Africans dance: they dance for joy, they dance for grief, they dance for love and they dance for hate; they dance for bring prosperity and they dance to avert calamity; they dance to pass the time.
--Geoffrey Gorer
Traditional dance has been Africa's superlative art form. To the traditional African, life--with its rhythms and cycles--is dance, and dance is life--expressed in dramatic terms. Among the Igede of Nigeria's Benue State, for example, wake dances are performed during a funeral to express grief. The Masabe dances of the Tong of Zambia are performed by women to exorcise mischievous possessing spirits. The Azande of southern Sudan use divination dances to ascertain the causes of repeated failure in hunting. The Adzogbo dance of the Ewe of Ghana was also originally a divination dance, through which war leaders would predict the course of an upcoming battle by interpreting the movements of young male initiates. Dance acts as a healer during the curative rituals of many African groups, including the Ndembu of Zambia.
Modernity, however, has tended to deculturalize the African peoples and bend them toward Western cultures and imported value systems. Traditional values have been eroded by growing secularization, the ascendancy of materialism, and the impact of role models in the realms of politics, the media, sports, and music. Pride in indigenous culture has dwindled. Togo, for example celebrates seventeen national holidays, all of them commemorative of either political history or alien religions.
The decline of traditional culture
In Africa, the decline of traditional art means more than a loss of entertainment or a diminishing aesthetic. Indigenous cultures are functional social instruments, which have been developed over the centuries to meet practical needs. In nonliterate societies, art forms contain a mosaic of information and skills for coping with the environment. They serve not so much as artifact--an end in itself--but more as a process, as a means to an end.
As a link in a chain of activities directed to some specific goal, traditional village-based communication systems (of which music and dance are an integral part) have been central to the rural African economy. They provided a source of authoritative information; expressed social organization, solidarity, and integration; portrayed values; and validated institutions. But although basic farming technologies have remained unaltered for centuries, the social institutions that have orchestrated those technologies have been eroded. Impoverishment in many rural areas in Africa can be directly attributed to the decline of traditional culture.
The traditional role of dance can be contrasted to the role it has come to play in African society today. Christianity, for example, discourages traditional dance and has failed to acknowledge, with the exception of the Aladura-type churches (free churches in Nigeria), that dance in Africa has been a means of expressing African spirituality. Pop culture has also served to displace traditional dance. Influenced by Western thought, many now limit the functions of dance to recreation and entertainment.
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