Cooking with Lud

Audio: Singing Contest at Agricultural Fair, Mokhotlong 2000

I’ve always felt remiss in not releasing the recordings frm Lesotho. In a couple of days, I’ll put up a separate page with the whole album including the liner notes. The above link is to get you started.
Following is a story I wrote a few years back about the trip and the contest.

The Singing Contest

Whether you were walking or riding as we were in a splendid Toyota Hilux, a double cab pickup, there is no fast way to get to the high plain at Malefiloane. It was maybe 20 kilometers from Mokhotlong and it took three hours even though some of that went quickly on the new blacktop.

We had been in Lesotho–in Mokhotlong along the South African border–about two weeks and were leaving soon. The May 2000 Agric Show at Malefiloane was a perfect culmination to the trip. It was a kind of county fair, not too surprising since the guy that cooked it up is a native Midwesterner.

My wife, Sally Heiney, met Lyle Jaffe in college and has stayed in touch with him as he traveled to various parts of Africa working on development projects. He’d been in Lesotho for about 12 years as director of GROW, an international nonprofit whose Lesotho project was aimed at water sanitation and crop diversity. He is a thin, wiry man with a determined gate and a lot of energy. He and his wife, Simone, had stayed with us in Indiana after they got married, and when Sally and I got married we got an invitation.

It had been a strange and wonderful two weeks starting with frantic preparations at GROW headquarters over the impending visit of the king, Letsie III, and his new queen, Mrs. Karabo Seeiso. Two days after we drove from Durban up the Drakensburg escarpment and onto the plateau of Lesotho, the king arrived at GROW preceded by 30 men on horseback and a couple of military pickups. There were a lot of speeches, singing and praise poetry that day. The king gave a speech praising GROW’s literacy volunteers and the new couple planted a tree before moving on to their next visit. That night the king instructed the power plant to run late. The lights stayed on in Mokhotlong and we all had a heck of a party.

I taped a bit of the singing at the party and at one point a group of senior GROW folks and I went next door to work on an arrangement of their new theme song.

Over the next few days, I gathered mostly atmospheric sounds along with late night African radio evangelists. Although I never regretted taking Chuck up on his offer to loan us the Marantz for the trip, but it wasn’t until we got to the Agric Show that lugging that tape deck all over the mountains really made sense.

We knew a little of what to expect; in addition to horse racing, a feast and crop judging there would be a singing contest. Several of the primary schools in the area had been challenged to come up with original songs celebrating things like clean water, nutrition and diversity.

People started arriving, most on foot, around midday. At the core of each group were schoolchildren, more than a hundred in all, from different villages each in their school’s uniform–yellow, green blue or black. Each group announced their arrival by singing a song as they walked into camp. Ululations and cheers from the growing crowd of parents and grandparents greeted them as they came into view.

We knew a little of what to expect from the kids, too. A few days earlier we’d traveled to the village of Likoae and visited the Nazareth Primary School. It was bare bones–almost no books nor much to write with, no blackboard. Lesotho had just made primary education free and little schools like Nazareth were overwhelmed. We gave the teacher some rands to help pay for a blackboard. It wasn’t much but she was overjoyed and ran back into the school. We heard some cheering and the whole class followed her out, formed a semicircle around us and they gave us a preview of their songs.

The choral music of Lesotho is a joyous music. It’s got a heavy beat arranged with groups of voices creating rhythms and counter rhythms.

The recording made at the Agric Show, is quite literally, a field recording. The plain, maybe a mile or so high, was so windswept that it took a while to get the mic screened from the gusts. Each school had two or three tunes worked out, some with dances and speeches woven in.

They would march up to a microphone connected by a long cord to a beat up blue pickup with a couple of speakers mounted on top. Some groups would dance as they sang or march around in a circle. One group bought carrots and pictures of latrines that GROW had built for their school.

The competition was fierce and the judges, including the local chief, were lobbied hard by the crowd.

Winners, including our friends at Nazareth, got an encore set and the adoration of the growing group collecting on the plain. Most of those recordings of the second set are all but drowned out in places by the sounds of cheering grandmothers and mothers who would run up and with a shout place a coin at the choir’s feet and dance away proudly.

We converted the tape to CD and got it mastered when we got home. It has always been a dream to put out a CD of the kids and within a few months we did–five of them in all–which were shipped back to Mokhotlong, where in certain villages, we’re told, they were top of the charts.