Some Traditional African Cultural Influences On Baton Twirling & Other Elements Of Haitian RaRa, Dominican Republic GaGa & Cuban GaGa

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.)
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I reformatted this passage to enhance its readability. I added italics to highlight those words.

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Example #6

https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-121-caribbean-rasanblaj/12-1-essays/e-121-essay-hume-from-bush-to-stage.html

...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.

[...]

Over time Gagá became imbricated into the social life of the bateyes and functioned as a source of community identification and solidarity from as early as 1915.[14] As an annual commemorative rite, Gagá functioned as a central feature of the liturgical calendar, thus punctuating the otherwise monotonous flow of agricultural labor. Like many traditional masquerade forms found in the Afro-Atlantic world, Gagá functioned as a collective ceremonial reprieve from an otherwise arduous work schedule. In fact the shortened time frame of the festival correlated with the one-week respite laborers were given during Holy Week or Semana Santa, which also coincided with the height of the zafra, or harvest period. Symbolically, Gagá became enveloped within a liberatory ethos, as performers bracketed the realities of life in the bateyes through releasing into the communal spirit of celebration, ancestral veneration, and social detachment. Yet Gagá bands not only followed prescribed Vodú rites, they also mirrored the structures of power and social hierarchy in the Cuban batey. Similar to the Dominican Republic, where Gagá bands are also found, these community-centered associations, as June Rosenberg (1979) argues, “offer[ed] an identity which [was] far removed from the possibilities of these individuals…as the structure of the group reflect[ed] the values of the larger society” (203). As an example, in Cuba, as in the Dominican Republic, the maximum leader of the band was on occasion called a dueño/a meaning “master.” The term was used to designate the sugar boss, and hence the locus of power and prestige in the bateyes. With the appropriation of the title, the id came also to refer to a Vodú priest (oungan or manbo) of great repute who was a spiritual director of the serviteurs (devotees) and revelers and a proprietor of his/her own Gagá society and band. Even with the adoption of a Spanish title, the sacred dimensions of the form and the primacy of the Haitian god of war, Papa Ogou, remained evident. 

[...]

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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