Word: isicathamiya
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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...crumbling YMCA on Beatrice Street near the Durban waterfront resounds with music and foot-stomping. Once this South African port city on the Indian Ocean hummed day and night with Zulu stevedores hauling ship cargo. Now in the small hours, the docks are quiet, but inside the Y, isicathamiya choral groups are pulsing. Isicathamiya (i-see-ca-tah-me-ya) encompasses elements of Zulu ritual celebrations and American gospel and ragtime. Opening for concerts in the late evening, the Beatrice Street Y offers a dim, sweltering performance hall one flight up crooked wooden stairs. The Saturday crowd sitting on plastic...
...More than a decade ago Paul Simon's "Graceland" album introduced Ladysmith Black Mambazo to international popular culture, promoting this a cappella ensemble as a global emissary of isicathamiya and its sonorous hymns of protest and healing. For years apartheid repression haunted this music, with verses mourning loss of ancestral land to European farmers and love eroded by the distance between a Zulu migrant worker and his rural family waiting for him and his wages. Now in South Africa many isicathamiya performers no longer denounce white minority rule. New lyrics portray Africans straddling rural tradition and urban modernity, and dreams...
...Zulu men dominate isicathamiya, though Zulu women are entering the ranks. A troupe often represents a district from one of the former apartheid reserves administered by tribal chiefs. Residents in these infertile scrublands remain dirt poor and dependent on income from emigrant relatives. Their homes are only now receiving electricity and running water. A lone goat bleating often punctuates the usual rural stillness, but when people gather for traditional ceremonies the landscape reverberates with songs of courting and dances of war. Isicathamiya embraces both these vibrant customs and the modern cultural innovations brought by Zulu workers living in cosmopolitan cities...
...profound emotions shaping South Africa come with no extra charge. The performance is in Zulu, but spectators with no understanding of the language can grasp the feeling. Evocative words such as "AIDS," "lover boy," "our parliament" and "Mandela" are at the foreground. Hope and gloom duel in the background. Isicathamiya is South Africa's blues...
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