Sihlalo Children’s African Music Workshop
Kuda is the Sihlalo African musician, teacher and instrument maker. He produces a range of beautiful instruments at the Sihlalo workshop (marimbas, mbiras, koras and nyatitis of a range of sizes, shapes and designs). He is now using padauk for marimba keys because of its excellent acoustic qualities. Not only does it sound wonderful, but it also colours the workshop (and everyone in it) red with the distinctive padauk sawdust when he is cutting and tuning the keys…
Sihlalo recently sold four beautiful 12 key padauk marimbas to a primary school in Queensland, Australia. We’ve just received video of them being played in an ensemble of stringed instruments, digeridoo, drums and choir. Sounded FANTASTIC!!!! A unique fusion of African, Western and Australian sounds. So exciting that Sihlalo is contributing to children’s growth on the other side of the world.
The Sihlalo African Children’s music group has just restarted for the July-August school semester. We had two weeks of quiet, but all of a sudden there are between 10-15 children tumbling through our doors to learn traditional African songs on drums, marimba, mbira and shakers on Saturday mornings. All their instruments have been made at Sihlalo, and each family has a small Sihlalo marimba and/or mbira for home practice. The children come from several urban locations and are now confidently travelling as a group on public transport. We believe that their independence, leadership and responsibility in organising themsevles are non-musical markers of success of the program.
Class starts at 10am, however the children regularly arrive early ‘just in case! They have confidently performed in public six times in the last 18 months, proudly wearing their donated shirts from Switzerland and Australia. Trying to get a measure of impact of the program from them is tricky. We need this so we can apply for funding to continue their training. The typical response to date is ‘we love it’, or ‘we like playing music together’ or ‘its better than school’ or ‘I like learning new songs’……Food is essential. The children generally arrive hungry and unless they eat immediately, training quickly becomes chaotic! So the Sihlalo kitchen is a constant source of easy to prepare, nourishing food on Saturdays (if only for the adults’ sanity). There is never enough……………….
To find out more about Sihlalo activities, bookmark our website www.sihlalo.org.za and follow us on instagram @sihlalowood.
We passionately believe that our activities ‘Support Training, support local, support South Africa’, are doing making a tangible impact to build youth capacity and opportunity, young person by young person.
Please contact us on info@sihlalo.org.za with ideas for doing things better, purchasing or commissioning products, or for attracting funds so that we can offer training in the workshop to more girls, and give more children the opportunity to learn about their musical heritage, and to play African music on African traditional insturments.
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