Ever since school started in January, my students have been practicing for the infamous Moshoeshoe’s Day. From the beginning, I had a love/hate relationship with Moshoeshoe’s Day, because since January, our afternoons have been dedicated to practicing various extracurricular activities instead of attending regular classes. It just seemed like a complete waste of time.
Oh, by the way, it’s pronounced “Moh-shway-shway”. I didn’t guess the first time I read it, either.
Moshoeshoe’s Day rolls around every March. It’s a day to celebrate the founding father of Lesotho and (all three of) his subsequent ancestors. For Moshoeshoe’s Day, schools across the country compete in traditional cultural activities, such as dancing and singing, and not-so-traditional activities, such as “athletics”—or what we would call track and field.
I have to admit, the traditional dances are so cool. We don’t have anything like a “traditional American dance” that we can proudly showcase on the 4th of July. The twist? The hand jive? Can you imagine schools training for months to have a national Hand Jive competition?
The boys have a dance where they do high-kicks and stomp around with bells attached to their ankles, all while jabbing sticks in the air and acting threatening to anyone who happens to be nearby watching. They wear colorful man-skirts and long, bright feathers attached at their shins. Despite the costumes involved, it’s actually a pretty testosterone-filled dance. My students are anywhere between 10 and 15-years old, but when they start doing this dance, all of the sudden they spontaneously grunt out loud in these deep, manly voices, and hold their little muscular arms outstretched like a rooster showing off by fluffing up his feathers.
The girls have a couple of dances; one is Lesotho’s version of the Beyonce booty shake. They wear short, thick grass skirts with loud bells attached underneath, so when they pop their butts in the air, the grass flies up just enough to see their tiny (and usually naked) butts underneath. They pop their booties to the rhythm of a deep bass drum being pounded by one of their classmates. The simultaneous clinging of the bells in their skirts makes the whole thing sound so… tribal. Also, traditionally, most of the girls go topless during the dance. Apparently this is all OK—the girls are still too young for it to be considered inappropriate. To my surprise, my 7th grade girls (who are not too young to still look like boys) were totally comfortable wandering around topless for a good part of the afternoon of Moshoeshoe’s Day. A part of me was jealous; never in my dreams would I have been that confident at 13-years old.
The second girls’ dance is more of a shoulder-pop move, where they kneel on the ground and move their shoulders back and forth in harsh rhythm to the deep bass of a drum while waving feathers or sticks in the air. Their costume for this dance is much more conservative: a long, flowing skirt matched with a buttoned-up blouse.
Maybe I should have mentioned this a few paragraphs up: today was Moshoeshoe’s Day. Finally, after months of practicing choir songs in a stuffy, overcrowded classroom, and running sprints in the scorching afternoon heat, and monotonously clapping along to the rhythmic beat of an African drum (an overturned large plastic bucket), we were ready to compete.
We left school this morning around 9:00am—only an hour later than when we were actually supposed to leave. Not bad for Basotho time. We had arranged for three taxi-vans to pick us up from school. When the taxis pulled up with electronic music playing at deafeningly full blast from the speakers, the kids were uncontrollable. We finally got them all loaded in, and after a strict talk about not dangling their bodies out the window while we speeded down the highway, we were off.
We drove to a nearby elementary school, about 15 minutes northeast from our school. We were the last of eight schools to arrive. We quickly met with the other schools’ staff members for a coffee and bread in the teachers’ lounge before the day began.
We started with athletics—100 meter, 200 meter, 500 meter, and relay race. It took hours. By the end of it all, I felt awful for my kids. They were so exhausted, and water was extremely limited. I spent most of the afternoon either screaming along the sidelines at my students during the races or herding the tired, hot kids underneath my umbrella and in the shadow of my skirt to rest in the shade. I felt like a real Momma Hen.
On the way back home, electro music blaring from the speakers and the bass so loud that my ponytail quivered with every beat, the kids still screamed and danced just as enthusiastically as they did at 9:00am on our way to the fields. They were just totally overtaken with excitement and happiness from the day’s activities.
I couldn’t help but think back to similar events during my middle school days—field trips, school carnivals, ice cream socials—they were the only thing you ever had to be preoccupied about for months. Nothing else really mattered. And the “day of” was so overwhelming, that I would think about it for weeks afterwards.
My kids are surely no different. I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face for the rest of the ride home. For some reason, I felt so proud and happy to be a part of such an important day for them this year. I wanted to squeeze all of them and tell them individually how well they did in the day’s events and how proud I was of them. I think that would have been a little creepy, so instead I showed them videos taken on my cell phone during their traditional dances. Their faces lit up when they saw themselves on the screen. They didn’t need me to tell them anything; they were proud for themselves.
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