Dancing and Xhosa Resistance

The revolt of the Xhosa against the British colonial forces in early 19th century South Africa was marked by dancing. Like the Native American Ghost Dancers, and similarly faced with overwhelming military force, some hoped that dancing would summon the ancestors to aid them in their struggle. The Xhosa did not rely on dancing alone though, and waged a long campaign of armed resistance. Today an area of the Eastern Cape is named after Makana (sometimes splet Makanda or Makanna) the leader of this campaign.

A close association of millennialist prophecy and warfare against intruders occurred in South Africa during the unsettled period of European conquest in the first half of the nineteenth century. European misconceptions of the tribal system of the Bantu and, even more, the misapprehension of the missionaries concerning native religion, were important factors in the wars between the Xhosa and the British forces in the Cape in the carly nineteenth century.

... Ndlambe [leader of many of the Xhosa groups], who had been a persistent enemy of the British... was pushed over the Fish River by British forces in the Fourth Kaffir War in 1812. A prophet, Makanna, arose as Ndlambe's adviser, and he persuaded Ndlambe's following, and the warriors of the Gcaleka, that with his aid the bullets of the English would turn to water, and the English themselves would be pushed into the sea. The numbers involved on the two sides were so utterly disproportionate that, once bullets were neutralized, such a result appeared a certainty. He would release lightning against them, and ensure victory for Ndlambe's warriors...

He taught that he was the emissary of Thlanga, creator of the Xhosa, who would raise ancestor spirits to assist them in battle. The god of black men, Dalidipu, was greater than the white god, Tixo, and Dalidipu's wife was a raingiver, while his son was Tayhi, the Xhosa name for Christ. Dalidipu sanctioned the Xhosa way of life, including the customs of polygamy and brideprice, which the missionaries said were sins. Makanna taught that black men had no sins except witchcraft, since adultery and fornication were not sins: on the other hand, the white men were, on their own admissions full of sins. Dalidipu would punish Tixo, and the white men would be destroyed. If the Xhosa danced, they could bring back the ancestors, who would come armed and with herds of cattle.

The British were allied with Gaika [leader of another group of Xhosa], who was the first object of attack by Ndlambe and Makanna. His defeat led the British into the Fifth Kaffir War of 1818-19, but their first success against Ndlambe's men beyond the Fish River did not prevent further hostilities between Gaika and Ndlambe, and Makanna's army crossed the Fish River singing that they would chase the white men from the earth. On 23 April 1819 ten thousand warriors, led by Ndlambe's son, Dushane, and Makanna attacked Grahamstown, which they failed to take and where they suffered heavy losses. This failure did not, however, bring about Makanna's downfall, and the war continued with the British driving the Xhosa back as far as the Kei River. In August Makanna gave himself up because his people were starving, and, so he declared, to see whether this would restore the country to peace. He was drowned some months later in attempting to escape, after his fellow prisoners on Robbell Island had overwhelmed the guard and made a bid for the mainland. That he was dead was not believed by the Xhosa, who for years expected his return to help them.

Source: Bryan Wilson, Magic and the Millennium (London: Heinemann, 1973).

Powwow - the Dream Dance

An account of the Powwow ceremony- also known as the Dream Dance or Drum Dance - which spread amongst Native Americans from the 1870s. It apparently went into decline from the 1950s, although it is still performed today - the photographs are from a Shinnecock Nation powwow festival in 2004 .


The introduction of the Drum Dance was the work of a Sioux girl who, in 1876, whilst fleeing from the white soldiers who had killed all the other members of her band, concealed herself for about twenty hours in a lake. Eventually the spirits offered her help, and told her that she must teach a new dance to all the Indian tribes. The girl apparently went from tribe to tribe teaching the dance, enjoining Indians to put away the small drums they had used and to use larger ones, and to discontinue their war and pipe dances in favour of the new dance. Only the new large drum would be sufficient to keep away bad spirits. The dance appears to have spread to the Chippewa in the late 1870s, and from them to the Menomini. To the original story there was an accretion of various myths-of the girl acquiring invisibility and so escaping the soldiers, for example- but the more important aspects are the organization of the cult, the rituals and the ethical injunctions.

The central rituals of the Powwow consisted of both weekly and seasonal performances. The drum, which was invested with power from the spirits, was the central object of the cult. It was itself sacred, and was a symbol of the supernatural, much as the cross or the altar in Christianity. It was also a symbol of the world. In the rituals the beat of the drum, undertaken in unison by the principal officers of the cult, was all-pervasive. To this beat the dances were performed. The officers of the organization symbolized different spirit beings. One, usually the drum-owner, impersonated the Great Spirit; others the thunderbirds who were protective agents for the tribe; yet four more represented the spirits of the four cardinal points of the compass...

....The drum chief was responsible for selecting the other members of the organization, all of whom had important ritual functions- drumming, singing, dancing, offering sacrifices, attending to the dancing ground, and looking after the pipes which form so important a part of the sacrificial system. Women participated as helpers to the singers, and one, the drum woman, represented the Sioux woman to whom the cult had been first revealed.

The purpose of the rituals was to strengthen the ties between the members and the spirits. The normal weekly rite consisted of songs, most of which were sung four times. It is possible that the first songs which were sung were intended to discharge bad spirits, with later ones that expressed the joy of living, although this does not appear to have been formally established. Special handshake songs are included… The dancers danced as each song was sung, although over the years the dancing became less ecstatic and more of a formality. There were prayers and the drum chief usually preached, both on the ethical injunctions of the faith and on the original myth of the acquisition of the cult. The pipes were smoked by the officials as an offering to the spiriits, they symbolized a pipe of peace among mankind. Like the drums, the pipes were embellished with symbolic designs. The seasonal rites secured the the help of the spirits for the forthcoming season.

Gatherings on these occasions used to last several days, until the influence of the white man’s working week made such prolonged religious festivities difficult to organize. Food was also consecrated (invested with spirit power) and became part of the sacrificial offering in these rites, which also included private songs for the support of the male officials, each of whom danced while his song was being sung. The elaborate belts, decorated with feathers, were used by the men who represented the thunderbirds, and who danced to protect the weaker members of the community: others also danced with the belts, to acquire special protection. Special rites were undertaken to bring individuals who were in mouring back into the community of their fellows, and in the early days of the dance there were customs acquired from the Plains cultures, particularly the divorce songs, in which divorces were solemnized, and warrior songs-although these were somewhat inconsistent with the brotherly ethic of the Powpow… An important feature of the seasonal rituals was the presentation of gifts to people from other tribes who were present. This epitomized the central ethical ideals of the Powwow.

The ethical injunctions recounted as the instructions of the Great Spirit (or the spirits) to the Sioux woman emphasized a few simple propositions, which are remarkable when the warlike virtues of the Indian past are recalled. The dance was given for all Indians, and the drum was a manifestation of the Great Spirit's will to help his people, the Indian people. Indians were not to fight each other or cheat each other. They were not to be angry, nor to be jealous. They were to help each other in every way. The ethic was taught by exhortation and by formal didactic orations in the Powwow. The cult had no specific eschatology but inherited the general pantheon of Indian spirit beings, both good and evil, and accepted the need to make offerings to the good, and to placate the evil (although this last item became in­creasingly vestigial). The spirits themselves, as represented in the drum, were the fountain-head of help for all Indians in all their enterprises, including such common tasks as deer-hunting and berry-picking.

The Powwow and its dances superseded the older dances of the tribes in which it gained adherents. The war dance and the buffalo dance, for reasons which their very names suggest, were rarely performed by the early 1950s. The medicine dance still lingered on among the older people… In its early days, the Powwow cult was also known as the Dream Dance and this presumably related to the vision experience of the Sioux girl.

Source: Bryan Wilson, Magic and the Millennium (London: Heinemann, 1973).

See also Ghost Dance and Comanche Sun Dance

Trance Dancing

I originally wrote this article for ‘Head’ magazine where it was published in issue no.10, ‘Altered States’, 2000.

After more than ten years of the instant altered states offered by drugs, dancing and electronic beats it has become almost a cliche for people to see themselves as following the shaman’s footsteps on the dancing ground. A typical example talks of 'techno trance parties as the new contemporary ritual', embodying “the power of ecstatic trance dancing' like 'the temple dancers of Egypt, the ecstatic Dionysian dances in the temples of Greece', Sufis, Native American Sundancers and Australian Aboriginals (Return to the Source).

Music, dance (and sometimes pyshcoactive plants) are certainly key ‘archaic techiques of ecstasy’ (Eliade) used to achieve trance states throughout history and in most parts of the world. But it is misleading to think of a universal, unchanging trance dance. There is a great deal of variation in terms of the kind of music used (and in some cases there is even dancing without music); the bodily movements of the dance, which range from the calm to the frenetic; and the kind of mental state induced. Most importantly, the meaning given to the trance state varies according to the ritual context and the beliefs of the participants.

Clearly there are parallels with modern dance scenes, but it is arrogant to assume that all the various techniques of trance dancing amount to the same thing as staying up all night at a club in South London. It implies that we already know it all, and have nothing more to learn. Considering the differences may be more instructive.

In most settings, trance dance is not just about hedonism (although pleasure is often part of it) or even the mystical state of oneness. Typically, trance involves some notion of possession, with spirits being invoked in a controlled ritual context. These spirits may be ancestors, nature sprites or aspects of Gods and Goddesses. Furthermore these rituals tend to be undertaken not just to achieve altered states of consciousness but to bring about change in the material world, such as curing sickness or making it rain. These rituals can be very complex, with the trance dance only one element. For instance the all night dance of the Navajo’s healing ‘medicine sing’ marked the conclusion of a nine-day ceremonial featuring prayers, sand paintings, sweat baths and medications.

It follows from this complexity that to be able to master the trance experience can take years of training. It is perhaps typical of the commodified New Age spiritual supermarket that people imagine they can achieve the same results for the price of a pill and a ticket.

To say that contemporary mass dancing offers a different kind of trance experience is not to say that it is always inferior. Practitioners of esoteric/magical trance dancing sometimes bemoan the lack of focus for the energy raised in a club or party, but in some ways the key to this experience is precisely the pleasure of abandon and excess without purpose, an anti-economic expenditure of energy without return (Bataille).

There is a clear political aspect to many traditional trance practices. I.M. Lewis refers to spirit possession/trance as a ‘ strategy of mystical attack’ by which people of low social status are able to act and speak in ways which would not otherwise be socially permitted. He gives examples of spirits which possess women and servants, demanding that their husbands or masters treat them with respect or offer them gifts. Since it is the gods or the sprits who are responsible, this ritualised rebellion is tolerated within certain limits, beyond which people risk being labelled as witches or sorcerers.

Trance dancing is also characterised by what the anthropologist Victor Turner calls ‘liminality’ (from the Latin for threshold). This describes the way that people in ritual activity ‘separate themselves... from the roles and statuses they have in the workaday world’ crossing the threshold to a space emphasising ‘equality, anonymity and foolishness when compared with the heterogeneous, status-marked, name-conscious intelligence of the social order’ (Driver).

An example is the medieval phenomenen known as St Vitus Dance or tarantism. In Germany, Holland, Belgium and Italy ‘In times of misery, the most abused members of society felt themselves seized by an irresistable urge to dance wildly until they reached a state of trance and collapsed exhausted... peasants left their ploughs, mechanics their workshops, house-wives their domestic duties, children their parents, servants, their masters - all swept headlong into the Bacchanialian revelry’ (Lewis).

Trance dancing ceremonies often involve reaffirming the bonds between people, between the living and the ancestral dead; between humans, animals and the land. Turner calls this ‘communitas’, a spirit of unity and mutual belonging generated by ritual that is more than simply the fact of living in a common space implied by ‘community’.

Prior to their last stand against confinement in a reservation in the 1870s, the Comanches held an elaborate sun dance: ‘the people danced in bands for five days before the sun dancers themselves danced, drummed and sang for three further days, doing without food and water for the duration of the dance’ (Wilson). We can trace a similar link between dance, community and resistance today. On Reclaim the Streets parties for instance dance music is much more than just a soundtrack. It is the act of dancing together that help creates a collectivity from a collection of isolated individuals, giving us a sense of our power and a vision of a different way of being.

Anybody who has been out dancing in the last ten years will recognise something of their own experience in these ideas of liminality and communitas. (I would add that this applies not just in the self-defined trance scene, but in dance music scenes generally whatever the soundtrack.). Of course, it is possible to criticise this experience as illusory, compensating for, but not challenging the ruling society that denies real community. In this sense, the contemporary dance scene could be said to perform the same role as religion as ‘the heart of heartless world... the opiate of the masses’ (Marx). And there is a truth in this. In clubs you sometimes get an incredible mix of people dancing together, but whatever the feeling of togetherness, at the end of the night some go back to stately homes, some to children’s homes. Yet, however fleeting this feeling, it is never entirely a fiction - even if it only provides a glimpse of how different things could be.

References:

- G. Bataille, Eroticism, 1962.
- T.F. Driver, The magic of ritual: our need for liberating rites that transform our lives and our communities, 1991.
- M. Eliade, Shamanism: archaic techniques of Ecstasy.
- I.M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: an anthropological study of spirit possession and shamanism.
- Return to the Source, Deep Trance and Ritual Beats booklet, 1995
- B. Wilson, Magic and the Millenium, 1973.

Ghost Dance

‘All Indians must dance, everywhere, keep on dancing. Pretty soon in next spring Great Spirit come… All dead Indians come back and live again. They all be strong just like young men, be young again. Old blind Indian see again and get young and have fine time. When Great Spirit comes this way, then all the Indians go to mountains, high up away from whites. Whites can't hurt Indians then. Then while Indians way up high, big flood comes like water and all white people die, get drowned. After that. water go way and then nobody but Indians everywhere and game all kinds thick. Then medicine man tell Indians to send word to all Indians to keep up dancing and the good time will come’ (Wovoka, the ‘Paiute Messiah’).

In the wake of military defeats and conquest, millenarian hopes of divine intervention spread among the desperate Native American survivors of the West in the 19th century. The most widespread movement was the Ghost Dance, at the heart of which was the hope that a better world could be brought into being through dance. In 1870, a prophet called Wodziwob amongst the Northern Paiute people (who lived on the California/Nevada border) told of a vision that the ancestors would return on a train, the whites would disappear and heaven would be created on earth. ‘These miracles were to be hastened by ceremonial dancing around a pole and by singing the songs that Wodziwob had learned during a vision’ (Farb). Although the movement faded away, it was revived twenty years later by Wovoka the prophet, son of an assistant of Wodziwob. In his vision he was told by God ‘about a dance that the people must perform to bring the dead Indians back to life again, for the dance generated energy that had the power to move the dead’ (Farb).

The dance spread quickly to the Cheyenne, the Sioux and many other tribes. Some wore ‘ghost shirts – dance shirts fancifully decorated with designs of arrows, stars, birds, and so forth’ believing that they could ward off bullets. In 1890 Kicking Bear and his brother Short Bull brought news of the movement to Sitting Bull of the Sioux. Kicking Bear told of a vision he had of Christ: ‘Kicking Bear had always thought that Christ was a white man like the missionaries, but this man looked· like an Indian. After a while he rose and spoke to the waiting crowd. ..”I will teach you how to dance a dance, and I want you to dance it. Get ready for your dance and when the dance is over I will talk to you”… They danced the Dance of the Ghosts until late at night, when the Messiah told them they had danced enough.’ (Brown)

“By mid-November Ghost Dancing was so prevalent on the Sioux re­servations that almost all other activities came to a halt. No pupils appeared at the schoolhouses. The trading stores were empty, no work was done on the little farms. At Pine Ridge the frightened agent tele­graphed Washington: 'Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy ... We need protection and we need it now. The leaders should be arrested and confined at some military post until tbe matter is quieted and this should be done at once’.'' (Brown)

Orders were given to arrest leaders of the movement, and on December 15 1890, Sitting Bull was killed during an attempted arrest. Two weeks later at Wounded Knee Creek a group of Ghost Dance believers – 120 men and 230 women and children – were surrounded by the US military. They opened fire indiscriminately, killing between 150 and 250 people. It was the last stand of the Ghost Dance.

Sources: Man’s Rise to Civilisation – Peter Farb (1969); Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee – Dee Brown (1970). See also: Comanche Sun Dance.

Comanche Sun Dance

In desparate times, millennarian movements have arisen in which people hoped to be liberated from their oppression by a sudden magical transformation, perhaps sparked by the return of the ancestors or divine intervention. In many of these movements communal dancing and festivities have played a key role, what Bryan Wilson in his study Magic and the Millennium called 'efforts to dance into being the new dispensation' - a party to bring on the end of the world, or at least turn it upside down. One such episode arose on the South Plains of the United States in the 1870s:

'the Comanches... way of life was under severe threat in the 1870s, when the buffalo herds were fast diminishing, when Ishatai ('Coyote Droppings'), a young warrior medicine-man, who had 'proved' his own immunity to bullets and had 'raised the dead", arose in 1873. The Comanches had resisted confinement in the reserva­tion at Fort Sill...

Ishatai claimed to have communed with the Great Spirit, and he successfully predicted the appearance of a comet, to be followed by a long summer drought. He succeeded in gathering all the Comanches together—a feat which the great chiefs had never been able to do in the past—to perform the Sun Dance, in which all but one band, the Swift Stingers, joined. This was a wholly new venture for the Comanches, although they had watched the Kiowa sun dances and those of the Cheyenne for many years. A buffalo herd was captured, and a buffalo was killed, stuffed, and mounted on a pole. Mud-men clowns (imitated from clowns seen among the Pueblos) provided 'a light hearted gesture in an act of desperation—the inauguration of the Sun Dance for the earthly salvation of the Comanche way of life'.

A mock battle was fought, and the people danced in bands for five days before the sun dancers themselves danced, drummed, and sang for three further days, doing without food and water for the duration of the dance. Ishatai had promised that he would share his immunity with others, and that they should drive the whites from the land and restore the old way of life. But in the action they mounted against a post at Adobe Wells, soon afterwards, nine Comanches were killed. Ishatai lost his power, and the Comanches, their spirit broken, entered the reservation in 1875.

Source: Bryan Wilson, Magic and the Millennium (London: Heinemann, 1973). Picture is of a Sun Dance amongst the Ponca people