William Moses Serwadda was a folklorist and a musician who taught at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. As he explains in the introduction, these are the songs and stories he grew up with: "My grandfather was a chief in the Bukunja area on the northwest shore of Lake Victoria, so he had his own group of musicians in his enclosure. My father himself used to play fiddles and bowl lyres. My grandmother was a very good storyteller. We grandchildren used to sit in the evenings around the fire in her house and listen to her stories and songs. We were always expected not only to be good, active listeners, but also to be able gradually to tell the stories." And so Moses Serwadda has indeed grown up to tell the stories and share the songs with the whole world here: "For a long time," he writes, "I have had a desire to see that Americans and Europeans understand our music and learn to sing or play it."
The book has the Luganda lyrics for the songs, along with the English translation. The idea is not to sing the songs in English ("Please don't sing these African songs in English. It sounds awful," as the editor, Hewitt Pantaleoni, explains); instead, the idea is to sing the songs in the Luganda language, using the English to understand the meaning of the words.
Plus, you get to enjoy the beautiful illustrations by the Dillons. They made illustrations for the stories, like these:
And even some of the music has illustrations also, like this:
For more beautiful work by the Dillons that I've featured this week, you can use this link: Dillon illustrations. I'll be back again with another book illustrated by the Dillons tomorrow... and for now, please enjoy these songs and stories:
by W. Moses Serwadda
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