ambience: Yakke charm competition
We’re listening to members of the Wodaabe tribe in Africa as they perform their ceremonial courtship ritual, called the charm dance. In this part of the southern Sahara, Wodaabe men parade before women in a kind of male beauty pageant, and the women choose the most charismatic contestants to be their new husbands or lovers. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet, presented by DuPont. “We’re hearing the sounds of the Yakke charm competition, where the men are forming a long line in front of a bank of five hundred to a thousand female judges.” Carol Beckwith has spent thirty years photographing the peoples of Africa and recording their time-honored traditions. In her book “African Ceremonies”, co-written with Angela Fisher, Wodaabe men are seen competing in the charm dance wearing yellow makeup that lightens their skin, black coal around their eyes to make them seem to sparkle, and black lipstick to show off their broad smiles, they line up in front of their judges. “The men are rising up and down on tip-toe to show off their long, lithe bodies, and they’re rolling their eyes around and showing their teeth and broad smiles and then puckering their lips up, and all the while they’re making these clucking sounds. You get a real sense of a great number of men performing with high intensity, with a feverish pitch, in front of women who are scrutinizing their every bodily and facial movement. A man does not have to be beautiful to perform but he has to be charismatic. He has to have inner sociability and charm. They believe that this is equally important to physical beauty, so even a man who’s not attractive can be a winner of the Yakke all-male charm dance.” Pulse of the Planet is presented by DuPont, bringing you the miracles of science, with additional support provided by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.