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African Dance in Transition
| Article
# : |
14871 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1988 |
5,025 Words |
| Author
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Robert W. Nicholls
Robert W. Nicholls is a media specialist with the Howard
University Research and Training Center in Washington, D.C. |
Africans dance: they dance for joy, they dance for grief, they dance for love and they dance for hate; they dance for bring prosperity and they dance to avert calamity; they dance to pass the time.
--Geoffrey Gorer
Traditional dance has been Africa's superlative art form. To the traditional African, life--with its rhythms and cycles--is dance, and dance is life--expressed in dramatic terms. Among the Igede of Nigeria's Benue State, for example, wake dances are performed during a funeral to express grief. The Masabe dances of the Tong of Zambia are performed by women to exorcise mischievous possessing spirits. The Azande of southern Sudan use divination dances to ascertain the causes of repeated failure in hunting. The Adzogbo dance of the Ewe of Ghana was also originally a divination dance, through which war leaders would predict the course of an upcoming battle by interpreting the movements of young male initiates. Dance acts as a healer during the curative rituals of many African groups, including the Ndembu of Zambia.
Modernity, however, has tended to deculturalize the African peoples and bend them toward Western cultures and imported value systems. Traditional values have been eroded by growing secularization, the ascendancy of materialism, and the impact of role models in the realms of politics, the media, sports, and music. Pride in indigenous culture has dwindled. Togo, for example celebrates seventeen national holidays, all of them commemorative of either political history or alien religions.
The decline of traditional
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