Mmabandjouma Letra

Sir Albus was not a sociable traveler. He prefered to see each new city sitting alone in a cafe on the plaza, exchanging a minimum of signs with the servers, even if the cafe were a mud-and-thatch hut serving redbush tea and the plaza, a dirt clearing in the center of some small African village. It is from such a vantage point that one imagines he first saw the now-vanished snake-whistle-dance performed by some children in Mmabandjouma.
The snake-whistle itself was made from the young bush viper, a particularly poisonous and currently protected snake, which was killed and stretched out until rigor mortis set in, when finger holes could be cut out of the long stomach and a reed fixed in the jaws. Despite the otherwise solemn sight of a dozen barefoot children blowing into the mouths of snakes, the snake-whistle-dance was neither melancholy nor ecstatic. The music is simply happy because the player knows he has outlived the snake.