To sing and dance like a Kenyan

Americans are afraid to sing and dance. We’re embarrassed, we’ll look silly. We don’t have rhythm, our voices aren’t good enough. We make excuses instead of enjoying the feelings that music elicits.

I should specify that I’m talking about American adults, or at least most of them. The same doesn’t usually apply to children, as so perfectly captured by my 5-year old niece as she sings “The Bare Necessities” at the top of her beautiful little lungs in a recording my mom emailed to me. It makes me laugh and smile every single time I listen to it.

I love the few times I’ve experienced other cultures that sing and dance without the restrictions of embarrassment and self-awareness. I witnessed that at Love & Care School in Thailand, where the Burmese students sang without abandon, and I’ve seen it throughout Kenya since my arrival in May.

A few examples come to mind, including seeing a middle-aged man simply stand up from his table in a Kisii restaurant to swing his arms and shuffle his feet to a good song. At the primary schools I’ve visited, the children have gathered in circles to sing gospel songs to welcome their guests. For Bryson’s birthday on Friday, our 50+ colleagues and professors sang him songs in Kiswahili, Kisii, Luo and Kalenjin languages, and we all danced in a circle for nearly twenty minutes. It was a birthday. It was an event to celebrate with a cross-cultural exchange of traditions. It was wonderful.

Sometimes the experience can be almost emotional, as when we visited Dr. Susan Chebet’s Centre for Social Transformation and Empowerment in the Rift Valley recently. In spring, my classmates and I wrote a grant proposal and were awarded $5,000 for a project at the Centre, so we spent two days there to visit the newly-constructed kitchen, sleep in the new guest facilities and start a compost pile for a humanure latrine. Upon our arrival, twenty-thirty women from the community greeted us with a Kalenjin welcome song. We passed through a receiving line, kissing and hugging each woman in time with the music. The songs and dances continued throughout our two days in the valley, including when they presented each of us with a kanga cloth to thank us for our partnership and when they sang to us as we loaded up the van for departure.


Being welcomed to participate in those moments is a joyous, almost freeing feeling. It feels innocent, yet genuine. We’re neither laughed at nor applauded for trying to sing along in Kalenjin or Kiswahili. We just do it; it’s our contribution to the moment. And it shapes moments that I’ve come to treasure.