Innibos music festival

We started the day early again (seems to be the thing to do around here) by going to the morning security meeting at Innibos, which is the region's largest music/cultural festival. The Innibos festival is focused on Afrikaans culture, so it's very specific. But it's been going on for six years and has grown steadily each year -- now they're up to about 120,000 attendees.

Almost all the music is performed in Afrikaans, which was pretty cool. I caught a minute on video (below). A lot of the tunes were really schmaltzy but at least one of the acts was pretty good -- Snotkop. Funny name, eh? The show had a really interesting format where they had all the bands on stage at once and they brought people on stage from the audience who got to pick which song they wanted the performers to perform. It was fun and interactive (and I didn't mind that it was all in a language I didn't understand...in fact, that made it more interesting to me.) Joanne did a nice job of describing the format of the show and posted a couple photos.



I got to try a couple of South African carnival food specialties -- Roosterkoeke (which was a nice grilled bread filled with the stuffing of your choice, such as sausage or cheese etc) and Spitbrei, which was basically just grilled meat on bread (only the guy insisted we put mint jelly on it, which I could have lived without.)

We heard a couple more bands, including one that had perhaps the worst lyricist I've ever witnessed (I think he might have been Belgian singing in English). All of his songs were pedantic, literal and cliche. However, his back-up band was incredible -- they had a stand-up drummer from Cuba who was rocking out. Terrific. After a while I found myself able to tune out the singer and focus on the beats, which were complex, polyrhythmic and multilayered.

It was definitely strange to be in a place with nearly no black people. The festival caters to the whites because it's all about Afrikaans culture. So with the exception of a few black families and festival staff, it was all white. I can't tell you how strange it was to be in a crowd of 40,000 white people in Africa. Everyone on the CSC team definitely noticed it.

As for the Business Against Crime project, we're making some progress. Today I drafted the outline of what will be our final report and sketched out a little more detail for what will go into our deliverable to the client other than the report. We're nearing the halfway mark, so we need to stay focused on actually pulling together our final work in time.

I think this weekend we're heading to Swaziland on Saturday and to a safari on Sunday. Oh, and the Americans on the team are going to put together a little barbecue for tomorrow night in honor of July 4th. Should be a hoot.