It's rumba time!

UNESCO Courier, April, 1998 by Isabelle Leymarie

Afro-American music began making its way back from the Americas to African shores in the 1920s. It had changed, and returned in a creolized, hybrid form which engendered stimulating new musical forms such as mbaqanga in South Africa, juju in Nigeria, "highlife" in Ghana and mbalax in Senegal. At the same time, contemporary African music, influenced by jazz, soul, funk, rap, Cuban rhythms, reggae, beguine and calypso began moving to the New World, bearing fertile seeds of change.

Much secular Afro-Latin and Afro-Caribbean music is of Bantu origin, from regions which once belonged to the ancient kingdom of Kongo. American dances such as chumbe, paracumbe, fandango, candombe, yuka, makuta, samba and conga are all danced to a regular drum beat with strong hip gyrations and pelvic thrusts and can incontestably be traced back to Kongo sources.

The Congolese musician Rido Dieudonne Bayonne (see box) has recently traced the remarkable history of the rumba.

The rumba brava, which is derived from fertility and war rituals, first appeared in Cuba in the mid-nineteenth century. Today, it is still danced in the poor neighbourhoods of Havana and Matanzas, and in Cuban communities in the United States. The dance has three variants: the erotic guaguanco, the yambu, which is more buttoned up, and the acrobatic columbia, which is usually a men-only dance. The most popular version today is the guaguanco, and its rhythms have been widely incorporated into Latin jazz and salsa.

The birth of son

Some years later, a more hybrid rhythm known as son was born in the rural areas of Cuba's Oriente province. Spanish in origin, son has become syncopated through contact with Blacks. It was initially played using a marimbula (xylophone) or a tre s (a type of guitar with three double chords), a bongo and a botija, a jug which the instrumentalist blows into to produce sounds like a bass. Needy musicians often made rough-and-ready tre s out of packing boxes for codfish. Like samba or calypso, son lyrics are a mine of broad and satirical humour and constitute a juicy chronicle of Cuban life.

Son took root in Havana in the early twentieth century. It was censored in the 1920s during the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado because it was regarded as too "African", but it survived in the city's Black neighbourhoods. Under the influence of jazz, the trumpet soon became part of son combos, which were seven strong and usually included two singers. Competitions were held among different groups and occasionally degenerated into altercations requiring police intervention.

In the 1920s, when the tango and popular Mexican music were all the rage in the United States, several American firms offered recording contracts to son groups. The Sexteto Occidente, the Septeto Habanero, the Septeto Nacional and the Trio Matamoros all helped win a reputation for this music which then very quickly made its way into the homes of the white Cuban middle class. Havana's elegant clubs soon began opening their doors to son musicians.

Together with rumba brava, son is still highly popular among Cubans today, and is the basis of the dance music known as salsa.

From rumba to soukous

At the same time, in Africa and particularly in Congo and the former Zaire, where music lovers hear the distant echo of their own musical heritage in Cuban rhythms, many "Latin" bands were created, their singers reproducing Spanish lyrics phonetically without understanding what they meant. Promoted under the more commercially appealing name of "rumba", a blend of son, West Indian beguine and indigenous rhythms later gave rise to Zairean and Congolese rumba. Just as anecdotal as its Cuban cousin, this African rumba recounts the small details of daily life, and praises the charms of women and nature using the melodic scansion of lingala (a Bantu language).

With the rise of Rock n' Roll and the popularity of the twist in the 1960s Congolese groups replaced their acoustic guitars with electric guitars. Towards the end of the decade, the soukous, a hippy dance that is particularly suggestive when performed by women, became more popular than the local rumba. Influenced by soul and by the Christian hymns introduced to Africa by missionaries, sukous also underwent changes and became more dynamic and more fundamentally African.

Further reading and listening about slavery, Rido Bayonne, and Afro-Cuban music:

Slavery: an Unpunished Crime, UNESCO Courier, October 1994.

Interview with Rido Bayonne, in The Body and the Self, UNESCO Courier, April 1997.

"Gueule de Black," Rido Bayonne in concert, DC Jazz aux Remparts, JAR 64008

La salsa et le latin jazz, by Isabelle Leymarie, Presses universitaires de France ("Que sais-je?" series), Paris, 1993.

Du tango au reggae, Musiques noires d'Amerique latine et des Caraibes ("From the Tango to Reggae, Black Music of Latin America and the Caribbean"), by Isabelle Leymarie, Flammarion, Paris, 1996.

Cuban Fire. Musiques Populaires d'expression cubaine, Isabelle Leymarie, Outremesure, Paris, 1996.