Youth Eagerly Experience Their Cultural Heritage

[vc_row type=”vc_default” margin_top=”0″ margin_bottom=”5″][vc_column][vc_column_text]MaKuYa Festival – Children’s Appreciation of the Cultural Exhibit

One of the components of our MaKuYa Traditional Culture and Performing Arts Festival was the Traditional Cultural Banda (or hut) – the other two being the dance performances and traditional games. This Traditional Culture Banda focuses on traditional skills, daily life activities, food, artifacts, and so on. In all honestly, I expected that I would be be more excited about its content than the locals would be. I had not imaged that the Tanzanian visitors would be overly interested in how a fire was started before matches, how iron was forged with gazelle skin bellows, how bark cloth was made for clothes and bags, or how storage baskets were woven. But I was completely wrong. Not only did I like it, but everyone did. Particularly the young students did, who commented, “We had read about these things in school books, but we’d never seen them.” The visitors enjoyed what they learned and the elders loved to share stories about times when these things were a part of every day life. This exhibit constructed a bridge between the generations, and I was honored to be part of the building team. Over the eight years of the festival, the collections presented grew to include masks and costumes related dance performance, traditional indigenous foods and medicines, weapons, household items, water related artifacts, transport, and other items of interest that I will discuss in other blogs.

This enthusiasm seen in the Traditional Cultural Bando continues in our MaKuYa Museum open all year long.

Thank you – Asante Sana – Ashe oleng

Douglas – Kupikita – Oloikurrkurr

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