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.

Windhoek Adventist Choir - Kumbaya

Topic: Movement - Suppression
Puritans may have assumed a severe style in the pulpit, but apparently were not censorious of secular dance. Percy Scholes noted the first English collection of country dance music was published in 1651 while Oliver Cromwell was still Lord Protector. [1]

The introduction of the waltz in Vienna in the 1770s [2] provoke the ire of individuals who distrusted the placement of people’s arms. Instead of standing side by side, holding hands and moving to a XxXx cadence, men and women faced one another and placed their hands on each others’ torsos in three-quarter time.

John Wesley could not bring himself to condemn all dancing, but argued it should follow the example of "ancient Heathens" who kept men and women in separate rooms. [3]

The latent prohibitions became overt when missionaries were granted access to slaves on Southern plantations. Charles Lyell visited James Hamilton Couper while he was touring this country from England in 1849. He observed:

"At the Methodist prayer-meetings, they are permitted to move round rapidly in a ring, joining hands in token of brotherly love, presenting the right hand and then the left, in which manœuver, I am told, they sometimes contrive to take enough exercise to serve as a substitute for the dance, it being a kind of spiritual boulanger, while the singing of psalms, in an out of chapel, compensates for the songs they have been required to renounce." [4]

The geologist was describing a ring shout, an African ritual transplanted to the New World, and had observed several subterfuges used to maintain them. The first was claiming they were not dances but exercise. [5] The second was appending them to the end of Protestant services.

After the Civil War, freedmen organized their own churches. Some rejected the shouts as African survivals that hindered their full assimilation into American society. In 1878, the bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal church attended a "bush meeting" near Philadelphia. Daniel Payne recalled:

"After the sermon they formed a ring, and with coats off sung, clapped their hands and stamped their feet in a most ridiculous and heathenish way. I requested the pastor to go and stop their dancing." [6]

This was the restrained tradition adopted by the Harlem Seventh Day Adventist church mentioned in the post for 1 October 2017. It also was the practice of the SDA church in Windhoek, Namibia, that uploaded a video of its version of Lucas Deon Bok’s arrangement of "Kumbaya." They did not clap or turn their bodies like the Soweto Gospel Choir had done.

The female director of the youth choir used her right hand to set the beat, and, when necessary, used her left to mark changes in dynamics. The rest of the time, she held it in front of her body. She only moved when she turned from one section to another as their parts entered.

The girls stood in the front row; most had their arms at their sides and were wearing white blouses, black skirts, and red scarfs. They obviously had been told not to move, but their childhood experiences asserted themselves. To avoid detection, most moved their hands in small ways.

A girl who wore a gray dress held one hand over the other in front of her stomach. The inside hand was pointed down and moved to the music behind the cover of the other. Later, she rhythmically clasped and unclasped her hands.

The girl on her left side (from the camera’s view) held her hands down low to keep them from moving, while she bent her knees. Beyond her a girl with short hair let the ends of her scarf drop. She kept her hands behind the tails, and one could see her forearms move slightly.

On the other side of the girl in gray, a girl in a white jacket patted her thigh. The one next to the girl wearing a stripped jacket kept her hands clasped low in front of her body, and moved them back and forth from her body. The singer at the far end of the line moved her hands in a small arc that was the most visible of the gestures.

Performers
Vocal Soloist: none

Vocal Group: Windhoek Central Seventh Day Adventist Church Youth Choir; twelve young women in the first row; the young men in the back row were obscured.

Vocal Group Director: woman
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: none

Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: koom-BY-yah
Verses: crying/praying; despair

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

Format: Lucas Deon Bok
Verse Repetition Pattern: ABACCC
Ending: repeated "Oh Lord Kumbaya" seven times
Unique Features: none

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

Singing Style: unadorned; the variations came from the interplay of vocal parts based on singing of the Soweto Gospel Choir

Notes on Performance
Occasion: probably a rehearsal

Location: it looked like a meeting room in a church. They stood behind a table holding a lectern; a video screen was behind them.

Microphones: two portable mikes lay on the table.

Clothing: The director wore a white blouse and black bottom; the lectern hid her body below the hips. The boys wore white shirts and black slacks or suits with red or maroon ties. The girls wore variants of the black, white, and red uniform with their hair styles ranging from cornrows to straightened.

Notes on Movement
The choir stood erect. The women were turned toward the director. The boys must have been facing front because one could see their eyes turned to the center.

Notes on Performers
The local Adventist church originated in Southern Rhodesia in the 1920s and moved into bordering Caprivi strip, and from there to the capital of Southwest Africa. [7] South Africa had taken control of the area from the Germans in World War I. [8] The church was segregated, and did not begin organizing separate Black and mixed-race churches until the 1960s’ [9] movements for independence. [10]

Availability
YouTube: uploaded by Davy Kambinda on 13 February 2016.

End Notes
1. Percy A. Scholes. The Puritans and Music in England and New England. New York: Russell and C Russell, Inc., 1962 edition. Legend for illustration opposite page 74. The collection was by John Playfield. English Dancing Master. London: Thomas Harper, 1651.

2. Wikipedia. "Waltz."

3. John Wesley. "The More Excellent Way." Sermon 89. In The Works of John Wesley. Edited by Thomas Jackson. London: Wesleyan Conference Office, 1872 reprint of 1831 edition. Version posted on UMC Global Ministries website edited by Michael Anderson with corrections by George Lyons. Wesley was responsible for the creation of Methodism.

4. Charles Lyell. A Second Visit to the United States. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1849. 1:269-270. This comment immediately followed his note about banishing violins mentioned in the post for 11 September 2017.

5. This may have been a deliberate pun on the expression, "exercising one’s religion" if that usage was common in the late 1840s. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it appeared in the 1700s. The use of the word for "training or improvement" was older. (OED definition of "exercise").

6. Daniel Alexander Payne. Recollections of Seventy Years. Compiled and arranged by Sarah C. Bierce Scarborough; edited by C. S. Smith. Nashville: Publishing House of the A. M. E. Sunday School Union, 1888. 253.

7. Shekutaamba Nambala. History of the Church in Namibia. Edited by Oliver K. Olson. No publishing information; copyrighted by Lutheran Quarterly, 1994.

8. Wikipedia. "Namibia."

9. Gary Land. The A to Z of the Seventh-Day Adventists. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2009. 209.

10. Wikipedia, Namibia.