Dancing Their Disease
Vanderbilt professor explores role of music in fighting AIDS
by Maria Browning
In the first chapter of Singing for Life: HIV/AIDS and Music in Uganda, Vanderbilt ethnomusicologist Gregory Barz gives a brief overview of the grim statistics on AIDS and HIV infection in Africa: in 2004, North America had a million people infected with HIV or suffering from AIDS; Latin America had 1.6 million; South and Southeast Asia had 6.5 million; sub-Saharan Africa (with just over 10 percent of the world’s population) had 25 million people with HIV infection or AIDS.
For many, these are not unfamiliar numbers. They are sobering, disturbing, tragic. But to understand fully how such an epidemic pervades a society, listen to track two of the CD that’s included, “Bakabitandika nk’onigambo” (“It All Started as a Rumor”). This is a performance by nursery school children, aged 2 to 4, in a small town in western Uganda. With its reedy little voices and the indulgent chuckling and applause of the adults, it could be a pre-school recital anywhere—until you turn to the book for a translation. It’s not exactly “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider.”
AIDS cannot be cured in villages Neither can medical doctors cure it! The only cure is death and the hoe Young boys and girls, we hope you have heard our message Men and women, you can make the right choices or not Adulterous and promiscuous people, you have nowhere to go AIDS is finishing you Ask God to forgive you
As discomfiting as it may be to think of tiny children absorbing rote lessons in the mechanics of AIDS prevention (the song includes direct reference to unprotected sex), Singing for Life makes the case that the performance of the Kasenyi Nursery School children represents a heroic cultural response to the plague. Uganda has had far more success in reducing the spread of AIDS than other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, in large measure because its president, Yoweri Museveni, was among the first national leaders to pursue an aggressive campaign to educate people about transmission and prevention. Music has been a central part of that effort.
A sizable segment of the population of Uganda is illiterate, and access to broadcast media is minimal outside of urban areas. Consequently, traditional music provides one of the more readily available means of disseminating information. As Barz explains it, music for Ugandans (in fact, for all East Africans) is much more than a performance of organized sound, passively enjoyed as entertainment. It’s a special, powerful form of communication. As one of Barz’s Ugandan research subjects explains it, “If the song has news to tell people, they pay attention and hear what you are saying in that song.” Presenting a message in song gives it weight it wouldn’t otherwise have. The communal nature of the performances also helps overcome the embarrassment people feel about discussing the realities of HIV transmission and AIDS.
Singing for Life describes how the musical traditions of Uganda can work to fight AIDS and become, in a very literal sense, a treatment for the disease. In local organizations throughout Uganda, people come together both to exchange information about AIDS, and to alleviate their physical and spiritual suffering through the shared joy of making music. Groups with names like “People with AIDS Development Association” offer performances by their members, with skits and songs that encourage premarital testing and the acceptance of medical treatment. Through performing, the group members themselves find solace and support.
Barz recounts how he marveled at the athletic dancing at a community group for women with HIV/AIDS in Kampala. “I glance over at Noelina Namukisa, director of the women’s group, and she covers her mouth with a hand and laughs as I raise my eyebrows. She comes over to join me, still laughing as she slaps my hand, shouting in my ear, ‘You think just because we women are sick that we can no longer dance?’ ” As the performance goes on, a woman Barz describes as “frail and quite ill” gets up to join the dancers. As Namukisa explains to Barz: “Look at them. It makes them feel better when they dance. They’re dancing their disease!’”
The recognition of music as an agent of healing has given rise to a new academic discipline, “medical ethnomusicology,” and Gregory Barz is a leading proponent. The aim of the field is to study the roles music plays in a society’s response to disease, and also to promote appreciation of music’s therapeutic value. Barz has long been recognized as an authority of conventional ethnomusicology—that is, as a neutral observer and recorder of indigenous musical traditions—but the overwhelming impact of AIDS on the East African cultures he has studied for so long has reshaped his approach. He no longer sees the necessity, or even the possibility, of perfect objectivity as a cultural scientist. A researcher who encounters people during a time of crisis, he believes, can and should act to preserve human life and health, and he sees Singing for Life as a way to encourage cultural initiatives that are effective against the epidemic.
It’s a somewhat controversial position: “activism” has always been something of a dirty word in academic circles. As Barz explains,“In anthropology and ethnomusicology we are trained to do no harm, to leave no footprints.” But Barz believes he’s actually had an effect, however slight, on the Ugandans he studies. “I used to think that this was a bad thing, but I now fully embrace my personal involvement with local and global health care interventions.” Reading Barz’s account of walking through eerily silent villages, emptied by the disease, or his description of a lone elderly “auntie” who finds herself overwhelmed with the care of orphaned children, it’s hard to imagine turning away from any opportunity to reduce the suffering.
Barz doesn’t shy away from discussing the social and political forces that continue to interfere with the fight against AIDS. He is eloquent in his empathy for Ugandan women, who, because of gender inequality, are often helpless to protect themselves from HIV. He points out the problematic nature of aid efforts that impose religious and moralistic constraints on offers of help, such as the reluctance or outright refusal to promote condom use. But Singing for Life is no polemic. Ultimately, it is a testimony of human loss and hardship on an almost unimaginable scale. This is a work of scholarship, but its academic frame doesn’t obscure the pain in the songs Barz has so carefully cataloged. At one orphan school, he records the brutal lament of the children:
Oh AIDS, you killer You killed my Daddy So is my Mommy Oh AIDS, I hate you I’ll never forget you till I die I’ll never forget you till I die.
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