The Hills Are Alive With The Sound of Miusic

The hills are alive with the sound of music!

For you avid music and/or movie fans, you will recognise this from The Sound of Music. I think this phrase is very fitting for the hills of Rwanda, especially around this time of year.

The hundred days of memorial have just ended and from that sombre period, we move on to the brighter side of life in Kigali. I don't believe there is a single country in Africa that does not appreciate the sound of music. Rwanda is no different.

I just came from the Kigali Up Music Festival, an annual festival held in Amahoro Stadium. It lasted the entire weekend and featured artists from all over East Africa and a few from the USA all with different genres of music ranging from Jazz to Reggae. I have to admit, reggae fan I am not, but it was really good. Who knows, I might change my mind about it after all.

There were two stages as well which confused me at first but made sense after a while. While the first stage was setting up, you had the choice to move to the second stage and listen to the amazing music there. When the first stage was fully set up, you could move there and enjoy more music. For the patient ones, you could wait for the stage to be set up properly then enjoy the music, but as I like to say, “To each, his own.”

The highlight of the festival for me was when about twenty Rwandan women came on stage with their drums each dressed in the traditional Rwandan garb. I've heard drums before and they were pretty fun to listen to but this was simply awe-inspiring. I have to say, there is nothing quite like the synchrony of a multitude of African drums played in perfect rhythm. In that moment, I couldn't have been prouder to be an African.

As I later found out though, women are not supposed to drum according to African tradition. I wondered why not when the women I saw were so good (power to the women!). Well, as it turns out, this is part of Rwanda moving forward.

All that aside, I wasn't surprised to see that some of Kigali's famous restaurants were not to be left behind. In the tents surrounding the entrance to the stadium were several of these hotels selling their food to the hungry crowd. I liked the diversity as well since there was a choice between African dishes, snacks, American fast food and Indian food – decisions, decisions...

For those of you interested in jewellery or perhaps some postcards, curios or clothes, those were there too. And the best part was, as always, the security. I will have to say this for criminals in Rwanda, you had better be fully committed to your job since the penalties for being caught are very high.

All in all, the festival was great fun and if you missed it, you can catch it all again next year!