Communicating for Social Change in Africa Using Traditional Dance and Music

Evidently, by using traditional dance and music to socialize and integrate the young into the group, the Taita have for many years used the idea of combining entertainment and education to inform and instruct. Presently, entertainment-education is being widely used all over the world as an innovative approach bringing together entertainment and education for social change (Roger & Singhal, 1999). Enter-education is the process of purposely designing a media message to both entertain and educate in order to increase audience knowledge about an educational issue, create favorable attitudes and change overt behavior.

There are a number of projects in Africa that have had some success using this strategy. For example in Mali, Griots have put into their songs messages of immunizations, breast-feeding and oral rehydration therapy. Griots as chroniclers in an oral tradition have a big following among all sectors in the country. Due to this the stakeholders decided to use their art to reinforce campaigns on child survival and this particular project proved quite successful (Zakes, 1993).

The work of Maratholi Traveling Theatre in Lesotho, in using traditional and popular media to sensitize and mobilize a rural community for social change have in many ways positively answered the question whether traditional media can carry modern messages (Zakes, 1993). Through theatre that included dance and drama, the group successfully attempted to precipitate discussion among community members by sensitizing them on issues such as sanitation, family planning etc and ensured their (community members) participation in decision making.

Nigeria on the other hand is using popular theatre to sensitize on health issues such as immunization, AIDS, safe motherhood etc. as the only strategy possible for reaching the poorest of the poor and the most isolated communities that cannot be reached through mass or the print media. (Gumucio, 2001). UNICEF identified one hundred villages in Oyo and Ondo States where immunization coverage was at its lowest and then organized village performances by theatre groups, who would go along with the immunization services to the villages. By 1991 this successful experience later led to the full-blown project called the Network of Educational Theater (NET), where training became the key element (Gumucio, 2001).

A continuous program of training has contributed to the establishment of permanent drama groups in each of the selected Local Governments within Oyo and Ondo States. The innovative characteristics of the program derived from the fact that each drama group was culturally appropriate to the villages where performance would take place. Not only was the language the same, but also other cultural codes specific to each community were taken into account for example the costumes, the songs and the local greeting. To ensure audience participation during the performance, the drama group would arrive at a village a few hours before the show to collect information and anecdotes about recent happenings in the village so as to incorporate them into the play. While scripts were adapted to each concrete situation through improvisation, care was taken to ensure the quality of the messages to be delivered was not lost (Gumucio, 2001).

The advantages of popular theatre in Nigeria is that it can be built on existing ritual manifestations, taking advantage of local culture to communicate new messages of benefit for the community. Gumucio (2001) reported that the important and immediate impact of the popular activities resulted from marrying the dramatic performance with service delivery. For cultural reasons, many women in Nigeria did not immunize their children. However, after Jimmy Solanke's performance of The Postman Calls, nurses had to deal with hundreds of women and their children of all ages lining up to get their immunization shots or drops. This had a double benefit: on one hand it created greater awareness among the people in the villages; on the other hand it ensured that the health staff from the local government would go out to the villages on a regular basis, which they were often reluctant to do.

Some of the constraints noted in this project were lack of funds; lack of support from the government and not all the groups took training very seriously. The ten intensive days were sometimes shortened to eight because some groups were not willing to continue the training over the weekend. Finally, the very advantage of adapting the scripts to the concrete situations of the villages where the performances were scheduled often became a dangerous practice, since some drama groups left out important messages and derived their performance into a sequence of funny situations with little or no content (Gumucio, 2001).

The Kenya Community Media Network (KCOMNET) was established in November 1996 during a sub regional Community Media Workshop for Eastern and Southern Africa where the crucial role community media plays in development was recognized. Networking was also identified as useful for harnessing and supporting efforts towards developing concrete programs (Gumucio, 2001).

KCOMNET favors development-oriented, horizontal communication structures, which are owned and run by communities as opposed to top-down communication structure. Its main objective is to facilitate networking of small community-based groups that were dispersed all over the various provinces of Kenya. These groups operated in isolation and had little or no support. The network has contributed to facilitate exchanges among groups, and the training provided has strengthened internal organization, as well as enhanced technical skills to improve performances at the community level.

Most of the groups under KCOMNET are currently involved in social campaigns on the different issues affecting their various communities. For example Eldo theatre group from Eldoret in the Rift Valley uses dance and songs to promote nutrition and AIDS prevention among other topics: Mutidwa Theatrix in Meru has tackled through drama the issue of female circumcision, educating audiences to perform a symbolic ceremony without doing the “cut” while Mumbi theatric uses vernacular poetry, drama and songs to educate on health issues. These form part of the over a dozen community groups that have joined KCOMNET. Plans are underway to increase group membership as well as to conduct training at the District level using member groups as focal points (Gumucio, 2001).

Gumucio (2001) reported that there are a number of challenges that face KCOMNET. The concept of community media is not well understood by policy makers and communities of Kenya. The challenge is to change the attitude of the society, so that community media can be given the place it deserves as opposed to treating the sector as just entertainers. Volunteerism in community media and how long this should continue is another issue. All members of KCOMNET core team including the coordinator are volunteers.

My research is geared toward the same basic principles as employed in the above-mentioned projects. I aim to inventively use Taita traditional dance as a tool in sensitization, dialogue and mobilization campaign to increase awareness in reproductive health and HIV/AIDS in Wongonyi community. I have an intuition that the common traditional pieces can creatively be loaded with appropriate health and HIV/AIDS prevention themes and effectively utilized in a sensitization and mobilization campaign to change attitudes and social behavior.

I also envision a good rapport being established between stakeholder and beneficiary through a joint powerful session in dancing and singing message-laden tunes. The participatory, persuasive, and repetitive culturally relevant dances should make the “message” intelligible to the low literacy villagers and hence easy to internalize. I suggest this model not as a replacement but to supplement the current modes of information exchange adopted by development agents in social change campaigns within Wongonyi location.