TRADITION: The Acholi larakaraka dance is a medium of language

PERSPECTIVE OF A UGANDAN IN CANADA

Opiyo Oloya

Last Tuesday morning, the day after returning from the week-long trip to Uganda, my six-year old son, Oceng, asked if he could take to school the African CD by Kenyan artiste Susanna Owiyo.

The album has been a family favourite, seeing more play than anything we have bought in the last year. It is played in the van, in the house and on the computer-and, I dare add, very loudly at times. Now, though I know both my sons love the album, I was loath to lend any of the family albums to school, let alone to a First Grade classroom, so I asked why he needed the album.

The class was having a blast (whatever that means) at lunch time and he wanted the album to play his favourite track and show classmates some of his fluid dance moves. His plea of “Please, please, daddy”, convinced me to let go. I told him that he could take the album, but to be very careful with it and to bring it home at the end of the day. Inside, meanwhile, I was smiling like the cat that swallowed the canary. My happiness could not have been greater if my son had come back home and told me he was at the top of the class.

This, after all, was something my wife and I had been working on for the last six years. Let me explain. From the moment they were born, we have strived hard to teach both boys to be proud of their African heritage. We speak Luo as much as we can so that they can learn to speak it. Both speak the language, though the little guy, Ogaba, uses it more than his older brother.

We also spend time reading the Acholi ododo story books with characters like obibi (ogre), apwoyo (hare) and kwadenge (beetle). But the most natural, almost effortless part of this cultural branding process is listening to African music.

I still have a large collection of African music from my days as a radio programmer with CIUT 89.5 FM Toronto community radio. Name any brand of African music, I have it —right from Algeria, makossa, highlife, jit, mbira, mbaqanga, kora, soukous, creole, reggae, and everything else in between.

It was therefore very easy to induct the young ones into the African music scene since that is the only thing they hear from morning till sunset.

That said, we were never quite sure whether my son really felt proud enough to take his music to share with his classmates. For one thing, almost all his classmates are white, and, moreover in a school of more than 800 students, there are less than a dozen black children.

The other problem is the undue influence of the television which practically oozes everything American — the music video of Snoop Dogg, 50 Cents, Puff Daddy all spill out of the tube like bad breath, snaring everyone within hearing distance, and that is just about all the youth hear in north America and beyond.

Indeed, one of my biggest disappointments visiting Uganda two weeks ago was listening to American pop music practically everywhere. The morning talk-shows sounded like something right out of Detroit, loud, brash and full of mindless blathering about nothing in particular. At Pabbo IDP camp, a place God forgot a long time ago, there is a bar with a big television screen which is cranked up in the evening using a diesel electric generator, and out pours all the rap videos from New York.

And when I visited a few schools in Kampala, it was as if the indigenous languages had been banned, and try as I might, the sweet rounded Luganda was utterly missing.

And this is the place where the Minister of Information is worried about the V-monologue because it might corrupt the culture? For crying out aloud, you want to protect the culture, start by protecting the language, by investing in it preservation, and by ensuring that children are provided a lot of opportunity to speak it. So, back to Toronto, you could imagine me standing there, the sounds of Uganda still ringing in my ears, and my son wants to take his African CD to his class. Now, it is at moments like this when you feel like walking with the back of your feet on the ground. It felt like a big triumph getting the little man to sign onto the African culture, and most important, not feel shy about sharing it.

In any case, at the end of the day, exhausted, presumably after showing all his African dance moves, my son returned with the CD unscratched. When I asked how it all went down, he said his classmates loved the music, and that he had a great time dancing to the album. Well, I thought to myself, there is one down —and a few millions to go. Hopefully, and only a faint hopefully here, the Minister of Information could start by banning Celine Dion and Mariah Carey and 50 cents from the Uganda airwaves to be replaced by some sweet sound of nanga and lukeme...

Oh-oh, did I say that — now the Canadians are going to get on my back for being unpatriotic with Celine who is a goddess here. Well, win some, lose some.