The Traditional Concept Umunthu as entangled in a Malawian Dance Teacher’s Educational Practice

Traditional dance

Throughout the article I use the term “traditional” about the dances performed and rehearsed. “Traditional” here is to be understood as music, dance and songs, as well as stories deriving from different tribes in Malawi, as musicologist Austin Emielu uses the term when discussing tradition and modern music/dance in West Africa (Emielu, 2018), even though these will sometimes be shared between tribes and the same expressions can be found in different languages but with the same content. The most dominant tribe in Malawi is chewa, but the traditions of big tribes like tumbuka, yao and ngoni are also strong. The dance troupe Hear Us Children is not focused on one specific tribe, but rather on a spectrum of traditions within Malawi. Emielu (2018) points out that the concepts of popular and traditional music in an African context are artificial and do not represent the local perception of the expressions. These terms are still in use, even though Duma uses the term traditional and modern¹, but they should not be understood as exclusive as they might be used in a European context, where the categorization comes from and where the traditions have developed differently than in African contexts (Emielu, 2018).

Area 23, Lilongwe and Music Crossroads

Area 23 of Lilongwe, one of the areas on the border of the city, is the home of about 650 000 people (United Nations, n.d.). In this area, the Malawian branch of Music Crossroads² can be found, a non-profit organisation, which uses the power of music education, professional training, live performances and the promotion of young talent to develop music education and the music industry in the southern African region. The impact of the institution locally is immense, and a lagre number of young musicians use this institution in Area 23.

The researcher’s voice

I am a Norwegian citizen, born and raised in Norway, with all the privileges of education, travelling and financial security that might give, and as an adult I also got a Malawian family. As part of a Norwegian/Malawian family, as a musician and music researcher, I have been staying in Malawi for many periods, usually of between 1 and 3 months, since 2014. When I am in Malawi, I typically spend time at Music Crossroads, both giving and participating in workshops, taking part in Dumas dance classes, contributing to the musical education of the dancers, and taking drum lessons with Duma or one of his students. My position as a Norwegian university-educated person, mastering a rare instrument in Malawi (the accordion), my position is also worth looking at ethically. As the writer of this article, how am I supporting the colonising powers of Western academic traditions? To this, I must say: possibly on many levels, an important aspect of the research. I also see it as a duty to contribute with my kind of knowledge³. I can merely hope, since this has been a process where Duma and Mathews Mfune (the director of MCM), as well as many Malawian friends and colleagues, have contributed by being readers, significant research participants, discussion partners and consultants, that my writings are more of a starting point of discussing and developing these issues, rather than a final answer to the needs of research on Malawian traditional expressions.

Using the interview quotes as untamed stories

The material from the interview with Duma is presented as fragments, written in italics. Some of the fragments are quotations, and some are embedded in the text. I have let the stories from Duma be what Anna-Lena Østern and Sunniva Hovde call untamed (2019), as I have used fragments from Duma’s stories not to look for coherence, but rather to examine the complexity contained in the utterances on dance education. Luc Herman & Bart Vervaeck (2005) write about postmodern stories as “les savages narratives” (untamed stories), with patchworks as juxtapositions of disjunctive stories, and not a continuous pattern (Østern & Hovde, 2019).

Doing fieldwork as an ethnomusicologist

When doing fieldwork, I am used to noting my own process as well as what is going on around me: how it feels, how the teacher(s) are interacting with me or the rest of the participants, how it smells, how it is part of someone’s everyday life, and how people interact and relate to the arts. It is necessary to use my senses in a broad way. Nic Beech and Stephen Broad (2018, p. 5) phrase it in this way: “fieldwork provides the route through which the researcher becomes immersed in the music and meaning of a culture.” Sensory ethnography has been re-introduced as a methodology to acknowledge the sensory part of fieldwork, and how much information it actually gives us (Pink, 2009). When you do not feel indigenous in the culture you are operating in, your sensory apparatus can be on an intense perception-volume, in order to perceive and receive all the information you might need to understand the situation you are in. That has at least been the situation for me, in many situations: trying to absorb all the details in my drum teacher’s hands, his jokes, the movements in the dance, the interaction between the dance, the drums and the students, as well as other people’s musical, physical or social commenting.

For some time, I had Duma as a drum teacher. He would show me a few drum patterns, but the rest I would learn with the dance troupe Hear Us Children as he believed you cannot learn to play drums alone. He emphasised that I had to have confidence that the drum did what I wanted it to, as well as having the self-confidence to play independently. I followed Duma closely through many observations when Hear Us Children was practicing outside in the same area; we had some workshops together on how to teach traditional dance, many informal conversations, and observations within and outside of the MCM camp. I had one formal interview with Duma, in March 2018, in his classroom, while the dance troupe was practicing outside. The interview was scheduled with him, and when I planned it, I asked specifically if I could perform the interview with the purpose of writing this paper.

The analysis of ethnographic data in this study

The ethnographic data are analysed through a post-human positioning, utilising perspectives on intra-action and agential realism from Karen Barad (2014) and disagreement-tracing (Latour, 2005) in a post-colonial context (Hovde, 2012). Through these perspectives, I have wanted to destabilise dichotomies like modern/traditional, city/village, individual/community, Malawian/non-Malawian, and African/European(American) that easily present themselves as available from a global hierarchical understanding, but whose contexts are connected to colonising systems and terms. The intra-action way of thinking corresponds well with the intra-relational concept of ubuntu, as the relational rationality weaves both future, past, present, nature and culture together with mutual dependency on each other (Murove, 2012).

A position within Barad’s agential realism (2014) implies the use of human and non-human performative agents of importance for the learning processes (Østern & Hovde, 2019). They are entwined and intra-acting, like the relations in a community. In Duma’s stories, uMunthu is a strong performative agent, but so also are globalisation, modernisation, love, education and tradition. The entanglements are analysed by looking for traces of conflicts between performative agents and congestions of energy, indicating many performative agents being active. When Duma relates love to a number of other aspects, or when he talks about respect in a variety of forms, it gives energy to the performative agents (love, or respect/uMunthu), and they are what Gilles Deleuze would call the starting point of a line of flight (Deleuze, 2005). Analysis has also been fuelled by me noting that Duma was pointing out something, like storytelling, in an intense way, affected by the importance of it, even though I was not left with a large amount of material connected to storytelling. I also understood storytelling as important, because it has such a crucial value in Malawian relations. These sparks of energy and traces of conflict as an analytical tool have contributed to the embodiment and intra-acting of agents with time-space, materiality, sociality and cultural expressions. Barad (2014) emphasises that the colonising logic implies either eliminating, or dominating “what it takes to be the other, the non-I” (Barad, 2014, p. 169). To contribute to destabilising these structures has been one motivational factor, and I hope that the focus on the material, on the local knowledge and the local pedagogical perspectives can fuel this process.

When, for analytical purposes, I present a dichotomy, at the same time I cut it together in a diffractive process (Barad, 2014). The material can be split up, to then be put together differently. In doing this, I can see them as variations of each other, not oppositions. Throughout the analytical process these performative agents stood out:

These performative agents relate to each other on different levels and in different entanglements, and it is these entanglements/relations that I have been examining.

uMunthu, the community and intra-relational dance practice

uMunthu, as explained by Duma, is related to three things: “You do things at the right time, at the right place to whomever.” He then explains that uMunthu has to do with the fact that your actions are always affecting someone, somewhere, at some time. “If I don’t respect your time or your background I am not doing good. The kids have to respect their teacher, themselves and me, their family, neighbours and fellow kids.” uMunthu in this sense is connected to being part of the community and for the child to be growing into a human being as part of something and not being an animal in the wild. In addition, Duma states: “uMunthu is also about bringing the youth together”.

As the community needs educated children, he keeps a vigilant eye on all the students and makes sure that they “study extra hard”:

Dance is just a tool to grip the students. My teaching is not only about dancing; the dancing is just a tool to engage them and bring them together: a good tool, but just a tool. (…) I am not training them for the programmes, actually, I am always training to teach them (making a circle in the air) “the whole”, for a programme, and to counsel them. They should work extra hard in school.

He creates a space where the outlines of formal and informal education are challenged and broken down (Bracken, 2014). The dance-activity becomes an opportunity to create a relationship between the community, the school, the dance, the student and the family. Community music researcher Jillian Bracken (2014) states that community music also provides opportunities for extra musical benefits: in the case of MCM and Hear Us Children, entrepreneurship and leadership, as these are greatly needed qualities in a country where there extensive unemployment.

Duma’s core aim for the group is that they are as good artistically as possible. The artistic ambition is part of a love-relation, as they work for the same artistic expressions together. His focus on both art as a tool to “grab the students” and his profound interest in traditional dance practices are not conflicts of interest.

Mabingo (2015) identifies music to be a learning tool, and so does Duma. When the children do not have drums to accompany them, they sing the rhythms: “Then we start singing. They’re singing many times. Many times. Then dancing and singing together”. They let the music be

(…) an aspect that invokes the body’s agency in understanding movement. Students play music to understand dance from a standpoint of makers and producers of rhythmic frameworks that inform and frame dance. (Mabingo, 2015, p. 137)

As music and dance can be understood through each other, both Duma and Mabingo (2015) comment on the relational aspect, which you learn as: “(…) Ugandan dances are grounded in relational interdependence of performers” (Mabingo, 2015, p. 39). The norms are taught not in terms of solitary individuals, but as a community. It is through the community that you learn the dance, how to gain self-esteem, and where to train to be uniform/precise or responsible leaders. When they intra-act, applying Barad’s (2014) term, together their relations with each other, with each other’s families, communities and identities overlap and change all the relationships from within. They depend on one another as their relationship is not something between them, but the relationship is in them: they are both themselves and the relationship.

Miriam Giguere emphasises the humanity in community dance, as follows: “It’s about who these dancers are and what dance can do for them […]” (2017, p. 3). This is significant for the way Duma is teaching. Giguere also points to the challenges of dealing with individuals in a setting where you have the community’s wellbeing foremost in mind, which Duma addresses when he mentions how some families persuade their daughters to get married at a young age. Because of a lack of financial resources and within a cultural tradition, the families want the girls to marry, as after a marriage, the girls are no longer the responsibility of the parents, but the husband’s. These girls are the high-risk population in school drop-outs and unemployment. The community, here represented by Duma, wants as many educated children as possible, while the family might have other priorities.

Love: Dancing to trust yourself

Duma emphasises the importance of love, and that if the children do not love him or his plans, in the sense that they know he truly cares for them, he has failed as a teacher. His focus on trust from the students’ side is deep and remarkable. The Finnish dance researcher Isto Turpeinen (2015) also emphasises love as the basis of his own dance teaching. Turpeinen discusses how “pedagogical love” is related to agape, unconditional respect, as well as the pedagogue Paulo Freire’s concept of dialogical education being related to love as a “crucial medium facing a genuine human existence” (Turpeinen, 2015, p. 97). Turpeinen explains “pedagogical love” as an altruistic relationship with the other, including his/her potentiality, actuality, character, aspirations and limitations. This is recognisable in Duma’s philosophy as he explains love as related to trust, to be part of a community. He talks about how love and uMunthu have to do with growing within society and the community through being together, caring for each other, and leading each other:

From my side, I know that now (if they care for each other) they are growing up. I should give them leadership. To teach dancing is to teach respect and leadership, too.(…) It is about bringing them together, and uMunthu is the basis of being together. And in the dance, there is friendship, uMunthu.

Love-trust is an entanglement, something Duma expects and somehow demands from his students. They should give it to each other, to him and to their families. He also emphasises the importance of self-love-trust, of trusting your own way of uMunthu, and respecting yourself for who you are in the community. These are not contradictions, but co-existence, forming the community.

Duma first mentioned the concept of love and trust through discussing the hipmovements of some of the children in the troupe. There would be great variations in how they did a particular hip-movement, and I knew he appreciated that each child would have their own style: “That is because they have to do it from the bottom of their heart, in their own way. (…) But it is a good thing that they do it their own way, still similar. It is important. It is part of their confidence. He acknowledges the different bodies the children have, and that they learn that all bodies behave differently and give different expressions: their bodies should not have anything forced upon them.

The self-confidence you get through being part of a communal practice stands out as both a result of and a means to dancing, if it comes from the student and is not forced. Duma points out that the children/students also learn self-confidence through the training for the dance, as they will criticise each other if they are not doing the movements correctly, or if their facial expressions are not the right ones:

And in dance, the way I know that this one has got self-confidence is he knows where to start or to teach his or her friends, with respect. (…) You don’t need to prove yourself. I see it even if their backs are turned to me.

Duma explains that self-confidence means to be on your own, to take decisions on your own, and that if you do not have self-confidence you are not a man or a woman. He points at me and tells me: “You left Norway because you have self-confidence on your own. You are on your own”. When I reply that I think maybe it had to do with curiosity in my case, he says: “How can you be curious about other things if you are not confident in yourself?”

The tribal-modernized-urban-traditional-Western entanglement

While many of the dances are unproblematic to dance according to tribe, initiation dances opens a door to a cultural and artistic challenge. Duma would like to teach both boys and girls the full initiation dances, but it is not possible as they then would be formally initiated into the actual tribe, and the children come from different tribes. Some have more tribal awareness than others, and in the city tribes tend to be less important, but not for all families. As a result of this, the dances they learn are not learned as part of an initiation ceremony, but just as dance. Duma emphasises that these learners are young children and not yet ready to learn the full version of an initiation dance, like the chisamba⁴. (a female version of the male-oriented Gule Wamkulo)⁵. The transfer from a village-based, informal, community-oriented dance practice meets the formality of MCM, corresponding more to modern expectations. If he had been teaching in the village, it would not matter if the children were young: they would learn it, and it would be part of their games, until they were considered old enough for initiation⁶.

Duma refers to a similar issue about understanding the culture and the socio-cultural context of the dances/music:

When the kids are in school, they are in town, of course. In the holidays the parents still keep them here, not going to their respective villages, to see their culture, their land and their heritage. It affects the indigenous knowledge a lot, because here we don’t have real traditional dances originating from home, but in their villages they can see the real traditions, so when they are here they just see the surface and not the base.

Even though Duma did not train as a dancer as a child, he says he knew the steps,; his eyes and his body knew all of it, the muscles just had to be used to the movements. Mabingo uses the term “communal apprenticeship” (Mabingo, 2015) as a “methodical process that engages the participants in norms of creativity and practices not as isolated individuals but as a community” (Mabingo, 2015, p. 136).

Duma emphasises the importance of tradition as the core of the dance troupe, and while he plays down his tribalism, he emphasises the local/village sound while talking about how he builds up the repertoire as something supporting the dance, even though it can be played with: “(…) in the beginning, it would be very much local sound. It would be like straight from the village. But for market purposes I can put some dynamics and variations to add some flavour”. In this fragment he shows us a glimpse of an entanglement of purposes: village-programme-modern-local-market-variations.

Storytelling: Physical, social and historical movements and sense of community

In Duma’s practice the beginnings are the children’s stories about themselves and about the dances. Duma’s storytelling of the dances, as Mabingo (2015) also indicates, is an important part of putting the movements into a context where they can be felt, understood and done. The stories are ways of preparing the movements and the artistic performance⁷. When the children succeed, he adds flavours:

I could add beats on top and let them be dynamics for the dancers and for the drummers. So, they would see me play as well. Hear my playing not just for showing them what to play, but to be part of my playing. Adding flavour. But in the beginning, it would be very much a local sound. It would be like straight from the village. But for market purposes I can put some dynamics and variations to add some flavour.

In playing for them, and developing the rhythms, adding the flavours, he also shows them how he is as a performer, and how it sounds artistically when he plays. In Duma’s educational philosophy, the teacher is a performer. He never stops performing. He mocks them, or himself, to make them laugh and he changes his emotions to show them who he is, and guides them. He performs as an artist and he is performing as a teacher.

When he teaches the younger children or the new beginners, he tells them the stories of the dances, and when he performs the dance and shows them the art, not just the steps, but the real thing, he emphasises the importance of showing and telling as an artist, because they should feel the dance – inside. If not, they cannot love it, and they cannot perform it properly. His focus on the children’s competence in telling a story, but also their experiences of art, is an important contribution, as it is a performative pedagogical entrance: it includes him as an artist teacher and shows the importance of meaningful art experiences for children.

When someone struggles with movements, he often turns to games, jokes and already familiar movements as educational tools to activate already established competence. It is used to “inaugurate learners into (…) practicalities of dance” (Mabingo, 2015, p. 138).

If they don’t manage I use my hands and move them (the children’s body parts) with my body. Very few need this. (…) I would ask that girl who didn’t manage – she was very young – to greet me. If you greet someone, you do the exact, perfect movement. It is important to make the movements familiar to them in ways they know.

The stories he tells when he is teaching, the stories he tells about himself as a teacher-artist when he is teaching and performing, and the stories he creates when he wants to put the knowledge together for them, to learn more easily, these are also part of a Malawian storyteller-tradition. Knowledge is passed through oral words and where you actually are your stories when you dance, present yourself, or teach.

Figure 1 is a visualization of the entanglements presented in the article. They fold in and out of each other, twist, share, repel and connect each other through shared performative agents, time, materiality and space. As the words share spaces, some places, they share a thread somewhere else, and the performative agents are truly entwined and intra-acting.

A critical view of the study – and suggestions for further research

This study is an investigation and a discussion of the pedagogical perspectives in John Duma’s practice of traditional dance education in Area 23, Lilongwe, Malawi. The study potentially has blindspots caused by my, the author’s economic, educational and national privileges, and there is potential cultural/knowledge appropriation happening, all the time that I am a married Malawian, and not Malawian-born. I have done my best in this regard, but this also gives space for exoticism and an overly uncritical way of analysing the material. In this study, though, the aim has not been to look critically at the educational perspectives. Being non-indigenous, I do not consider that to be my role, but I encourage and hope for this to come from Malawian contributors in the field, as it is healthy in a discourse, and needed to develop the field of knowledge. I see some possibly interesting roads to walk down for further research, one of them being how the students relate to the dynamics in gender roles in dance in Malawi, both traditional and modern. There is a wide variety of sexualisation in Malawi, both between genders, and within, dependent on class, geography, tribe and education. Another path is to follow the relation between humans and traditional music/dance, how people perceive a young traditional dancer and how traditional expressions are meaningful in peoples’ lives. There is also a need to further formalise the pedagogical perspectives on dance learning at Music Crossroads Malawi, as the institution also wants to formalise the dance education that until now has been informal. The relationship between particular traditional dances, like Gule Wankulu, young performers and the modern society is another arts-based research-path I find intriguing. Finally, I want to mention that I find it particularly interesting how the young traditional dancers at Music Crossroads Malawi, who also perform modern dances, mix the traditions, and how modern and traditional concepts are even less dichotomous than they might have been perceived in this article, when it comes to practical dance routines and music mixing.