Ghanafest opens doors to migrant youths

Though the annual festival of Maltese folk song, Ghanafest, is ostensibly a celebration of traditional musical genres, during the past couple of years the festival - organised by the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts - has been open to musicians from various countries, chiefly the Mediterranean region.

This year, however, the multicultural aspect of the festival will be further enhanced thanks to the inclusion of young migrant musicians from Africa.

With the aid of No Bling Show's Jon Mallia and Cultural Mediator Khadar Ali - who liaised between the youths and the cultural entities (namely V.18 and MCCA) that pushed to make the collaboration possible.

The initiative was initially the brainchild of the Valletta 2018 Foundation, which pursued the idea in a bid to "include all facets of society in its cultural programme," according to Mallia. Mallia goes on to describe his own particular attraction to the project.

"Political ramifications aside - which I'm not really interested in anyway - I think the phenomenon of migration has become an intrinsic part of our society. It would be foolish for us not to start some form of dialogue that would help us understand each other. Instead of viewing the migrants as a number - the 'hundreds of Somalis who arrive to Malta', for example - we wanted to discover how we could engage with them as individuals."

Mallia said that, "astoundingly", the one common interest he found among all the youths he tried to get involved in the project was, quite simply, the concept of love.

"None of the youths I spoke to had any real musical background. But all of them, without fail, would have penned a poem about a girlfriend, or a romantic interest. They would even tell me of instances where, even though some of them may not be skilled songwriters, they would engage a musician to pen a song to their girlfriend... so there was already that kind of activity going on."

Love, in fact, was the hook Mallia needed to get the boys to properly open up with their own stories.

"At first I made the mistake of trying to be a bit too programmatic with what I wanted them to tell me. I kept asking them to tell me things about their own country, what it's like to live there day-to-day and so on. It was only later that I realised that you need to build to that sort of thing gradually. So to start with, we got to writing songs about girls..."

Until, that is, a simple song about Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, broke the mould.

"It was just one verse at first: 'Mogadishu, where are you?', but as we went on I began to realise that it was striking a pretty raw nerve. Basically the song is a lament: 'Where is the city that our parents promised us? Where is all the beauty, all the happy, smiling children?' I realised that this was something that struck them really deeply when even our translator started crying..."

Given that all of the migrants are musical amateurs, it's no surprise to hear Mallia confess that the team are still rehearsing tirelessly - and will be getting straight back to it after our conversation is over.

But he parts on a confident note.

"More than anything, I'm sure it will all be rather interesting."

The migrants will be performing with Jon Mallia and No Bling Show on the first evening of Ghanafest on 7 June at 8pm. For more information log on to the Ghanafest offical website.