Slight observations on culture and language

Another week-end in Ouaga with the VSOs there – gosh they lead a different life!  It was Jazz à Ouaga week-end;  there were amazing acts at the French Cultural Centre and on Friday after rocking off the bus, throwing a meal down my throat and dashing in a taxi – always taxis in Ouaga – I got to see Ba Cissoko which is a serious electric-kora-playing rock and roll band from Gambia, I think.  No doubt the many African music purists among you will be appalled at the thought of an amplified kora.  I am a Philistine.  This was really my kind of music.  The French cultural centre is beautiful and full of well-fed, comfortable people in elegant clothes.  Is this the same country I live in?  I had really travelled from Corby New Town to South Kensington in a day.  We ate pizza!

On Saturday we saw a fabulous piece of theatre – a five-handed version of Candide set in Africa with a griot/storyteller sitting at the front of the stage explaining the action and a two-part musical accompaniment – wonderful physical performances, full of energy and humour – even gay jokes.  Gay life is a commonplace in the fringe theatre I have seen and absolutely invisible and a  no-no everywhere else that I have observed/enquired about.  There is no Larry Grayson equivalent on TV.
 
A heart-breaking moment this morning.  One of the many children who now share my courtyard with me said the others had told her I had thrown the photographs of her in the dustbin where I burn my combustible rubbish.  I had to explain – and I am not sure she absolutely believed me despite the demonstration – that I had put them in another folder called ‘dustbin’ on the computer.  I had to show her that I had lots of photos of her;  yesterday afternoon a couple of the older girls and I had been through about 150 pictures that the kids had all taken of each other, and weeded out the dross – the decapitated ones, the camera-shake ones etc.  Aseta – the little sad girl – is a middle child between two brothers – my sympathies are engaged 100% and there is a strong identification.  (Apart from the brothers, of course – my tragically-stricken childhood was not quite so gender-afflicted – it was simply a surfeit of siblings – or to misquote Sebastian Flyte, maybe the mixture rather than either the quantity or the quality…...)