Under African Skies

ALISTAIR PEEBLES catches up with the director of the St Magnus Festival following her sabbatical year, which included a vist to Malawi. In part one of this interview, Glenys talks about her experiences in Africa, and in part two, looks ahead to the 2006 St Magnus Festival

ALISTAIR PEEBLES: Glenys, I’d like to start by asking you about your recent return visit to Malawi.

GLENYS HUGHES: While I was living and working in Malawi during my sabbatical year, I’d thought that it would be wonderful to be able to bring back something from that country to Orkney and the 2006 St Magnus Festival. Against a background of poverty Malawi possesses such a strong artistic and cultural tradition and given Scotland’s long association with Malawi it seemed very apt to try to represent the vibrancy of Malawi’s arts at the Festival. In particular I wanted to bring over one of the choirs I had the privilege of working with, a youth choir from Limbe, a town near Blantyre where I was based. This choir was special in that they incorporated traditional instruments, dance and costumes into their performances. I also hoped it might be possible to arrange a Festival exhibition of some of the wonderful woodcarvings produced in Malawi. The two aspects can be seen as complementary in many ways, a mixture of tradition and contemporary expression.

AP: We’ll hear more about the choir shortly, but can you describe the carvings?

GH: Yes, they originate from the Kungoni Art and Culture Centre, a very special place which was founded in 1977 by a French-Canadian priest, Father Claude Boucher. There was always a strong tradition of carving in the country, but Father Boucher encouraged the carvers to explore their own culture and heritage which had been stifled to some extent by the Scottish missionaries. The carvers create intricate panels and free-standing pieces which depict various aspects of Malawi life and culture. It’s wonderful work which has been exhibited all over the world – there are pieces in the Vatican Museum. So the Festival has commissioned new work which will be exhibited in Orkney and will provide much-needed income for the 100 carvers the Centre supports – and of course I hope that people will want to buy these beautiful pieces.
 
AP: So your visit was to attend to the practical arrangements associated with the Festival visit in June this year?

GH: I knew that trying to correspond with the choir at a distance would be difficult – communication by email is very unpredictable. Most of the choir members have never travelled outside Malawi and so I needed to explain about Orkney and the Festival and give everyone a deadline for getting their passports organised. So I decided to go out for six days during November. I visited the choir and the Kungoni Centre and firmed up all the arrangements, and it was certainly worth going to make sure everyone knew exactly what was involved.

AP: You’ve benefited from additional funding from the Executive for this.

GH: Yes. I knew that bringing a 24-strong choir from Africa to Orkney would be beyond the Festival budget. But I was fortunate to get substantial funding from the Scottish Executive’s fund for international development. Of course development funding is usually associated with education and healthcare projects, but I feel there’s is also a place for celebrating the positive and thriving aspects of a country like Malawi. The project will provide a wonderful experience for the 24 young choir members and will enable people here to begin to understand a quite different people and culture and hopefully raise awareness of the needs of that country. The choir will fly to London and then spend a couple of days in Edinburgh, hopefully to sing for the Scottish Parliament, before coming to Orkney to be part of the Festival. On their way back, they will sing at the start and finish of the Dundee Half-Marathon as part of a fund-raising effort on behalf of Malawi.

AP: And how was it to go back?

GH: It was lovely, although since I left last August there have been increasing problems with food shortages. Last year’s maize harvest failed. People had been fearing that this would happen because of the lack of rain last year. The rainy season should run from November to March, but by January 2005 the rains had just about stopped. In April, when the maize would normally be harvested you could see everywhere that the crop had withered. The staple food in Malawi is nsima, a porridge made from maize flour – it’s fairly tasteless, but filling, eaten with a vegetable relish or chicken if there’s more money to spend.

AP: You’re clearly quite familiar now with the country and the people, but I’d like to ask you about the year you previously spent in Malawi. What prompted you to do that?

GH: I’d been thinking for a while that I would like to go and work abroad, possibly in a developing country. I’d lived in Orkney since 1973, had been very involved with the Festival since 1980, and took on the paid job of Festival Director in 1998. Though in many ways running the Festival is a dream job I felt I’d been a long time in one place and that I needed to do something different. When the opportunity came up I thought I would have to resign my Festival post, but when the Board suggested a year’s leave of absence, for me that seemed ideal.

AP: Was Malawi always the place you had in mind?

GH: Not initially. Certainly a developing country, but I thought most developing countries wouldn’t be looking for either music teachers or festival directors, and really I was looking round for an organisation that might feel I had any skills that were of use. However I was put in touch with an organisation called World Exchange, which is based in Edinburgh. World Exchange is supported by the Scottish Churches, and although I wasn’t looking specifically for a church-based organisation, they seemed to be very flexible and open to discussing what I might have to offer and how they might use those skills. I was very excited when Malawi was suggested – I assumed I would be doing some form of teaching, and the teaching language is English. I hadn’t been to sub-Saharan Africa before and I thought it would be fascinating to find out about the education and the music there – I knew there was a wonderful musical tradition. So I headed off for Malawi in August 2004.
 
AP: You were based in Blantyre, a name which certainly reminds us of the Scottish links.

GH: Yes, named after David Livingstone’s birthplace south of Glasgow. Blantyre is the second largest town in Malawi and is in the southern part of the country. My host organisation was the Blantyre Synod of the CCAP, which stands for the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian. The Church is very active in sub-Saharan Africa, and the Synod has an impressive campus there, on what was the old mission site founded by the Scottish missionaries. I was based in the education department and the music department, and the work I did was shared equally between the two.

AP: How was your time spent in the education department?

GH: It was felt that, rather than teaching in one school, I should run a series of in-service music courses for primary school teachers. There is a music curriculum of sorts, based on a very outdated and not very relevant Scottish curriculum I have to say, but since there is a shortage of music lecturers in the training colleges, very few students come out of the colleges feeling able to teach music – though most of them are intensely musical!

AP: The Synod, in other words, made sure your work fitted very well with the skills you had to offer?

GH: That’s right. The idea was that I would run four courses in different areas of the southern part of the country, and then go into the schools and work with the teachers who’d attended the courses. Each course was spread over a month and teachers from different schools in the area came for two days each week, making a total of eight days altogether. And then at the end I ran a more advanced residential course for some of the teachers who had been on the earlier courses, with the aim that they would themselves be able to run music courses for other teachers in their areas.

AP: It must be satisfying to feel that your work in that area will continue long after your stay, which in a way mirrors what you’re doing in bringing the Limbe Choir to Orkney.

GH: It is, really, and I’m glad things have worked out so well with the choir coming here. There’s a huge amount of interest in choral singing in Malawi, and in my work for the music department I worked with various choirs – adult choirs and youth choirs, of which there are very many, mainly church-based. A church could have anything up to twelve choirs, and with people allowed to join only one choir, an awful lot of people in any congregation were singing in choirs! Each choir had to have its own slot in the Sunday service, so I think two and a half hours was the shortest service I ever went to, maybe five hours was the longest. But I suppose attending church on a Sunday is a highlight of the week for many people in a country such as Malawi. There’s little money to spend on entertainment, no Sunday afternoon ‘Eastenders’ to watch, and they can go to church and hear this wonderful singing all morning and are happy to do that.

AP: What are your most lasting impressions of the country…?

GH: It’s incredibly beautiful, more beautiful – and more mountainous – than I had imagined. It’s a small, thin country sandwiched between Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia, and down one half of the country, on the east side, is Lake Malawi, more like an inland sea and sometimes called the Calendar Lake because it’s 364 miles long and 52 miles wide. The lake shore is very beautiful and the tea-growing area is wonderfully green and lush. The mountain in southern Malawi that they sometimes call “The Island in the Sky”, with its own special cedar trees, featured in Laurens van der Post’s “Venture to the Interior”. He climbed the Mulanje – and so did I, I’m proud to say!

AP: … and its people?

GH: I had been expecting poverty though I wasn’t prepared for its extent. And as I was saying earlier, things haven’t been getting any better. As soon as you get outside the main towns, people are living very much a stereotypical African existence that you thought might have disappeared fifty years ago – mud huts with no power and no water; women having to go to the bore holes every day and carry buckets of water home on their heads. I’d thought life might be like that in remote villages, but even along the sides of the main roads that was the way people lived. And there were many people, too many people – people everywhere, and of course that’s one of the main problems. It seemed that every girl or woman of childbearing age carried a baby on her back. And it’s a young population, with an average life expectancy of 37. The AIDS pandemic has affected the country terribly and malaria is the other big killer. Driving around the countryside, you’d see so many funeral processions, and coffin manufacture seems to be the only growth industry. But despite that, they are wonderful people, incredibly friendly and positive and generous, and I never felt at all threatened or unsafe.
 
AP: Were the people you met interested in Orkney at all?

GH: Not really, though they were quite interested in Scotland and frequently asked “Have you been to David Livingstone’s birthplace?”. I was referred to as “The White Scottish Lady”. They had very little interest in what my life might be like in Orkney and found it difficult to understand why I had to go home at the end of the year. They’d say “Why do have to go? Why can’t you just stay here?”

AP: Mind you people say that here, to visitors to Orkney, “Do you have to go away?”

GH: Yes I suppose that’s right. But most of the people there could imagine nothing about any job or responsibilities I might have anywhere else. Most would never have been outside Malawi, or even visited many places within their own country. Many of the teachers only knew their own area and often told me they had never gone to the Lake or seen Mount Mulanje. People were surprised that I hadn’t been to Africa before, as if there were nowhere else but Africa.

AP: There’s an Orkney connection with Malawi, as well as the many Scottish ones. Was that a surprise?

GH: Yes. When I came back home, I did a concert in St Magnus Cathedral with Ian Ritchie who had directed the Festival during my time away. The intention was to raise funds for projects for children in Malawi and in Bosnia where Ian had close associations. I wanted the money for Malawi to go towards providing secondary school bursaries, because children have to pay to go to secondary school. Many parents can’t afford the modest fees and so there’s a huge dropout rate. I decided to channel the funds through the Nchima Trust, a small trust which funds education projects in Malawi. When I looked at the trust’s website I discovered that it had been founded by Margaret Gardiner, who was a great patron of the arts and who founded the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness. Her family had a tea estate in Malawi, the Nchima Estate, and she visited the country regularly and formed the Nchima Trust.

AP: And you’re making a further trip to Malawi in March.

GH: Yes, I’m going out for two weeks at Easter. I want to pack all the pieces for the exhibition so that they can be air-freighted to Orkney and I want to rehearse pieces with the choir for the Festival Service, because we’re going to combine the Limbe Choir with the St Magnus Cathedral Choir. And I want to deliver the plane tickets and finalise all the arrangements. I’ll be relieved when the choir actually steps off the ferry in June!

AP: I’m sure you will, but let’s turn to the Festival itself now….

Continued in Part Two.

© Alistair Peebles, 2006
 

Related links

• St Magnus Festival website