Giving voice to joy, sorrow
Bryn Mawr Presbyterian choir sings with S. Africa sister group
GUGULETHU, South Africa -
Brighten the corner
Where you are
Where you are.
Three hundred of us held hands and sang this sweet, simple song. The woman holding my left hand, her face smooth and brown as a sculpture under her headwrap, showed me how to do the steps that everyone in the congregation already knew. When she murmured, "You got it," I was pleased beyond saying.
The thrilling two-hour concert combined the choirs of the Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church and its sister church in South Africa, the JL Zwane Presbyterian Church. And it was just by luck that I discovered they would be performing in Gugulethu, a black township outside Cape Town, on one of the days I was spending in that city.
Gugulethu is a place of wooden shacks and crowded concrete houses bravely painted bright colors - fuchsia, turquoise. This church is one of the few to embrace AIDS victims. Earlier in the day, some of the Bryn Mawr choir members had paid a visit to a young woman dying of AIDS, singing "Amazing Grace" at her bedside while her sister held the woman's 2-year-old.
The African choir, dressed all in black and accompanied by two electric guitarists and a dreadlocked drummer, sang in Xhosa (except the surprising "O Sole Mio," performed with much swaggering style by a young tenor). Their faces were remarkably expressive when they sang - eyebrows raised in passionate sadness, or smiling in transcendent joy - and every song, sacred or not, has accompanying doo-wop moves. From the sopranos to the basses (and what basses!), their voices combined in exhilarating sound.
Next up was the blue-robed, mostly gray-haired Bryn Mawr Presbyterian choir (55 of the 120 singers made the trip), whose excellent voices gave the congregation not only traditional songs ("I Will Sing With the Spirit" and "Praise His Holy Name") but also wowed it with a number in Xhosa.
"Thank God there is only one click in the whole piece," Jeffrey Brillhart, Bryn Mawr's irresistibly enthusiastic choir director, said of the language's distinctive vocal sounds. "It's taking more rehearsal time than anything else!"
"Prayer for the Children" was very moving in both lyrics and melody, evoking the horrifying violence against children at home in Philadelphia as well as here in South Africa.
And when the choirs joined onstage to sing "Soweto: June 1976," which combines the American protest song "We Shall Overcome" with the Zulu equivalent, "Senzenina," the air was electric. The Zulu text means:
What have we done?
Our sin is that we are poor
Our sin is that we are black
They are killing us
Let Africa return
The big finale, the "Hallelujah" chorus from Handel's Messiah, brought all to their feet.
When the congregants liked what they heard, they waved their arms, wiggled their index fingers in the air, ululated and danced. Never has church music been so much lively fun.
Their pastor, Rev. Dr. Spiwo Xapile, wearing traditional robes, had the dignified presence of a chieftain. And when, after all the singing and presentations and hugs and tears, he ended the afternoon by saying, "We meet to part to meet again," there was not a person among us who didn't believe him.