Edited by Azizi Powell
This pancocojams post provides six excerpts about the influence of the Kongo (Central African) culture and/or West African cultures on Haitian Rara, Dominican Republic GaGa, and Cuban GaGa celebrations.
I'm particularly interested in presenting information in this post about traditional African cultural influences on baton twirling and other twirling performances.
The content of this post is presented for historical, folkloric, cultural, entertainment and aesthetic purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks to all those who are quoted in this post.
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With the exception of Excerpt #6, this post is a replication of a now deleted 2018 pancocojams post that was entitled "Book & Article Excerpts Of African & Haitian Rara Sources Of Baton Twirling & Other Twirling Performances". Read that "original" Excerpt #6 in the comment section below for this post. That post didn't have any comments.
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Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2025/02/two-youtube-videos-of-whistle.html for the closely related pancocojams post entitled "Two YouTube Videos Of Whistle Blowing/Baton Twirlers In Haitian Ra Ra & In Dominican Republic & Cuban Ga Ga".
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SHOWCASED EXCERPTS
These excerpts are presented in no particular order. The
excerpts are numbered for referencing purposes only.
Excerpt #1
From https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0253217490
Africanisms in American Culture edited by Dr. Joseph E. Halloway pp. 12-13 The Kongo Pose And Baton Twirling
"Robert Farris Thompson's essay (chapter 10)
contributes to our understanding of Africanisms found in African American
aesthetics, revealing that the majority of African retentions in African
American folk art are Bantu in origin. Thompson shows that the impact of the
Kongo on African American culture contributed to the foundation of black
American aesthetics and musical culture in the New World. The Kongo influence
contributed to the rise of the national music of Brazil (the samba) and to one
of the most sophisticated music forms in the United States (jazz).
Thompson demonstrates that Kongo influences are widespread.
...The African Haitian ritual dancing based on a dance form found in northern Kongo was adopted by the baton-twirling "major jonc" called rara. Its members twirl batons and strike a Kongo pose when confronting a rival group. it is hypothesized that in Mississippi. where many Kongo slaves resided, such groups had a major impact. Mississippi has become a world baton-twirling center".
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Excerpt #2
From
http://www.asarimhotep.com/index.php/articles/18-posture-and-meaning-interpreting-egyptian-art-through-a-kongo-cultural-lens,
publisher Asar, 27 January 2012
"The book Africanisms in American Culture edited by Dr.
Joseph E. Halloway documents some of the Africanisms that have survived in the
Americas during and after the enslavement period. A good number of the
surviving Africanisms that have survived are in the form of poses...
Telema
The most dramatic incursion of a Kongo gesture in Haiti is
the reemergent biika mambu stance. This stance is frequently called telama
lwimbanganga in Northern Kongo. This pose is identifiable as the left hand on
the hip and the right hand forward. This became the drum majorette pose that
gave way to baton twirling in the United States.
In Kongo, placing the left hand on the hip is believed to press down all evil, while the extended right hand acts to “vibrate” the future in a positive manner. Important women used this pose at dawn to “vibrate positively” the future of town warriors. Advocates used its power to block or end a lawsuit (Halloway 2005: 298). One will notice that this is the pose for the famous Supremes song, “Stop in the name of love.”
.... The telema stance has to do with power and mediating
force (power grasped and evil contained).
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Although they probably weren't aware of it, the R&B group Diana Ross & The Supremes' used a form of the Kongo's telema stance in the choreography for their 1965 hit record "Stop In The Name Of Love". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPBkiBbO4_4
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Excerpt #3
From https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1598842439 Martial
Arts of the World: An Encyclopedia of History and Innovation, Volume 2 , edited
by Thomas A. Green, Joseph R. Svinth, pp 45-46
"On Haiti the Rara parade is a pre-Lenten (Carnival)
event. It features competing groups of singers and musicians playing homemade
instruments. The content is typical of Carnival in general and the Caribbean
varieties in particular. Each Rara band is led by a major jonc, also major
jonk, majo jonk. The major jonc carries a baton known as a jonc. The jonc is
100 to 137 centimeters (39 to 54 inches) in length and is brandished and
twirled much as a drum major twirls his baton in a military or collegiate marching
band.
Like the musical instruments carried by the bandsmen, the jonc is supernaturally strengthened. In Haiti, the practice of supernaturally strengthening fighting sticks (mayombo), thereby giving the owners both protection and ability to defeat opponents has been documented as early as the eighteenth century (Debien 1972). The major jonc’s skill at twirling is believed to be related to his magical and fighting skills. Thus he is that figure that folklorist Roger Abrahams (1983, xvi), labeled “the man of action, the physical adept one”. Major jonc are in fact accomplished stick- fighters. Practical use of this talent may be tested, too, because when one of the bands encounters another, the conversation can move from verbal or musical duels to actual fighting.
According to Haitian folk history, the baton work that is acquired by Africans from the indigenous Tainos who used the stick as both a weapon and a dance prop. Nonetheless, the most convincing contemporary analysis of baton twirling both by major joncs and baton –twirlers in North American athletic events traces it to northern Kongo sources. (Thompson 2005, 298-299)
In some parts of Haiti, village competitions of wrestling (pinge’) were also held in connection with Rara. (Courlander 1985, 108)
The Haitian expression of African spirituality is Vodun (also Vodu and Vodou), whence comes the English word voodoo . The word comes from the Fon vodu (“spirit”). Vodun incorporates religious traditions from West and Central Africa...
Like Lucumi, Vodun has a warrior deity derived from the Yoruba orisha Ogun, who in Haiti is known as Ogou. As elsewhere, Ogou fights with a machete or sword. The devotee who is “ridden” (possessed by) Ogou the lwa during a Vodun rite takes up the machete dedicated to Ogou and performs an aggressive dance filled with chopping and stabbing movements, as in Lucumi, and also punches, kicks, grunts, and growls. (Daniel, 2005, 163). "
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Excerpt #4
From http://www.bookmanlit.com/rara.html
"In Haiti, rara is a kind of marching band festivity
open to the public and observed mostly during the Christian Easter season. It
is connected to Nago Egougoun society practices and to Kongo military
tradition. Among the Nago people, the word rara means eulogy. An essential part
of rara involves a walk to the cemetery, mazi, or lakou to pay respect and to
eulogize former members of the rara. After paying respect to the Ancestors, the
rara is viewed as having been fortified (chaje).
Nago tradition runs deep in rara and can be seen in the manner that the rara members dress. They often cover their entire bodies just as it has traditionally been done in Egougoun celebrations. Men can wear dresses and skirts because in Nago Egougoun celebrations, women were not allowed to participate but they could be represented by men. ...the clothing and hip movements of the baton twirlers is reminiscent of female role play in Egougoun, called Gougoun in Haiti. Today in Pestel Haiti, there is a kind of rara in which its male members always dress in female clothing.
In raras, like in Egougoun celebrations, one member carries a whip to ceremonially maintain order in the rara. In Haiti the whip used is the fwèt kach, a slave whip. It is cracked repeatedly in the air where it is said to be whipping zombies, a reminder of the suffering of our fore-parents who were once enslaved on the island."...
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Excerpt #5
From http://rara.wesleyan.edu/rara/carnival/analysis.php
"Rara as a Form Of Carnival"; Analysis - image of Rara in New York
"Rara season overlaps with Carnival season, and so Rara
activity begins on January 6th, known on the Christian calendar as Epiphany.
Rara bands usually parade as small carnival bands, and then continue to parade
after Carnival, during Lent, until Easter. The "tone," or
"ambiance," of Rara parading is loud and carnivalesque, and if you
don't know about the hidden, religious core of Rara, you'll think that Rara is
simply a matter of young people exhibiting their talent at singing and dancing
in a boisterous, rebellious atmosphere. As in Carnival, Rara is about moving
through the streets, and about men establishing (masculine) reputation through
public performance. Rara bands stop to perform for noteworthy people, to
collect money. In return, the kings and queens dance and sing, and the baton
majors juggle batons-and even machetes! Rara costumes are known for their
delicate sequin work, which flash and sparkle as the batons twirl. There is a
lesser-known costume, too, of colorful streaming cloth hung over knickers and
hanging from hats.
The competitive music and dancing, the sequins, and the cloth strips are all echoes of festival arts in other parts of the Caribbean. In its orality, performative competition, and masculinity, Rara shares similar characteristics with other Black Atlantic performance traditions like Carnival, Junkanoo, Capoeria, Calypso, Blues, Jazz, New Orleans' second-line parades and Black Indians' parades, Reggae, Dance Hall, Hip-Hop and numerous other forms. Unlike many Afro-Creole masculinist forms, however, Rara is explicitly religious.
(Excerpted from chapter one of Elizabeth McAlister, Rara!
Vodou, Power, and Performance. University of California Press, 2002.)
-snip-
I reformatted this passage to enhance its
readability. I added italics to highlight those words.
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Example #6
...The Early Formation of Gagá Societies in Rural Cuba
In their 1988 study of the Haitian settlement Caidije, a
batey in the old provincial area of Camagüey, Cuban ethnographers Jesus Guanche
and Denis Moreno contend that Gagá bands were started fairly soon after a
population of Haitian migrants settled in the batey. As an example, in 1926,
three years after the community of Caidije was founded, the primarily male
residents created a Gagá society that had been performing this celebratory and
communal rite consistently for over eighty years.
[...]
[...]
Outside of the geographic territory of Haiti, Gagá
performers systematically borrow and draw on the rich spiritual world of their
adopted home, incorporating some of the symbols associated with other
sacred complexes. The inherent syncretic nature thus points to what scholar
Margarite Fernández Olmos (2000) has identified as “a secondary type of
syncretism, one between (ex) colonized peoples” (273). Foregrounded in the rite
around the train tracks is the pivotal place in which Ogun is situated within
the ritual landscape of Cuba, where the boundaries of his spiritual identity
bleed across Vodú and the Yoruba-derived Santería/Lucumi tradition. As a
powerful African warrior who brandishes a machete as his spiritual tool and
creative devise, Ogou/Ogun initiates war and clears the fields to usher into
being civilization and modern industry. In this way, Ogun becomes linked both
to positive and negative deeds. As such, he represents the African ideal of
complementarity, whereby a destroyer-creator binary operates within a broader
imaginary of social transformation.[18] The iconographic emblems of the machete
and sacred banners that are ritually mises en activite (put into action) also
point to Ogou’s metaphorical link between religion and the military, which gave
rise to the birth of the Haitian nation. Religion scholar Karen McCarthy Brown
(1989) writes that “[t]he military-political complex has provided the primary
niche for Ogou in Haiti” (71). Within the diasporic enclaves, this embodied
memory of Haiti becomes activated through rites for Ogou, which references
these two interlocking forces. Repeatedly, younger and older men spoke of their
affinity to Ogou’s revolutionary and transformative power. According to one
performer, “Papa Ogou is our most important spirit. He brought freedom to our
ancestors in Haiti and he fights for our freedom in Cuba…he lives in all of us,
he is in our blood.”[19] After probing this comment further with other
performers, it became apparent that Gagá in the bateys became in some ways a
festive ode to this god of war. In collectively embodying the gestures and
agile movements of this divine warrior, the remembrance of Haiti and the revolutionary
struggle for freedom is repeatedly brought to memory as an on-going process.
Ogou’s transformative power is continually recalled and harnessed in the
collective bodily labor of the performers, as they, too, in their performance
and everyday lives toil for a greater sense of self-actualization.
The communal efforts of the majó machete with the accompaniment of the ritual chorus of queens and mobile orchestra ignite Ogou’s energy through their collective spiritual work and discipline. The flags and sabers become condensed symbols of potent power, or what is known in Haiti as pwen (power point). As mnemonic devices, they call to the fore this history and serve as the channels through which they cleanse and recharge the earth at the very place where Ogou’s power is concentrated (i.e. a railroad track), a numinous site in Cuba where diverse spiritual worlds collide. Through their highly choreographed performance, they reclaim the land that has historically been the source of not only their labor but also their oppression and, in turn, recast it as the sacred domain of the lwa.By extension,they harness the might and authority of Ogou to enact a power that they do not ordinarily have.
[...]
The haitiano-cubano (Haitian-Cuban) communities, mostly
dispersed across the eastern provinces from Camaguey to Holguin, are unlike
their Haitian diasporic counterparts residing in metropolitan centers, who are
embedded in well-established transnational networks and social fields.[20]
While the recent relaxation of travel restrictions for Cuban nationals may
shift this reality, the prohibitive socio-economic climate makes the continuous
circulation of cultural products, peoples and ideas between the two Caribbean
nations relatively minimal.[21] Thus the diasporic subjectivity constructed in
Cuba has been articulated and sustained primarily through collective memory,
guarded traditions, and cultural inventions, as opposed to an identity forged
through consistent transnational flows. As a case in point, the repetitious
sequencing of events that mark Gagá festivities, including the feasting of
ancestral kin, days of rehearsing songs and dances for the journey across the
bateyes, the conducting of ceremonial offerings at auspicious sites and within
the family compound, and the final act of burning an effigy and ingesting the
ashes in a sacred alcoholic brew, became part of the naturalized rhythm that
defined this seasonal festive form. There has been a maintenance,
amplification and creation of some characters, most notably the majó table,
which is no longer part of the repertoire in Haiti. Similarly, the
formidable skills of the majó machete —a competency honed over generations of
cutting cane—have usurped the primacy placed on the traditional Haitian majó
jonc, or baton twirlers. Meanwhile, the majó rua diable, with his
multilayered strips of cloth reminiscent of a traditional egugun-like
masquerade, has been added in as the spiritual protectors of the band, who
deflects negative energies with his twirling cloth.
Although deviation from the cultural script
concerning the sequencing of the ritual events would occasion criticism, the
inherent hybridity of the form manifests itself nonetheless"...
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I added italics to highlight these sentences.
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