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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