|
THE AFRICAN INFLUENCE ON BARBADIAN CULTURE
by Trevor G. Marshall
PAGE 12
Back to the Africans and to the cultural contributions they made to Barbados. Also in our cultural baggage which our people brought to the Caribbean was music and not just drum music, but the mouth organ, the one string guitar, the banjo, the wooden xylophone and other musical instruments like that. African rhythms, syncopation, drumming and polyrhythmic music which have survived over the last three and a half centuries and find their exciting representation and manifestation now in our Crop Over Festival and our calypso. Calypso is an African form of music which pervades the Caribbean. We must ignore the names by which these musics are called, "mambo", "samba", "cha cha cha", "rumba", "calypso", "meringue", "zouk" in the French Caribbean territories. You can remove all of those names and put the term "African derived popular music". When you go through out the Caribbean, you can go to Costa Rica, to Limon and you hear the music there, and you come to the mainland of South America Rhumba in Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, you go south to Brazil - samba. You come up through the islands from Guyana, Trinidad, Barbados etc and the beat, the rhythm is the same; it goes faster, sometimes slower, and we call it by different names, but the African music is there and that music which emphasises what is called "hot rhythm", danceable music. The dance is attached to those musics, those which emphasise the waist and the pelvis, and there are jerky rhythmic dances; you will see them at the Holetown Festival tomorrow, and these are unstructured dances, not the graceful ballet of Europe, but jerky rhythmic dances, sometimes orgiastic, suggesting fertility or copulation, and some libertinism in that sexual frenzy is exhibited as well. This is the music of the equatorial people and I do not suggest, as some people argue, a lack of civilization, these people are not savages. It is an enthusiasm for life and one finds that during the slave period this was perhaps the only area of African art apart from the culinary tradition which the white elite allowed because there were slave orchestras. Africans played at almost every plantation banquet and there was a festival called "Crop Over" in Barbados and elsewhere in the Caribbean. It was at the end of the harvest, which could have been the yam harvest in Africa or the sugar harvest in the Caribbean or the wheat, oats and barley festival in England, but coincidentally it was held around the end of June. It was at that time that the drum-oriented music of the Caribbean was performed in all of its splendour and that drum music has remained. It is found in the churches, it is found in our regimental bands in Trinidad, not so much in Barbados, but elements of revelry on our public holidays from Christmas right through the year. The drum-oriented sounds and drum-developed music can be found in Barbados. One of the reasons is that music is a universal language; as Bob Marley said "hit me with music, one good thing about music when it hits you, you feel no pain." That was one of the cultural elements from Africa which seemed to overcome all kinds of boundaries.
-- © Trevor G Marshall, 2000. This document is the property of the author. Quotation or reproduction without the permission of the author is expressly prohibited. |
