Voices Of Zimbabwe - Kumbaya

Topic: Movement - Origins
Hypothesizing African origins for the movements used with "Come by Here" is easier than finding evidence. Alan Lomax’s cross-cultural research team suggested the trait that separated Africans from Europeans was the use of the torso. The group observed whites treated the trunk as a single unit, while Africans divided it at the waist. [1] Peggy Harper noted:

"There are three characteristic dance postures. An upright posture with a straight back is used as an expression of authority in the dance of chiefs and priests. In the second posture the dancer inclines forward from the hips, moving his attention and gestures toward the ground. In the third posture the dancer holds the torso nearly parallel to the ground, taking the body weight onto the balls of the feet." [2]

Both Lomax and Harper attributed the differences in placement to economics. Lomax thought mobility at the waist resulted from the twisting movements used in planting millet. [3] The cultural divergence in the use of the spine may have followed the adoption of the plow and domestication of draft animals elsewhere that allowed farmers to plant and cultivate standing erect. In parts of Africa where crops like rice were grown, farmers needed to work low to transplant and harvest.

Harper paid more attention to the ways Africans used their feet and suggested they were related to the terrain: people who lived in savannah grasslands "place their feet firmly on the sunbaked earth"; the Ijo, who lived in mangrove swamps, "use a precision of light, rapid foot beats, moving their weight from heel to toe to side of foot in a variety of rhythmic patterns, as though balancing on an unsteady canoe or picking their way through the swamp"; and the Yoruba altered their foot patterns in ways that suggested the need to find "a way through forest undergrowth, which necessitates reactions ever alert to the unexpected." [4]

The human body has at least 320 pairs of muscles [5] that are developed through use rather than deliberate exercises by children copying the adults around them, and by adults as they walk and work. The resulting musculature reflects cultural values and necessities. In this country, football players strengthen their leg muscles, while ballet dancers stretch the very same ones to maintain flexibility and long extended lines. Once trained, neither can do the routine actions of the other without some soreness. [6]

During the years of slavery, some Africans were shipped to familiar climatic zones in the American South to do analogous work. The ones taken from the upper Niger river to South Carolina rice plantations were the most obvious example. Others, especially those purchased for cotton plantations, encountered different work environments and the appropriate muscles were strengthened. These changes occurred without altering what parents perceived to be the proper posture to be learned by their infants and toddlers.

The remigration of African Americans to urban areas further altered kinesic habits without completely obliterating certain ways of using the feet and torso that had survived from Africa. Thus, Jerome and Fred Williams of the Evereadys bent their torsos forward or arched back from the hips in Detroit and Jerome executed rapid combinations with his feet. [7] Similarly, the man at the far end of the line of men in Skylar Patterson’s backup group sometimes bent forward but treated his feet as rigid units in Alabama. [8]

Some of the patterns mentioned by Lomax and Harper, and exhibited by the Williams brothers and Predestined, were clear in a video made the Voices of Zimbabwe. The students at the girls’ private boarding school were barefoot when they performed a variant of the Soweto Gospel Choir’s arrangement [9] of "Kumbaya" on the parquette floor [10] of an English church in 2011. Even though they had the potential to arch or flex their feet, they keep them flat in the same way Bessie Jones had learned in Georgia. [11]

The group retained Lucas Deon Bok’s tripartite division of "Kumbaya," but changed each section. The Soweto choir stood still during the first part. The Arundel girls began with their heads bent down and their hands in the conventional western prayer position for the opening verse, "somebody’s crying/praying." When they reached the phrase "Oh Lord, hear my prayer" they raised their heads, and lowered the hands, keeping them in the prayer position until their arms were down. Then, they fell to their sides. They stayed in that position for the remainder of the first section, standing still and facing straight ahead.

In Bok’s second section, the Soweto choir began turning to the right and left and clapping when they reached the forty-five-degree diagonals. One Zimbabwe group sang "Oh Lord" while the other repeated a native phrase. They stepped to thirty-degree diagonals, but kept their heads facing front, so their torsos were divided into two parts at the neck.

Soweto’s third part included a Zulu phrase. Voices of Zimbabwe changed to "Zita Rake Guru Ndiye Mutsvene," a traditional hymn. A young woman began playing a four-foot-high, cylindrical, floor drum. One group sang hosanna against a Shona phrase. The girls bent their knees in unison; their shoulders rose and fell slightly.

The lyrics changed to all Shona ones, and the girl sometimes stopped playing the drum with her hands. The chorus members moved their shoulders and feet to the diagonals, but kept their waists facing front. Most bent at the waist, and their arms were bent at the elbows with their forearms in front of their bodies.

Toward the finale they stood facing front and raised their bent arms upward, with their fingers extended together and introduced a different musical phrase. They brought their arms down into the prayer position, then dropped their arms with their palms facing outward. They repeated this pattern, then resumed the second native melody and movement pattern without the drum. They ended by sustaining a tone and raising their arms again.

While the girls’ movements varied by melodic section, the director’s were tied only to the rhythm. Her role was essentially a western one that had been Africanized. She used her arms, often in rolling sorts of motions, to signal the different groups, but she maintained the beat by stepping. Thus, even when the girls were standing still, she was stepping the rhythm for them. Her footwork became progressively more pronounced as the chorus moved from the partly Christianized beginning to the completely native text.

Performers
Vocal Soloist: none

Vocal Group: looked like eight women in the first row and five in the second

Vocal Group Director: woman
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: cylindrical floor drum

Notes on Lyrics
Language: English and Shona

Pronunciation: coom BY yah with long "ba"; this differed from Soweto who made each syllable longer than the previous one

Verses: crying/praying, in despair, local ones

Bok verses
Vocabulary:
Pronoun: somebody
Term for Deity: Lord

Format: Lucas Deon Bok
Verse Repetition Pattern: AABCBC

Zita Rake Guru Ndiye Mutsvene
Vocabulary: the hymn means "his greatest name is holy" according to YouTube notes.

Repetition: phrases repeated

Notes on Music
Singing Style: one syllable to one note with little ornamentation. The variations came from two or more groups singing different parts.

Notes on Performance
Occasion: the school was named for Arundel Farm, which was purchased in 1954 for the school’s Harare campus. [12] In 2011, the chorus was in England and visited the town of Arundel in West Sussex on 12 February. The relationship between the Simpsons, who owned the farm, and Arundel was not mentioned.

Location: Saint Nicholas Church was built in 1380. [13] The acoustics of the stone building reinforced the group’s harmony.

Microphones: none

Clothing: ankle-length brown print skirts with turquoise trim; turquoise bodices or corsets over brown tops. Their hair was pulled back and their feet were bare.

Notes on Movement
Some girls moved their torsos more than others. The one second from the left was the most flexible.

The motions using the gesture for praying were inspired by the word, but not directly tied to it as they were in the Wyandot County 4-H version mentioned in the post for 25 October 2017. The girls changed their positions when verses changed; the smallest unit of text associated with a movement was a phrase.

The director did not stay in one place, but stood directly in front of and close to the group that began the first verse. She then moved to a central location from which she rotated or moved toward groups when they had key parts. It was possible to see her step down like Bessie Jones without shifting her weight.

Notes on Performers
Arundel School opened in 1956 for girls 12 to 18 years of age. One alumna wrote in 2012:

"Deportment – a term most teenagers go through high school not knowing how to spell, let alone use – was the mark of a true Arundel girl. It symbolised a manner of personal conduct synonymous with Austenesque behaviour: ladylike, well-groomed and intelligent." [14]

Most of the boarding houses were named after English female authors, including Jane Austen. [15]

Availability
YouTube: uploaded by KiasuKiasuKiasuKiasu on 16 February 2011.

End Notes
1. Alan Lomax, Irmagard Bartenieff, and Forrestine Paulay. "Dance Style and Culture." 222-247 in Folk Song Style and Culture. Edited by Alan Lomax. Washington: American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, 1968. 237.

2. Peggy Harper. "African Dance." Encyclopædia Britannica. 18 January 2002; last updated 26 July 2017.

3. Lomax. 237.

4. Harper.

5. Wikipedia. "List of Skeletal Muscles of the Human Body."

6. In 1972 I took a beginner’s ballet class at a small college in Ohio. Some professional football team apparently had brought in a dance specialist to help its players with flexibility, and so some of the school’s players decided to take this class. They came back surprised at how many of their muscles had ached from what seemed so simple. And, the class really was basic, what I remember doing when I was in elementary school. They simply had never used those muscles in those ways.

7. The Evereadys’ live performance was described in the post for 3 August 2017.

8. Skylar Patterson was discussed in the post for 27 October 2017.

9. The Soweto Gospel Choir performance was described in the posts for 28 August 2017 and 29 August 2017.

10. Wooden floors laid on wooden beams have some give and are easier on dancers’ ankles, calves, and knees that solid concrete or stone ones. They might be softer than bare dirt, but have a different feel: at a minimum they are level. If the women in Voices of Zimbabwe wanted to flex or arch their feet, nothing inhibited them.

11. Bessie Jones was discussed in the post for 27 October 2017.

12. "History" tab on school website.

13. "Welcome to St Nicholas’ Church Arundel." Church’s website.

14. Fadzayi Mahere. "Does the Colour Pink Imprison Women? The Case of Arundel School." Her website. 15 August 2012. She was a lawyer and running for the parliamentary seat that included the school in the 2018 elections.

15. Wikipedia. "Arundel School."