ABSTRACT
Africa is the second largest land mass in the world and boasts the world's longest river (Nile), the world's largest inland lake (Victoria), the world's greatest falls (Musi 0 Tunya (Victoria) - the River That Thunders) and the world's largest desert (Sahara), all surmounted by great peaks like Kilimanjaro, Kenya, the Ethiopian Highlands and Cameroon Highlands. It is this Africa that awaits a giant - a master music and dance director with the composite vision of Soyinka, Ngugi, Oyono-Mbia, Opoku, Tewfik al Hakim and Fugard, that awaits more Blacks, more Arabs and more Caucasians who will together conduct a chorus (formed by all the spirits of the different climes of Africa) called The Great Ode of History. This Ode will be in a thousand keys with another thousand kinaesthetic parts, and it will give a full picture of the broad typography and variety of Africa's musical and dance heritage, a heritage bequeathed to us by millennia, by the human dwellers of tropical rainforests, by those who lived and still live in vast stretches of woodland, grassland, scrubland, desert oases and the swamps of river basins, by climes reflected vertically here and there along the slopes of highlands and snow-capped mountain tops in tropical climes. This Ode will proclaim African music and dance in its full historical glory rising from the painted caves and open-air art galleries of the continent's prehistory.
