THE BIA SO MENGONG FESTIVAL LOGBOOK. DAY 8

LOGBOOK DAY 8,SATURDAY, JULY 23, 2022,BIA SO MENGONG FESTIVAL.

Located at the halfway point of the festival, this day is inevitably a pivotal moment both in terms of its place in the calendar of activities and the number of activities on the program. The day starts early with the songo contest.

On the starting line sixteen players divided into four pools who first compete in a championship format before going through play-offs and which will crown the winner.

 

The festival-goers barely have time to rinse their throats and salt a piece of bread in their stomachs when the traditional dance competition is announced. If the songo’o contest has attracted for the most part only lovers of the beautiful game, the traditional dance contest is crowded. All until the organizers are surprised by the craze caused by the steps of Mengan Abok Bekon, Melan greeted by the cheers and applause of the crowd.

It is besides by promising to offer to this often neglected aspect of our culture, still more time that the organizers give to the five winning groups their price.

 

Day already filled but which did not know yet its apotheosis which is indisputably the varnishing of work of art planned for 8 p.m in the room of the acts of the town hall.

Can we tell without fear of omitting a key moment or a moment marking a vernissage? Can we restore the essence? The solemnity? The emotion? So many things, so many moments, so much beauty. It is an opportunity for VIPs to discover the best works of art of the district selected during more than a year by the team led by Amandine Desjardins Beling-Koumba, who for this has crisscrossed all 49 villages of the district, often braving the reluctance, bad words and insults.

It is to this valiant team that everyone here owes the rediscovery of the traditional masks, the divinatory statuettes and especially the ekang thrones. It is also to this team that we owe one of the main attractions of the exhibition, the nkul, tom-toms used to communicate between villages. While elsewhere information was still carried on horseback, among the ekang it was already carried by the airwaves. The story of this exhibition would not be complete without the declamation of poems by His Majesty Medouane, traditional chief of the third degree of the village of Ababita and especially a poet and lover of beautiful letters.

Just as it would not be without the passage noticed by the traditionalist and patriarch François Bingono Bingono, who through a lecture that was widely applauded, undertook to show the indestructible link between culture and development.

 

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