Bayimba Regional Festival of the Arts: Jinja

Bayimba Regional Festival of the Arts: Jinja

“What should the audience expect from Rachel”

“This time, it’s different from my usual performances: I am doing a fusion with African Instruments comprised of Students from the Music Department of Kyambogo University and I am very excited about performing in my home Town and I hope they too are eager to watch me perform live” says Rachel Magoola.

Rachel Magoola is one of the artists who will be performing at the Bayimba Regional Festivals of the Arts that starts in Jinja on 26th March 2011 at the Main Street Primary School along side Siraje form Iganga, Inkwanzi and Munaku Kaama Dance Group, Mbikko Brass Band, Dizzoman and Ivulungo who will be performing Live with a Jazz Band.

Festivals in Nigeria

Festivals 

Nigeria has many local festivals that date back to the time before the arrival of the major religions, and which are still occasions for masquerade and dance. The local festivals cover an enormous range of events, from harvest festivals and betrothal festivals, to the investing of a new chief and funerals. It seems odd to Western ways of thinking to see a funeral as something to be celebrated. But for many of the tribes, death means joining the ancestors, and so the deceased must get a good send-off.

The dances that were once performed by members of each village have now been taken over by professional troupes, who tour villages performing at each local festival.

Arts Festivals, Craft Markets and Cultural Events Guide : South African Tourist Attractions

From theatre to dance, opera to cabaret, fine art to craft art, classical music to jazz, poetry readings to lectures, every art form is well represented in all South Africa's cities and larges towns. The growing range of arts festivals around South Africa offers visitors the opportunity to combine their pursuit of culture with sightseeing, wine tasting, beach visits, wildlife viewing, history, palaeoanthropology and relaxing in some of South Africa's most beautiful spots.

South African Arts Festivals:

Tunisian theatre pays tribute to revolution

Tunisia's once tightly-controlled theatre enjoyed a remarkable outburst of creative humour, inspired by the revolution. "Intox", a one-man show played by Atef Ben Hassine, premiered last week in Kasserine.

"This is the first time we staged a play without the supervision of the Theatrical Guidance Committee, which always acted as a censor, clipping off many parts of the script," Ben Hassine said. "The Tunisian actor, however, always outsmarted them and still managed to get the message across in a number of plays."

Algeria welcomes Pan-African festival

Thousands of artists and visitors from dozens of African and diaspora nations converged on Algiers for the official start of the second Pan-African Festival. After a 40-year absence, the event returned on Sunday (July 5th), also Algeria's Independence Day, as a large-scale endeavour to revive the continent's culture and arts.

The event, set to run through July 20th, began in spectacular style on Saturday. A grand parade wound through the streets of Algiers, from Sofia Park to Bab-El-Oued. Showboat-style floats from each African participating nation, along with thousands of performers, brought Algiers colourfully to life and raised anticipation for the official opening ceremony on Sunday night.

African Harvest Festivals

African Harvest Festivals 
In Africa the festival is of a religious nature and has lots of dancing and music. Dancers wear masks and each dance tells a story. The stories range from a good ghost who looks after their crops and scares away the bad ghosts who try to spoil the food.

ISLAM'S RESPONSE TO AFRICAN TRADITIONAL RELIGION IN NIGERIA

The history of Islam in Nigeria has examples of a wide range of interaction with African traditional belief systems and practices. At certain times, particularly when Muslims constituted a minority, a pluralist response to other cultures and religions occurred. Muslims took the view that different forms of primal religion could exist side by side with them in the same society. Coupled with this was the recognition that the social and political structure of the wider society could be accommodated. Individual Muslims, and whole communities, throughout Nigeria have incorporated into Islam to varying degrees different aspects of traditional life....

CREATION IN AFRICAN THOUGHT

African theologians have stressed that the substratum upon which all future Christian theologizing in Africa must be built is African Traditional Religion. So the question of African conceptions of nature is certainly an appropriate one. By far the largest portion of African theological discourse relevant to ecology thus far has been on the conceptions of creation and/or "nature" found in ATR. As part of the quest of the 1970s, much was written on nature in ATR during this period. We shall discover that in the 1980s African theologians have paid more attention to explicitly Christian theological reflexion on Christian ecological responsibility. In the pages which follow I shall first present some of the salient aspects of some African conceptions of nature, then move to a survey of the more recent theological responses.