ACADEMIA Letters

SOCIABILITY PRACTICES IN THE DIASPORA:

REINVENTING AFRICAS
Elias Alfama Moniz

By analyzing cultural manifestations of enslaved Africans who - upon arriving in the Amer-
icas - found themselves confronted with the need to reformulate their cultural practices, I
came to understand disputes regarding erudite knowledge/practices and knowledge based on
oral practices, their ways of prose, environments of reminiscences, and legacies, highlighting
contrasts regarding corporations and diligence in the face of the challenge of knowledge in
different societies.
In particularizing landmarks, by probing utopias, signs or experiences in symbolic prac-
tices, I came to understandings about uncontested concepts and allegorical principles, in-
tertwined with the generation of knowledge - in schematic judgment or faculty of remem-
brance/explanation of the real sustained in exercises of orality - among Africans in the di-
aspora. Their experiences and knowledge are fixed in universal knowledges, corporal perfor-
mances, foundations of sensitive reasoning in the face of enlightenment perception, expanding
into modes of argumentation, codes, particular or collective knowledge and experiences, fixed
in repository or tangible knowledge, in congruence with writing or the rationality of the verb.
In this study I turn to cultural manifestations of enslaved Africans, in Africa and in Amer-
ica, that uncover strong ties of cultural connections between the archipelago of Cape Verde
and parts of the Americas. Following trails/residues of enslaved black bodies, I glimpsed rhi-
zomatic practices in cultural performances of Africans in diaspora, who retraced memories of
stopovers in Atlantic transits, as happened with Mandes, Fulas, Hauças, Songais, Tucolores,
Mossis, Dagombas from the Senegambia region and other parts of Africa who climbed the
Cape Verde archipelago, before being dispersed to various parts of the Americas. Their con-
tributions to safeguarding the heritage in living memory are indispensable and can contribute
to a better understanding of the junctions of cultural performances that, for some, seem to be

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Elias Alfama Moniz, micunhos@yahoo.com.br

Citation: Moniz, E.A. (2021). SOCIABILITY PRACTICES IN THE DIASPORA: REINVENTING
AFRICAS. Academia Letters, Article 2771. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2771.

1
from here and, for others, seem to be from there, but, pondering over these practices, one can
easily see that they are loose threads that remake themselves in the diaspora, mitigating, in
some way, the bloodletting initially provoked by the act of slavery, still in Africa.
Such evidence is reiterated by the positions of authors such as Sheila Walker, for whom
the importance of Africans in the invention of America is such “that there is no way to discuss
the Americas accurately and honestly without taking them into account”, for,
They were part of the agriculture that allowed voluntary European and involuntary African
immigrants to survive. They were part of the technology that allowed everyone to work and
create. They were part of the economy that allowed societies to develop and expand. They
were part of the creation of the languages in which everyone learned to communicate. They
were part of defining the nature of the spiritual and how to access and relate to it. They were
part of the creation of all the myriad cultural systems, forms, and styles in which all European
and African immigrants organized themselves and expressed their identities. (2002, p. 37).
Enslaved Africans, as Sheila Walker reveals, bequeathed relevant contributions to the con-
struction of what is today consensually called “Latin American culture”. Deeply crossed by
shared historicities, such contributions show how, in an almost synchronous way, practices
reinvented in diaspora are transmuted into rites, rhythms, sounds, flavors, performances, giv-
ing origin to ritualistic festivities.
Practices such as batuque, funaná, tabanca, crossing the morna, coladeira, cola-sandjon,
lundú - bodily performances that perennialize Africa in exile -, initiated in Cape Verde, have
similarities with practices such as samba, rumba, tango, merengue, on the other side of the
Atlantic, in different parts of the Americas. On the other side of the Atlantic, as if in a mat-
uration process, they gained different dynamics, incorporating new elements, but the essence
remains allowing the tributaries of these matrixes a veiled identification, as if, among them,
the cut, the separation, the rupture provoked by slavery/colonial processes had not occurred.
These cultural practices, reinvented in diaspora, bear witness to these connections between
Africa and the “Africas” of exile and reiterate the thesis that advocates, for Cape Verde, a pio-
neering role in the process of formation of the African diaspora in the modern/contemporary
period.
A strong evidence of this can be found in the similarities between Tabanca1 and Jonkonu2 ,
cultural manifestations in which enslaved Africans mobilized to travel the streets in proces-
sions, with stops at the door of the houses, in singing, dancing, and body performances, re-
1
On the Tabanca see, among others, Filho, João Lopes (1998) Vozes da Cultura Cabo-Verdiana. Lisboa:
Ulmeiro.
2
For more information on Jonkonnu, see, among others, The Joy of Junkanoo.” The Islands of the Bahamas.
The Bahamas Ministry of Tourism and Aviation. Retrieved 2020-12-27.

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Elias Alfama Moniz, micunhos@yahoo.com.br

Citation: Moniz, E.A. (2021). SOCIABILITY PRACTICES IN THE DIASPORA: REINVENTING
AFRICAS. Academia Letters, Article 2771. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2771.

2
ceiving, in exchange, offerings. Another aspect that identifies these two manifestations is
the practice of mutualism that translates into support for the members of the communities in
situations of illness, death, or even in the building of their houses, for example.
Another element that unites these two cultural manifestations is their flexible character,
which allowed them, in Africa or in America, to survive the impositions of slave regimes.
Thus, to escape the repression and marginality to which they were submitted, these manifes-
tations appropriated dimensions of European cultural practices, promoting, especially in the
religious sphere, true symbioses of practices, which ended up causing some confusion in the
minds of Europeans, oppressors of African practices.
Thus, notwithstanding the oppressive exercises of the white masters, the enslaved Africans,
in Africa and in the Diaspora, reworked their thoughts based on mysteries, omens, and per-
formances, sneakily perpetuating their cultural practices.

References
ALMADA, J.L.H. (1997). “A Organização da Tabanca”. Cultura, 1 (1), 84-88.

FILHO, João Lopes (1998) Vozes da Cultura Cabo-Verdiana. Lisboa: Ulmeiro

A ALEGRIA DO JUNKANOO. As Ilhas das Bahamas. O Ministério do Turismo e da Avi-

ação das Bahamas. Recuperado em 2020-12-27.

WALKER, Sheila (2002). African Roots, American Cultures: A África na Criação das
Américas. Lanham, MD: Rowman& Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Elias Alfama Moniz, micunhos@yahoo.com.br

Citation: Moniz, E.A. (2021). SOCIABILITY PRACTICES IN THE DIASPORA: REINVENTING
AFRICAS. Academia Letters, Article 2771. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2771.