DURHAM --
Braima Moiwai teaches a class at Lakeview Elementary School in Durham, using West African drums to teach conflict resolution to students who have a history of chronic misbehavior or who have been suspended from their regular school.
When the rhythms Moiwai plays on the djembe and djun djun drums can't hold the children's attention, he will tell them a story that begins, "My grandmama used to say. ... "
"They will immediately stop whatever they are doing," Moiwai says. "Because most of them are being raised by their grandmamas."
Moiwai, 47, has shared the stories and art of his native Sierra Leone with thousands of children in classrooms, festivals and community centers across North Carolina. He has sung "Jiggy, Jiggy Skima," a song of his childhood, told the stories of the five little birds looking for their mama and cooked the food of his native land in school and university classrooms in several states.
Moiwai (pronounced MOH- ee-WAH) is celebrating his 21st year with the Durham Arts Council's Creative Arts in the Public/Private Schools program. He is the program's longest-serving artist, says director Shana Adams.
"He's been very important to our community, our schools and beyond," Adams says. "He just fills a room with warmth by creating unity and a sense of community. He does that by sharing his experiences of growing up in Africa. He connects that with how the students are growing up here and shows them the similarities."
Moiwai's songs, dances, music and stories resonate with children as he connects his country's history with the history of slavery in the United States. He tells them of the two countries' common ancestry, which led to rice cultivation in South Carolina, and how West African culture, particularly Sierra Leone's, was preserved by the Gullah people of the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina.
"He's just fabulous with any age group, but he really captured the college-age group here," says Sabine Moedersheim, a professor of German studies at the University of Wisconsin, where Moiwai travels each fall for a weeklong residency with Moedersheim's freshman students.
"At first they don't want to dance or drum and listen to stories, because they think it's for kindergartners," Moedersheim says. "But after two minutes, they are just enthralled with what he's doing. It has a radical aspect, but he serves it all up with a big smile, and they just fall in love with him."
Sea Islands tour guide
In 1990, Moiwai took 40 Hillside High School students on a tour of the Sea Islands. The youngsters visited a rice plantation, a former slave auction market in Charleston and a shed where sick, enslaved Africans were quarantined during illness. The students saw women weaving sweetgrass baskets and listened to Gullah talk.
Moiwai still hears from former students who tell him the experience made a lasting impression. It connected them to their roots and their African heritage.
"I told them, 'This is the closest you can get to Africa,' " he says. "This thing changed their lives."
Moiwai's work as a cultural artist began in 1987. He was working in the produce section at the Wellspring market in Durham and struck up a conversation with Catherine Hemingway, a teacher at Durham's East End Elementary School. Hemingway, impressed by Moiwai's story of his homeland, asked him to talk with her third- and fourth- grade students.
The next day he took photos and a slide projector to the school. He showed the children pictures of his friends and family back home and of the lion-shaped mountains that rise out of the Atlantic Ocean. He repeated the stories his mother and grandmother told the children in his village. He described the snakes in the rain forest where he grew up. He taught the children games.
He ended up staying all day.
"Oh, these were tough kids, man. They were fascinated by my accent," Moiwai says. "I'm telling you man, I loved it. That was my opportunity."
The teacher paid Moiwai $15. But Moiwai learned a valuable lesson.
"Right there I was able to see: Children all over the world are the same," Moiwai says. "The things that get them excited, the way they move their bodies, are the same."
Moiwai recalled his mother's last words to him before he left Sierra Leone: "Remember your food." He realized she wasn't merely talking about remembering the dishes of their homeland, but also his heritage, culture and values.
Stories pass on culture
The stories he shares with children were passed down to him in his childhood by his grandmother, Nematu Davuwa, and his mother, Matta Gbateh, a heralded storyteller and herbalist in Bunumbu, a small village in a tropical rain forest that once straddled the Liberian border. Bunumbu was overrun and ravaged in 1991 at the onset of a civil war.
After the war ended in 2001, Moiwai returned to his village and found homes, schools, medical centers and churches razed and the verdant farmlands overgrown with neglect.
"My family's home was destroyed," Moiwai says. "I could only recognize where it was by looking at a mango tree that I used to climb to the left of the house."
Moiwai, the seventh of nine children, is a wiry man, as tough and strong as the thick cowhide he uses to cover his West African bass drums, but also as light, buoyant and agile as the young goatskins that cover the djembe drums, the solo drum in West African drum orchestrations.
He was born in Vaama, a jungle with palm trees, pineapples, mangoes, monkeys, baboons and cobras.
The family farm was in Bunumbu, a bigger village about 20 miles to the east. The staple crop was rice, which the Sierra Leoneans have cultivated for hundreds of years. Moiwai's father, Kenei Moiwai, sold rice and vegetables to the Lebanese and Indian businessmen who shipped the produce abroad. He also grew hundreds of acres of coffee and cocoa, yams, cassava and koala nuts.
"Everything we would eat, we would grow it," Moiwai said.
Moiwai's solo journey began when he became the only one of his siblings to receive a formal education. His father did not want his children to leave the country to attend British schools before independence. He thought the white man would brainwash his children and drive them away from their way of life. His mother felt the same way.
"Mama used to say, if they tell us to forget about what we know, then we won't have anything," Moiwai says.
Moiwai's father died when Moiwai was 2. When he turned 6, he begged his mother Matta to let him attend a nearby school, especially after he saw other children returning to the village in their navy-blue school uniforms.
When the school day ended, the children did chores and farm work. Then they would congregate outside at night for games, dancing, drumming and to listen to grandmama tell stories. There was also a woman who went from village to village telling stories.
"She would tell us about our history, where we were from -- stuff the English did not tell us about in our history classes," Moiwai said.
Moiwai's mother was distrustful of Western culture and preferred life in the rain-forest village. Matta Gbateh died in 1995. Moiwai counts his mother as a casualty of the country's war, along with his aunt and 14 of her 15 children.
Moiwai spent Tuesday evening watching "American Idol." He feels "really lucky" to have been in America during the rebel war. His adopted country saved him from being killed. He tries to pay the country back by working with its children.
"I tell them a story about a village that doesn't exist anymore," he says.
