Last week (edit: two or three weeks ago) I spent a lot of time tutoring English and Math at Sithembele Matiso Senior Secondary School in Nyanga township.
My learners are the most lovely group of kids, they are in 11th Grade and they have some, but not lots, of English. Each one of them has this thirst to learn, though! They really try to catch each bit of information that you throw out to them. This makes it a bit ironic that most of the exam texts that we read are about how English language is the key to passing exams, getting ahead in life, etc. And the rest are about other "cultural" problems. Sometimes it's like everyone is afraid to use the word "race," even when it is warranted to describe a particular problem in the townships... and even on this blog post, I hesitated before writing it because you never know when someone will take your words and twist them in a way you didn't intend. Anyway, these learners are lovely. And they start their year-exams at the beginning of next week, so they needed all the extra boost they could get from us!
This past few weeks I have attended steel drum lessons run by a wonderful man named David Wickham. He heads up the Steelband Project, which is an organization that both teaches and performs on the steel pans. Apparently, the steel pan is another instrument that is attributable to the infamous Tracey family. I got to meet Andrew Tracey last week, he was in Cape Town to check out the Steelband Project and I chatted with him for a while. I am hoping to set up a visit with him at Grahamstown University later in the year to see his collection of African musical instruments and check out the International Library of African Music.
Anyway, the Steelband Project is doing great things. The rehearsals that I attend are bands of underprivileged youth--one group is part of a catholic youth project that takes in students off the streets, and the other is a group of kids from Langa, the oldest (and most musical) township in Cape Town.
These photos are of the street youth playing steel pans... they get so into it! And it's a very different sort of thing from the marimba. When kids play marimba they get excited because they are moving and hitting a big instrument and making lots of sound. The steelpans are much more delicate, so when these kids enjoy their rehearsals it is really the music itself that they're enjoying. Very cool to see!
The steel pan is constructed in the conventional manner for mallet instruments. Instead of having a linear pitch/space relationship, with adjacent notes sounding adjacent pitches in the scale, the steelpan pitches progress around the circle of fifths. This makes a lot of sense in terms of chord patterns and progressions, but it sure wreaks havoc on my melodic brain! I have played a bit at a few of the lessons and I was completely terrible at it until my brain shifted over to "circle of fifths mode." Regardless, it was quite fun.I also spent a morning picking the brain of my drumming instructor from the drum circles that I attend in Observatory every week, Patrick Dilley. I went to his flat to look at some drums (which I have a beeeeeaaaauuuutiful one of now! See my photo below!) and we ended up talking music and drumming and musicians and Africa for the whole morning! It was very instructive to get inside his head and hear what he thought about the musicians in the area. Apparently there is a problem with integrity and loyalty in South Africa... any musician who sees an opportunity grabs it, whether it means switching to a rival company and disregarding years of training and assistance or even moving overseas. Makes sense to me, actually, but it still blows for him. I got to play on his balafon while I was there... it's a West African marimba-like instrument with gourd resonators. It was a beautiful instrument but the pentatonic scale really threw me a curve ball. I couldn't seem to find any melodies that were compatible! Too bad, really... but maybe I'll just have to travel to Ghana and get some training :).
A few weekends ago I went to the famed Castle of Good Hope. Actually, it's not really famed at all... it's just a castle in the middle of the city. But it was worth the visit, if only to get the view from the walls. I really enjoyed the museums on the Castle grounds and I might go back to take one of their guided tours. It's one of those places where there's not much to see but there's a great deal of history that makes the sights more interesting. That Sunday we went out to drive a beautiful road called the Franschoek Bus. The road goes out around Franschoek and through some gorgeous scenery. It was a cold day, so it felt nice to be warm and cozy in the car. We even got snowed on for a few minutes! It was very slushy snow, though.Since then I've also been on a tour of the Winelands outside of Cape Town. The wine industry here is flourishing, but I think it is still trying to find it's identity. Unlike most wine regions, there is no specialty wine that is grown in each region. Instead, all the wineries simply pick a few to specialize in. That means there is a wide range of wine tasting available to a tourist here, but it makes me wonder what grape really grows best here, or if the microclimate of each farm is really so different that you can grow anything you want in different areas. Somehow, I think that as the wine industry matures here in the Western Cape there will be a specialty emerging. We had a good time on the wine tour, but the weren't stunning. Many of the reds from the region are too fruity for my taste and the whites too... tasteless. But there were also some jewels hidden in between... the Pinotage is very nice from some of the farms and I had a wonderful Mourvedre. Anyhow, it was a nice tour!
Goodness... there is still so much more to say and I am out of energy to type it. So I think I will leave the rest for another post... which will come soon, I promise!
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