Reforming the Circle: Fragments of the Social History of a Vernacular African Dance

Form
Author(s): Wendy James
Source: Journal of African Cultural Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, In Honour of Professor
Terence Ranger (Jun., 2000), pp. 140-152
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1771861
Accessed: 14-08-2016 19:25 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Taylor & Francis, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of
African Cultural Studies

This content downloaded from 128.255.6.125 on Sun, 14 Aug 2016 19:25:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Journal ofAfrican Cultural Studies, Volume 13, Number 1, June 2000, pp. 140-152 iIsz

Reforming the circle: fragments of th

history of a vernacular African dance f

WENDY JAMES
(Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxfor

ABSTRACT A common dance-pattern in Africa takes the form of a wide, sweep

around a group of musicians in the middle. This pattern has proved very durab
periods of historical change, even when there have been official attempts to c
people by breaking up the circle or co-opting its musicians into other fo
Ranger's book on Dance and Society in East Africa (1975) showed how a focus
forms could be woven into mainstream history, especially a history of
dominance and cultural response. This paper takes its starting point from thi
and considers some of the symbolism and experiential meaning of the moving
which defines an inner space for the dancers and invites interpretation as a cel
their distinctiveness. It is a form whose trajectory can be traced even through
political subjugation and great social change. After offering a brief compa
aspects of dance history on the slave plantations of the New World, this paper
some detail on the Sudanese and Ethiopian region of the upper Blue Nile,
circle-dance formation has proved equally robust. A particular case-study trac
in which the Sudanese Uduk-speaking people have revived various forms
dancing in a modern refugee scheme in Ethiopia.

1. Introduction

An older generation of anthropologists, and historians too, tended to treat dance (together
with music and song and even 'ritual') as something of an add-on 'cultural extra' to the
serious study of the structural base and political form of society. In anthropology today,
the living, felt, and performative aspect of social life has moved centre stage, even to the
point where phenomenology, embodied experience, and subjective engagement has
almost displaced the older search for contextual pattern, system, and explanation. The
main problem for many anthropologists, especially the historically-oriented among us, is
to retain our sense of the connectedness of form through time while acknowledging the
powerful subjectivities which define the individual and collective experience of any one
moment. In respect of the dance (and associated music and song), Terry Ranger's study
of the Beni ngoma (1975) offers real inspiration here. His analysis does not treat the
marching dance in isolation as a cultural phenomenon, examining its internal
performance for its own sake, nor does it account for the Beni ngoma with reference
simply to the content of other ceremonials, rituals, or dances in the manner of the
specialist cultural historian. It seeks the links between the dance form as such, and the
changing shapes of the non-dance arena - that is, of everyday life and of political
structures. Formal patterns in the dance and the non-dance domains can affect each other:

ISSN 1369-6815 print; 1469-9346 online/00/010140-13 ? 2000 Journal of African Cultural Studies

This content downloaded from 128.255.6.125 on Sun, 14 Aug 2016 19:25:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Social history of an African dance form 141

sometimes in a mutually constitutive hall of mirrors sense,

ways which can themselves become part of 'real history'. My
a dance-pattern found very widely in Africa, that is, the gr
draws everyone into the movement, enfolding a group of mu
example is that of the Zande beer dance, gbere buda, for wh
analysis, a diagram and pictures from the early twentieth cen
Similar patterns have proved very durable through periods
when there have been official attempts to control the people
the dance or co-opting its musicians into other forms. Ev
usually a military-style parade or procession, sometimes took
example, Ranger 1975: 5. 49-50, 111).

2. The independent trajectory of dance-patterns

I have drawn the idea of dance versus non-dance domains part
Alfred Gell (1985), who uses it primarily to analyse disti
movement among the Umeda people of Papua New Guinea an
context of a very stimulating collection of papers edited by
the distinction with reference to the way in which the bod
walking, already culturally patterned in the working lives of
are transformed into the more highly stylized movements o
does not seek to demonstrate, for its own sake, a close cultu
two domains, however, but rather their difference from ea
juxtaposition. We could say that dancing everywhere has a d
dance, not so much because the one is expressive, artistic and
which is mere utility, but because the world of non-dance i
world too: a world of work, of sexuality, a world of physical
of submission to the imposed disciplines of timing and s
suggest that the performative and experiental aspects of th
patterned movement everywhere, whether ritual, marching
understood as a reflection of the 'ordinary' habitus, but der
preserving an ironic distance from this very base. The v
comparable dance-like patterned forms, also play upon each
and contrast while often copying, mimicking, and transfor
also pursue their own trajectory within the wider milieu of
serve as a kind of collective 'commentary' in body-language u
Older studies in anthropology tended to seek the inner org
ritual with the conventional structures of society itself. Howe
enacted patterns of perfomance as distinct unto themselves, a
in a sense competing with each other, allows more space for t
of history. This perspective allows us, perhaps, to com
phenomenologists crave with the more sober discipline of
perception of an ironic distance between dance-patterns and t
in Ranger's analysis, informs a number of more recent stud
the Notting Hill Carnival (1980), Martin Stokes's studies of c
music in Turkey (1995) and his edited volume on Music, Iden
For the Sudan, which will be my main focus in this essa
shown how the dramatic rites of the Sudanese zar spir
interpreted as ironic performance, as an 'anti-hegemonic' em
demonstrated how plural can be the inner life of a Sudanese c

This content downloaded from 128.255.6.125 on Sun, 14 Aug 2016 19:25:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
142 Wendy James

of 'Hofriyat' in the northern Sudan, where the zar spirit possession cult exists as a
defining frame of life for the women. It is practised side by side with Islam, its rituals
linked in a sort of counterpoint not only with the male sphere of Islamic religious
authority but also with the standard public rituals of marriage, circumcision, and
childbirth. Or at least this was the case in the 1980s; the current regime in Khartoum has
reportedly banned the zar, though in a few regions of the eastern Sudan where there are
still Eritrean refugee camps the zar is still held. Women who happen to be Sudanese
nationals apparently sometimes escape the new and strict Islamic authorities, leaving
their own villages to join the refugees for the special zar rites. This not only brings into
sharp focus the performative and bodily forms of marginality and resistance, but also the
way in which political authority has again and again claimed the spiritual and moral high
ground, if not prohibiting then at least undermining the power of competing performative
practices by restricting, co-opting, or trivializing them.
Also in the Sudan, Gerd Baumann (1987) has shown how the people of Jebel Miri in
the Nuba Hills, a community distinctly more 'marginal' than Hofriyat, were living in the
1970s with an even more profound pluralism, a kind of double morphology in their
perfomance of national and local styles of dance and music. A large proportion of the
men were labour migrants in the towns; many were Muslims, spoke good Arabic, and
were familiar with the music and dance of the northern Sudan. Even back at home in
Miri, although the mother-tongue of Miri was still vital, many women also knew some
Arabic, and the young girls would play and sing Arabic romantic love songs (daluka)
they had learned in some local market place or from the radio. But when the men
returned home on leave, they joined in the local harvest songs and music, and when the
young girls married, they had to forsake the Arabic love songs for Miri grindstone songs
and other 'autochthonous' forms. Baumann argued that a balance had been reached in
Miri between local and national 'identity' and that musical practices reflected this
balance. While this was no doubt an apt way of seeing the plurality of Miri's social life at
that time, Miri has since been destroyed by civil war, which is a reminder that any state
of 'balance' must be fragile and that a picture of the competing rise and fall, convergence
and divergence of practices, genres of dance and music, and aspects of 'identity' would
often serve us better. In the peripheral regions of the south-eastern Sudan, bordering
Ethiopia, this has certainly been the main pattern.
This discussion is mostly devoted to the shifting varieties of dance, music and
parading in the displaced camps and refugee schemes of the Sudan-Ethiopian border -
mainly the communities of Uduk-speaking Sudanese with whom I have had intermittent
contact since my original fieldwork in the Blue Nile province in the 1960s. One of the
most persistent choreographic forms among them, common to several genres of music
and dancing style, is that of an all-embracing circle, with the musicians in the middle and
the dancers, men, women and children, circling around in a great anti-clockwise sweep.
A key variant of this form (at least in the way people talk, though it was scarcely
performed in the villages when I used to stay there) is the barangu, a dance which figures
in the myths of prehistory, when all the creatures came to join in with their different
stepping rhythms around the players with the calabash flutes. It was at this great dance,
sometimes represented as taking place in the sky, that many defining events happened; it
was even here that the first great enmity broke out between human beings and the rest of
the animals. Other circling dances, which were frequently performed in the 1960s,
included the athele' (with beaten logs and flutes) and bolshok (flutes only). There is
some evidence that choreography of the great moving circle was once widely established
in the hilly regions of the upper Blue Nile and along the Ethiopian escarpment to the

This content downloaded from 128.255.6.125 on Sun, 14 Aug 2016 19:25:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Social history of an African dance form 143

south. Its persistence today, while clearly in some sen

however, more than simply a vestige from the past. It ex
and transformations. Elements from 'traditional musi
into the ceremonials of kings and chiefs, armies and mod
the great circle has often been broken in the process. For
inward and enveloped by dancers are made to face forwar
dancers, moreover, liable to be denigrated as undign
disappeared from the performances commissioned b
participants, especially, are left behind in the village, w
itself with all the lively sexual expression it desires.
In what follows I attempt to take a historical view
choreographic form of the great circling dance in sp
rearrangement of its elements as a result of the impositio
last hundred years or so. It is not exactly a question of '
aspect of the deliberate performance of a contrasting form
forms. It is also possible to ask, though not easy to answ
there has been a 'secularization' of the circular dance. Cer
certainly been detached from a ritual context. But the c
lasting quality, sometimes with mythical echoes, which
which it defines a special, inward space of its own, a cen
themselves and through which they relate to each other.
movement, and those who take part turn their backs, lite
on outsiders and mere spectators. Before looking in som
the circular dance of the Blue Nile, I would like to set the
article on the slave dances of the old American plan
African-American musical and dance culture.

3. Dancing on the slave plantations of the New World

Katrina Hazzard-Gordon (1996) offers an intriguing story of the origins of African-
American secular dance in the social conditions of life under slavery. There were often
strict controls, and it was very generally the case that Africans were not permitted access
to drums. Nevertheless, there were opportunities for making music and dancing;
Hazzard-Gordon traces the gradual homogenization of cultural practices across southern
regions of America, especially after the ending of the trade in the early 19th century, and
the spread of common working patterns of the 'cotton culture'. She also examines the
development of a dichotomy between sacred and secular dancing and music in the
context of Protestantism. What were taken for African forms of pagan worship were
banned and survived only precariously in the circle dancing or 'shouts' which retained a
sacred character. Line dancing, rather than circle dancing, became the permitted secular
form. Under the slave regime, a dance culture developed which served many ends: 'the
enslaved Africans danced for themselves as celebration, recreation and mourning - and
for the entertainment of their masters' (Gordon 1996: 109). The rewards were money,
extra food, or a pass to visit another plantation.
Dancing often accompanied types of agricultural work, such as corn shucking or
husking. There were competitive teams, and a caller-out - 'genmen to de right' -
evoking the call and response pattern of African music. Corn shucking brought together
people from different plantations and 'was not without its strains of resistance ... The
dances as well as the songs often turned to satire' (ibid: 121). Dance was an even safer
form of self-assertion than songs.

This content downloaded from 128.255.6.125 on Sun, 14 Aug 2016 19:25:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
144 Wendy James

Secular dance became at one and the same time a medium of assimilation and of
political expression. 'For the African, dance was both a means to camouflage
insurrectionary activity as well as other kinds of resistance behavior; for the masters it
was a means to pacify the desire of their bondsmen to rebel' (ibid). Some slave masters
even allowed 'praise houses' and permitted their bondsmen to hold 'shouts' as well as
secular dancing. Festivities were often allowed at Christmas, though Hazzard-Gordon
quotes one source as disapproving 'the strolling about of Negroes for a week at a time,
during what are called Christmas Holidays' as it was productive of much evil; '[f]rom
considerations both of morality and needful rest and recreation to the negro, I much
prefer a week in July, when the crop is laid by, to giving three days at Christmas' (ibid:
111). Weekends offered some opportunities too. 'Some masters even purchased slave
musicians to provide music' (ibid). African-style instruments were often made or
improvised; an ex-slave recalled how they would make a fiddle-gourd with horse-hair
strings (as still found in West Africa). 'When we made a banjo we would first of all catch
what we called a ground hog, known in the north as a woodchuck. After tanning his hide,
it would be stretched over a piece of timber fashioned like a cheese box, and you couldn't
tell the difference in sound between that homely affair and a handsome store bought one'
(ibid: 112). Slave masters provided the opportunity for slaves to dance, even though it
violated their religious principles; 'these occasions were certainly intended as
opportunities for them to buy into the contract of their own oppression', but it was 'clear
from the amount of insurrectionary activity that took place during slave holidays ... that
the role of dance ... was not limited to escapist entertainment' (ibid: 113). This is why
drums were forbidden, and different instruments had to be substituted, ones that would
not be seized - and could not be used to incite or signal rebellion. Interplantation dances
were a particular source of worry to the slaveocracy; there is ample evidence of plotting
on such occasions, 'giving these occasions a striking resemblance to war dances, or
dances in which preparation for battle was the central theme' (ibid: 114). There were
large public dances on the edge of towns, and while plantation owners tried to restrict the
movement of their slaves, it was in these public spaces that the African-American dance
could be celebrated. Crowd control was difficult; Hazzard-Gordon quotes some vivid
eye-witness accounts from 18th-century South Carolina. Another account from a
Louisiana resident reads:

Nothing is more dreaded than to see the Negroes assemble together on Sundays, since under
pretence of Calinda, or the dance, they sometimes get together to the number of three or four
hundred, and make a kind of Sabbath, which it is always prudent to avoid; for it is in those
tumultuous meetings that they sell what they have stolen to one another, and commit many
crimes. In these likewise they plot their rebellions (ibid: 116-7).

By 1817 in New Orleans, dancing was restricted to Sundays before sundown at one place,
Congo Square.
This story of American dance history is not one of total prohibition, but of attempts
over three centuries to restrict, reshape, and effectively to co-opt dancing, to co-opt it into
the usefully productive rhythms of work, and to allow it into the social lives of the slav
communities as part of a package which (mostly) kept the peace. This story is full of
ironic echoes for the history of dance in other regions marked by a history of slavery an
by modern forms of military enlistment, forced labour, forced migration, force
settlement, and other kinds of imposed social control which allow no space for dancing
and even fear it as subversive. The most subversive-seeming form, perhaps because it
articulates a private hidden centre, certainly appears to be the closed circle. It is quite
striking that the circular form has not only survived, but is now deliberately celebrated

This content downloaded from 128.255.6.125 on Sun, 14 Aug 2016 19:25:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Social history of an African dance form 145

a 'sacred' form in African-American dance culture today. I kn

parallels to be found across the African continent today, and
evidence for the analogies from North East Africa, specifically
Blue Nile, on the Sudan-Ethiopian border.

4. Music in the upper Blue Nile: notes on historical context

Music, and musicians, have long drawn the attention of trave
James Bruce wrote a full account of Ethiopian instruments in
return to Scotland. It is interesting that he observed the link
politics and war.
There are six musical instruments known in Abyssinia; the flute,
drum, the tabourine, the sistrum, and the lyre. The four first ar
much the most common; the fifth is dedicated to the service of th
peculiarly an attendant on festivity and rejoicings ... The kettle
because all proclamations are made by the sound of this drum (t
made by governors they have the force of laws in their provinces;
they are for all Abyssinia. The kettle-drum is a mark of sovereign
promotes a subject to be governor, or his lieutenant-general in a
kettle-drum and standard as his investiture. The king has forty-fiv
bearing before him when he marches (1804: vol. ii, 279).

The smaller 'tambourine' is carried and beaten by hand either

when an 'inferior officer' marches. The trumpet, which
terrible tone' is played slow when on a march, but fast when
the effect on the soldiers of 'transporting them absolutely to
throw themselves into the midst of the enemy (ibid: 280). The
personal and peaceful character, as it is played to accompa
Henry Salt met in northern Tigre in 1810 a Gumuz slave calle
homeland, Oma-zena remembered the delightful music of
exhilarated at the recollection of its harmony' (Salt 1967 [181
I have not pursued a thorough search of the sources, but
assume, in addition to the lyre, a long-established tradition of
beaten antelope horns in the musical life of the borderlands
Sudan. My assumption is that back at home in village festivit
formed the focus of circle-dancing, a context which was tran
optation into official ceremony. The Dutch traveller Juan Mar
the fright caused by his arrival with a large black dog at the
1881.

The village is in a state of great agitation; fifty armed negroes, blowing on antelope horns,
come to dance around us and shake their spears. But when I walk towards the people and, in
a friendly but firm way, slap them on the shoulder and take one horn to show that I, too, can
make music like this, they turn more friendly.
The music lasts throughout the night; heard from a distance, it is quite similar to a
European brass-band which gets stuck in the first bars of an overture without ever
progressing to the melody (Schuver 1996: 315).

Later on, in 1882, Schuver describes a 'tremendous wardance' in a Gumuz village of the
Blue Nile.

A poorly clad minstrel dominating the crowd from a boulder, sang a ditty which strongly
reminded me of the Castillian muleteer. At the chorus all joined raising their lances, shields
and boomerangs above their heads, while dozens of youthful couples executed all around a
'pas de ballet' so voluptuous, that is better seen than described.

This content downloaded from 128.255.6.125 on Sun, 14 Aug 2016 19:25:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
146 Wendy James

... but one of the ugliest musical instruments conceivable, consists in a round, nutlike
fruit of the size of a nut, four rows of which roughly fastened together, formed the clumsy
and absurd anklets of many a fair dancer (ibid: 194).

There really is some doubt as to whether these performances were 'war-dances' in quite
the way that Schuver indicated; the first could just have been some kind of welcome to a
visiting dignitary, and the second seems to have been some kind of celebration. Both
dances are described as moving 'around', which suggests the circular form.
However, when followers playing local instruments made of calabashes, horns, nut-
like fruits, and so on are brought in by various kings, chiefs and war leaders for purposes
of display and extra accompaniment to the regular marching instruments, the
choreography of their performance is quite changed. For example, the drum and bugle
certainly played an important part in the regular armies of both Turco-Egyptian and
Mahdist regimes in the Sudan. But in addition, the presence of slave soldiers was marked
by their musical contribution to ceremonial occasions using rather different and distinct
instruments of their own. The Khalifa Abdallahi's jihadiyya (slave soldiers) brought
antelope horns with them. Slatin described how the Khalifa would occasionally parade
around the town of Omdurman:

The melancholy notes of the ombeija [trumpet] and the beating of war-drums announce to
the inhabitants that their master is about to appear in public ... A square is immediately
formed around [the Khalifa]; and the men advance in front of him in detachments, ten or
twelve abreast. Behind them follow the horse and foot men of the town population, while on
the Khalifa's left walks an immensely powerful and well-built Arab named Ahmed Abu
Dukheka, who has the honour of lifting his master in and out of the saddle. On his right is a
strongly-made young Black, who is chief of the slaves in the royal stables. The Khalifa is
immediately preceded by six men, who alternately blow the ombeija by his orders. Behind
him follow the buglers, who sound the advance or halt, or summon, at his wish, the chiefs of
the mulazemin. Just behind these follow his small personal attendants, who carry the Rekwa
(a leather vessel used for religious ablutions), the sheepskin prayer-carpet, and several
spears. Sometimes, either in front or rear, as the case may be, follows the musical band,
composed of about fifty Black slaves, whose instruments comprise antelope-horns, and
drums made of the hollow trunks of trees covered with skin. The strange African tunes they
play are remarkable rather for the hideously discordant noise they make than for their
melody. These rides are generally undertaken after midday prayer ... (Slatin 1896: 528-9).

The Khalifa had been active in the Bahr el-Ghazal before the Mahdist uprising, in the
context of the trading and slave companies, and had already taken possession of the great
Zande long drum. Various kinds of drums were already well established in the political
and military ceremonial of the Sudan: the Turco-Egyptians brought in the bugle, the snare
drum, and the kettle drum; copper kettle-drums were carried in any campaign or parade
of the various Pashas.
For the twentieth century, Major Cheeseman recorded both the local circling dance
form and its restructuring by official authority in western Ethiopia. His first encounter on
the way down the Blue Nile in 1927 was at the Dura river:
In the evening a negro chief with his band of musicians carrying weird instruments appeared
on a friendly visit ... The officer who was escorting me was an Amhara official ... who had
been placed in charge of the Negroes by the Abyssinian Government. ... He seemed on very
good terms with the Negroes, and greeted the chief by giving one hand which the latter took
in both of his. The official then raised his own hand to his lips and kissed it. The Negro
saluted me by bending forward and touching the ground with both hands.
The musical instruments of the band were from four to five feet in length and were made
from the narrow part of calabashes joined together. Some were held straight in front of the
player like coach-horns and others sideways like flutes, but in both kinds the mouthpiece was
at the end. The musicians danced while they played, stepping in time to the rhythm and
swaying the body (Cheeseman 1936: 336-7).

This content downloaded from 128.255.6.125 on Sun, 14 Aug 2016 19:25:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Social history of an African dance form 147

Further towards the Sudan border, across the Balas river,

lit by the guards sent to meet them by Dejazmatch Banj
Governor of Gubba'. His guide 'blew his official Abyssin
them know we were friends and not raiders' (ibid: 35
entertainment provided by Hamdan at Gubba. The contr
welcome of the police-style band, lined up along the roa
the later circling dance of the Gumuz with women partici
The Ford lorry came to take me to pay a call on the Governor
top ... A guard of honour was drawn up alongside the road
equipped with Khaki uniforms of the Sudan Police pattern,
which I was greeted with a twang of Arab music ...
In the evening he sent his Gumz villagers to play and da
like those seen in Abyssinian churches, and some men were bl
or cane, one foot long, which gives a peculiar squeak; wh
makes a weird volume of sound. The men flourished tree-br
wide circle with the drums and a few dancers in the middle
and the crowd joined in the refrain, shuffling feet to and fro
women danced in the centre by themselves. Most of the peo
but women who had brought water for refreshment in calaba
bamboo and balanced on one shoulder, for dancing in that h
group outside and did a stomach dance to time. Occasiona
standing in front of a woman, danced with her, placing on
shoulders. Facing each other they did the stomach dance, then
his naked right breast to her left breast, and then his left bre
made a sucking noise with his lips. Little girls were standing
and doing the stomach dance to the time of the music. One
balls made of dom palm nuts ... [there follows more desc
grease] (ibid: 369-71).

The contrast here between the regimented performan

ceremonials of authority, and the circular local dances, w
the observer as sexually suggestive, is very clear. And y
no doubt from the same Gumuz villages as the flute pla
were living both in a local, and in a wider world. Even t
light as entertainment for a distinguished visitor in thi
many other visitors would have a chance to pronounce up

5. Trajectory of the Uduk circular dance: Chali, 1940s -

The Sudan Interior Mission first arrived among the Udu
interruption because of the War they returned and establ
early 1940s (see James 1988a: ch. 4). Malcolm Forsber
years. The Uduk dance was identified as a prime obstacle
Devil. The following account, written after the War, refe
When misfortune did not demand their concentration on a
danced. There was nothing formal about this. Any Uduk cou
between his legs, pound out a few hot licks, and draw a cro
tired to work or talk to us, but they were seldom too tired to
[sic] beat I went to the village to see what was happening. I to
'It's pretty primitive,' I reported. 'They have six men in a t
flute in his left hand. The flutes are of different sizes and dif
has a block of wood between his legs, which he pounds with
hand. The people go round and round the band in a circle, m
women. It looks rather monotonous and harmless.'

This content downloaded from 128.255.6.125 on Sun, 14 Aug 2016 19:25:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
148 Wendy James

Eventually we learned that the dances were not always so harmless. A dance which
followed a beer drink lasted until dawn, or sometimes for forty-eight hours, and was lewd
and sensuous. Men and women, boys and girls, danced opposite one another, motioning
erotically. Old men, nearly blind, shuffled around the outside of the circle as they kept time
by tapping their sandals on the hard ground. Middle-aged people danced for a while, then
went to sleep, and even women with babies saddled to their backs danced, the baby rocking
to the harsh drumbeat [sic]. Young married people felt the impelling beat of the drums [sic]
and danced feverishly.
Often a dance was the beginning of illicit courtship, broken marriages, and polygamy.
Men and women would disappear into the night and the next day in the village the first and
second wives would prepare for battle over possession of the man. The dance was especially
suited to the restless impulses of the young people, who danced wildly as the drums [sic]
waxed hotter at midnight and beyond. The older people would go home and the younger
ones would pair off and disappear in the bush (Forsberg 1958: 152-3).

Forsberg comments that 'We did not want our gospel to be negative, but we were dealing
with matters beyond our control'; he told the people, 'God doesn't want us to behave like
animals'. The Forsbergs were horrified to find their own infant son imitating the dance
beat and the flute playing. 'We were suddenly brought face to face with the results of our
living in Africa. The dance, like the snakes around us, had turned up inside our house.'
The little boy would join with playmates in the village imitating the dance band, until the
'witchdoctors' called a halt to the dancing when locusts came during the rains. The
Forsbergs kept closer supervision over their son, and prayed more earnestly for the
'coming into being of a strong Christian community at Chali' (ibid: 153). On the dust-
jacket of the book, the publishers gave even more of a dramatic emphasis to the Uduk
dance: 'Here is a great Christian adventure - the story of a young couple who dedicated
their lives to primitive African tribes, and who found romance, drama, and excitement
such as few experience ... The Uduks were not only frankly polygamous, drank hot beer,
and held unspeakable ritualistic dances, but also practiced rites that included murder'
(ibid: inside front cover).
The dance described by Forsberg was the athele', not much of a ritualistic affair at
all, but on the whole rather secular, at least when I came to know it in the 1960s.
Occasionally it was danced at the death commemoration ritual for a senior person, and it
is true that the instruments were ceremonially 'blessed' when first brought out for a
season, but otherwise the athele' was danced for recreation. There were no drums,
despite Forsberg's repeated evocation of the heady image of 'African drums' in his
writing. His initial phrase 'dance blocks' is a more sober description of the set of curved
and slightly smoothed out logs beaten for the athele '. The missionaries maintained their
opposition to this dance, which became an icon of the paganism they were struggling
against, even though it was not a form of dancing centrally linked with spirits,
'witchdoctors' or significant ritual practices. Among the Uduk themselves, the dance as
such came to signify the old ways; to 'return to dancing' was shorthand for having left
the discipline of the church. At the same time, it was immaterial for the question of
allegiance to 'pagan' practices and beliefs whether one danced or not. In this overall
situation, it is scarcely surprising that far from falling into obsolescence, the dance
remained as vigorous as ever, even gaining a kind of extra vitality and symbolic
resonance because it was so frowned on by missionaries. With the departure (by
government order) of the missionaries in early 1964, church discipline fell away
somewhat, and the dance scene was certainly a lively one during my visits from late 1965
to mid-1969.
There was still, during this period, however, some pattern and discipline to the
athele'. In the outlying hamlets, the pattern was for one village to take out the

This content downloaded from 128.255.6.125 on Sun, 14 Aug 2016 19:25:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Social history of an African dance form 149

instruments (eleven logs, and eleven flutes in a full set) to b

month, after the new moon. There would be dancing every o
tired of it or until it was given up because of some even
rainstorm. People would come from miles around. No r
provided. After a while, maybe the next new month, another
of dances. Men and women joined in, as described by Forsbe
of the dance movements themselves were, in my view, styl
lewd. On wonders what missionaries might have made of th
dance evenings of course provided opportunities for affairs a
but they were confined to networks of people who shared a
including working activities, kinship, etc.; and people r
innocent fun. There were virtually never strangers present,
dances of the 1960s were threatening or dangerous to girls
believe has begun to happen in the 1990s, in the much la
camps).
There were other kinds of music and dancing, too, in the Uduk villages of the 1960s.
There was a similar type of ensemble with gourd flutes played by men, though slimmer in
shape and sweeter in tone than the athele': these were the flutes of the bolshok. They
were accompanied only by a percussion of short sticks. The musicians would play for a
while in one place, while the dancers gathered round and circled; but all of a sudden, the
musicians would move off in one direction or another, the dancers following and
reforming the circle. The Uduk said they had taken over this kind of dancing from the
Berta, and indeed the music I have heard recorded by a German ethnomusicologist for the
Berta sounds the same. It belongs to the broad genre of what is called in Bertaland
zumbara, though the Uduk have not as far as I know adapted the very long alpen-horn
gourd instruments which the Berta also use.
Other kinds of music which one could broadly regard as 'secular' included the playing
of the girls' instrument dumbale, a double-stringed sort of bow, played by one girl who
attracted a bunch of children dancing round her. There was also the girls' music played
on a set of carefully-constructed holes in the wet earth of the early rains, beaten by hand;
the delightful sounds of the pubulu also brought children along to dance. An informal
dance could also develop around a (male) lyre-player, men and women doing a kind of
rhythmic dance by slapping their sandals on the ground. The lyre itself was the
commonest instrument, again wholly secular, mostly used to accompany song rather than
to provoke dancing.
There were 'ritual' forms of dancing, too. The ceremonies for hunting, or
commemorating past successful hunts, such as those for the elephant or the leopard,
included special dance forms. These were no longer common (though I have seen the
two-week long ceremonies for a leopard killer among the Gumuz in Ethiopia). The Uduk
did, however, quite frequently hold rituals for the promotion of their diviners to a series
of special stages of initiation leading to senior status, and on these occasions a lot of
energy was devoted to the dance of the diviners' horns. Two kinds of antelope horn were
beaten with soft wood (not blown), and the musicians again played in a small circle,
while the general dance circulated around. This occasion seemed to have a more military
air; groups of young men dressed in feathers and body-belts of leather would advance,
feigning attack, and leap and jump together on the outskirts of the main circle. This
whole style of music-making and dancing was said to have been learned from the Jum
Jum to the north, along with the rest of the diviners' activities.

This content downloaded from 128.255.6.125 on Sun, 14 Aug 2016 19:25:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
150 Wendy James

I was able to revisit Chali and the outlying villages briefly in 1983. The dominant
change seemed to be that the younger generation had switched over to Christianity, and
there were a lot of small bush churches operating. Another feature that struck me was the
popularity of gymnastic exercises among the young men in the area I knew well. There
were parades and marches and whistles, along with the exercises. It took me a little while
to realise that what the youths were doing was imitating the training they had seen at the
military garrison recently established in Chali. Was there dancing? If so, it was not very
conspicuous; the fashion that year, at any rate, was for Christian activities such as
football and hymn singing, as I had seen in 1967, when there was a brief season's
Christian revival (James 1988a: ch. 4; 1988b). However, I think there was even by 1983 a
loosening of the moral rigidities that defined dancing as non-Christian and evil. I think it
likely that there was occasional athele' dancing.
In 1987, when the civil war came to the Blue Nile and all the villages in the southern
part of the province were destroyed by the Sudanese army, a large proportion of the Uduk
crossed the border to a new refugee camp near Assosa. Here, I am told that the athele'
dancing resumed. In the light of what came later, this period was relatively comfortable,
until the advance of anti-Mengistu forces led to its evacuation in early 1990. I have told
the story elsewhere of the years of flight and disaster since then (James 1994, 1996). Here
I should note simply that as far as I could learn, from 1990 there was no dancing of the
'traditional' circular type until about three years later in the Ethiopian transit camp of
Karmi, and then again in the refugee scheme at Bonga. Some of the young lads, however,
had taken up the popular Sudanese daluka playing, and singing, and I saw this in the
temporary camp of Nor Deng back in the Sudan in 1991. Individuals did perform dance
steps here and there, but no wheeling dance formation developed.

6. Reviving the circle: dancing in the refugee camps, 1992-present

It was at Karmi, I believe, that the athele' was reborn. There were no proper
instruments, which require suitable materials from the cultivations and the forest and take
time to fashion. But old plastic jerry cans and other debris of the international aid scene
were put to use, and the 'jerry can dance' was established, on the old pattern of a band in
the middle with the great wheel of dancers. The formalities of style had softened up; the
crowd was much bigger than it had ever been in the old village days; and I think it fair to
say that women were more exposed and vulnerable to unwanted advances than before.
The old polarity between church and dance ground was marked again. However, while
the community were by now as good as a hundred per cent acknowledged Christians,
nearly everyone seemed to cross the line without qualms. This was one theme running
through the documentary film I helped to make in Karmi (James 1993). The dance
ground was marked by a sort of flagpole, with fragments of cloth and paper attached; this
appeared to mark, as it were, the 'place of evil', and we learned from Christians in the
film how fragile relations between men and women had become, how tempers could
flare, and how it had been agreed that the dance should stop at sunset.
By the time the people had settled into the refugee scheme specially set up for them at
Bonga (1993-present), the contradiction of church vs. dance had become even clearer, the
dances themselves were louder, larger, and totally secular (though still circular and
nowhere near as modernized - let alone electrified - as in some of the refugee camps of
East Africa; see Kaiser 1999). They were even organized around the brewing of beer, and
for long periods of time went on all through the night and into the next morning. Even
when I was there in late 1994, one or two quite serious fights blew up, and eventually the
camp committee (I think in conjunction with the representatives of the Gambela police)

This content downloaded from 128.255.6.125 on Sun, 14 Aug 2016 19:25:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Social history of an African dance form 151

tried to set rules and regulations. Representatives of th

Missionaries (formerly Sudan Interior Mission) started to wo
soon after the Bonga scheme was established, and while obvi
new large scale dancing, they did so mainly on grounds of t
and not on the grounds of dancing as such being immoral.
It was in this context that I suddenly heard of the revival o
1994. I had already noticed that gourd flutes for the bolshok
a few men and were being played, though this never became
dance'. It was quite a surprise, thirty years after my original
said the barangu was no more, to hear the music of this ant
This was supposed to evoke the beginning of time, when eve
the giraffe high-stepping tuku, tuku, tuku, the elephant calu
etc; this happened, and that happened, people took sides, iro
beings began to hunt the animals, permanent death overtook
life, and so on (James 1988a: 31-41). There had been plent
during the 1960s, but while they told these stories and occasi
barangu cycle, people said that the dance itself was finished
thought perhaps to practise it still, but no one was sure, and m
It was William Danga, one of my former staunch assistants,
the reappearance of the dance in Bonga and roused the relev
the new gourd flutes they were fashioning, shaping the mo
tuning them by soaking and partially filling them with water
crowd spontaneously started the hopping, skipping pattern of
musicians and singing snatches of song. Those who resurrect
come from the remote group I had heard of before, but ever
satisfaction at the chance to join in.
For those church people I talked to about it, the barangu ha
'Uduk custom and tradition'. The idea that such a thing as 'U
recently been stimulated by a trip up to Addis Ababa for re
organized by the UNHCR. The occasion was World Refugee Day, 1994, and
performances were not only staged for a distinguished audience in the capital city but
also broadcast on Ethiopian Television. I did manage to get a tape of the programme, but
the performances were so dominated by Nuer and Somali refugees that the Uduk scarcely
made an appearance - at least on the tape I have. I know that lyre players were present,
and performed. I am not sure about any flute players - I think probably not, because you
need eleven men to form the ensemble. You also really need a crowd to circle round them
and interact with them. On previous occasions, when Ethiopian kings and chiefs brought
musicians up to their highland courts to entertain themselves and their guests, the
musicians certainly had to leave their circling entourage behind and face the audience
squarely (even before the days of the television camera). When bands of antelope horn
players were co-opted into the armies of the old Sudan, they had to march forwards. The
best examples of the instruments used by all these musicians co-opted by the powers that
be are no doubt safely conserved as 'material culture' in one museum or another. It is
interesting that the great formative circle of players-and-dancers survives socially in
rather a different way: it survives in the refugee camps, sans classic instruments, making
do with discarded bits of modernity (shades of the Caribbean steel band?), but
recognizably itself. Against this background, the circular dance, however secularized and
even vulgarized, represents some kind of claim to a space for the people to be

This content downloaded from 128.255.6.125 on Sun, 14 Aug 2016 19:25:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
152 Wendy James

themselves, to celebrate a self-referential centre of their own, and to turn their backs on
spectators.

WENDY JAMES can be contacted at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology,
University of Oxford, 51 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6PE; email:
Wendy.james @ anthro.ox.ac.uk.

REFERENCES

Baumann, Gerd. 1987. Local Integrity and National Integration: the Miri of the N
Sudan. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Boddy, Janice. 1989. Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men and the Zar Cult in Northern Sud
Madison: Wisconsin University Press.
Bruce, James. 1804. Travels to Discover the Sources of the Nile, in the Years 1768-1773, 2
revised edition. 7 vols. Edinburgh: Constable and Manners and Miller.
Cheeseman, R.E. 1936. Lake Tana and the Blue Nile. London: Macmillan.
Cohen, Abner. 1980. Drama and politics in the development of a London carnival. Man 15:
77.
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1928. The dance. Africa 1: 446-62.
Forsberg, Malcolm. 1958. Land Beyond the Nile. New York: Harper.
Gell, Alfred. 1985. Style and meaning in Umeda dance. In Society and the Dance: the Soc
Anthropology of Process and Performance, ed. by P. Spencer, pp. 183-205. Cambridge
Cambridge University Press.
Hazzard-Gordon, K. 1996. Dancing under the lash: sociocultural disruption, continuity, a
synthesis. In African Dance: an Artistic, Historical and Philosophical Enquiry, ed. by K.W
Asante, pp. 101-130. Trenton, NJ and Asmara: African World Press.
James, Wendy. 1988a. The Listening Ebony: Moral Knowledge, Religion and Power among t
Uduk of Sudan. Oxford: Clarendon Press (reissued with new Preface, 1999).
. 1988b. Uduk faith in a five-note scale: mission music and the spread of the Gospel. I
Vernacular Christianity: Essays in the Social Anthropology of Religion Presented to Godfre
Lienhardt, ed. by W. James and D.H. Johnson, pp. 131-145. Oxford and New York: JASO an
Lilian Barber Press.
. 1993. Documentary film: Orphans of Passage. Director, Bruce Macdonald. Disappearin
World, Granada Television.
1994. Civil war and ethnic visibility: the Uduk on the Sudan-Ethiopia border. In Ethnicit
and Conflict in the Horn of Africa, ed. by K. Fukui and J. Markakis. London and Athens, O
James Currey and Ohio University Press.
1996. Uduk resettlement: dreams and realities. In In Search of Cool Ground: War, Fligh
and Homecoming in Northeast Africa, ed. by Tim Allen, pp. 182-202. London and Trenton, NJ:
James Currey and Africa World Press.
Kaiser, Tania. 1999. Living in limbo: insecurity and the settlement of Sudanese refugees
Northern Uganda. D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University.
Ranger, T.O. 1975. Dance and Society in Eastern Africa 1890-1970: The Beni Ngoma. Berkel
and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Salt, Henry. 1967 [1814]. A Voyage to Abyssinia and Travels into the Interior of that Countr
London: Frank Cass.
Schuver, Juan Maria. 1996 [1883]. Juan Maria Schuver's Travels in North East Africa, 18
1883. Ed. by W. James, G. Baumann and D.H. Johnson. London: The Hakluyt Society.
Slatin, Rudolph. 1896. With Fire and Sword in the Sudan. London: Arnold.
Stokes, Martin (ed). 1994. Music, Identity and Ethnicity. Oxford: Berg.
1995. The Arabesk Debate. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

This content downloaded from 128.255.6.125 on Sun, 14 Aug 2016 19:25:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms