Saturday 24 August 2013

July 31
Today was our second day at the Tamale Youth Cultural Center. Today began with a performance from the dance troop. Like all groups, it was high energy and wonderful to watch. This group was distinguished by the amount of accessories they used. Fans and hats, cowrie jewelry and anklets covered in metal rings which jingled to the rhythm of the dance. The men wore large belts around their waists with 6 rope loops draped off of them, with which they made a trick of flipping up onto their abdomens with a hip movement. As we have learned firsthand, there is a large amount of hip movement in Dagbon dancing.
                The names of the two drums that I didn’t know yesterday are Lunga and Gong-gong. Gong-gong is the larger drum, and it has a string across the head that acts as a simple snare. You engage or mute the snare by pushing on the skin.  The drums are accompanied by a piccolo-like petatonic flute. Between the snare and piccolo sounds, it sounds very much like a British fife and drum band. Tamele is very fr north and I understand they hardly had any British contact. At the very least, not as much as the coastal cities. But the two styles of music are so similar that it’s hard to believe it was a coincidence. How did military regimental music make it so far north?

                This afternoon, we went to a small village outside of Tamale where a group of women have a shea butter cooperative. A friendly woman named Alima showed us around the grounds and the phases of how shea butter is made. The nut is separated from the fruit, ground and roasted, separated from the waste and finally processed into soap and lotion. The cooperative is a wonderful opportunity for these women, but their business is stunted by exploitation from exporters. From the information we were given, it sounds like very little profit from their sales actually gets back to the women themselves.


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