SWARKOPMUND, Namibia—Once a year, Swakopmund, a German-coined city in Namibia, holds an unusual festival called Swakopmund Music Week. Founded by the protestant church, the festival has been connecting people across ethnic and cultural boundaries for 46 years.

For a couple of days each year, the festival bridges a social abyss between blacks and whites, still in the process of coming together after apartheid. The festival took place a few weeks ago, from Dec. 9-18, 2011 and was more successful than ever.

Swakopmund is situated in southwest Africa, on the edge of the torrid Namib Desert, ironically where other opposites meet: Antarctic currents and strong winds are cooling down the Atlantic Ocean on this coast.

Germans founded the small coastal city in 1892 when Namibia was a German colony. The city reached the peak of its fame in 2005—when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie lived here for half a year.

The Germans Organize Music Week

Although the festival is sustained by an association, making it all happen falls to Christiane Berker, who is in charge of Music Week. The tall grey-curled lady, donning a baseball cap and a Music Week t-shirt, radiates serenity whether caught amidst a tangle of laptop cables in her “office” (improvised from a vacant classroom), or whether engaged in a multilingual dialogue of English, German, and Cape Dutch with her volunteer staff.

Traditionally, the festival takes place shortly before Christmas because that’s the time of summer vacation in southern Africa. The rooms of the Namib Primary School look a bit careworn. A paper note on the door reminds the teachers to be role models for their students.

Berker stumbled into the organizing team straight from her job as staff member because of her useful talent for organizing. When not coordinating the music festival, the 52-year-old psychologist serves the HIV population.

At the festival she coordinates the requests of 250 people: participants and musicians, instructors, and lecturers, coming from Swakopmund, South Africa, Germany, and the United States.

Black and white, old and young, play music together under the theme of “the way is the goal.” For a small fee anyone can register. Participants just need to bring their own instruments and music stands.

At the end of the week, the orchestra, choir, and big band hold eagerly anticipated concerts; orchestral music is rarely heard in the sparsely populated desert nation of Namibia.

What a Tour of the City Reveals

The reason the music festival takes place in Swakopmund of all places is explained by a tour to the city’s museum. When the Germans landed here, they brought with them—besides their technology and infrastructure—their culture, which gave them a foothold and identity.

To give the reader a sense of the importance of music for the German culture: historically, an indispensable part of each German household was a piano. And, among the museum paraphernalia of uniforms, small arms, stuffed zebras, and meerkats, a document shines forth, in which the German Sängerbund (singing society) congratulates in the ’70s Swakopmund choral society on the occasion of its 75th anniversary. The importance of music is entrenched.

In town, Christmas LED lights hung on the street lamps, together with evergreen branches, reindeer, seals, and dolphins. Motley shop signs reminded one of an American town. Everything was covered with concrete. If not, one would have ended up standing on dusty desert ground.

The city has about 30,000 inhabitants and everyone knows everyone else, at least in the nearby surroundings. That’s why “Uschi and Diane” can run a real estate agency using their first names.

The Namibian state, however, has adopted German orderliness. Officially there are no homeless in Swakopmund. Whoever registers with the government, obtains an address in the suburbs on a street with street lamps, running water, and toilets, even without an income. Six thousand blacks live there in makeshift huts in the desert.

Continued on the next page: … The Finale Concert

The Finale Concert

On the evening of the final concert, Swakopmund looked deserted. The whole town, it seemed was streaming to the concert at the school auditorium. Also called “Bank Windhoek Culture Auditorium,” the auditorium is a venue for all occasions and has about the same charm as a gymnasium. The audience looked like they were attending any German cultural event—just more family-like and enthusiastic, perhaps.

For 50 Namibian dollars (about $6.50), one heard Namibia’s only orchestra playing a bit of Brahms, a bit of Borodin, and “My Heart Will Go On” by 20 traverse flutes. All 460 seats were taken; there was even a waiting list.

The result of the eight days of rehearsals turned out to be sensational, and the joy of the multicultural orchestra was just as contagious.

The professional musicians who participated as both lecturers and musicians were exceedingly relaxed and congratulated each other cordially. Competition didn’t exist.

Alexander Fokkens has been the musical director of the Music Week for years. The freelance conductor and double-bass player from Capetown praised the job his U. S. colleague Steven Meier did with the big band. It was Meier’s debut at the Music Week, and Fokkens said, “Tonight there was swing here for the first time!”

Even ‘O Fortuna’ Works Out

How does one pull a professional sounding production together with nothing?

Hans-Jochen Stiefel from the Helmholtz-Gymnasium of Karlsruhe looked like a cycling enthusiast during the rehearsals. He encouraged the 50-plus-member choir, composed of mostly older white ladies, to give top performances, but this still meant that the Music Week choir was composed of only altos and sopranos.

To solve this dilemma, Music Week asked the local Mascato Coastal Youth Choir of 30-40 young people to join the choir. With only 20 or so tenors and basses to round out the bottom sounds, performing five pieces from “Carmina Burana” became possible. Astonishingly, the choir sounded wonderfully young and balanced.

This performance would not have even been possible if the sheet music for “Carmina Burana,” which cost almost $4,000, hadn’t been donated by Schott publishing.

The next problem was space. The stage was so small that the orchestra filled it completely. To accommodate everyone— the choir was put in front of the stage and Stiefel, the conductor, in front of them all. He had to stand on a yard-high box so that the performers could see him.

What sounded like a desperate attempt of the best known piece of “Carmina Burana,” “O Fortuna” during the open-air concert three days before, turned, miraculously, into professional-sounding Orff.

Everyone contributed; everybody there who was capable of playing or singing participated in the “Carmina Burana” pieces. The music professors, mingled with the orchestra members. Even Fokkens, just having been the conductor of two swinging Hungarian dances, beat the big drum in the rear of the orchestra for the “O Fortuna.” When the piece was finished, he raised his hands to the sky like a football coach whose team had won.

Lucky Chance for a Namibian musician

Marcellinus Swartbooi, a young black composer, who joined the singing, spoke thrillingly of the festival: “This kind of music we only know from movies! That we are now playing it ourselves is the greatest thing!”

As a native Namibian musician he has had no chance to get advanced training and his aspirations for music making are continuously thwarted. He has been close to giving up music completely.

He explained that it is easy for composers in Germany to have their music performed, as there are so many professional ensembles capable of doing the job. But in Namibia, “Once I give free rein to my musical thoughts, my choir tells me that this is too difficult; we can’t sing that.”

After the music week workshop with the German composer and conductor René Giessen, Swartbooi was reminded that he is not alone in his problems.

“I’ve become an entirely new person!” Swartbooi said. “I always thought that I’m crazy, but René told me: Being crazy is actually normal.”

Continued on the next page: … Lack of Funding

Lack of Funding

Engelhardt Unaeb, too, sang as a soloist. The baritone with rasta coils, whose head voice breaks into a powerful alto, is, as a singer and composer, a local star. Just recently, he was selected as the first Namibian to serve as a messenger of the African continent for the project “S.O.U.L” (Singers of United Lands). Together with three other singers, each representing a different continent, he will tour the United States for six months to present authentic songs from his homeland in workshops and concerts.

“How he lives is unimaginable—in a small room, in which the keyboard takes half the space,” Berker said.

“Actually, someone like him should be assisted by the government,” she said. As this doesn’t happen, the Swakopmundians collected money for his journey. “We hope he gets new inspiration abroad but still keeps in touch with us.”

For Music Week, Engelhardt, as everyone affectionately calls him (“engel” means “angel” in German), wrote a children’s musical. “Desert Express” describes the dream of a little boy, who learns from the animals of the desert to think of others first. He sees how an elephant with a kettledrum nearly tramples a lion to death while combating for scarce water and from this he learns a lesson.

“Desert Express” premiered with a children’s choir, beginning violinists, and Unaeb as narrator, to great acclaim, despite the stage fright of all the young participants.

Ten children came from the Arts Performance Center (APC) in Tsumeb, in city in north Namibia. The project of the Swiss Lis Hidber, an artist and social worker, APC gives street children and HIV orphans a chance to change their perspective on life by means of a comprehensive musical education. About 100 students are currently enrolled in the APC.

Berker would like to enable more APC children to take part in Music Week but the money for food and accommodations is lacking.

Dreams for the Future

“Music Week got a push in the last two years, and we have to think about where we want to head to. We have definitely left behind the small-scale, straightforward, amateur performances we were giving five years ago,” Berker said.

With increasing professionalism, the tempting potential to commercialize the festival grows. Possibly the Swakopmund Music Week could become interesting to tourists.

Currently, Namibia is mainly a Safari destination. But for the first time, the Namibia Tourism Board has become a main sponsor of Music Week. The board’s goal is to use tourism to improve the living conditions of the local population—this goal matches that of Music Week.

How this might be accomplished, however, remains a question. The event already takes the largest stage and all the different hotels in town to their limits.

How would an open-air event in a spectacular location present itself to prospective tourists? The committed musician, Giessen has several ideas to publicize this festival. For instance, might not a concert in the moon landscape of the million-year-old rock formations of the Namib Desert attract attention?

Giessen foresees the benefits of such a concert going mainly to the children he teaches harmonica. Giessen envisions creating a music project with borrowed instruments and volunteer musicians, comparable to the youth symphony orchestra in Venezuela. This might be manageable with some prominent supporters from Germany, he believes.

Wrapping Up

Traditionally, the musicians perform the final concert twice, repeating it the night following the final concert, and then afterwards celebrate. In spite of the extended party atmosphere, the musicians and the audience dispersed quickly after the final applause.

Some participants were supposed to leave as early as seven the next morning. Giessen was leaving early the next day, too, for a sound check in the desert, the first step in making his dream project a reality.

Before leaving, the light technician apologized to Berker for a glitch in the show: during Franz Lehar’s “Ballsirenen Walzer” the spotlights on stage suddenly went off—and the emergency lighting went on. But this kind of electricity shortage occurs at any major event, he added.

Berker just smiled, composed as always, she said, “On this electric line, we, the hotel, two restaurants, and the Christmas market depend … Yes, that is Africa.”

The Namibia Tourism Board graciously aided in the arrangements for Rosemarie Frühauf’s travel.