Teaching African Dances in the Caribbean: Horizontal Interpenetration and Afrocentricity in Jamaica

Abstract

This article examines how pedagogy of African dances can act as a site where issues of Afrocentricity and horizontal interconnection can be activated, negotiated, and embodied. I draw on the selected reflections of the participants in dance workshops and my experiences as a teacher of Ugandan dances in Jamaica to demonstrate how pedagogy allowed the learners to embody, deconstruct, and conceptualize kinaesthetic, storied, and musicalized dance material as valued and valid knowledge that is anchored in the worldviews, dignities, and ontologies of indigenous Ugandan communities from where the dances originate. The article frames pedagogy of the dances as an epistemological and ontological framework through which the learners sought to know, think, do, question, connect, and become. For people of African descent, partaking in teaching and learning processes of the dances created possibilities for cultural connections through experiential, imaginative, participatory, and reflective dance activities. The analysis further reveals how teaching dances from African cultures, a subject that is treated as insignificant within academic and artistic thought, positioned me to en/counter, rationalize, and address the challenges, dilemmas, and anxieties surrounding Black dance scholarship. It is hoped that this article can expand discourses on how African dances can be engaged as valued and valid epistemological and ontological domains in scholarship and practice to pluralize creative and cultural thought and empower communities and liberate their bodies of knowledge that have been dispossessed by Western hegemonic epistemological canons.

Keywords

Afrocentricity African dances dance pedagogy horizontal interpenetration Black scholarship

Introduction

Two African thought leaders have articulated two complimentary visions for empowerment of Black people: on the one hand, Molefi Kete Asante has advocated for Afrocentricity—a system of thought that considers the African worldview as a key driver of human progress. On the other hand, Ali Mazrui has suggested that through horizontal interpenetration, Black people across geographic locations can exchange ideas and experiences as a way of advancing self empowerment and actualization in the era of Western hegemonic trends. How can Black scholars of dance use pedagogies of African dances to advance the vision of the two aforementioned black thinkers?

As a Black scholar, who has practiced dance education in intercultural contexts, my interest has been in investigating how pedagogies of African dances act as a framework of inquiry and thought—knowing; a mechanism of transformation—becoming; system of creation—doing; and a process of cultural re/production. Although there is existing exchange of cultural experiences between Black communities, how teaching and learning processes of African dances in the Caribbean can deepen people’s connections to Indigenous African realities and nourish the worldview that is informed by African thought is a subject that has not been examined.

This article critically examines how teaching processes of Ugandan dances at Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Jamaica illuminated Afrocentricity (Asante, 1987, 1988, 1991) and horizontal interpenetration (Mazrui, 1981). I drew on the following key question to unpack the centrality of the pedagogies of Ugandan indigenous dances in cultivating Afrocentric worldview and connections to indigenous Ugandan experiences: How does pedagogy of Ugandan Indigenous dances participate in allowing the Black Diaspora to embody, experience, and reflect of the African worldview and nourish connections to indigenous realities of African communities? In attempting to address this question, pedagogy was conceptualized as a site where the dance participants experienced, embodied, and negotiated knowledge about the people, the culture, the histories, the spiritualities, and the practices of Ugandan Indigenous communities from where the dances originate.

According to Mazrui (1981), horizontal interpenetration connotes that communities in the formerly colonized and enslaved Black communities can exchange cultural, political, intellectual, and social experiences, knowledge, and worldviews as a step towards collective empowerment and actualization. Horizontal interpenetration enables “. . . theorizing Southern issues beyond their artificial boundaries. For example, seeing Africa beyond the boundaries created by colonial authorities and making the necessary internal and external linkages with local groups and Diasporic and other colonized people” (Dei, 2000, p. 118). Using this concept as an analytical lens, I explore how pedagogy “dwelled on historical and cultural principles of unity for all peoples of African descent and worked to educate the Black communities about its ancestral heritage via music, dance, and oral legacies” (Gittens, 2012, p. 58). I use teaching experiences in Jamaica, a Black Caribbean nation with deep ancestral roots, pride and connection to Africa, as a miniature around which constructive and meaningful cultural and personal connections between Black people can be pursued, negotiated, revealed, and expanded.

Pedagogies of African Dances: Deconstructing the Epistemological and Ontological Frames

This analysis frames pedagogy as epistemological and ontological phenomenon that immerses a person into experiences that are “deeply interwoven within the sociocultural histories of particular civilizations and within particular groups within those civilizations” (Scheurich & Young, 1997, p. 8). Through pedagogy of the dances of Black people, “the subjugated knowledges and blocks of historical knowledges which are present but disguised within the body of functionalist and systematizing theory” (Foucault, 1980, pp. 81-82) were deconstructed as valid, valuable, and civilizational episteme.

Through experiential, embodied, and reflective dance activities, pedagogy can ignite the inner reflections of the self to illuminate the social, cultural, and embodied interpretations, meanings, experiences, and explanations (Dei, 2000). For the case of African dances, this is significant because these dances encompass intricate knowledge domains and civilizational paradigms that have links to the cultures, identities, histories, society, nature, worldviews, and continuities of the people.

Illuminating Asante’s (1991) notion that “Naturally, the person of African descent should be centered in his or her historical experiences as an African” (p. 172), pedagogy of African dances positions an individual as a thinker, doer, collaborator, questioner, and knower of embodied experiences, reflective thought and experiential practices of Indigenous African communities. From an Afrocentric perspective, pedagogy counters,

discourse frameworks that are rooted in one dominant western discourse wherein things African are conflated with things “exotic” or “other.” . . . which reinforces relation of power and domination along the lines and location in the first versus the “third” world. (Maurer, 1991, p. 2)

In the case of African dances, pedagogy of the dances can address the cultural, social, spiritual, and intellectual imbalances that were caused by European colonization and Christianization of Black people, which characterized dances as primitive, exotic, devilish, and sexual (Asante, 2000, 1996). This ‘invention’ of Africa (Mudimbe, 1988) has caused a section of African people to disidentify with their heritage, culture and history and adopt ways of behavior, thinking and practices of the dominant Western culture (Fanon, 1963, 1967). In some postcolonial African communities, objectification of indigenous dances is still prevalent. Wasswa (2007) has reported that in Uganda, people refer to music, dance, and drama as musiru ddala ddala, a Luganda derogatory phrase that loosely translates into “s/he is exceedingly stupid.” Similar attitudes have been reported in the Western academic discourses where African dances are treated as just physical routines, through which people perfect how to get low, move the waist, and become physically fit (Mills, 1997).

Historicizing Afrocentricity and Horizontal Interpenetration: The Caribbean, Continental Africa, and American Black Diaspora Triangle

In formulating the thesis of this article, reference was made to prevailing literature on the historical interconnection and interactions between continental Africa, the Caribbean, and the wider Black Diaspora. Examination of these historical experiences provided a framework in which analysis of my pedagogic reflection in Jamaica was anchored. The interaction between continental Africa and the Caribbean started before but intensified during the colonial period when Black thinkers, scholars, politicians, writers, and artists in North America, the Caribbean, and Africa teamed up in the struggles against colonial exploitation and dominance. Edmondson (1977) has observed,

One of the most relevant consequences of the sharing of a colonial experience by both regions was a consolidation of Pan-African linkages between African and Caribbean enemies of the empire. Indeed, nothing did more to stimulate a spirit of rising Black Nationalism among Afro-Caribbeans by the early twentieth century than the final subordination of Africa to colonial rule. (p. 212)

The intellectual and political work of Aime Ceisar, Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon, and Walter Rodney, among others is still considered remarkable in sensitizing the Black communities against Western imperialism, occupation, and supremacy (see also Edmondson, 1977). These transcontinental synergies spurred internationalization of Black racial discontent (Edmondson, 1968) and strengthened commitment of the Black people to pushback against Western hegemonic excesses, decolonize the minds and imagination of black people (Wa Thiong’o, 1986) and decolonize modalities of discovering, authoring and disemminating indigenous knowledge (Smith, 1999).

In the context of dances, Katherine Dunham, Maya Deren, and Zora Neale Hurston explored artistry in local Caribbean communities through dance ethnography to acquire firsthand cultural experiences (Clark, 1982; Durkin, 2011; Fischer-Hornung, 2008; Osumare, 2010; Vega, 1995). Pearl Primus also toured West Africa to immerse herself in native artistry (DeFrantz, 2011; Griffin, 2013; Schwartz & Schwartz, 2011).

The dance material that these artists and researchers gathered was extended into performances and literary writings as valid and valuable knowledge, which they shared with the black diaspora and wider communities in North America. In decentering dance knowledge, these Black anthropologists, thinkers, and performers made “an endeavor to revalue an African heritage in light of its contribution to human development, to recuperate folk practices as appropriate source material for creative pursuit” (Thomas, 2002, p. 517). It can be argued that the ideas of Afrocentricity and horizontal interpenetration owe part of their existence to these historical endeavors by the aforementioned Black personalities and their ideaological and practical endevor. In terms of artistry, the creative Black thinkers and performers shared works and ideas that amplified the “the rich cultural histories and complexities of lived experiences that illuminated the diversity of events and ideas that have shaped and continue to shape human growth and social development” (Dei, 1998, p. 203) of Black people.

Reflexivity and Reflective Pedagogic Practice as Research Methodology

This article engages selected reflections of the participants in the dance workshops that I facilitated and my experiences as a teacher of Ugandan dances in Jamaica to reveal how issues related to Afrocentricity and horizontal interpenetration were negotiated. These dance workshops were conducted in July 2017 with two different groups, each consisting of 15 to 25 participants. The dance participants were of diverse age, sex, and social, academic, and cultural backgrounds. The primary source of data was my teaching experiences that were borne as result of “some self-conscious awareness of the process of self-scrutiny” (Chiseri-Strater, 1996, p. 130). This was coupled with information that I collected from the informal conversations that I had with dance participants about the dance activities and their experiences. I used reflection and reflexivity as praxes to de/construct meanings out of the embodied, experiential, storied, and reflective pedagogic experiences.

In this inquiry, I was “a reflective practitioner-action researcher” (Leitch & Day, 2000, p. 186) who engaged reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action (Alrichter & Posch, 1989) to developed critical consciousness of how my self-location and experiences translated into pedagogic interpretations and meanings. Since teachers “have the ability to critically examine their own actions and the context of those actions” (Valli & Taylor, 1988, p. 20), I engaged in “an ongoing self-awareness during the teaching process, which aided in making visible the practice and construction of knowledge within the pedagogic experience (Pillow, 2003).

Reflexivity and reflection entailed interrogation of “what I knew and how I knew it as an ongoing conversation about the experience while simultaneously living in the experience” (Hertz, 1997, p. viii). I recorded “an account to self and others of people, places, events, and the relationships that hold between these elements” (Barrett & Stauffer, 2009, p. 7). In the process of inquiry, I questioned “my own thoughts and action, and within, or in terms of this, transformed them” (Silcock, 1994, p. 277) into meaningful stories and notes that I recorded as reflective experiences. I also considered insights from the informal interactions with dance participants. This information was considered as a “complex, constitutive, meaningful phenomena that introduced unique ways of thinking and feeling, and helped people make sense of themselves and others” (Adams, 2008 cited in Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011, p. 274).

The reflections placed me at the center of pedagogic experience as a “self that is capable of reflecting on him or herself and is knowable” (Pillow, 2003, p. 181). Having agency in the pedagogic practices allowed me to “systematically seek out my own subjectivity and become fully aware and observe myself through the use of reflexive notes about myself” (Peshkin, 1988, p. 17).

Preparing to go Dance It: Reflection on My Complex Identity

My thought process entailed reconsideration of my academic and cultural orientations. I reflected on the anxieties, contradiction, and transformations that I have undergone as a Black scholar of African dances. This reflective trajectory involved uncovering vivid memories, which I recorded as stories such as the one below:

Sittings on my reading table in Auckland, New Zealand, in preparation for teaching responsibilities at Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, I reflected on my complex identity and the influences that I have encountered through my intercultural experiences. I visualized my childhood in my ancestral village, Mbuukiro, central Uganda: As a child, I created and performed children folk songs, dances, and games with other children. We made instruments, prominent of which were the kazoos. We sang songs and danced while walking down valleys and up hills to fetch water and firewood. Dance and music ushered me into the cultures, community, and practices. This foundation transmuted when I attended school and religious studies in Catholicism during my childhood. I dedicated more time to religious and academic education. We could not sing and dance anymore. This alienation heightened when I joined a boarding school during middle/secondary school education. Later, at Makerere University, the absence of traditional dances and music was glaring. Before assuming my teaching responsibilities in Jamaica, I reflected on how my past influences defined the complexity of my identity as a Black dance scholar. The following questions linge my mind: What was African about me? How did the multifaceted influences convene in my pedagogic practices? How would my teaching be relevant to Jamaica, a country that shares colonial history like Uganda? How would I build on my identity to teach in ways that would illuminate horizontal interpenetration and Afrocentricity?

As a person who was born, raised, and educated inside and outside a Christianized and formerly colonized Uganda, revisiting my past became lieux de memoire—site of memory (Clark, 1994). Reflection on my complex identity sought to locate the interplay between my multiple heritages (Mazrui, 1986): Indigenous experiences, Western education, and European Christianization. Revisiting my past to locate my Indigeneity, as a teacher of Ugandan dances, was a quest to understand and strengthen my identity as a Black scholar (Dei, 2014). This reflective encounter revealed nuanced insights “about a complex relation of culture, history, politics, identity, and the capacity of Black subject for scholarly aesthetic appreciation” (Dei, 2014, p. 168) and revealed how my intercultural exposure had relegated me to an internally displaced person in sholarship (Rowe, Martin, Knox & Mabingo, 2016.

The introspective reflections on who I am as a Black scholar drew parallels with the questions that Dei (2012) has raised concerning recovery and sustenance of African Indigenous knowledge:

How do we subvert the ways the education of peoples of African descent has denied heterogeneity in local populations through the project of “sameness”? How do educators provide anti-colonial education in ways that allow learners to develop a strong sense of identity, self and collective respect, agency and empowerment to participate in community building? (pp. 112-113).

For Black people who have undergone Western education, reclaiming their indigenous self and identity after years of studying and working in Western hegemonic environments can be complex (Dei, 2014). Most importantly, regaining this identity is essential if teaching mechanisms that conceptualize African dances as epistemological, spiritual, and ontological domains are to be effectively applied. Reflection empowered me to identify content and teaching methodologies that would make the Indigenous worldviews, realities, and practices intelligible and accessible for the dance participants in Jamaica. When Black scholars reflect on their Indigeneity, they minimize obsession with Western academic canons and cultural paradigms and move to embrace content and methodologies that reflect the Black people and their epistemology in form of history and realities, and its contribution to the world (Wane, 2009).

Locating the indigenous aspect of my identity prepared me to speak as a Subaltern (Spivak, 1988). The insights that I arrived at enabled me to find “an intellectual praxis informed by an Africa sense of history, culture, identity, community knowledge, and political work to bring about change in the lives of African peoples” (Dei, 2014, p. 167). This underscored the fact that teaching African dances is about what you know as it is about who and what you are.

Identifying the Dances as Valid, Valued, and Distinct Indigenous Knowledges

That moment to select the indigenous Ugandan dances to be taught in Jamaica came. I went through a cycle of reflections through which I scrutinized a myriad of different forms of dances. I considered the diverse ethnic communities from where the dances originate. Sifting through the different categories of the dances such as war dances, worship dances, harvest dances, royal dances, children’s dances, fertility dances, courtship dances, rite of passage dances, among others, I put emphasis on the complex uniqueness of each dance. From this thought process, I selected dances such as Kizino, Maggunju, Bwola, Kimandwa, Kitaguriro, Runyege, Ntogoro, Gaze, Baakisimba, Mwaga, and Naleyo. Each dance exuded richness and depth in music, spiritualties, experiences, stories, techniques, histories, and kinesthetic complexities, representing various (but not all) indigenous communities of Uganda. I isolated each dance and deconstructed it in its entirety. Identification of the music, costume, drum rhythms, stories, histories, contexts, sites of performance, techniques, specificity of performers in terms of age, sex, and social class, and movement vocabularies of each dance was made to develop a pedagogy that I would effectively apply to deliver the inherent spiritual, epistemological, ontological, contextual and historical knowledges of the dances.

Meaningful scholarship in African dances begins with recognition of these dances as constellations of valid and valuable knowledge, which is developed and sustained by people. As a teacher, I conceptualized the dances as domains that reflected “our epistemological frameworks and the body of knowledge of the producers, places, and traditions within which the production of such knowledges occurs” (Dei, 2014, p. 170). This knowledge is embodied and historicized within the collective memories, spiritualized realities, and individualized psyches of people.

Drawing on the foregoing consideration, I used the following question to frame the pedagogy that I implemented in Jamaica: What kind of dance experiences would better reflect the heterogeneous cultural realities, experiences, and set of ideas of the complex indigenous communities in Uganda? Because “bodies matter in discourses about Indigeneity” (Dei, 2008, p. 9), the scholarship of African dances requires discarding their imagined homogeneity. Each dance can be conceptualized as a specific episteme that occupies and draws on a particular place, space, history, spirituality, and continuity. Part of my pedagogic agenda was to illuminate this heterogeneity in order to confront the reductionist notions that view Africa as a ‘country’ with a ‘single story’.

To apply a pedagogy that underpins Afrocentricity and horizontal interpenetration, African dances need to be theorized in ways that defy the prevalent containerization of a wealth of cultural dances under labels such as “African dance,” “West African dance” (Mabingo, 2012), and “world dance” (McCarthy-Brown, 2017). Gittens (2012) has cautioned that it is “impossible to place thousands of movement techniques that vary dramatically from region to region under single title simply because they originate on the same continent” (p. 54). From a standpoint of scholarship of African dances, paying attention to the abundance of local, specific and historically, contextually, and spiritually informed dance episteme grounded in intricate civilizational and cultural contexts (Seidman, 1994) of diverse communities is key in deepening the Afrocentric worldview and the idea of horizontal interpenetration.

The dances that I selected and later taught were considered as “Indigenous knowledge that is generally transmitted experientially and is not written but is learned through hands-on experience and not taught in an abstract context. Its parameters are holistic, non-linear and reflect a qualitative and intuitive mode of thinking” (Capp, 1997 as cited in Wane, 2005, p. 29). This qualitative aspect transcends and is constitutive of corporeal knowledge. The intention of my pedagogy was to not only offer embodied experiences through practical activities, but to also engage the dance participants in constructing meanings and nourishing reflective, spiritual, and experiential connection to Ugandan indigenous traditions, places, and communities.

For scholarship in African dances, there is also a risk of compressing dances into postcolonial national identity categories such as “Ugandan dance,” which diminishes the ethnic richness of African communities. My experience revealed that even in a country like Uganda, the dance traditions are exceedingly diverse. Hence, in the process of developing and applying pedagogy, I “critically acknowledged the complexities of our identities as we celebrate our shared and collective experiences, histories, and cultures as African/Black people” (Dei, 2014, p. 174).

Deepening Afrocentricity and Horizontal Interpenetration Through Embodied Pedagogy

Teaching and learning of dances sits at the intersection of the people (agents), place (nature), dancing (activity), dances (practice), thought (rationality), participation (agency), and corporeal, reflective and spiritual explorations (experience). Dancing encompasses a pedagogy that articulates knowledge through participatory action, reflective inquiry, and interactional practices between the people, their culture, and environment. This pedagogy is a “Trialectic space where there is the interface of the body, mind, soul, and spirit (as a challenge to Cartesian dualism), and an appreciation of the nexus of society, culture, and nature” (Dei, 2014, p. 177).

Teaching and learning of dances sits at the intersection of the people (agents), place (nature), tradition dancing (activity), (practice), thought (rationality), participation (agency), and physical and spiritual explorations (experience). To teach and learn dances is to reflectively, spiritually, and experientially embody, historicize, share, and expand these key senibilities of indigenous communities. The following sections explain how the pedagogies of Ugandan dances in Jamaica allowed dance participants to embody and experience Afrocentricity and horizontal interpenetration.

Talking Dance: The Heterogeneity of Dance Movements

Seated outside the dance studio after a dance session, one of the workshop participants came to me to share her experience of the dance class. She said; “What I find interesting about the class is that the dances have a lot to do with the lives and cultures of the people. It is so educating to experience the uniqueness of each dance. For example, the dances of cattle herders are different from courtship dances.”

“How were you able to identify these differences?” I asked her.

“The difference was vivid with the movements. The movements of cattle keepers imitate cows whereas the ones of the courtship dances emphasize that attraction and interaction of other dancers around you. This is important for me because I can understand the differences in Ugandan cultures and communities. Since Africa is our ancestral and historical home, I feel that connection to the mother continent. I have done dances from West Africa before and I expected to see many similarities. But the movements of Ugandan dances are different from dances from West Africa,” she elaborated.

The above excerpt demonstrates the extent to which learning dances can provide a snapshot into the complexity of African cultural practices. Beyond immersing a person into a physical and corporeal experience, teaching and learning dances can facilitate a connection to nuanced meanings and knowing, which emanates from the dances and the culture that they represent. In the case of the aforementioned participant, the corporeal movement experience acted as signifiers that offered her entry into the cultural realities of people and their ways of living. Moreover, partaking in the embodied activities enabled her to locate the differences in the contexts, content, and practices of the people. This offered her knowledge about the distinctivenes of African practices and the importance of understanding this specificty as a reality that defines the heterogeinity of communities.

The search for intricate epistemological, ontological, and spiritual meanings that resided both in experiential and embodied experiences of the workshop participant subverted objectification of the body of Black dancers. Gottschild (1990, 1996) has decried the continuing fetishization of the body of Black female dancers as mere exposure of the three Bs—buttocks, belly, and breasts waiting for White gaze. The aforementioned reflection reveals that pedagogies that allow the learner to question, explore, rationalize, deconstruct, connect, and know can allow them to be “enculturated into a world of meanings and movements” (Warburton, 2011, p. 68).

In African dances, embodied knowing “draws a connection between identity and knowledge production” (Dei, 2008, p. 9). The anecdotes of the workshop participants show how teaching and learning cultivates an understanding of the inner sense of self (Ermine, 1995 cited in Dei, 2000) in relation to kinaesthetic and conscious dance experiences. When the workshop participant stated that “Since Africa is our ancestral and historical home, I feel that connection to the mother continent,” she was bearing testimony to this sense of connection. The search for the cultural and historical relationship was not only limited to Ugandan cultures. The dance participant made reference to her past experiences of other dances from West Africa to find the complexity and heterogeneity of African communities through dance. What made dance pedagogy an appropriate space to explore Afrocentricity and horizontal interpenetration is that it allowed her to cultivate firsthand experiences, dig through her past experiences of dance, and construct meanings from embodied encounters.

A pedagogy that values dance as a knowledge domain has potency to empower the learner to question, to connect, to relate, and to grow. It brings the dimension of spiritual action and reflective thought to embodied experience. This spirituality springs from the inner search for embodied and conceptualized meanings.

Narrativizing Dance: The Messages Behind the Dance Stories

“We want to hear more of the stories about the dances and the cultures and communities where they come from. These stories give us an understanding of how people in Uganda live, their history, their practices and what happens in each ethnic community. The stories make the movements of the dances clearer. Things such as worshipping, rituals, working the land, and storytelling, which these dances represent, are also practiced in some rural communities in Jamaica. As you know we all came from Africa, hence the stories help us to make that connection between some of our practices and African cultures and Africa as our ancestral home,” a dance participant remarked.

Part of the pedagogy that I applied encompassed integrating storytelling as a mechanism to illuminate the theory and rationality behind the dances. The dances do not exist in vacuum: They are integral to the contextual, spiritual, and historical experiences that mirror the ways of life of the people. The stories provide answers to questions related to what the dance is about, why the dance is performed, where the dance is performed, how the dance is performed, who perform(s) the dance, and when the dance is performed.

In African civilizations “the myths, words, folksongs, stories, folklore and other oral narrative accounts have a continuing life of their own” (Dei, 2000, p. 127), which is relayed through dance. The stories are part of the corporeal knowledge paradigms that drive communities and validates human experiences (Dei, 2008). In teaching the dances, the stories acted as theoretical lesnses through which practical dance movements were anchored. By stating that “These stories give us an understanding of how people in Uganda live, their history, their practices and what happens in each ethnic community,” the dance participant revealed that the uniqueness of each dance form and by extension the people who perform it is illuminated through the stories. Pedagogically, the stories of the dances deepened understanding of the Indigenous worldviews, experiences, realities, and local creativity.

The stories demonstrated that Ugandan dances, as an aspect of complex Indigenous knowledge, are holistic (Dei, 2000). A dance performer is a storyteller, a listener, an interrogator, a thinker, and an innovator. The dance participant’s reflection that “The stories make the movements of the dances clearer” proved that a pedagogy that incorporated storytelling acted as “the epistemic space for learners to openly utilize the body, mind, and soul . . . ” (Dei, 2013, p. 32). Moreover, as Dei (2013) has further noted, pedagogy “was also space that nurtured embodied conversations that acknowledged the importance and implications of working with knowledge base about society, culture, and nature” (p. 32).

The pedagogy sought to nourish an understanding of African dances as complex epistemological domains that “can open up a new and transformed consciousness of all peoples, particularly those of African descent” (Dei, 1994, p. 5). For a long time, a notion has been developed based on Euro-American scholarly paradigm that dances from African cultures are mere physical, exotic, and merrymaking activities that reflect civilizational inertia and are devoid of intellectual manifestations (Monroe, 2011). The stories about the dance aimed to allow dance participants as “Africans to take up their right to the experience of the continent, the enjoyment of their culture, the celebration of their histories, and shaping of memories, irrespective of where they have decided to reside” (Dei, 1994, p. 5).

Musicking Dances: Songs and Drum Rhythms as Dance

Teaching Ugandan cultural dances involved integrating their songs and drum rhythms into pedagogy. In the first session of Gaze dance, I taught the songs first. Working with dance participants, I sang the songs and they responded back as a community using call and response technique.

“I cannot get the words of the songs. Can you write them on the white board,” one participant asked.

“We are going to learn the songs by listening to the calls and responding to them. You will use your ears to listen and your mouth to sing,” I replied.

The activity continued and the dance participants gradually grasped the songs. As the dance participants sung the songs continuously, I taught the drummers the drum rhythms. I demonstrated rhythms for the drummers. We merged the drum rhythms with the songs. Finally, the dance participants explored the movements of the dances with the songs and drum rhythms as one piece of performance. Observing the participants, I realized that they had difficulty singing, dancing and listening to the drum rhythms simultaneously. I decided to do these sets of dances repetitively. The more the dance participants went through the songs and dances repetitively, the more they developed abilities to perform and share them comfortably.

The depth and richness of African dances as Indigenous knowledge is holistically complex. As the abovementioned extract shows, the aspect of musicality is inseparable from the dance. Musicality is expressed in vocal songs, verbal sounds, and instrumental rhythms. However, music is not just an accompaniment of dance.

Pedagogically, music acts as an epistemological and spiritual domain that allows a learner to access corporeal and nuanced subtexts of the dances. When a learner embodies and experiences music, they attain a deeper understanding of dance and vice versa. Unlike in the Western artistic thought where dance is separated from music and balkanized into isolated specialities such as performance, choreography, technique, somatics, among others, music and dances in African civilizations are reciprocally integrated. Spiritually, a combination of music and dance ensures that the “dancer has an enlivened spirit that stems from a deep relationship to music and communal ritual. The attributes of music and community ethos can stimulate a musical spirit alertness, and a suppleness and joyfulness in the body” (Banks, 2014, p. 169).

Integrating the songs into dance pedagogy allowed the workshop participants to search for a deeper meaning of the dances beyond movements as active thinkers, listeners, and collaborators. Learning music, drum rhythms, and dance movements, as Indigenous knowledge was cyclic, not linear. A dancer was a musician as a musician was a dancer. By engaging in learning of songs as dance, the dance participants were able to experience singing, dancing, and listening to the drum rhythms, which cultivated “concrete experience as a criterion of meaning” (Collins, 1991, pp. 208-212). Engaging the voice, the body, and aural faculties brought together the mind, body, voice, and soul to the center of embodied dance experience.

The element of musicality acted as a framework of inquiry and knowing. Individuals brought their varied skills (singing, dancing, and drumming) to the learning experiences. Techniques such as call and response enabled dance participants to engage in music and dance as a community of interdependent individuals. The bodies of the dancers were an extension of the songs and drum rhythms and vice versa. Each element clarified the intricate and nuanced knowledge imbedded in the other. For example, drum rhythms illuminated movement phraseology and vice versa.

In the process of teaching music as dance and dance as music (Nannyonga- Tamusuza, 2015), I declined to write down songs on the white board as one of the dance participants had requested. Deconstructing dances through songs and rhythms aimed to allow the dance participants to access the esthetic qualities of the dances through vocal agency. The songs and drum rhythms have complex meanings, which deepened the dance participants’ understanding of the dances, the people, the experience, and the cultures.

In the process of applying musicality as a teaching aid, I noticed that the dance participants encountered difficulties in learning songs, verbal sounds, and drum rhythms. As a unique form of language and expression, African dances and music can occasion acculturative stress (Berry, Kim, Minde, & Mok, 1987). Through repetitive oral and embodied revisitation of the material, the workshop participants gradually immersed themselves into not only the material but also the spiritual experiences of the dances through integration of voice, sound, instrumentation and the body. Ssekamwa (1997) has explained that the technique of repetition is a cornerstone in facilitating Indigenous education in ethnic communities in Uganda.

Communalizing Dances: Collective Embodied Experiences

From the onset, I set out not to use the dance mirrors. I expressed this to the participants. In the first week of the dance classes, I noticed some workshop participants were still turning around to see themselves learning and performing the dances using the dance mirror. The discomfort of not using the mirror was visible. I discouraged use of the mirror. With time, I noticed that dance participants grew into learning and performing dances without any reference to the mirror. They would support and interact with each other and the drummers regardless of the their different levels of interpretation and comprehension of movements, songs, and drum rhythms.

One of the salient characteristics of African dances is how they orient individual actors into communities of practice. Dance is a shared communal Indigenous knowledge and experience that connects individuals to one another, society, and nature. The spiritual aspect of the dances is anchored in this communality. As Banks (2014) has noted, the dances “fuel a sense of self-vitality and community solidarity, which can usher in a sense of spiritual well-being in the body . . . and unleash energy that extends beyond a single dancer or musician to exhilarate an entire social environment” (p. 169).

During the dance workshops, I applied a pedagogy that emphasized embodied connections between dancers as opposed to using the mirror, which de-socializes the dance experience, cultivates individualism, and creates an atmosphere of self-centeredness and self-surveillance. My pedagogy aimed to expand on the following question: “How do we co-produce knowledge as a community in ways that fundamentally shift the established ways of knowledge production?” (Dei, 2013, p. 32).

As a response to this question, I utilized what I have referred to as communal random mirroring (Mabingo, 2015) as a pedagogic methodology. This covered free interaction between dance participants, learning from one another, sharing experiences with each other, and considering each other as a source and resource for epistemological, ontological, and spiritual experiences and growth. The intention was to enable individuals to understand how “our thoughts, beliefs, and interaction with others [as black people] are shaped by systems that create universal norms” (Wane, 2009, p. 171).

Communal random mirroring carried the element of unitary energy and embodied intercorporeality, which is a cornerstone to Indigenous African epistemological, spiritual, and ontological thought, being, and living. The worshop participants experientially, subjectively, and communally experienced the inner workings of the self to generate social and spiritual interpretations, meanings, and explanations (Dei, 2000). The dancing space was an extension of embodied and reflective kinaesthetic output where the dances were embodied and shared forms of knowing, becoming, thinking, and doing. The dance experiences aimed to humanize the dance participants by inviting them to process dance as an experiential and spiritual process that connects the inner being of the person to their outer environment—people, nature, history, and culture.

Dancing Into Afrocentricity and Horizontal Interpenetration: The Pedagogic Coda

This article has illuminated issues surrounding my work as a Black scholar of African dances in Jamaica. The deconstruction of these issues began with recognition of the influences that have shaped my intellectual and intercultural life and identity. I examined my pedagogic applications of Ugandan dances as a site where the dance participants negotiated, embodied, and experienced Afrocentricity and horizontal interpenetration.

To reveal the dances as valid and valued epistemological, ontological, and spiritual domains, I drew on the intellectual output and literary productivity of Black scholars such as Ali Mazrui, Molefe Kete Asante, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Walter Rodney, and Frantz Fanon to understand the potency of Black thought and depth of intellectual and artistic connections between Black communities. From this perspective, an analysis of pedagogy was done to examine how the teaching and learning processes invited the worshop participants to connect with, embody, experience, question, expand, and extrapolate the worldviews of the Indigenous Ugandan communities from where the dances originate.

This article has discussed how the pedagogies deconstructed the dances as “forms and systems of thought and ontologies speaking to the realities and workings of the cosmos, and the nexus of nature, society, and culture” (Dei, 2012, p. 112). By emphasizing the nuanced meanings of movements, dance stories, musicality, and communality, the pedagogies enabled the worshop participants to configure the epistemological, ontological, and spiritual foundations of the dances, the people who perform them, and the environment in which they are practiced.

Over the years, Black scholars, theorists, thinkers, and artists such as the ones that this article makes reference to have worked to advance the intellectual validity of knowledges from Black communities. This article attempts to expand this debate by revealing how embodied and experiential practices such as Indigenous dances can participate in illuminating the the realities and worldviews of African people and their realities. The ideas presented in this piece of work highlight the significance of rethinking education for Black communities such as youth, children, and working professionals, particularly at this time where Black diasporic identities are becoming more complex. This analysis was based on my subjective reflections as a Black dance scholar in Jamaica. This imposed idiosyncratic limits on scope of the study and the content that was generated. Hence, comprehensive empirical studies can be conducted to examine how Black dancers claim agency in constructing embodied, spiritual, reflective, and experiential Afrocentric connections, realities, and meanings through African dances, and the implications of these experiences on their identities as Black people. Moreover, more studies can be pursued to examine how issues of gender and African womanist dimensions can be nourished through pedagogic practices of African dances.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Alfdaniels Mabingo

Author Biography

Alfdaniels Mabingo, PhD, is a dance scholar, educator, researcher, performer and percussionist from Uganda, East Africa. He was born and raised in his ancestral viallage Mbuukiro in Central Uganda where he first made contact with indigenous dances and music. Mabingo holds a PhD in dance studies from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. A former Fulbright exchange student, he has taught dance courses at New York University in the U.S and Makerere University in Uganda. Mabingo’s area of speciality include pedagogies of African dances, intercultural dance education, community dance, and dance and urban youth culture. His research output has been published in several peer-reviewed scholarly journals and book chapters.

References

Adams

T. E.

(2008). A review of narrative ethics. Qualitative Inquiry, 14, 175-194.

Alrichter

Posch

(1989). Does the “grounded theory” approach offer a guiding paradigm for teacher research? Cambridge Journal of Education, 19, 21-31.

Asante

K. W.

(2000). Zimbabwe dance: Rhythmic forces, ancestral voices-an aesthetic analysis. Trenton, NJ: African World Press.

Asante

K. W.

(Ed.). (1996). African dance: An artistic, historical and philosophical enquiry. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

Asante

(1987). The Afrocentric idea. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Asante

(1988). Afrocentricity. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

Asante

(1991). The Afrocentric idea in education. Journal of Negro Education, 60, 170-180.

Banks

O. C.

(2014). West African dance education as spiritual capital: A perspective from the United States. Dance, Movement & Spiritualities, 1, 163-179.

Barrett

Stauffer

S. L.

(2009). Narrative inquiry: From story to method. In Barrett

Stauffer

S. L

(Eds.), Narrative inquiry in music education: Troubling century (pp. 7-17). New York, NY: Springer.

10.

Berry

J. W.

Kim

Minde

Mok

(1987). Comparative studies of acculturative stress. International Migration Review, 21, 491-511.

11.

Capp

J. C.

(1997). Traditional knowledge: Don’t leave home without it. Paper presented at the 62nd North American Wildlife and Natural Resources conference, Washington, DC, March 14-18.

12.

Chiseri-Strater

(1996). Turning in upon ourselves: Positionality, subjectivity, and reflexivity in case study and ethnographic research. In Mortensen

Kirsch

G. E.

(Eds.), Ethics and responsibility in qualitative studies of literacy (pp. 115-133). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

13.

Clark

(1994). Performing the memory of difference in Afro-Caribbean dance: Katherine Dunham’s choreography, 1938-1987. In Fabre

O’Meally

(Eds.), History and memory in African-American culture (pp. 188-204). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

14.

Clark

V. A.

(1982). Katherine Dunham’s tropical revue. Black American Literature Forum, 16, 147-152.

15.

Collins

P. H.

(1991). Black feminist thought. New York, NY: Routledge.

16.

DeFrantz

T. F.

(2011). Theorizing connectivities: African American women in concert dance. The Journal of Pan African Studies, 4(6), 56-74.

17.

Dei

G. J. S.

(1994). Afrocentricity: A cornerstone of pedagogy. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 25, 3-28.

18.

Dei

G. J. S.

(1998). “Why write back?”: The role of Afrocentric discourse in social change. Canadian Journal of Education, 23, 200-208.

19.

Dei

G. J. S.

(2000). Rethinking the role of indigenous knowledges in the academy. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 4, 111-133.

20.

Dei

G. J. S.

(2008). Indigenous knowledge studies and the next generation: Pedagogical possibilities for anti-colonial education. Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 37(Suppl.), 5-13.

21.

Dei

G. J. S.

(2012). Indigenous anti-colonial knowledge as “heritage knowledge” for promoting Black/African education in diasporic contexts. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1, 102-119.

22.

Dei

G. J. S.

(2013). Critical perspectives on indigenous research. Socialist Studies, 9, 27-38.

23.

Dei

G. J. S.

(2014). The African scholar in the Western academy. Journal of Black Studies, 45, 167-179.

24.

Durkin

(2011). The Black female dancing body in the films and writings of Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Nottingham, UK.

25.

Edmondson

(1968). The internationalization of Black power: Historical and contemporary perspectives. Mawazo, 1, 16-30.

26.

Edmondson

(1977). Educational challenges of the Caribbean connection with Africa. Journal of African Studies, 4, 206-227.

27.

Ellis

Adams

T. E.

Bochner

A. P.

(2011). Autoethnography: An overview. Historical Social Research, 36(4), 273-290.

28.

Ermine

(1995). Aboriginal epistemology. In Battiste

Barman

(Eds.), First Nations education in Canada: The circle unfolds (pp. 101-112). Vancouver, Canada: University of British Columbia Press.

29.

Fanon

(1963). The wretched of the earth. New York, NY: Grove.

30.

Fanon

(1967). Black skin, white mask. New York, NY: Grove.

31.

Fischer-Hornung

(2008). “Keep alive the powers of Africa”: Katherine Dunham, Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Deren, and the circum-Caribbean culture of Vodoun. Atlantic Studies, 5, 347-362.

32.

Foucault

(1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977 ( Gordon

, Ed). New York, NY: Pantheon Books.

33.

Gittens

A. F.

(2012). Black dance and the fight for flight: Sabar and the transformation and cultural significance of dance from West Africa to Black America (1960-2010). Journal of Black Studies, 43, 49-71.

34.

Gottschild

B. D.

(1990). Black dance and dancers and the White public: A prolegomenon to problems of definition. Black Literature Forum, 24, 117-123.

35.

Gottschild

B. D.

(1996). Digging the Africanist presence in American performance. Westport, CT: Praeger.

36.

Griffin

F. J.

(2013). Pearl primus and the Idea of a Black radical tradition. Small Axe, 17, 40-49.

37.

Hertz

(1997). Introduction: Reflexivity and voice. In Hertz

(Ed.), Reflexivity and voice (pp. xii-xviii). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

38.

Leitch

Day

(2000). Action research and reflective practice: Towards a holistic view. Educational Action Research, 8, 179-193.

39.

Mabingo

(2012). Theorizing ‘Africanness’: Why ‘African dance’ is not ‘African dance’. Retrieved February 21, 2018 from http://mabingo.blogspot.co.nz/2012/06/theorizing-africanness-why-african.html.

40.

Mabingo

(2015). Decolonizing dance pedagogy: Application of pedagogies of Ugandan traditional dances in formal education. Journal of Dance Education, 15(4), 131-141.

41.

Maurer

(1991). Caribbean dance: “Resistance,” colonial discourse, and subjugated knowledges. New West Indian Guide, 65(1/2), 1-26.

42.

Mazrui

A. A.

(1981). Exit visa from the world system: Dilemmas of cultural and economic disengagement. Third World Quarterly, 3, 62-76.

43.

Mazrui

A. A.

(1986). The Africans: A triple heritage. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.

44.

McCarthy-Brown

(2017). Dance pedagogy for a diverse world: Culturally relevant teaching in theory, research and practice. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

45.

Mills

G. Y.

(1997). Is it is or is it ain’t: The impact of selective perception on the image making of traditional African dance. Journal of Black Studies, 28(2), 139-156.

46.

Monroe

R. L.

(2011). ‘I don’t want to do African… What about my technique”’: Transforming dance places into spaces in the academy. The Journal of Pan African Studies, 4(6), 38-55.

47.

Mudimbe

Y. V.

(1988). The invention of Africa: Gnosis, philosophy and the order of knowledge. London, England: James Currey.

48.

Nannyonga-Tamusuza

(2015). Music as dance and dance as music: Interdependence and dialogue in Baganda Baakisimba performance. Yearbook of Traditional Music, 47, 82-96.

49.

Osumare

(2010). Dancing the Black Atlantic: Katherine Dunham’s research-to-performance method. Ameriquest, 7(2), 1-12.

50.

Peshkin

(1988). In search of subjectivity-one’s own. Educational Researcher, 10, 17-21.

51.

Pillow

(2003). Confession, catharsis, or cure? Rethinking the uses of reflexivity as methodological power in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16, 175-196.

52.

Rowe

Martin

Knox

Mabingo

(2016). Refugees, migrants, visitors and internally displaced persons: Investigating acculturation in Academia. Higher Education Research & Development, 35, 58-70.

53.

Scheurich

J. J.

Young

M. D.

(1997). Coloring epistemologies: Are our research epistemologies racially biased? Educational Researcher, 26(4), 4-16.

54.

Schwartz

(2011). The dance claimed me: A biography of Pearl Primus. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

55.

Seidman

(1994). Contested knowledge: Social theory in the postmodern era. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

56.

Silcock

(1994). The process of reflective teaching. British Journal Educational Studies, 42(3), 273-285.

57.

Smith

L. T.

(1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. New York, NY: Zed Books Ltd.

58.

Spivak

G. C.

(1988). Can the subaltern speak? In Nelson

Grossberg

(Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271-313). Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

59.

Ssekamwa

J. C.

(1997). History and development of education in Uganda. Kampala, Uganda: Fountain Publishers.

60.

Thomas

(2002). Democratizing dance: Institutional transformation and hegemonic re-ordering in postcolonial Jamaica. Cultural Anthropology, 17, 512-550.

61.

Valli

Taylor

N. E.

(1988). Reflective teacher education: Preferred characteristics. In Waxman

H. C.

Freiberg

H. J.

Vaughan

J. C.

Weil

(Eds.), Images of reflection in teacher education (pp. 20-21). Washington, DC: Office of Educational Research and Improvement.

62.

Vega

M. M.

(1995). The Yoruba Orisha tradition comes to New York City. African American Review, 29, 201-206.

63.

Wane

N. N.

(2005). African indigenous knowledge: Claiming, writing, storing, and sharing the discourse. Journal of Thought, 40, 27-46.

64.

Wane

N. N.

(2009). Indigenous education and cultural resistance: A decolonizing project. Curriculum Inquiry, 39, 159-178.

65.

Warburton

E. C.

(2011). of meanings and movements: Re-languaging embodiment in dance phenomenology and cognition. Dance Research Journal, 43(2), 65-84.

66.

Wasswa

(2007). Makerere university music dance and drama department: The development of performing arts in Uganda (Unpublished BA dissertation). Makerere University, Uganda.

67.

Wa Thiong’o

(1986). Decolonizing the mind: The politics of language in African literature. London, UK: James Curry.