goat kebabs that were surprisingly spicy (and tasted good), goat soup, and fried goat. The goat meat in the soup and the fried goat was impossible to eat. By "impossible" I mean that I was given a spoon to eat with, the pieces of meat were way to big to fit in the spoon, and besides that, the meat was so gristly and fatty-looking that I couldn't find a place on it to bite even if I could find a way to get the meat to my mouth.
Also, the only non-alcoholic bottled beverage that they had was malt soda, so I got to drink a couple of those. The taste of them reminds me of wheat chex cereal. Definitely not my beverage of choice, but it was better than drinking the questionable sachet water or worse, the juice mix that might have been mixed from the tap.
Peter did not attend the goat party because he was feeling too tired. It was probably a good choice; I'm sure nothing that they served would have agreed with his stomach.
No comments:
Post a Comment