The Batwa are an indigenous tribe who originally lived in the forests of Mgahinga and Bwindi which were both gazetted as National Parks in 1990s with an aim to protect the mighty mountain Gorillas. They are now referred to as “Conservation refugees.” The Batwa lived a lifestyle of hunting and gathering of fruits and plants mainly for food and medicine. They never practiced farming, deforestation, or forest fires. They coexisted in harmony with all creatures in the forest including the Mountain Gorillas for so many years. As a result, most of them were left landless and needy.
They resorted to begging and working as laborers on other people’s land in order to survive. However music is and has always been part of their DNA, Batwa still practice ancient traditions and customs, which form part of their rich artistic life. As a way to conserve such endangered music and promote indigenous talent holders. The music heritage of the Batwa has been influenced for years by their connection to the forests of Ichuya, Bwindi and Mgahinga.
The Pearl Rhythm Foundation went on a journey to trace their story and try to understand how the Batwa’s Music Heritage that consists of music instruments and sounds, dance, chants and other forms of expression, reflect their ancient relationship with the forest, in part by exploring a trail developed for tourism that enlightens visitors and researchers about who the Batwa used to be. Their ancient practices from the knowledge of plant based medicines, hut- and fire-making practices, wood-working skills, and other aspects of their former forest life can still be traced with the older surviving generation among the Batwa.
However, all this heritage is currently at great risk of extinction due to no or limited space for genuine expression of their cultural heritage. The Batwa still make their indigenous instruments like the Omuduri (Bow and Instrument), The Enanga, and (Harp) and the Ikondera (Wind pipes) and drums. They still practice oral tradition passing on ancestral knowledge to their offspring. The Batwa have always been passionate about music because it is a way of bonding among them as they transition through their journey of life.
Much as there is a level of protection of their culture from the Batwa our current field research indicates a change and a gradual shift of their sound from what it used to be years ago, to their current context which keeps changing owing to their movement as they adapt to their new settlements in order to survive, interact and gain acceptance in society. A lot of their Batwa cultural shift is coming from their cross-border movements between Rwanda and Congo, which comes with social context changes like intermarriages. As it is the case for most Indigenous minority groups this change can be traced back to their community disruption and function as a people in relation to their environment and expulsion from the forests were they used to be. In this day and age the young Mutua is influenced by other cultures and does not speak Lutwa their Indigenous language.
However, the conservation of art forms like chants, storytelling, and singing can help salvage the situation as it is a clever way of continuously engaging the young Mutua to learn their language. These forms of Intangible Heritage also contain important information that is usually intended for future generations of such communities.
Singing in the Batwa culture is an art of oratory that should be preserved among as it could be one of the ways of safeguarding their Lutwa dialect in the near future. According to research, there is a deep link between language and music. This could contribute to a better understanding and survival of Batwa’s music heritage as a whole.
Academic investigation into the relationship of language and music has a deep and long history (neatly outlined by Feld and Fox, 1994). Up to the mid-1970s, research mostly centered on the possibility of applying linguistic models to musical analysis, and the overlap of musical and linguistic phenomena: the musical properties of speech, for example, or the relationships between song structure, texts, and poetics (Feld, 1974). These fields of investigation have continued to develop, but since the 1980s they have expanded to include broader aspects of the language–music relationship, like the biological origins of language and music and their relative functions in the survival of our species. In these later studies, research from other disciplines, such as anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience, has significantly contributed to our understanding of the language–music equation.
Read more about Music Endangerment: How Language Maintenance Can Help
the only hope lies with the community wisdom keepers and the young people who are still part of the Community despite the changes in their environment. “The positioning of music genre within a society is a multifaceted phenomenon, and one that has, in many ways defined ethnomusicological research for decades.” (Catherine Grant).”It embraces broad issues that include the social function of music within a community, its interconnection with non-musical aspects of community life, and its economic basis in society. All these issues interrelate with the sustainability of the genre.” (Merriam The Anthropology of Music 1964).
