Festival of the Nomads ,Cure Salée

Festival of the Nomads – Cure Salée

One of the most important festivals in West Africa is celebration Cure Salée (Salt Cure). It’s held annually and each Nomad ethnic group has its own celebration. The biggest celebration you can see at Wodaabé (Bororo) tribe, held in September around small town In-Gall, in North-east Niger. The festival takes about a week, but two days are major. The exact date is not known, it’s changing every year and it’s announced approximately one month before in depending on rains strength.

Wodaabé tribe is part of z gibber family called Fulani. Fulani were the originally Nomads and herdsmen, but when they migrated from Upper Nile area to West Africa, many of them converted to Islam and settled down. The rest of them remained Nomads and herdsmen are called Wodaabé. In fact, Wodaabé called themselves ‘people of the taboos’, with is connected to their traditional Fulani law, moral restrictions, honesty and fairness. Some of them are called Bororo which is linked to their live with cattle.

Wodaabé men have often women-like elegant faces. They believe they are very attractive. The beauty is very important for them. The most important for the parents is to have pretty child. In some cases a man who is not so pretty has to share his wife with another more beautiful man, so the probability a pretty child is born is higher. Wodaabé women are indeed care about their beauty and surprisingly they have sexual freedom before the marriage.

During the year Wodaabé people are spread around almost all West African fields. Because their living is dependent on cattle, they bring the herds once a year to In-Gallu area, which is rich to the salt and healthy. The area is mostly visited after the raining season when there is enough to eat for the cattle. That’s the right time for Cure Salée celebration. The festival is a big social and cultural event. The old friends can meet, men are searching for their wives, people are chatting about the news.

Wodaabé join the Cure Salée celebration with their own festival Gerewol called after their traditional dance. The right time to attract woman is a beauty contest. The main event is Yaake dance. Men are dancing showing their beauty, charisma, elegance and charm. Preparation is tough. Men are decorating themselves in front of a small mirror for long hours. The face make-up must be perfect. They are carefully selecting bracelets and necklaces. When they are ready, the dance can start. It’s a quite strange and different dance we are get used to. Men are dancing in a row, wobbling, rolling eyes and showing the teeth. Before the dance they usually take a stimulant drink, so they can dance for hours. It’s not rare to see men dancing the whole night. Some of them are in ecstasy and need help from the others. Men beauty is scored according to their dance. Women are watching carefully and quietly selection their husbands. If the merry offer is accepted by man, he has to give a calabash of milk to her parents. If they accept it, he has to pay with three cows for the wedding celebration. save your loans with payday advance

New Year’s Eve in Africa

New Year’s Eve is celebrated in many communities across Africa. In most African cities, hotels and bars will be full of party goers celebrating the New Year. Every country in Africa enjoys a public holiday on January 1st, regardless if they celebrate their traditional New Year on that day. Ethiopia for example enjoyed a huge New Year’s celebration in September 2007, to welcome the year 2000 — but the Addis Ababa nightlife will still be rocking on the eve of December 31st.

New Year’s in South Africa

South Africa is one of the best places to celebrate New Year’s Eve if you like big parties. The Victoria and Alfred Waterfront in Cape Town hosts one of the country’s biggest bashes with fireworks, music, dancing and more. Other Cape Town venues that are hosting big parties can be foundhere. Once you’ve finished parting, don’t forget to check out the big Minstrel Carnival on New Year’s Day.

Durban’s beaches are full at this time of year and the waterfront with its many clubs and hopping nightlife are perfect for celebrating the New Year in style. The beaches along the Garden Route are also famous for all night parties with drumming, singing and dancing.

Johannesburg used to celebrate the New Year by firing gunshots and throwing fridges off balconies, but that appears to be under control now. Instead you can usually head downtown to the Mary Fitzgerald Square in Newtown and party the night away with 50,000 of your friends. If there’s nothing official scheduled in Newtown (2008/9 has not been announced at the time of writing) then head to any of Johannesburg’s numerous nightclubs and bars which all have big nights planned.

New Year’s in North Africa

African Muslims enjoy several celebrations around this time of year. There’s Eid ul-Adhawhich is an important festival, happens on December 8 – 11 (2008). Tunisians, Algerians, and Moroccans will still be recovering from the traditional slaughtering of a sheep or goat, and enjoying family gatherings . There are also plenty of Muslims traveling over the New Year returning from the Hajj.

In North Africa’s Maghreb region New Year’s Eve is actually celebrated around 12 – 15 January. The Amazigh (Berber) people of North Africa will celebrate their own New Year,Yennayer, for the 2,959th time (in 2008/9) in accordance with the Julian calendar. If you’re in Algeria or Morocco you’ll get to enjoy steaming plates of chicken and couscous as a New Year is welcomed.

New Year’s in Ethiopia and Egypt

Of course, in Ethiopia or Egypt, the Coptic Christians celebrate the New Year in September and Christmas is celebrated on the 7th of January. Ethiopia celebrated their millennium with huge festivities in September 2007. Egyptians and Ethiopians still get the 1st of January off though, so there will be parties at the big hotels and resorts. Getting car hire South Africa will help if you travel with family.

Personally, I’ll be celebrating at home with my family and I’ll use this opportunity to wish everyone a very happy and prosperous New Year, or as they say in Swahili, Heri ya mwaka mpya.

Christmas in Africa

Gift Giving

Those who can afford it will generally give gifts at Christmas but the holiday is not nearly as commercial as it is in Europe or the Americas. The emphasis is more on the religious aspect of celebrating the birth of Jesus and singing in church, than it is on gift giving. The most common thing bought at Christmas is a new set of clothes to be worn to the church service. Many Africans are too poor to be able to afford presents for their kids and there aren’t too many toy stores in rural Africa to shop at anyway. If gifts are exchanged in poorer communities they usually come in the form of school books, soap, cloth, candles and other practical goods.

Christmas Dinner

As in most Christian cultures, celebrating Christmas dinner with friends and family tops the list after attending church. In most countries Christmas is a public holiday and people take the opportunity to visit friends and family. In East Africa goats are quickly snapped up at the local markets and roasted on Christmas day. In South Africa the sun is hot and the beaches are full of families enjoying braais (barbeques) or traditional Christmas dinners with paper hats, mince pies, turkey and plum pudding (a vestige of the British colonial legacy.) In Ghana Christmas dinner is not complete without fufu and okra soup and in Liberia rice, beef and biscuits are the order of the day. Zimbabweans make sure there’s plenty of bread, jam and tea to eat along with their goat meat.

Church Services and Caroling

The history of Christianity in Africa dates back to the 1st Century AD. What every missionary has found since that time is that Africans are very spiritual people. (Besides Christianity, the other main religions are Islam and indigenous beliefs). Going to church is generally the main focus of Christmas celebrations in Africa. Nativity scenes are played out, carols are sung and in some cases dances are performed.

One of my earliest Christmas memories in Malawi is watching groups of young children go door to door to perform dances and Christmas songs dressed in skirts made of leaves and using home made instruments. They received a small gift of money in return. In many countries the processions after the Christmas Eve church service is a joyous occasion of music and dance. In the Gambia for example, people parade with large intricately made lanterns called fanals in the shape of boats or houses. Every country has their own unique celebrations no matter how small their Christian population.

Christmas Decorations

Decorating shop fronts, mango trees, churches and homes is common throughout African Christian communities. You may see fake snow decorating store fronts in Nairobi, palm trees laden with candles in Ghana or oil palms loaded with bells in Liberia.

How to Say Merry Christmas

In Akan (Ghana) Afishapa
In Zimbabwe Merry Kisimusi
In Afrikaans (South Africa) Geseënde Kersfees
In Zulu (South Africa) Sinifisela Ukhisimusi Omuhle
In Swazi (Swaziland) Sinifisela Khisimusi Lomuhle
In Sotho (Lesthoto) Matswalo a Morena a Mabotse
In Swahili (Tanzania, Kenya) Kuwa na Krismasi njema
In Amharic (Ethiopia) Melkam Yelidet Beaal
In Egyptian (Egypt) Colo sana wintom tiebeen
In Yoruba (Nigeria) E ku odun, e hu iye’ dun!

Cape Town Minstrel Carnival

As the southeast breeze kicks up outside Cape Town’s Greenpoint Stadium, the sound of strumming banjos and banging drums reaches a crescendo, and thousands of merry minstrels hold onto their multicolored hats. It’s the final day of the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival, known more colloquially among “coloured” or mixed-race Capetonians as the “Coon Carnival,” and the excitement generated by weeks of parades and months of preparation is building to a climax. Dressed in a dazzling array of shining colors, the “coons”—mostly men but also some women and children–burst spontaneously into song and dance. They croon in the local Afrikaans dialect of “Kaapse taal” (literally, “Cape language”), jump into little Chaplinesque jigs, and pump their parasols to and fro. And in their midst, looking dapper in his sky-blue jacket and with neon-green polka dots painted across his cheeks, is the festival’s only white participant: Henry Trotter, age 28, of New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A.

“Henry!” shouts a coloured woman wearing a press badge. “There you are!” She gives him a hug and motions to a cameraman, who starts filming. Mr. Trotter strikes a pose and is immediately surrounded by camera-happy comrades from his troupe, most in blackface or in some version thereof, who flash toothless grins and victory signs. Then the troupe’s band rumbles past and Mr. Trotter falls into formation with the rest of the minstrels, who gaily shimmy and shuffle their way into the stadium to the rhythm of drums and the flutter of tambourines.

Mr. Trotter, a graduate student in Yale University’s African Studies program, first came to Cape Town in 1997, at the end of extensive travels in the eastern and southern regions of the continent. “I was curious about the coloured community here, because it’s quite different than what I’d seen in the rest of Africa. Here you have a community basically predicated on the idea that they’re mixed, that they’re not ‘pure’ whites or Africans. And even though you have, of course, mixed people everywhere else, you don’t find any [mixed] communities necessarily…and you would never find a majority mixed community. But here in Cape Town, you have that. So I wanted to look into it, and see what it was all about.”

Three years after his first visit, Mr. Trotter has returned to Cape Town, this time not as just a traveler but as a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholar working on an M.A. thesis. He took up residence in the coloured township of Bonteheuwel (bon-teh-HEE-vel) on the Cape Flats and decided to study the ways in which the coloured community remembers the forced removals of the apartheid era. While conducting interviews throughout Cape Town’s coloured townships, he began to learn more about the Coon Carnival and was eventually invited to observe a troupe rehearsing. Soon, he found himself becoming more than just an observer.

“They said, ‘Well, why don’t you just run with us?’” he recalls. Mr. Trotter could not play or sing the Kaapse songs in the troupe’s repertoire, but he found a role as a “runner”—one of the dancers who marches behind the band and the main chorus. So after attending a few rehearsals and paying 250 Rand (about $35) for his outfit, Mr. Trotter was officially a member of the Lentegeur Entertainers, named after the Cape Flats neighborhood where most of its members live.

In joining the “coons,” Mr. Trottercreated a minor sensation throughout this city, which is still deeply divided along racial lines. Few whites, and few blacks for that matter, participate in or attend the Coon Carnival; it is largely a coloured affair. And although a handful of foreign tourists come to watch the troupes parade through the streets, there have been no other foreigners in recent memory who have actually participated. Mr. Trotter also discovered that his participation exposed class divisions within the coloured community itself. Henry’s girlfriend, for example, a coloured woman who works for the municipal department of land affairs and aspires to be a lawyer, was mortified when he joined. “She was so against it,” laughs Mr. Trotter. “She had never seen the coons in her life. Part of the way to set yourself apart from the working class is to deny interest and participation in the ‘coons,’ which [are] a celebration of working-class existence, basically. She had a strong aversion to it, and she said, ‘it’s so local, it’s just a bunch of skollies, just a bunch of riff-raff, getting together and jumping up and down.”

Mr. Trotter’s neighbors in Bonteheuwel, however, and his new friends in the Lentegeur Entertainers, were enthusiastic and encouraging. Of course, the young man had to endure his share of good-natured ribbing. “‘Hey, whitey, stay in formation,’ they used to say,” he recalls with a smile. But his involvement was welcomed and even celebrated by his new friends and neighbors. They were thrilled that someone outside the coloured community had taken an interest in the carnival. The Cape Argus, one of Cape Town’s local dailies, was also exultant:“Uncle Sam marches with the minstrels,” it declared in a bold headline.

The carnival has its roots in the creole culture that formed at the Cape over hundreds of years from the interaction and intermingling of indigenous African groups, European settlers, Muslim slaves from the Indonesian archipelago, and people from a variety of other backgrounds. Freed slaves in Cape Town developed their own cycle of festivals in December and January, among them the Tweede Nuwe Jaar (“Second New Year”), which is celebrated on January 2nd and is a kind of independence day for the coloured community. When American minstrels arrived at the Cape in the mid-nineteenth century, the styles and sounds of vaudeville were incorporated into local celebrations, and the Coon Carnival was born. The word “coon” was borrowed but its pejorative and racial connotations were ignored, so that it came to refer to a member of a minstrel troupe and nothing more.

Today, the minstrels continue to borrow from a variety of cultural sources. One of this year’s favorite troupes, for example, is called the Pennsylvanians; another is known as the Fabulous Mardi Gras. And while the minstrels’ repertoire largely consists of folk songs, they also perform Broadway show tunes and dance to hip-hop and Latin tracks as they parade through the streets of the city.

It is perhaps ironic that a festival formed from so many varied and cosmopolitan influences should remain so local in character. Yet this is part of the charm of the Coon Carnival. Each troupe is made up of members from a particular neighborhood of the city, and each is expected to parade and perform for its local community in exchange for booze and tables full of delicious Cape cuisine. Of course, the local character of the carnival also means that the carnival reflects some local problems. Many of the city’s gangsters join the minstrel troupes, for instance, and tensions sometimes spill over into violence at the stadium. But rather than exacerbating the problem, the Coon Carnival often provides an opportunity for peace and co-existence within the community. “Look,” said one elderly minstrel in the green, yellow, and red of the Elsies River Community Entertainers, waving his arms over a dancing sea of colorful umbrellas. “All the gangsters from the Cape Flats in one place. And no guns. Everybody’s happy. It just goes to show you.”

Under apartheid, the Coon Carnival faced enormous challenges. Segregation, forced removals, and discrimination made the troupes and their performances more difficult to organize. The government often placed the best stadiums off-limits to the coloured community, and where the carnival was able to perform it had to do so in front of segregated audiences. Now, in the “New South Africa,” the government is lending its support to the carnival, and Nelson Mandela himself presided over the carnival’s opening in 1996. Academics have begun taking notice as well, with a groundbreaking study of the Coon Carnival being published in 1999 by the French academic Denis-Constant Martin. And with tourism quickly becoming a pillar of the local economy, city officials talk about turning the “Minstrel Carnival” into a celebration that will rival festivals in New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro.

As exciting and ambitious as that may sound, some of the minstrels themselves are apprehensive about opening up the festival to the world. There is a widespread fear that organizing the Coon Carnival to appeal to foreign tourists and commercial sponsors would mean taking it away from the local communities that have kept it alive for over a hundred years, in effect reserving the best seats for tourists just as they were once reserved for whites at the segregated stadiums. And there is an enduring ambivalence in Cape Town about coloured identity and whether it is something that can or should be embraced and celebrated. If Capetonians are unsure about how to respond to a parade of blackface minstrels, the feeling goes, how might the rest of the world react?

Mr. Trotter, for one, has made up his mind: the Coon Carnival is a lot of fun, even if wearing blackface might be seen back home as a provocative act. “I think it would be challenging to explain this to Americans, because we have abandoned these things,” he says. “But one group’s cultural taboos are another’s celebration.” In Cape Town, as in other creole cities around the world, it seems that pushing cultural boundaries is what the party’s all about after all. Use car hire South Africa and head on to your favorite spots easily.