South African firefighters arrive singing

‘JUST WHAT WE DO’

After a 24-hour Air Canada flight from Johannesburg, the South African firefighters stunned the Edmonton airport terminal by bursting into song.

“It really wasn’t choreographed, it wasn’t planned — it’s just what we do,” said Trevor Wilson with Working on Fire, the South African agency co-ordinating the firefighters’ arrival.

“We sing when we’re happy, we sing when we’re sad, when we’re tired we sing and dance so we don’t get tired anymore.”

The 300 firefighters moved through a 10-song, a cappella medley, complete with perfect harmonies, impromptu fills and co-ordinated dancing.

Their performance has gone viral on YouTube and generated global headlines.

Such a performance is rare in Alberta, where mass singing is largely relegated to O Canada at hockey games. In South Africa, it’s standard procedure for emergency service workers.

“I took a group of nurses to a hospital and while we were having dinner, (the South African nurses) got up and starting dancing and singing,” said Ramie Veerappan, the African-born founder of Integrity Tours, a Toronto-based South Africa tour operator.

“It was such a shock to the people I took.”

Training for South African firefighters includes drills and exercises constantly inflected with group singing.

As Julius Ossom, founder of Toronto’s African Music Week, notes, this is a “standard thing in Africa.”

“It’s not a choir … in every African community, folk songs are what groups sing when they come together for a cause,” he wrote in an email to the National Post.

The Edmonton performance featured songs in English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa and others in South Africa’s 11 official languages.

The medley was a mixture of known songs and improvised lyrics led by a choirmaster, with themes of missing home and stories about a child leaving his father to face the wider world.

While lengthy flights are usually quite effective at killing a passenger’s will to sing, Pius Adesanmi, an African studies professor at Ottawa’s Carleton University, said in the African context, “it’s the exact opposite.”

“The crappier you feel, the more tired you are, the more singing becomes necessary,” he said. “In the respect that it’s possible to generalize among African cultures, singing in the face of work is a widespread cultural practice.”

South African firefighters adhere more to militarystyle discipline than their Canadian counterparts, so the singing can also be seen as a less-regimented version of the marching songs of the Canadian military.

A century ago, for instance, Canadian troops arriving in South Africa for the Boer War sang The Maple Leaf Forever, a jingoistic pro-Empire marching song penned in 1867.

Adesanmi also said that many of the dances seen in Edmonton sprang directly from the “freedom songs” that characterized South Africa’s anti-Apartheid struggle.

“Protesters sing … miners sing, factory workers sing,” said Scott Rollans, founder of the African-inspired Edmonton vocal group Juba. “The short answer is no, this is not even remotely unusual for South Africans.”

The firefighters are members of Working on Fire, a job-creation program operated by the South African government.

After a final briefing and equipment check in the barracks of the Edmonton Garrison, they will be dispatched Thursday to fight “The Beast,” the 500,000-hectare fire that tore through 20 per cent of Fort McMurray and is now surging through parts of Saskatchewan.

South African firefighters were also in Canada for the 2015 fire season.

Then, as now, crews initially baffled local firefighters by singing in buses, singing in barracks and singing as they marched to the fire line.

“By the end of last year’s deployment, we had Canadians singing with us,” said Wilson.