Jowe-Jowe: Traditional Kalanga Girls Song Game
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Date
2011-09
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Association For Health, Physical Education, Recreation, Sport And Dance
Abstract
This paper describes jowe-jowe, one of the traditional indigenous games of the Kalanga
people of Zimbabwe and assesses the games’ potential in providing overt educational,
psychomotor and social out comes to the participants. Kalanga constitutes the people and language from south western parts of Zimbabwe in Bulilima and Mangwe Districts. Jowe-jowe is a girls’ play game song that is associated with the Kalanga speaking people of Masendu area. Data was collected from a population of the Kalanga women of Masendu ward. Focus group discussions, individual interviews, demonstrations, observations, visual recordings and audio recordings assisted in capturing of physical skills, techniques and game patterns. The study established that the game’s content of jowe-jowe is designed along gender lines based on women domestic chores of pounding and grinding grain for meals. The game involves getting astride one or two wooden pestles placed horizontally on the ground forming a cross with the other. The girls shuffle their feet backwards astride one or more pounding wooden pestles, with arms akimbo as
they sing. It sets one form of practice suitable for the women and not men, where the main theme is aesthetic modelling for self-esteem realization in young girls as they perform the domestic chores. The main implements for the game were the same wooden pestles used for pounding grain in a mortar. It was concluded that this game has a lot of merit and can be easily introduced to schools
with little cost to ensure that the game is preserved.
Description
Proceedings of the 9th Biennial Conference for African Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation, Sport and Dance (AFAHPER-SD)
Keywords
Jowe-jowe, Indigenous, Bushmen, Khoi, San, BaNkwa Kalanga people