According to Yoruba religious tradition, a woman with a child strapped to her back and a pot of herbs on her head for feeding the child, was running from a dispute with her husband, who also happened to be a hunter and a diviner. The woman fell while running and disappeared in a river of healing that flowed miraculously out of the pot of herbs, which also fell from her head. The woman’s name, Yemoja, became associated with that particular river, as a spirit of motherhood and healing (Abimbola 2005: 128-9).
Enslaved Africans from this Yoruba tradition looked back across the ocean from the port city of San Salvador, Bahia—where more Africans were enslaved than anywhere else in the Americas. They somehow managed to bring the consciousness of Yemoja’s healing and life-giving river across the Atlantic Ocean. Religiously speaking, this might be thought of as a pilgrimage. Environmentally speaking, it’s just the next logical step in the water cycle.
So, in the Candomble continuation of Yoruba tradition in the Portuguese language of Bahia, Yemoja became Iemanja as a mothering ecology of life in oceans and rivers throughout the world. The enslaved and their descendants thus celebrated and expressed their collective embodiment of the Creator’s sacred ego through ceremonies of drum, dance, and song that continue to reverberate globally even today.
This then perhaps becomes one of the first landings of what Lincoln would later describe as Black Religion in the Americas. Actual events and traditions even simply in Bahia and in Africa as well, are obviously much more complex, but the key here has specifically to do with indigenous West African cultural tradition, compassion and the water cycle. Embed a link to Light in the Sky video by Omar Sosa.
I’ve included a link below to a recent documentary movie that beautifully describes the evolution of what I’m calling compassionate community ecology in Brazil’s Candomble community:
https://www.yemanjathefilm.com/
Concerning the colonial period prior to the creation of the first American republic, Fisher describes a continuation of ethnically based meetings amongst enslaved Africans, in which community values were passed from generation to generation, often accompanied by drum, dance, and song. Fisher also mentions “talking drums,” which are likely to have been part of such ceremonies.
In 1676, Virginia became the first American colony to outlaw the drumming associated with such gatherings, for the obvious reasons that Africans who attended them were also inspired to revolt and escape rather than continue in their enslaved condition as disposable commodities (Fisher 1998: Kindle locations 110-251). Their human community ecology posed a threat to the British imperial ego of the American colonies. So the ritual articulation of this sort of community compassion took a different form in the Americas to be discussed in the next chapter.
Still, musically proficient Africans provided entertainment for enslavers during this time that became known as plantation music. The African banjo, imported through the Caribbean and New Orleans became the primary instrument for “American Roots Music.” Although I had heard statements to this effect before, it didn’t sink in until I ran into presentations by MacArthur Genius Grant awardee Rhiannon Giddens, such as the one below. In addition to providing perspectives that are fundamental to my hypothesis, the presentation below spans a much greater breadth of musical, cultural, and historical genius.
Embedded from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQe1p53YN2w
Rhiannon Giddens, a classically trained, Grammy-award-winning musician, and co-founder of the Carolina Chocolate Drops was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant ” in 2017 for her creative efforts in breaking through the silencing of the African roots in American roots music. “[It] can’t be stated strongly enough,” she said in a video-recorded interview, “that without African Americans, without black string band music, without the banjo, country music as we know it today would not exist.”[1] Incorrect assumptions tend to be taken for granted when discussing the history of American roots music, she said. One is that the music all starts in Appalachia and the other is that there were no Blackamerican people in Appalachia. Privately and publicly funded documentary research projects, such as the film Songcatcher (Lions Gate Films, 2000) and the Depression era recordings of Alan Lomax, have tended to perpetuate such misperceptions as well, she added. Simply recognizing the history of the banjo begins to set the record straight in and of itself.
The banjo originally arrived via the Transatlantic slave trade into the Caribbean and made its way up and into the United States through Congo Square in New Orleans. Different groups of ethnic Africans came together in these places with different cultures and languages, and the instrument, which went by such names as banja and banzar, was one of the instruments that was shared amongst them.[2] Like the circle dance, the banjo became part of what Noel describes in the next chapter as a “creolization” process. Unlike the banjos generally associated with American bluegrass music, the banjo Giddens plays is fretless, has nylon strings, and a much deeper resonance. She believes that it comes closest to the gut stringed instruments originally fashioned in the Americas by enslaved Africans.[3]
All of this started in the 1700s, Giddens said. For the first hundred years of its existence in the United States–up through the beginning of blackface minstrelsy in the 1830s and ‘40s–the banjo was a purely plantation instrument. It was played only by the enslaved for themselves and their enslavers. Thus African musicians also learned to play European music. Newspaper listings of runaway slaves during that period indicate that such musicians were highly prized. Enslaved African musicians learned to play all kinds of music on various instruments, including the fiddle. Various interactions between poor “whites” and poor Blackamericans introduced these skills to white American musicians, who gained international notice for the first time with the advent of blackface minstrelsy.[4]
Concerning the American independence from the British empire that began with the declaration of 1776, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker write that during the 1760s numerous and increasingly violent revolts against unjust authority began to occur throughout the Atlantic world (which included the American colonies, the Caribbean Islands, and Western Europe) and continued all of the way up through the American Revolution (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000). American independence was successfully achieved but the subsequent American republic upheld slavery and began to expand westward into a new empire of its own (Immerwahr 2019).
[1] Rhiannon Giddens, “Rhiannon Giddens on African American Contributions to Music” Amanpour and Company 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQe1p53YN2w, accessed April 21, 2021.
[2] Rhiannon Giddens, “Rhiannon Giddens: On the Lost History of the Black Banjo,” A Great American Tapestry: The Many Strands of Mountain Music, June 20, 2017, https://saveculture.org/agat-oral-histories/, accessed April 17, 2021.
[3] Giddens, 2017.
[4] Ibid.
Introduction / Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6 / Chapter 7
Peace Jungle 