The Washington Post tells the story of a group of young people from the Bokamoso Youth Centre, Winterveldt, South Africa, who are in the Washington, DC area on a cultural exchange.
The tall, thin girl from South Africa begins the song on a note so searingly high and pure that some students in the classroom of the Field School in Northwest Washington will recall having felt a chill.
This is what it sounds like when you are poor, from South Africa and singing for your life in one of the wealthiest communities in the Washington area.
Immediately, 11 of Elsa Nkuna’s South African peers join her in a traditional dance, chanting, smiling, twirling, telling stories between songs, as students from America sit before them.
For the past four weeks, the youths from Winterveldt, South Africa, have participated in a cultural exchange here. They have been living with host families in Potomac and Bethesda and performing at schools and churches sometimes twice a day to raise money so they can attend college back home. Through it all, they’ve attempted to explain their culture and their country and the importance of song to both.
“When our country was ruled by an apartheid government, it was illegal to say anything ill about the government, ” says Jabu Mfumba, 27, a member and a leader of the group. Song, he says, was a means of protest.
Now, the group is trying to sing its way out of poverty.
Founded in 1999 by a South African doctor and nurse, the Bokamoso Youth Centre annually selects 12 young people who have been trained in song and dance to travel to the United States for a month-long performance tour and to raise donations for scholarships through the exchange program.
“At the center, they get one meal a day,” says Roy Barber, a teacher at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Potomac. “The European Union built the facility. It is a big hall with a stage and room for sports. Funding is a struggle. The roof leaks. Sometimes the electricity is off, but they persist. A song they sing, ‘I will never give up,’ comes from the apartheid struggle.”