The integration of music and dance among African people is a well-articulated phenomenon both within and outside of ethnomusicology (e.g., Blacking 1973; Hanna 1973; Nketia 1974; Stone 1998; Mans 2002; Gilman 2009; Mason 2012:5). As Ruth Stone reports, “African performance is a highly wrapped bundle of arts that are sometimes difficult to separate, even for analysis. Singing, playing instruments, dancing, masquerading and dramatizing are part of a conceptual package that many Africans think of as one and the same” (1998:7). Despite the ubiquity of this conceptual packaging, African performance arts are realized in very particularized ways and contexts throughout the continent. In his study of the vimbuza healing ritual among the Tumbuka of Malawi, for example, Steven Friedson concludes that music and dance in vimbuza are not independent, but “multilayered and complexly interrelated” (1996: 131). In fact, “without drumming there would be no dancing, and without the dancing, the vimbuza [ancestral spirits] would be unable to ‘play with their children‘” (ibid.: 129). Friedson's observation goes beyond the basic acknowledgement that people who create and view dance experience it as sound too; as a practitioner, he found the very act of drumming to be “dancelike” (ibid.: 131–32). Similarly, in the specific cases of Ugandan kizino, kimandwa, maggunju, and gaze. Alfdaniels Mabingo argues that “to embody these dances is to personify the music that accompanies them. Music represents, frames and influences the corporeal bases, capabilities, performance and choreographic sensibilities of the dances” (2015: 13; see also Makubuya 1995). In both of these cases, music not only helps to define the choreographic movements, but also determines the speed and vigour of the dancers.
This article examines how children’s songs, musical tales, and games contribute to the socialization of rural Baganda girls in womanhood. Through metaphoric, symbolic, and idiomatic language; girlhood lullabies, musical tales, and games, gendered information is “dressed-up” to communicate a discourse that is otherwise only acceptable in private. Although the girls may not understand the gendered private discourse, the repeated performance of girlhood songs, tales, and games enhances memorization and storage of this information for use at a later time when the girls get married. Indeed, children’s music is important in the socialization of girls into womanhood and the life of a Baganda wife and mother.
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