Ndali - songs for freedom from addictions

Songs for Freedom
An addiction recovery program 
for the Ndali people

The initial situation

The Ndali live in a very mountainous region in southwestern Tanzania. It takes about four hours by car from Mbeya to the south almost as far as Malawi on many winding dirt roads to get to the center of their region. Their area has frequent rains and relatively large amounts of water, it is always green on the steep hills where corn, sweet potatoes, pineapples, bananas and beans grow. In between the beautiful red earth, from which the red mud brick houses are built, in which the Ndali live with their families. Many people identify with Christianity, which reached Ndali territory about 120 years ago. People go to the churches, from which loud music echoes through the valleys. In addition to Lutheran and Pentecostal communities, there are many churches founded by the Moravian Mission.
After our research and conversations with the Ndali people in 2021, we realized that not everything is as green as it looks, especially in families. The Ndali are quite poor. Despite the fertile soil, they can hardly sell their goods to get money to pay for their children's schooling. Poverty leads to frustration, frustration to drinking, drinking to family problems, family problems to drinking.
The Christian faith seems to have been grafted on, there is a religious approach, rules are preached, but there seems to be a lot of work to do for a deep understanding of the biblical content that would transform Ndali culture from within.
Churchgoers often leave the congregation after the Western-style choral music, the sermon is obviously perceived as irrelevant for life. Quite a few go to the pub right after the service. The bottle has become part of everyday life for many; it brings strength to work, people say. In addition to industrially produced alcoholic beverages, traditionally brewed alcohol or really poisonous booze are consumed, and marijuana is also widespread.
Up until now, the churches have tended to exclude alcohol addicts from the community of believers. There is hardly any real help for people with addictions. But how can people really be helped?

20-21 January 2022: In the office in Mbeya with representatives of the Ndali - The idea: a larger project with the Ndali for personal study of the Bible and for change from within the culture to the outside.

The idea

In several meetings with Ndali representatives, we decided to bring to the Ndali an addiction help program that missionaries in South America had developed to deal with the alcohol problem in the indigenous population. A colleague of mine, Scott Rayl, also an anthropologist (with whom I studied together in Dallas in 2016/2017) works for Storyweavers Global, a small North American missionary organization that has a major focus on mentoring addicts and not helping in psychology sees alone, but above all in a living relationship with Jesus Christ, in a personal study of God's Word and in the help of a community of people who are (or were) struggling with the same problem. The idea is that people meet in fixed groups every week for a good year, listen to and read Bible texts, and learn and sing songs together that touch them emotionally and in terms of content and follow them as catchy tunes to the field, where they pick their hoe do the heavy work. Some of these songs will also be composed in traditional Ndali art forms in order to bring the subject matter into contact with people outside of the churches in a way that is very familiar to them. Step by step, people are led to the roots of their problem and become more familiar with the Bible, Jesus Christ and like-minded people. This is how we believe many people are really led to real freedom.

The preparations

From March to May 2022, Imani Mtafya, a Ndali Bible translator, translated some Bible passages relevant to the program into his native language. In May, the first one-week addiction help song workshop with 20 artists and pastors was scheduled. Because the songs have to be available before the addiction help groups can start. Scott Rayl came from the USA to teach about addiction and to walk the participants through relevant Bible texts, which should serve as inspiration for the song compositions. Together with the Bible translators, we paid careful attention to the content of the songs. Are they meaningful enough and do they support the values underlying the program? In the end we were able to record seven newly composed songs with dance and everything that goes with it, all in traditional dance and music styles of the Ndali culture. A few pastors had taken a course I had on using traditional instruments for God's purposes last year, but there was opposition. For over a hundred years, Christian missionaries and the pastors they trained have rejected all traditional styles of music. How sad, because the Ndali have lost a lot of potential for change right down to the core of the culture and the identity of the people.

The preparations and the workshop with Ndali artists

Highlights at the song workshop


One participant told of how he used to run a pub. When something went wrong in his village, the police were the first to come to his door. He had grown up in a deeply animistic family, knew about the necessary sacrificial rituals for the ancestral spirits and also got to know many of the Ndali arts through them. God was working on him for a long time and that's how he came to believe in Jesus Christ. At first he felt comfortable in the Catholic Church because it did not prohibit alcohol consumption. But since he himself was deeply stuck in the addiction problem, he had to break away from his environment and ultimately became a pastor in another denomination. He was the most energetic composer at the workshop, as if God had already prepared him for the task.

There were many pastors present, also many believing artists, but also those who were far from the church and close to their Ndali culture. An elderly artist happily gave his life to Jesus midweek after Scott spoke to the group about the prodigal son of Luke 15. What a joy in heaven and for the workshop participants, but especially for the son of this elderly man, a pastor who was also present at the workshop. new text



Next Steps


Seven songs are not enough to start the addiction help Bible groups. Storyweavers Global's program includes ten interlocking thematic building blocks, or enabling principles, to lead people affected by addiction to freedom. There should be at least one song for each of these ten topics. The artists have composed seven songs for four basic building blocks. Therefore, there will be another composition workshop next year. We learned a lot from the workshop in May and would like to do better next time so that more songs of high quality are created.

In order to get pastors familiar with the idea, we would like to hold four or five pastors' conferences in the Ndali area in 2023, including one in the neighboring country of Malawi, where many Ndali live. The goal is to educate pastors to allow traditional musical instruments for God's purposes as well, so that the culture-loving Ndali will not be denied access to the Word of God and faith in Jesus Christ. The addiction help program will also be presented together with the songs composed for it. So the pastors can then go out and find potential group leaders for the addiction support groups. These leaders should then receive a one-week training course and then the groups could start in autumn 2023. The hope is that people will really get help with their addiction problems, but also find closer to Jesus and the Word of God in their language when reflecting on this topic. Ultimately it is about discipleship, following, changing lives out of the power of God. And we hope that this will positively influence other areas of people's lives and that the participants will be strengthened to live and serve in their communities and communities in a way that pleases God.


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General donations that go to our work account also flow into this work. Thank you very much for every prayer and every gift that helps the people here.





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