16–17 July 2014: Construction, and Music

16 July 2014

Today I spent about half an hour walking around the City Center taking photographs of things that have noticeably changed since last year. I will post some of them below. When I get the chance, I want to try to line them up with others I took last year, just to illustrate the difference—the problem, of course, is that it’s kind of hard to know what is going to change before it does!

Actually, that’s not quite true: construction projects post big signs as required by law giving descriptions of the building being built, who’s building it, etc. Just last year, I wasn’t thinking so much on my feet as to take pictures of those sites. (I should really do that this year, now that I think about it.)

Afterward, I met up with a family friend who runs a sewing cooperative in Rulindo, outside of Kigali. She came with an intern (a college student), and we had a nice conversation before I accompanied them to buy cloth in town.

Last year, this was a big pile of dirt: not just the parking garage, but also the feeder road in the foreground.

Every man-made object in this frame, except for the sign and the blue fence, was not there a year ago.

The building in the background was all covered with green scaffolding a year ago. The sewer in the foreground was open. The sidewalk on the right was not yet paved, and since this picture was taken the fencing has been removed and it is open to pedestrians.

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17 July 2014

Today I met the minister of education. He is a very nice man, and apparently a family friend of my hosts. (They grew up as neighbors north of the city.) We had lunch together with some others, and he was at least politely interested in the research work I was doing. His house is very nice, and—predictably and understandably for a government minister, he appears to live the life of a wealthy American (though the comparison is not perfect). He asked whether my research permit (granted by his ministry) was taking too long to come back; at the time it was not, so I didn’t say anything.

In retrospect, after interacting with someone obviously more important than me (or otherwise somehow intimidating), I am interested to think about how my behavior changed in the moment. First, I was rather shy about speaking Kinyarwanda: nervous that I might say something ungrammatical, conscious that I wouldn’t understand half of what he said, maybe wanting to preserve the possibility in his mind that I was actually fluent and just choosing not to show it! Second, I do have a number of questions and opinions about education in Rwanda, to which I would have been curious to hear his responses. I had all sorts of reasons at the time for not asking about them, and I was just about to when he had to get back to work. Oh well.

The other noteworthy event of the day was that, in wandering around the Nyabugogo taxi park/bus terminal before lunch, I happened upon a couple of people selling religious books, which included a hymnal! I had been hoping to find one of these (and I think my parents were interested too), but Kinyarwanda-language books are not easy to track down, even in the capital of Rwanda! (I know of just two dedicated bookstores in Kigali, plus a third that sells only schoolbooks and a fourth attached to a church.)

They were selling it for Fr. 1,500 ($2.16), so of course I bought it. It is a trade paperback, printed in Rwanda by the local Pentacostal Church:

Association des Églises de Pentecôte du Rwanda. Indirimbo zo Gushimisha Imana: Indirimbo z’Agakiza. Kigali: Éditions CELTA, n.d.

The hymns are all in Kinyarwanda (lovely) and all untitled (why?). They are taken from a wide variety of other hymnals (listed at the beginning), and mostly translated from French and English. The most interesting part at first glance, though, is the musical notation, which is all typed with no staff. This makes perfect sense given the machinery likely available to the printers. Here is how they print the melody of one song, which—from the section heading (Kuvuka kwa Yesu “Birth of Christ”) and the refrain pattern—I noticed is a translation of “O Come, All Ye Faithful”:

la

(235)

:d

|d

:—

|s,

:d

|r

:—

|s,

:—

|m

:r

|m

:f

|m

:—

|r

||

:d

|d

:—

|t,

:l,

|t,

:d

|r

:m

|t,

:—

|l,

:–.s,

|s,

:—

|—

||

:

|s

:—

|f

:m

|f

:—

|m

:—

|r

:m

|d

:r

|t,

:–.l,

|s,

||

:d

|d

:t,

|d

:r

|d

:—

|s,

||m

|m

:r

|m

:f

|m

:—

|r

||

:m

|f

:m

|r

:d

|t,

:—

|d

||f

|m

:—

|r

:–.d

|d

:—

|—

||

It’s a pretty smart solution, I think, to the problem at hand, as it finds a way of adequately notating melodies with no need for specialized software. Vertical bars are beats, colons half-beats, periods quarter-beats. The letters are notes: do (d), re (r), mi (m), etc. The key is in the upper-left, and notes that are down the octave are marked by a small vertical bar that looks close enough to a comma. (I may be misinterpreting something.) I would be curious to know whether this is an accepted alternate system, or something the Pentecostals made up for this book.

The major issue with it is that, for someone who is used to the normal staff notation, it is very difficult to read! I like being able to see that one note is above another, and though, granted, it’s my first time, I have a lot of trouble associating those letters with even relative pitches.

A final note: I respect whoever did these translations (uncredited), because they wrote lyrics that acknowledge the ellision of final vowels in most Kinyarwanda words. The Jehovah’s Witnesses’ hymnal does not do this, thus giving full syllables’s emphasis to sounds that are usually unpronounced, thus making generally awkward-sounding songs.

Both, however, ignore the importance of vowel length in the language. Taking this into account would make translating lyrics an even harder task than it already is, but having longer and shorter notes that do not correspond to longer and shorter vowels must make the song flow less nicely. (I think it would be fantastically cool if the songs also aligned their tunes to the tone melodies of their lyrics, but no one ever does this—I think—and it would have made good translations pretty near impossible!)