This weekend I travelled to my friend Norman’s family village to celebrate the birth of a new baby girl – it was in essence a South African baby shower. When we first got to the house it was quiet, the women were preparing food for the day while other guests sat outside drinking soda and eating. As I was starting to think that this would be a quiet afternoon in the village, I was shaken to life by an older woman dressed in traditional garb who grabbed my hand as people started running and yelling around me. Not understanding what was happening everyone just kept running towards the road with me being dragged behind. Women and girls had changed into these big skirts, someone was beeping a horn in the car, music was playing, people were yelling, and a taxi pulled up, with what I would later learn was the other side of the family to the newborn baby. We danced around the taxi as it beeped back at us and yelled and got excited. It was quite the site to see.
Once the family had emptied from the taxi I was wrapped in one of the traditional skirts that the other women were wearing and dragged into the stage that they had set up in their backyard with the other women. Traditional music was playing as the women tried to teach me the traditional dance. Essentially, the dance requires that you make the skirt jump and shimmy as you move just your stomach; let’s just say I tried to make it look as easy as the other women were making it look. Never-the-less, despite my attempts to keep up I was laughing the whole time, this was what a party should be like, dancing laughing, and everyone just being happy. My attempts at dancing, that time, ended when I got a stomach cramp from trying to shimmy the skirt.
It was at this time of relaxing that I be-friended the mother to the baby who we were celebrating, and who also explained the unfolding events that happened next. Tables, and clothes were being placed on the stage and family members were carrying out suitcases and boxes and sitting on the clothes around the area. She told me that they were welcoming her family who had come in the taxi and her family was going to present gifts to the hosting family, which was the baby’s father’s. The maternal grandmother pulled out shirts, scarfs, blankets, presents for the baby, and shoes and draped them all over the paternal grandmother who sat accepting all of her gifts. Once this tradition had ended the stage was cleared again for dancing.
During the party I made friends with a little boy named Quinton who would not let me go anywhere without his hand in mine, when I tried to leave to go to the bathroom he showed up right at my heels smiling up at me. When it was my turn to hold the baby he looked sadly at me, as if I was replacing him for this smaller child. At the end of the night, a tired Quinton fell asleep in my arms, with his arms around my waist.
Before the night was over for me though, I had danced again, or should I say attempted to, been given traditional necklaces and the traditional dress and had eaten a full plate of traditional food. At the end of the day I was tired, but filled with a feeling of love and happiness.
