Facial expression is key, says young dancer Winnie Zainabu Amaso, 12, giving a demonstration. “You have to put your legs straight, you have to put your body straight. But most importantly, you have to put a smile on your face.”
Amaso lives more than 4,000 miles from Ireland, in Namuwongo, the poorest slum in Uganda’s capital, Kampala. She and her classmates have been introduced to Irish dancing via online lessons and she loves it.
“If you practise a lot, you can get many things from the dancing,” Winnie says. “I want other children to practise it.”
Bringing a touch of Irish culture to Uganda was the idea of the Galway-born John Walsh, a member of the Irish Society in Uganda. Visiting a school run by Uganda Hands for Hope about two months ago, he saw that the class had screens for online learning and wondered about their potential. Walsh contacted Jean Kennedy, in the cast of Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance, who created a video for the children from her home in County Laois, Ireland.
This week her fellow dancers from the internationally successful show, Niamh Shevlin and Ciara Loughran, were teaching and performing in schools in Karamoja, Uganda’s most marginalised area, with backing from IrishAid, Ireland’s overseas development body.
“It was very eye opening, and humbling. All the kids welcomed us with their traditional dancing as well,” Shevlin says.
Loughran too has enjoyed sharing Ireland’s culture with Ugandan children, and says, “If you pursue talent, it can lead to places, you’ll be able to travel and meet people in the future.” Today, the pair will celebrate St Patrick’s Day with the children.
Flatley, the US dancer of Irish heritage who created Riverdance in 1994, then Lord of the Dance two years later, was delighted to hear about the lessons in east Africa. “I have fond memories of teaching children from Soweto [in South Africa] many years ago,” he says. “My dream is that some day one of these children will be in my show.”
This week, about 200 children from four schools were shown Gaelic football and hurling by the Gaelic Athletics Association as part of a St Patrick’s Day sports blitz in Kampala. Hurling was introduced into Uganda in 2019 by two Ugandans who saw games on social media.
Namuwongo is home to many refugees from north Uganda, the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan, and has high unemployment. About 90% of workers earn less than £1 a day, and an estimated half the slum’s population of 30,000 are children.
Kevin Nyarubwa, 14, loves the new dances, although he says he has not been told yet where Ireland is. “But we’d like to go,” he adds.
Felista Alinaitwe, also learning Irish dance, says she enjoys it especially because “life in Namuwongo is bad, let me say that. Many people, they take drugs, so we don’t have safety. But in life you have to learn new things. The video improves your listening skills. It’s easy to do and I’m good at it.”
The lessons, Felista says, have given her a new confidence. “When I grow up I want to be a coach of hockey, Irish dance – even a lawyer.”
