School of Rock

I am at Inkamana Abbey to work with Brother Clement Sithole, one of the few remaining teachers of Zulu musical bow music alive. His life is dedicated to a group of 20 odd children he has taken in over the years and turned into an ensemble of Zulu music and dance. It is a project I greatly admire, as the children are living a childhood I think I would have loved-- they spend a majority of the hours when they are not in school on their own, teaching themselves guitar, keyboards, bass, and creating musical numbers complete with choreographed dance routines. They have a large repertoire of traditional Zulu songs and ceremonial dances, though seem drawn more towards western-influenced popular music (their preferred genre, maskandi, blurs the lines between traditional and popular).

The whole situation is not without its flaws. As one of the teachers at the mission school pointed out, what Clement has done is technically illegal. He's unofficially adopted all these children, with no government paperwork involved. For the most part, they come from single parent households, where their mothers can't afford to feed and clothe them. Some of them have lost their mothers to HIV/AIDS. There is a child welfare system in South Africa, but Clement will have nothing to do with it. He is afraid the government would impose its own rules on his little group of kids. In part, this is probably completely accurate. Apparently, some years ago, government inspectors made the abbey tear down a decrepit old abandoned building where Clement had been housing his children. At present, some of the kids live with a pair of women (one of whom was the first mother to come to Clement asking him to take her child) in a tin-roof shack in a nearby township. Another group live in a basement on the abbey grounds.

It is really frustrating for me because I recognize that with a clever caretaker these kids could have good living facilities, money to support their schooling, and help with their music. They are adorable children, mature and well-behaved, and every one of them has grown up singing and dancing. Even the youngest can sing harmony without even thinking about it, and there are some real stars among them. Michael, who is entering eleventh grade, is the creative force behind their pop music compositions, and he composes and arranges everything from the melodies and words to the keyboard and bass parts. The leader of the traditional Zulu call and response songs is Qiniso, a brilliantly precocious girl of 11, who has a great singing voice, dances effortlessly, and has the confidence and stage presence to tie it all together. If these kids could get proper music lessons, they could be absolute stars.

The problem is that Clement is not a clever caretaker. He is forgetful and will consistently do things like fail to register a kid for school until the day schools open. Then he'll walk into town and be surprised when the schools are full. It's part of his nature, oblivious to how things work or how people expect him to act. He often asks me to help him find the number of someone who he has been speaking to on his cellphone, and can't help shouting at his phone in a voice that deafens me when I am sitting nearby. One of the lenses of his glasses fell out a few days ago, and he has not yet managed to put it back it (though I keep telling him this can be easily done with just a small screwdriver or a pocketknife). He has virtually no regular streams of income to support the kids, even though I could see foundations in the US falling over themselves to fund this endeavor.

As it worked out, I paid for my stay by giving some money for one of the older kids to stay in Durban until her university semester begins and drove Clement and one of the others the 350km down to Durban to register for college. I'm glad I could help, but it's one of those things that is heartening and so depressing at once.