Before I went to the circus I was told by a tired-yet-charming British man, “Oh, it’s quite fun. Lot’s of bendy people.”  My thoughts exactly.

The Mama Afrika Circus has been in Arusha for about a month and features acrobats and dancers from all over sub-Saharan Africa (especially eastern and southern countries). They all perform under a tent that accommodates approximately 200 audience members, creating an almost-too-intimate entertainment experience (a bit like black box theatre), where you can see their muscles shiver and you actually believe that they are going to tumble 30 feet to the ground, treating onlookers to a hearty splat of bone and brain. I have never been so anxious at a social outing.

Susan, my adviser’s wife, and I missed the opening of the show because we were having my birthday dinner nearby and got to talking about real estate (when did I become this boring?). However, there were seats a’plenty, despite it being 2-for-1 Thursday, and we took up residence behind some well-dressed young men while a few women reclined on stage, twirling placemats on their feet. The audience was surprisingly mixed: an ample helping of wazungu to be sure, but also quite a few Indian and Tanzanian families were peppered throughout the crowd, making this one of the most integrated social experiences I’ve had in Tanzania. I hoped there would be elephants.

After the twirlers, a man walked out wearing a white leotard with perplexing patches of animal fur (monkey? cow?) smattered around it. A smiley face of fur emblazoned his chest. This young man then proceeded to contort himself in all sorts of unnatural ways, spidering around on his feet while his arms and back folded in on themselves in such a way that it was difficult to remember which way he was actually twisted. The fur did not help. Then he passed his entire body through the head of a tennis racket and finale-d by stuffing himself in a glass box that must have been about 1.5 ft cubed.   Maybe I’m exaggerating.  But it was small.

This was followed by a musical interlude and then a clown who communicated entirely via kazoo. Susan and I both had mixed feelings about him when he mocked a confused six-year old who he’d pulled, blinking, on stage, but then he conscripted some 20-year old drunk Frenchman from the audience and proceeded to pull his shirt off and make him have a drum battle with a member of the circus band (the circus band was great). Before leaving, the clown invited three Alabaman clowns from the audience for an announcement. Now, when I say Alabaman clowns, you probably think I’m being derisive. But there were, in fact, three Americans from Alabama dressed as clowns, sitting in the audience. We had met the fat old Alabaman clown and his wife last week (the third might have been a new recruit) when they approached our table at The Blue Heron (a wazungu lunch hangout) and, in a soft southern drawl, made some weirdly lascivious jokes to the old nun sitting with us. To be quite honest, these people weird me out. But they were at the circus last night to make balloon animals and paint faces in order to raise money for “underprivileged children”.

(Let’s discuss that for a moment. The idea was that the next day the circus would perform for 500 “underprivileged children”. Now, the idea in and of itself is sweet, but the reality of it made me laugh. Because, by definition, “underprivileged” would apply to about 96% of all children in Tanzania. So, who did they mean? Susan and I pondered this for some time. Did they mean kids who couldn’t afford to come to the circus? Again, about 96% of all children in Tanzania. Did they mean orphans? That number is smaller, but still astronomically high. Street kids? Disabled kids? Regardless, the clowns did their duty at intermission, making inexact balloon animals and balloon swords that looked more like exaggerated phalluses than weapons. By the end of the night, most of the animals had unraveled and I didn’t see a single kid with their face painted because, well,  in Tanzania painting one’s face for non-ceremonial purposes is just WEIRD.)

After intermission, we were treated a man balancing on various types of rolling cylinders (the man in front of me had to cover his eyes he was so nervous for the performer), some hula hoopers, a really awesome Zulu dance, and a stilt-walker with a sequined cloth wrapped around his head. His performance met with a lot of quizzical looks, especially when a square-ish piece of cloth (maybe it was supposed to be a giant head?) scuttled out on stage (clearly someone was underneath it) and proceeded to slide and jiggle around on the floor, sometimes between the stilt-man’s legs, while the stilt-man grunted and pumped his hands in the air. I wanted to take a picture because I knew this description would make no sense, but none of my photos turned out. Just imagine a tall, faceless being that occasionally falls to the floor in a sort of faint, while a dog shaped like a quilt with no eyes R2D2’d back and forth nearby. In the background, men in red pajamas danced and swayed to peppy drumming.

And then came the vaguely homo-erotic gymnast routine. The lights were brought low and the band started in on some sultry elevator music that just possibly could have been the soundtrack to a cheesy love scene in some B 80s movie. And then two shirtless men wearing sparkly black pants glided out into the center of the arena. I stifled a giggle. The mood they were setting, at least for me, had to be different than they were intending. I expected the men to turn to each other and exchange a longing stare before running into each others’ arms and getting down to business. Instead, though, two ropes lowered from the ceiling and they did a lot of wrapping themselves up in them, faces in each others’ crotches, while they were lifted slowly into the air and twirled. After each successful aerial, they would walk around the ring to receive their praises, one of them casting the most suggestive smile imaginable as he strutted slowly by. He fully expected to get laid that evening.

The mood was then lifted by a strange ensemble piece involving hard-hats and stomping, and then the clown returned, plucking more wazungu and a rotund and insanely-tall Indian from the audience to participate in some sort of mock orchestra. He picked one white girl who seemed to have dressed up especially for the circus, her long blond hair flowing, her shirt cut low. Using a whistle this time to communicate all his intentions, the clown was able to get her to strut around, flip her hair, and give her breasts a healthy grab while she shook her hips. Later, he escorted her through the back curtain, making several hand gestures at the audience that suggested he would busy for the next hour or so. However, the girl resurfaced a minute later and I was vaguely relieved she hadn’t been forcibly wooed by a fat clown in the mud behind the tent.

The finale of the show was two incredibly bendy young men who were standing normally one minute and the next had bent backwards and were standing on their own shoulders. At one point they contorted into an impossible elastic pretzel of limbs and one lit a pip with his feet, smoked it, crossed his legs ON TOP of his own head, and then handed the pipe below him to his equally bent partner. Later he folded himself in half in a back bend and passed his entire FOLDED body through a metal ring that was about a foot in diameter. I wanted to throw up.

As the circus wrapped up, the main clown came out to make a lot of trite thank yous and introduce the performers, while the crowd filed out noisily, entirely ignoring him. Appalled at the rudeness, Susan and I stayed put and were able to hear his closing remark of, “And remember to make every day a Mama Afrika day!”

I still have no idea what that means.