Mr. Salsich's Class
Third Grade Explorations in Learning
Visitors From South Africa!
This past Tuesday we had a very special assembly. A group of travelling university students from South Africa came to our school to share some of the songs, dance, music, and culture of their country.
Song and Dance from South Africa
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Their country is a long way away from Connecticut!
From South Africa to Connecticut
Here is a video showing one of the songs they sang for us:
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They taught us a little bit about the different tribes, languages, and traditions of their country.
Here is a link to a Time For Kids webpage about South Africa to learn more about this fascinating country.
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We had lots of questions about the performance and the country of South Africa after the assembly.
These are just a few of the things we were wondering; What is a tribe? What special foods do they eat during holidays or celebrations? What kind of houses do people live in? How many languages are spoken in South Africa? Do they wear the traditional clothes all the time, or just special times? and, How did they learn the songs and dances?
We would love for anyone from South Africa to help us find the answers to some of these questions!
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Thank you so much for the amazing performance!
Traditional outfit and dance
(The group is giving a free concert this Saturday, October 6th in Old Lyme! Here is The flyer about the concert.)
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October 5th, 2012 at 4:48 pm
Dear Mr. Salsich,
I really like the video.
From,
Kali
October 7th, 2012 at 5:38 am
Hello there!
I am an ICT teacher from Cape Town, South Africa and I’d be happy to help with answering a few of you questions.
Houses – in the urban areas around the cities, we live in regular brick houses with tiled roofs, but in rural areas where many South Africans still live in cultural settings, homes are small and could be made from clay, with thatched grass roofs or similar.
We have eleven official languages!! However, English is the one you will hear most often, as well as Afrikaans.
I will leave some questions for others to answer, but I will check back here soon to see whether all your questions have been answered!
Bye!
Mrs Stadler
October 9th, 2012 at 9:15 am
Dear Mr. Salsich and Third Graders,
While traveling in South Africa, we enjoyed many colorful foods. I will share information about two very popular meals with you:
Potjiekos is a stew of meat and vegetables cooked outside in a three-legged cast iron pot over hot coals.
Bobotie is similar to our meatloaf, but it has raisins in it and usually a baked egg on top.
Many meals are served with yellow rice, fruit (such as bananas, melon and coconut) and chutney ( a sweet sauce made from chopped fruit) to pour over the meat.
We were also introduced to Rooibos tea ( pronounced ROY-bos). Rooibos is grown only in a small area of South Africa. It is an herbal tea and is very healthy. The Rooibos tea leaves are needle-like and grow on a bush. The tea is red when you drink it. It has become very popular and South Africa exports this tea to many Western countries.
Keep up your extraordinary learning!
Nora’s Grandmother
October 22nd, 2012 at 5:12 am
Hi everyone, I am one of the performers and let me take this chance to say it was an absolute pleasure performing for you all
Thank you for your questions, I will answer some of them, others were answered by karen (above):
What is a tribe? A tribe is a group of people that share the same language, and culture and usually live in the same general area under the same leader or chief. As some tribes grow in numbers, the number of leaders may also have to increase while other people of the same tribe leave the original home to make use of another piece of land. They can still trace their roots to the original tribe and may still identify by it. So Zulus are a different tribe to Tswanas; you see this is the way we dress, our languages and the type of music we have. Each tribe has a distinct way of singing and dancing; some kick really high and display their strength and others require a lot of agility, while creating rhythm using shakers on their feet, and each tribe is different.
What special foods do we have? Apart from ‘regular’ food such as burgers, kfc, mashed potato etc, we also have our indigenous food, which is food that our ancestors used to eat before we were joined by people of other countries. Pap is a great part of the staple diet, it is made out of white maize that is ground and cooked. However each tribe has a different kind of food that they specialise in. My people, the Tswana tribe, make a type of pap called ‘tieng’ (pronounced ‘ting’) and it is made of fermented ground sorghum. The Sothos however, also make tieng but they don’t let the sorghum ferment, so theirs tastes sweet while ours tastes bitter. We also eat tripe; which is the intestines of an animal, usually cow, chicken or lamb (don’t worry we clean it out first lol). Other delicacies include mopanie worms which are found on the mopanie tree, and this is mostly favoured by the Tsonga and Venda tribes; they are dried out and cooked, sometimes with onions, tomatoes and spices. Samp is another favorite food and comprises of different types of beans. We also have a variety of nuts, fruits, and vegetables. This is just a few of the foods that we eat in South Africa, on a regular basis. Other foods are tied to rituals, especially beer, which is made of sorghum and is used as a way to communicate with the ancestors. Some people can also drink it outside of ritual practices, however. Other foods include those that were brought in from other countries such as China, India, Malaysia and Europe-making our country even more colourful
Our country boasts 11 official languages, 9 of which are indigenous. We have more unofficial languages however, some are indigenous (like the khoisan or ‘bushmen’ languages) and others come from Asia and Europe. Apart from the Khoisan languages, only 4 of our languages produce the click sounds, and this is quite unique because, apart from some parts of Zambia, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, no other African languages have clicks in them. The clicks are thought to have been learnt from the Khoisan people, who, like the Native Americans, were the first to settle in southern Africa.
Do we wear traditional clothes all the time? Nope. Our ancestors used to, but we don’t. Now we wear traditional clothes on special occasions, weddings, heritage day, mediation with the ancestors (some South Africans continue to believe in the African traditional religion in which people speak to God through the ancestors), rain dances and so on. In some villages people still wear traditional clothes all the time, but this is becoming increasingly rare
How did we learn the songs and dances? We all come from different tribes from around the country, a few of our members also come from Zimbabwe, and as children we all witnessed a traditional ceremony where there was singing and dancing and we learnt as we grew. Sometimes our grandparents would teach us. Most of our folktales (or fairy-tales) have a song in them that describes the moral of the story. In Africa we practice oral teaching, so most of the songs we know were taught orally. The dances were taught through demonstration. We don’t have special schools for traditional music. So when we joined this choir we all taught each other what we learnt from our specific tribes; now I can sing and dance in Swati, Tsonga, Venda, Khoisan and Tswana.
Well I hope these answers will help you gain an even deeper understanding of South African culture. Thank you once again for sharing your culture with us during our stay, we all learnt a great deal and we enjoyed it immensely!
Molebogeng