FESPAD 2008 (from August...)

So back at the beginning of August (yes, it's taken this long to upload the videos!), the girls and I - along with Franco, the anesthesiologist from Montreal who was staying with Claire at the KHI guesthouse, and Hilaire, a Rwandan friend Claire met on her last trip to Rwanda – went to the closing ceremonies of the Festival of Pan-African Dance (FESPAD). We hadn’t managed to get to any of the other events but the closing ceremony was simply amazing.

We got there around 5pm, after a ridiculously complicated taxi ride. The performances started soon after, in a replica of the King’s Palace, complete with risers carved into the ground. The first few acts were Rwandan artists- almost all in Kinyarwanda, so it made it a little difficult to understand! The music was all very good though. It was too hard to catch the names of the artists, which was too bad as I really liked some of it… I’ll admit, mostly I liked the dancing, which was occasionally pretty ridiculous. After the modern Rwandan musicians came traditional music and dance from different African countries- all the region’s countries were represented (Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo) as well as Congo-Brazzaville, Namibia and Guinea. The group from Burundi was my absolute favourite – a group of men carrying huge drums on their heads… and actually drumming on them like that! It was amazing. Last came an hour-long performance by traditional Rwandan musicians and dancers… It was INCREDIBLE! Lots of drumming and singing, women dancing with pots and baskets, and finally the Intore dancers… It was just fantastic.

I don’t think I can describe it well enough in words, so I’ll let the videos I took do the talking. In some of them, you can’t see a whole lot- the lighting and distance made it a little bit difficult to get great shots, but at the least, the music is great.