Watmon Cultural Group
If you are lucky on a visit to Uganda you may get the chance to enjoy one of the most thrilling folklore entertainments provided most weekends by the Watmon Cultural Group. This is a team of Acoli musicians and dancers - most of them refugees and many of them orphans - who have fled their home villages in northern Uganda to escape the terrible havoc created for over two decades by Joseph Kony (the self-styled leader of the 'Lord's Resistance Army').
The group is named after Mathew Amone Watmon, a distinguished Acoli elder - himself a fine player of the traditional Acoli zither called nanga. They have a wide repertory of Acoli dances, among them the lively Dingi-dingi creative dance performed to flutes and drums, the famous chiefly Bwola dance, the Lamoko-wang (also known as Larakaraka) and the more modern lukeme (thumb piano) and the adungu (harp ensemble) dance. My favourite is the Lukeme - not simply because of the deliciously complex sounds of the consort of half a dozen or more lukeme in four different sizes played by a team of young men and girls, but also because of the dancing of the girls who move around the arena alternating between graceful upper torso movements and lively waist twisting while simultaneously balancing up to eight pots on their heads.
Mathew Watmon's aim is to provide a cultural outlet through which the group members despite the disruption to their lives can maintain a sense of Acoli identity, and maintain the rich performance arts of their people. But it also has a sound practical aim - to raise much needed cash to feed, clothe and pay the school fees of the members of the group who fled hundreds of miles to the comparative safety of Kampala with no more than the clothes they were wearing. They hold their rehearsals outside Watmon's small house in the shanty-town suburb known as Naguru Go-down Market. There the plastic and timber shacks provide a stark contrast with the palatial brick homes of the nouveau-riche that overlook them from just a few metres higher up the slopes of Naguru Hill.
All the dances are accompanied by songs whose words vary from expressing despair at the horror of the warfare which has afflicted them all to their hopes for peace and reconciliation and a return to their villages. Others remind one of the once-frequent inter-village dance competitions when similar groups would meet up to compete to be called 'namba!' ('number one') - i.e. to get the top prize. Competitions in the performing arts have long been a lively feature of village life in many parts of Uganda.
(Peter Cooke, 2007)
Paris Performance, 2006
Video of Paris Performance Watch Watmon's group perform at the festival de l'imaginaire, Paris 2006
Review Paris Performance Uganda's Watmon Cultural Troupe nearly brought down the roof with a stirring performance at a global cultural event in Paris, earning an immediate demand for a repeat performance the next day...
Article about Watmon Living a dream: from war zone to France
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