Miss Banamba!
My phone was about to die and my French Tutor has came to pick it up to charge it. He starts rambling about an election at the high school that very evening. I am lost but he keeps saying I should attend. He says they will elect the girl and then she will go to Koulikoro for another election. He is using words such as campaign and election. I agree to go but confused about the fact that the town is holding an election at night.
Mory, the teenage boy in my concession, is going to escort me to the Maison des Jeunes (house fo
r the youth) since it will be after dark. Mory and his friend, Barte, keep talking about the beautiful girls. The word misses keeps coming up. You'd think I would have figured it out by now but I am trying so hard to get this whole French thing that I am actually missing obvious clues.
We embark on the short walk to the open playhouse. It is there that I see tons of young people. I don't see people my age or older. I could have easily walked into the building in front of all the people (plus girls got in free). However Mory asks me to walk in with him (he likes to show off the fact that the white person is his friend and he knows her very well). We enter the playhouse and greet my tutor. I sneak off to the side with my friend Yaya, her husband is the caretaker of the playhouse. We sit around a bonfire while the DJs sit up the stage.
Finally, it seems to start up. There is some talking on the mic. Then there is some music. Then my tutor starts to dance on the stage… What is going on? A few people go on stage to dance. The music stops. The dancing stops and they sit down. Another starts. More people start dance. Is this a dance?
NO! A Songai guy asks me to dance. I tell him I do not like to dance, HA! If he only knew how much I love to dance! THEN He asks me to enter the pageant. OH!!! This is a pageant!!! Of course! How many people are already signed up? Two… Yep two girls… It is around 9:30pm… So they are wasting time with random dancing and songs while they try to recruit more girls. It is after 10pm and they have three girls. Again, they ask me to enter the pageant but it is my tutor that asks. I jokingly say that I will enter it only as a joke and to not be taken seriously. His face lights up! He can't believe that I will do it.
That is it. He pulls me out of the chair and behind the stage (a side room beside a slab of concrete that is suppose to be the stage). Also, he must escort me onto the stage so we promise to do it as a joint entry.
The first three girls strut out and do a little turn. They are a swishing and a swaying (can I get some fries to go with that shake?). Seydou and I walk out together. We are doing a high-step with exaggerated hip swaying with our noses pointed towards the full moon. The crowd went wild!
The girls are now frantically changing clothes for the next walk-around. So Seydou and I just rearrange our clothes. He rolls up his pants and sleeves. I tie my overshirt up like Daisy Duke, roll up my pants (only to right below my knees) and put in a side ponytail ('80s style). We waltz out there just as crazy but this time we do spins at each stop! The crowd ate this up!!! Then we were introduced to the crowd and had to do a small little excerpt about who we were… I was Miss Numero Quatre and forgot my weight and loved to eat beans!!! (that is quite the joke in the Malian culture)
Now it is our last walk-around that ended with a dance-off. Each girl did a lovely little walk-around and got hoochie with their dance… What type of pageant was this suppose to be?? Miss Banamba or Miss December for a Mali calendar??? Seydou and I do a little planning before we go out…. We decide to dance like really old people. We arrive at center-stage and have to dance to some American rap song that I can not quite remember now… We hunch over like we have a humpback and start two-stepping. We just rock back forth then do a few spins with each other but I was the lead but take into account that he is a tall guy and twice my weight!!!
Then the judges delegated for way too long!!!
They eventually announced the winners. When it was time to annouce the loser aka me… There was a small drum-roll and the crowd went crazy!!! I got a complimentary gift of three sodas!!! Heck yeah!!!
For the following two or so months people would talk about me in the pageant and loved how integrated I was in the community. Kids that saw or knew that I was in the pageant would chant "miss numero quatre" instead of "tubabo"… ahh what a sweet victory...
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