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Film short abstract:

The old makua Mame Keray, nowadays a Tanzanian citizen after having escaped from Somalia as refugee twenty years earlier, observes the performance of the sharappa dance in the village close to where she used to live. The dance helps her recalling the spirits of the ancestors and a past of slavery.

Film long abstract:

The old Somali Makua Mame Keray , became citizen of Tanzania after having escaped from the war in her country in 1992; has the chance to watch on a computer the performance of the Sharappa dance shot in the village close where she used to live in Somalia. She sees the old man leader of the Makua group in Somalia, she watches her now dead sister dancing, she cries and express what the dance means for her. Her nephew describes the meaning she gives to the dance she performed to heal from the trauma of been raped during the war in Somalia

The Sharappa Makua dance reproduces memories of ancestors involving wellbeing rituals. Elements of this matrilineal Makua dance performed in Somalia show that practice interconnected with the ancestors cults has been crucial to the identity of forced migrant people in East Africa. The Makua dance Shalipa fro mMozambique is videoed and compared with the Somali Makua on. People living in maroon societies in Somalia but whose origins were from the Nyasa, Yao, Zigua, Makua of nowadays Mozambique, Malawi and Tanzania elicit the crucial role of the dances as identity in times of forced migrations when societies were totally based on oral traditions.

This documentary dedicated to the specific Makua dance the author videotaped first in Somalia, later in Tanzania and, finally, in Mozambique synthesises a long research journey that brought the anthropologist to accompany refugees in several countries following along several decades the thread of the matrilineal ceremonies.