West African Drumming and Dance in North American Universities: An Ethnomusicological Perspective by George Worlasi Kwasi Dor (review)

This 300-page book was written by a Ghanaian musicologist who for many years has directed the University of Mississippi’s Ole Miss African Drum and Dance Ensemble. He examines the growth of West African drumming in North American universities since the 1960s (which began in 1964 at UCLA and Columbia University). These programs were followed by Wesleyan, Berkeley, Toronto, and Tufts Universities, and drumming is now taught in approximately forty American and Canadian universities that host liberal arts, music and dance, African studies and world music programs. Dor supplies a useful table of the first such seventeen university units (p. 45).

Dor first examines the reasons for the suppression of African drumming in the Americas during the era of slavery, including the Christian (and particularly Protestant) hostility to African drumming and culture in North America; however, slaves were able to perform African-influenced music within their independent black churches, with their spirituals, ring dances, and “pats,” in which African drum rhythms were transferred from drums to hand claps. Despite the abolition of slavery in the U.S.A. in 1865, in the Post-Reconstruction “Jim Crow” era with its accompanying “scientific racism,” the negative attitude to African performance as backwards, savage, and primitive continued to exist.

Nevertheless, there was a growing interest in traditional African performance from the 1930s, reflected by six key personalities whom Dor discusses. The first was the Sierra Leonean Asadata Dafora Horton, who studied art music and opera in Europe and then in 1930 formed his Federal Theatre African Dance Troupe in Harlem. He was followed by the African American dancer Katherine Mary Dunham, who studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, researched Caribbean voudoun (voodoo) dance, became the first black choreographer for the Metropolitan Opera, and set up her own Ballet Negres in the 1940s. Pearl Primus was a dancer and choreographer from Trinidad who was born into a Santeria family and studied anthropology at New York University. She carried out ethnographic research in West and Central Africa, and her first dance production was in 1943.

Dor mentions three West Africans who became important for the African drum culture in the U.S. during the 1950s and 1960s. One is the Ghanaian percussionist Guy Warren (Kofi Ghanaba), who in 1957 released the first of his several African jazz albums and worked with African American jazz musicians Max Roach and Thelonius Monk. Likewise, in the 1950s, the Nigerian drummer Michael Babatunde Olatunji set up a college African drumming group in the United States; he later released records including Drums of Passion and worked with John Coltrane and Art Blakey. The sixth pioneering figure is the djembe drummer Ladji Kamara, who came to the States in the 1960s with the Ballets Africain (of the newly-independent Guinea) and became the “father” of the American djembe movement.

Besides the roles of these six figures, Dor offers four other reason for the acceptance of African drumming in the American academy, the first being the role of African and Africanist scholars who from the 1950s and 1960s onward reassessed the importance of African culture and music: John Blacking, David McAllister, Mantle Hood, and A. M. Jones; and the West Africans, J. H. Kwabena Nketia, Akin Euba, and Chiekh Anta Diop.

Secondly, there was the impact of West African independence that resulted in Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Guinea’s Sékou Touré establishing touring drum and dance performance groups like Les Ballets Africain and the Ghana Dance Ensemble (set up in 1962 by Kwabena Nketia and Albert Mawere Opoku). This occurred at the same time as the civil rights movement in the U.S., and so there was a convergence of African and black American nationalism. This resulted in many African Americans visiting or returning “home” to Africa, including W. E. B. Dubois, George Padmore, the poet...