Cameroon Hymnal Initiative - Phase One - September 2005

Musical Discoveries

Highlights of Phase One

Presuppositions/ Were We Right?

A. The role of popular praise (louanges) will be central to the project

Soon after he invited me to consider helping with this project, Dr. Wes Magruder, the mission director, described the typical service of worship in Cameroonian United Methodism. He said that music appeared throughout the service, that the services normally started and ended with traditional sequential hymnody (with roots both in Europe and America), and that there was a period of praise singing (termed louanges in the Francophone region) early in the service. He also described the fact that the praise was sung in French, in local languages, and occasionally in English in the Francophone churches, and that the praise was sung in English, in Pidgin, and in local languages in the Anglophone churches. What Wes described was exactly what we experienced as we visited each church.

The period of praise singing in the Francophone region was more likely to bear the imprint of the popular praise songs being sung in Pentecostal churches throughout west Africa. Pentecostals are more likely to favor the use of electric instruments (synthesizer and bass guitar being the most popular). Most of the Francophone pastors came to United Methodism from Pentecostalism, and they have brought their musical tradition with them.

Anglophones were more likely to claim that electric instruments were not needed for praise singing, and some of the leaders expressed their feelings about electric instruments adamantly. The praise singing in the Anglophone region was accompanied only by drums, and by the body percussion of the singers.

The singing of traditional hymns was vigorous and not bound by western conventions like fermatas and coming to a full stop at the end of each stanza. The people sang hymns in a more cyclical fashion, moving quickly and easily from one stanza to the next. Whether it is because they thought we would want to hear it or not, the hymn How Great Thou Art (Dieu tout-puissant in French) was sung at every church we visited.

But while hymn singing was vigorous, the most passionate singing in each setting happened when people sang popular praise, especially when they sang in local languages. Choristers took great pride in teaching the words to their fellow choristers since it was often the case that the members of a given congregation would speak a variety of local languages.

Not a single congregation we visited was resistant to sequential hymnody, whether they sing it because they inherited it from previous missionaries or whether they’ve adopted it because they sense that it’s part of what it means to be Methodist. We didn’t encounter a congregation in which there was an expressed opinion that one form of singing was ‘right’ or ‘the best’ or the one most capable of putting people in the presence of God, while others forms were inferior.

So, though the repertoire of sequential hymnody is different in the Francophone region than in the Anglophone region (because they’ve taken their hymnody from different streams of the European and American hymn tradition), they have this form in common. They also have praise singing in common, and yet it comes from such a variety of sources that there is a multi-layered reality:

The Pentecostal-influenced popular praise is so widely sung through French-speaking west Africa that it will be a unifying force for Francophones, but a stumbling block for united singing in Cameroonian United Methodism

Popular praise has, and must retain, its local dimension as represented in the local languages. This is the most truly indigenous Christian musical form.

Because of the historic distrust that exists between Francophones and Anglophones in Cameroon, the only popular praise that has the potential of unifying people in worship across ethnic lines is music that comes from other parts of the world, especially in languages other than English.

The issue of accompanying instruments is likely to be a tension point among Cameroonian United Methodists, with some favoring more and more use of electronic instruments and with others resisting those instruments.

Finding:

We were right; much of this project depends on careful attention to the role of louanges (popular praise). If the hymnal/worship book is to be responsive to this multi-layered reality, then the selection of praise songs will be key. With traditional hymns, we can find or create solid, side-by-side French and English versions. With songs from the worldwide church, we can use the languages in which the songs were written (and in some cases, French and English translations). But the selection of indigenous praise will be tricky. In our strategizing, Wes and I both wondered whether one real possibility is to provide a few dozen of the most widely sung choruses from the Francophone and Anglophone communities and then to leave several blank pages in the hymnal which bear the simple title, “Left Intentionally Blank for the Inclusion of Praise in Local Languages.”

B. Cameroonians, both Francophone and Anglophone, are interested in the music of other Africans and want to learn it

I had certainly experienced the wonderful work Patrick Matsekenyiri has done in having his choir members at Africa University teach each other their distinctive songs, but I needed to have a sense that people in the smallest villages in Cameroon were interested in songs that came from other parts of Africa. What I discovered was that people were uniformly delighted to learn those songs, and sang them beautifully. My impression was that when I spoke the texts, it was as if I was speaking into a digital voice recorder; their repetition of the texts was surprisingly (and delightfully) exact.

The real bonus came when I discovered that they took delight in songs from Mexico, Argentina and India as well. Of course, I have to be sober enough to remember that the people of Africa have had songs brought to them by thousands of people and organizations, often with the suggestion that the imported songs were proper while the indigenous songs were heathen.

Finding:

Given the conflict and mistrust between the Francophone and Anglophone communities, it is possible that songs from other parts of the world (especially the non-English speaking world) will be the only songs that the entire United Methodist community can really sing with one voice. Thus, the selection of songs from around the world will be one of the most important elements in putting together a hymn and worship book.

C. We should have a text-only book, with English and French on facing pages, with a limited number of songs in local languages, and with tape cassettes to teach the tunes

Pedagogy is an issue. How will singing be taught? How will instrumental musicians be trained? What are the big issues of teaching the materials contained in whatever book we publish? I certainly experienced the gamut of musical pedagogy. At one Presbyterian church, all five choirs were instructed using tonic sol fa. It was clear that a whole generation of singers had mastered the technique, and so a wide variety of music was possible for that choir. But most of the current pastors in the Methodist connection have had little to do with formal musical instruction and have simply learned everything by rote. One of the pastors asked me earnestly how we would teach children to sing, so I know that there is concern over pedagogy.

Finding:

The Presbyterians are the one church that has taken formal musical pedagogy seriously, and because they are deemed by many Cameroonian Methodists as the stuffy, establishment church, there is reason to move slowly and carefully on the pedagogy issue. On the one hand, we want to teach new skills to help expressive, page-oriented music endure. On the other, we must resist being a people of the ‘book,’ and we must continue to remember that people can have vast musical talent even if they are not formally trained.

We still believe that voice to voice transmission is the best way to teach melody, so we stand firm in the conviction that we need a two-fold strategy for teaching new songs: A) to have quality recordings of the tunes sung by people whose voices sound like the voices of people in congregations, and B) to raise up and train song leaders for the congregations. Fortunately, there are already several gifted song leaders within the Methodist community in Cameroon.

D. Even though Cameroon is officially bi-lingual, the tension between Anglophones and Francophones is all too real. Therefore, a bi-lingual hymnal will actually be countercultural.

There will be nothing easy about producing a book for all of Cameroonian Methodism when the young church itself already has such clear divisions between Anglophones and Francophones. But there were hopeful signs throughout this trip. One gifted young choir director in Obala in the Francophone region was delighted to hear that a book might have songs in English and French because she was so eager to sing well in English. When we move to Phase Two and set up regional singing festivals using some kind of ‘sampler’, it will be absolutely necessary to have a team of musicians leading those festivals that embrace the value of a unified church.