Musicking and Dancing Imbalu at Namasho: Enacting Indigenous Education Among the Bagisu, Uganda

Abstract

Abstract This paper discusses how the activities during which people gather to create, perform, and transmit imbalu circumcision music and dance at Namasho Cultural Site (NCS) become a platform for the Bagisu of the Balutseshe clan to tutor boys about society’s gender ideology, social histories, and rituals of the sacred swamp, thus turning the place into a communal classroom for imparting this knowledge. Due to the changing context of contemporary Bagisu, I argue for efforts to archive these events to make them accessible by future generations in order to uphold imbalu performances as a mechanism of knowledge production and dissemination.