Kanjélé Choir - Kumbaya

Topic: Movement - Clap Origins
When one attempts to trace the origins of gestures used with "Come by Here," one needs to map versions and establish connections between geographic points. As an example, I knew William Averell moved from Chipping Norton, England, to Ipswich, Massachusetts, some time before 1637. [1] That information gave me starting points for tracing the cultural history of my immigrant ancestor.

African Americans were not as fortunate as I. The founder of the Boys Choir of Harlem wrote: "Like that of most blacks, our family history can be traced back two or three generations through slavery. Go back any further and our roots vanish into the Atlantic Ocean." [2]

Embarkation and debarkation ports are conjecture. If one knows which part of the South an individual’s ancestors lived, one can make guesses based on the fact that slavery moved west when new land was opened for cultivation. Dates exist for white settlement, and they can be related to the fact the slave trade also had a temporal-geographic dimension.

For example, when Charleston, South Carolina, first was importing slaves, they came from the area marked Senegambia on the map at the lower right. When they began growing rice with flood irrigation in 1741, they tended to come from Sierra Leone. [3] Cotton did not become profitable until 1793. At that time, slaves were coming from the Bights of Benin and Biafra. [4]

However, if like Walter Turnbull, one’s ancestors were in the Mississippi Delta, one knows much less. The area was settled after the end of the trans-Atlantic trade when slaves were purchased from the upper south. Much of the area was not cultivated until after the Civil War when freedman moved there voluntarily from other parts of the South.

Willie Mae Ford Smith was born in Mississippi in 1904 and knew her grandmother came from South Carolina, but did not say what part. She knew her grandfather, and knew he was born in Africa. That means he probably was imported by a smuggler after 1807 when slaves were coming from Portuguese areas in Angola and the southern Congo. [5]

These generic starting points in Africa are not as useful as they appear. In 1884, agents of the European powers met in Berlin to divide control of Africa among themselves. [6] As shown on the map at the right, many of the areas of greatest interest to African Americans went to the French, and whatever research exists today was done in that language.

The English gained control of modern day Ghana, whose slaves went to Jamaica, and Nigeria, whose Yoruba primarily went to Cuba, Haiti and Brazil. Most of the research has been done in eastern Africa colonized by Englishmen after the discoveries of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1884. [7]

The Soweto Gospel Choir was drawn from an area that suffered from forced labor in the mines, not from the external slave trade. The Voices of Zimbabwe and the Windhoek Adventist Choir Anglicized Lucas Deon Bok’s arrangement of "Kumbaya." They did not use drums or hand claps. In contrast, the Kanjélé Choir of Dakar, Sénégal, modernized it with a synthesizer and movements closer to those described by Bessie Jones in the Georgia Sea Islands. [8]

The men and women stood with their arms at their sides during an instrumental introduction that set the pace, rhythm, and key. They sang the first "somebody’s crying Lord" standing still, then began moving on the first "kumbaya." They turned slightly to the diagonal, then bent their outside arms to their waists and pushed them forward twice while bending their weightless knees twice and raising their heels. [9] They repeated the pattern turning from one diagonal to the other. Even when lifted, their feet remained flat.

The individuals in the front two rows introduced lexical gestures when they reached the "Lord hear my" phrase. The singers in the first two rows put their hands into the standard prayer position with flat hands, palm to palm, and bent over at the waists, with their weight on both feet. The tall men in back stood still.

When they reached the word "prayer" the ones in the first two rows straightened their backs and separated their hands. As they stood, they continued raising their arms with their hands pointed upward. The men in back resumed stepping to the left and right.

On the words "as I raise" they brought their arms back down toward their chests, then raised their left arms high on "I need you Lord today." They lowered the arms again on "I need you right away," then stood still for the "somebody’s" that introduced the next section. With the word "kumbaya" they began stepping.

They did not attempt any more lexical variations: the harmonies became more complex and the verse with "in despair" had fewer words that could be dramatized with conventional gestures. [10] Instead, when they reached the "Oh Lord kumbaya" refrain, they began clapping once, like the Soweto Choir, instead of pulsing their forearms twice.

The men and women in the first two rows clapped by bringing their flattened hands together side to side in front of their chests, and dropped their arms to their sides as they turned. The men in the last row clapped over their heads. They all continued bending their knees twice, so their hands and feet were making different patterns. On the last line, they stopped, stood facing front, and held the last note.

Performers
Vocal Soloist: none

Vocal Group: seven women in the front row; six women in the second; six men in the back row. It was hard to identify people in middle row, and my numbers may be wrong.

Vocal Director: none visible.

Instrumental Accompaniment: synthesizer. Men, seen from the back, were holding a hollow-bodied guitar and an electric bass, but their arms were not in playing positions.

Rhythm Accompaniment: drum, rattle. It could have been a shaker, but the man using it was only seen from the back.

Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: kum BYE yah

Verses: crying/praying, I need you, despair/care, kumbaya

Vocabulary
Pronoun: somebody
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none

Basic Form: Lucas Deon Bok
Unique Features: none

Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: Lucas Deon Bok
Tempo: moderate

Basic Structure: harmonies that increased in complexity

Singing Style: unornamented, one syllable to one note

Notes on Performance
Occasion: rehearsal
Location: long, narrow room
Microphones: none

Clothing: casual. Some women in the front row were wearing slacks or knee-length skirts that made it possible to see their leg and foot movements.

Photographs on its Facebook page showed the choir usually performed in robes. In one, the women were wearing tangerine floor-length evening gowns and the men were in brown suits with tangerine shirts. [11]

Notes on Movement
The singers stood at the far end of the room with open space between them and the musicians. A man playing synthesizer stood at the right side of the video, and the man playing the drum sat on the opposite side of the room where everyone could see him. The man using the rattle had his back to the camera, but his head was turned toward the drummer. The guitar and base player sat to his left and right. The camera was behind the man with the rattle.

Concert videos on YouTube showed the singers spread apart with a floor microphone for each one in the first row. Their arm and torso movements were more obvious that the ones with their feet. [12]

Notes on Performers
Music in Africa said the choir was "founded by Bruno d’Erneville, a politician passionate about gospel." [13] I could not determine if he was Bruno Victor Louis d’Erneville, the man who was one of more than a dozen candidates who ran for president of Sénégal in 2012. The choir began posting videos to YouTube in 2012, but Bruno Victor never mentioned any interest in music, not even on his Facebook or LinkedIn pages. [14] The man who founded Kanjele indicated he "performs on stage every Friday at the Dakar calabash restaurant." [15]

If they were two men, they shared a common ancestor. Pierre Henri d’Erneville was born in Normandy in 1714 and went to New Orleans as a soldier. He married a woman who was born in New Orleans in 1731 and who died in 1758, thirty years before he died in 1788. [16] More than likely he fathered Charles Jean Baptiste d’Erneville with a slave woman.

Charles moved to France where he spent time in debtor’s prison. Like his father, he became a soldier and moved to what is now Sénégal in 1785. He married into a prominent Métis family, and also contracted a second marriage. Métis women, the children of French men and native women, had become the wholesalers in the slave trade, sending parties out to capture slaves, then keeping them until European ships arrived to buy them. They, and Charles’ descendants, maintained contacts with Bordeaux merchants and rose to political power in the nineteenth century. [17]

The costumes worn by the Kanjélé choir suggested a continuing commitment to the symbols of the French church and its social elite. However, a concert televised by Dunyaa Télévision in 2016 showed the group had incorporated traditional artists into their programs. [18]

Availability
YouTube: uploaded by kanjele choir on 28 March 2012.

End Notes
1. Clara A. Avery. The Averell-Averill-Avery Family. 1922 supplement.

2. Walter Turnbull. Lift Every Voice. With Howard Manly. New York: Hyperion, 1995. 2.

3. Daniel Heyward introduced flood irrigation at Beaufort, South Carolina. The primary slave trader in Charleston from 1748 to 1762 was Henry Laurens. He worked with Grant, Oswald, who controlled the slave trade in modern-day Sierra Leone from Bunce Island. (David Duncan Wallace. The Life of Henry Laurens. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915.) As mentioned in the post for 10 November 2017, Sierra Leone became the center of the Poro and Sande societies who rituals were transferred and transformed in lowland South Carolina.

4. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and Michael A. Gomez each have chronicled the slave trade by African area. Her emphasis was on Louisiana, the Caribbean, and Brazil in Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). His focus was on the United States in Exchanging Our Country Marks (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

5. Willie Mae Ford Smith was discussed in the post for 10 November 2017.

6. Wikipedia. "Berlin Conference."

7. Wikipedia. "South Africa."

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

9. Bessie Jones also used an analogous "double offbeat clap pattern." (Bessie Jones and Bess Lomax Hawes. Step it Down: Games, Plays, Songs, and Stories from the Afro-American Heritage. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987 edition. 21.)

10. The ability to create a gesture when no convention existed was one of the defining traits of camps where lexical movement songs were important in the repertoire. This was discussed in the post for 25 October 2017.

11. Kanjele. Home and About tabs. Facebook.

12. They were wearing purple robes with lilac insets in "Prestation du Groupe Gospel Kanjele au Grand Théâtre de Dakar," uploaded to YouTube by SnlTV, 30 October2016. They wore cream robes with rust-colored stoles in "Kanjele Gospel Choir - Ke na le modisa," uploaded to YouTube by Jeff Mvondo, 2 January 2013.

13. "Kanjele." Music in Africa website.

14. Bruno d’Erneville, About tab, Facebook, and Bruno d’Erneville, LinkedIn.

15. Music in Africa.

16. Jacob Neu. "Pierre Henri Henry d’ Erneville" and "Perinne Pelagie Fleuriau" (his wife). Geni website. 11 December 2014. Neu’s primary interest seemed to be a sister of Charles. The information on Charles and his other sister did not include birth dates.

17. Hilary Jones. The Métis of Senegal: Urban Life and Politics in French West Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. 193. The French also used the word Métis for the children of French traders and Native American women in what is now Canada.

18. "CONCERT Chœur Kanjele." Uploaded by Dtv Sénégal on 13 November 2016. More than two hours in length.