THE KONGO ROOTS OF BATON TWIRLING

Excerpt from "Kongo Influences On African American Artistic Culture" by Robert Farris Thompson in Africanism In American Culture edited by Joseph E. Holloway (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991) ,162

This post is published for historical, folkloric, and aesthetic purposes. My thanks to the author. I claim no credit for this excerpt or its notes.

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"The Kongo pose can be traced through these various streams of documented influence, Telema lwimbanganga became pose Kongo in Haiti, then pose Kongo became the drum majorette pose in the United States. Almost all the early baton twirlers in and around New Orleans were black, or so it has been asserted by informants in New Orleans. (59). But the commanding, strictly chiseled, crisp quality of the pose was too powerful, evidently, for whites to resist. Today, the world center of baton twirling is said to be Mississippi - just east of Louisiana and not far removed from the influence of New Orleans. Constance Atwater's Baton Twirling: The Fundamentals of an Art and Skill was kindly shared with me by John Szwed. In this text teaching people how to stirke poses, atwater observes that the proper mode of presentation involves placing the left hand on one's hip and twirling the baton with the right hands. Szwed, arguing as early as 1971 that baton twirling- now considered all American and even Anglo-American - might conceal deep African roots, inspiring a reinvestigation of this important cultural phenomenon.(60)

Notes: pp 182-183
(59) Although baton-twirling cheerleaders are more or less resticted to football games in the United States at large, in the black South they accompany, or used to accompany, basketball, baseball, and other sport events. This popular art is firmly rooted among blacks in the South, where its origin- or, at least, its most intensive development-appears to have taken place. This phenonmenon parallels and is reinforced by the rise of baton twirling, with left hand on hip, in the black Caribbean, notably Haiti.

(60) John Szwed, introduction to Arthur Huff Fauset, Black Gods of the Metropolis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), vii: "Most commentators on possession in North America have in the past noted that some Euro-American people, especially in the Amerian South, also practice spirit possession in their services, and thus have argues that the practice spirit possession in their services, and thus have argues that the practice must have spread from white to black. The same arrogant logic would presumably attibute Afro-American contributions to American culture, such as jazz, baton twirling, dialects, and black cuisine, to Europe, simply because a large number of whites also practice them."

The definitive history of baton twirling in the United States remains to be written. Atwater's Baton Twirling is usefully mainly for the Anglo-American dimensions. Sampling th available evidence, I have impression that the main baton-twirling pose, with left hand on hip, was incorporated from black sources in the South adter the rise of football and half-time ceremonies. In 1939 it was noted that "some of the most versatile cheerleaders" were at southern colleges, notably Alabama and Tennessee; see "All-America", Time, 11 December 1939, 42. A host of European and African-American influences swept in together, merged, or were independently performed. In the process, jazz steps and strutting routines reinforced the black component and, through the tumult and creativity, the telema pose maintained itself intact; see American magazine November 1940 and May 1941, where photographers without comment record the continuity of the mode. Propably not until Trry Southern's article on baton twirling in Esquire, February 1963, did the veil of white imitation begin to part: "the best Strutting is done at the colored schools in the South, and of these the greatest of these the greatest of all is to be seen at Alabama State Teachers College. " 103. For nineteenth-century documentation of blacks twirling batons, left hand on hip, see Middleton Harris The Black Book<1> (New York: Random House, 1974), 42, 43, 45.)

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RELATED LINKS:

http://www.folkstreams.net/context,249
A Brief History of African American Marching Bands