Namibia: San singers to tour Europe

Supported by UNESCO and the Museums Association of Namibia, the tour is part of a two-year project designed to engage local musicians from the San community to promote traditional music internationally. As such, Shishani and her group will play with the San women in the Netherlands, Germany and Austria.

Comprising vocalists //Ao N!ani, Seg//ae N!ani, N!ae Komtsa and Baqu Kha//an as well as bassist Afron Nyambali, the Ju/’hoansi group will perform alongside the Namibian tales, which utilises the cello, kora, guitar, mbira and percussion.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime project," Shishani told Music In Africa. "The four ladies agreed to do this once and they just received their very first passports. We want to transfer management skills through workshops and promote this unique musical heritage through cultural exchange between the Namibian Tales and the San singers.

“Our aim with this tour is to showcase the beauty and unique cultural heritage of the San people. Rather than the common media portrayal of them as victims of the system, we see them as powerful resistors. So much of their knowledge about the world is stored in their music. We want to celebrate the journey and achievements we have made so far together through promoting our album internationally."

Shishani, who was born in Namibia and moved to the Netherlands at the age of five, said it was important to take the Ju/’hoansi singers on tour because it would help preserve their waning culture.

“They have such a characteristic and beautifully unique sound. Their music is highly complex and holds such valuable knowledge about nature, their world view and history as a people," she said.

"We felt that there is an urgency to collaborate with them because this unique cultural heritage is disappearing at a very fast pace. Only the elders in some villages still know and master these songs. So if we want to learn something from them and somehow support ways to have this music documented and remembered, this is the time.”

Shishani said preparations for the tour did not come without challenges.

“Bureaucratically it has been quite a nightmare and challenging to organise all the finances between Namibia and Europe. The ladies had to travel hundreds of kilometres to get their birth certificates and passports' paperwork sorted,” she said, adding that the elderly women travelled about 1 600km from their village to the capital Windhoek to acquire a Schengen visa.

"Then of course we are all dealing with cultural differences, which leads to miscommunications, but these worries were quite small compared to all the paperwork and financial hurdles. This will be the first time for two of the ladies to leave Namibia. The other two have once been in Germany 20 years ago.”

Asked what should be done to avoid such challenges, Shishani said: “Well, this is hard because we depend on institutional policies and structures like banking and immigration offices. I hope these institutions can adapt their policies to accommodate such cultural projects.”

For more information, visit the Namibian Tales-Kalahari Encounters official website here. See tour dates here.