Folklore Festival shows how Africans are taking ownership of their heritage

"This expressive body of culture shared and preserved by a particular group of people is inclusive of the traditional beliefs, customs and stories of a community, passed through generations by word of mouth, in the form of tales, sayings, dances, proverbs, jokes and music captured through various art forms,” says Bubu. "Distracted by colonialism and its effects, we have a lack of knowledge transference of African practice, African spirituality and African culture in our generation.”

Bubu is a woman of many talents. In addition to being an award-winning singer-songwriter, an entrepreneur and storyteller she is a presenter on the Home Channel’s interior design TV show Design for You with Pilani Bubu. 

Her love for folklore was ignited when she started her music career. “I was travelling a lot and touring the world when I realised that people are starved of content that’s original and indigenous and gives them an understanding of where I come from,” she explains.

It's taken two years to plan the festival and it is slated to be a celebration of Pan-Africanism to round off Heritage Month.

The festivities will include workshops for adults on Afrofusion dance and drumming; lectures on African storytelling; a book fair with authors as young as 10; a market; and plenty to do for children such as drumming, a workshop on indigenous instruments, a play area and edutainment. Naturally, it won’t be a festival without a diverse food offering.

“When culture is shared as Africans, it can really expand,” Bubu says when asked about the choice to include musicians from all over Africa in the line-up.

Some of the artists play indigenous instruments and who Bubu hopes will bring a knowledge share to the table include Papillion from Kenya, Leomile from Lesotho and Stevo Atambire from Ghana.

There will also be a set by DJ Nicky B and performances by the NSA and The Soil. As a headlining act, Bubu will perform with her new Folklore Ensemble.

“This is my new ensemble that plays my folklore repertoire. We’ve been working together for the last three months and we’ll be releasing Folklore Chapter 2 at the beginning of next year — what you'll be hearing at the festival.”

Bubu realised there was a gap when it came to intergenerational dialogue, the sharing of information and having cultural conversations. To address this, she started weaving a repertoire of music into her sets that was inspired by traditional folk music with a contemporary twist to tell stories and to give people a glimpse into who she is. Thus, Folklore Chapter 1 was born, her 2019 album for which she won a SAMA in 2020.

In 2020 she started Folklore Firesides and Folklore for Kids events. The next progression has become the festival. “Folklore Community [events] was about having this urban community of people coming together to share in culture and the Folklore Festival houses all of that for the entire family,” Bubu says. “Leaning into this kind of work — folkloric work or sharing African practice — is to create a sense of understanding.”

Bubu's friend and fellow folklore expert, thespian and poet Napo Masheane will MC the festival. “I am a theatre maker, which includes directing and  producing for stage,” says Masheane, who teaches African theatre history in the performing arts department at the Stockholm University in Sweden and is a guest professor at the SP Escola de Teatro in Brazil.

Being a theatre maker emphatically links Masheane to her heritage, she says. “Being a playwright and a poet means I'm constantly rewriting the principles of storytelling from an African point of view. Through my work, my collaborations and my teachings across the world I get to share the essence of what African theatre is, which includes folk laws, fairy tales, ideas, proverbs and  multiple uses of language that are unfamiliar to the Western canon.”

Masheane grew up in the eastern Free State. “I was surrounded by Sesotho culture. My mom, my grandmother, my aunts are storytellers. They sang when they cooked, when there's a funeral, when there's a wedding — always singing, dancing, composing with traditional music and steps. Our lives centred around rituals and ceremonies which are embedded in our culture. And there was always something theatrical, narrative and poetic about it. When somebody dies, there's a family poet on call. When someone is sad, there's a family comedian. I grew up being part theatrics.”

She turned her immersion in traditional stories into a profession. “When I finished high school I realised that theatre was part of my DNA and that I could make a living out of it. I've never looked back; 27 years later this is all I know, this is all I do. Every single day I write, I perform, I teach, I create stories.”

Masheane studied at Rhodes University but her education was layered. “My master classes weren't all given by African scholars or academics. My teachers were the old women from my village who tell stories that weren't documented. These women never saw a day in the classroom, but they are the origins of these stories. They're walking, living libraries.

When I go to the villages anywhere in Africa, I'm fascinated by the oldest people, the elders. That old man, that old woman, the songs they compose, the beat of the drum, the dance. And I ask questions. As a result I collect stories and compile them and they end up part of my thesis and my teaching methodologies. You won't find these things in libraries.”

She sees her own generation as privileged and informed. “We have access to education and so we can preserve these undocumented narratives, giving the storytellers names and faces and a sense of humanity, that they exist. They are our living, walking bookshelves that we need to archive for the next generation to access. Also, as Africans, we need to take ownership of our heritage — that's why I love being part of disseminating our folklore.”

Bubu and Masheane are delighted to be collaborating. “Through music, dance, sound, beat and rhythm we connect, but we're also doing workshops. It's part of us replaying, reimagining and rebirthing what the essence of history is in an African context.”

The two festival headliners believe their collaboration is long overdue. “I started admiring Pilani from a distance and then I listened to her first album. There were so many innuendos and layers from my childhood. She sings, she's a musician and vocalist, but what impressed me was her approach to weaving spoken word into music. With her first album, she archived old songs that I used to hear my father and grandfather sing from the rural areas, Xhosa and Sesotho — and her use of multiple languages.

Masheane's theatre pieces have been well received globally. “We're disrupting and decolonising the core of the perception of what theatre has been based on, the methodology of the West, and we're offering something new and original. But this is a connecting process, not a divisive one.

"Many people have the diaspora in common, the migration of different ethnic groups — there are a lot of Ethiopians in Sweden, for instance, Turkish people in Germany. There's an element that's new and fresh, but the minute you start elaborating you notice similarities.

“I gave a lecture in June and there was a prestigious theatre maker from Iran who had migrated as a refugee to Sweden. He could find similarities in my stories as could Pakistani, Asian and Indian people from his own community. It shows that we're linked.  That's the power of storytelling. You think you're are different, that Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty only exist in your language and culture, but that's not true.”

According to Masheane, stories are inherited but they are also contemporary. “There's always a street comedian when I travel; and when I go to my grandmother's house, there's always a group of boys telling stories about what happened the night before. There's always a travelling poet in the townships. There's always a living dictionary — someone who's a lover of books who walks around sharing his bombastic words and influencing our languages with his dialect.”

“Listening to each others stories  teaches us to have respect and empathy for our respective backgrounds,” says Masheane. “This is what the government calls 'social cohesion'. The artist or creator in me sees the artist or creator in you and we 'get' each other because we’ve proactively come together to exchange experiences and ideas through storytelling. This engenders a sense of belonging an identity as a nation — it’s a point of reference for us all.”

• The inaugural Folklore Festival is set to take place at the National School of the Arts on Saturday October 1 2022. Tickets available here.