The enslavement of African citizens and the influences from their many and varied cultures greatly contributed to the evolving art form of African American dance. In many African societies dance was considered to play a more central role than the use of language and literacy in general. Even though the roots of African dance may not remain in their purest form in the modern African American dance styles, they have certainly been heavily influential in the development of American dance.
The Slave Trade:
Slaves were imported from a variety of ethnic backgrounds; from Senegal to the Congo-Angola region, Mozambique and Madagascar – from all over West and West-Central Africa. Each group of people brought individual cultural traditions and dance styles that were unique to the different regions. 95% of the slaves didn’t actually travel to America but were shipped to the Caribbean – there they were said to be Creolized; they acclimatized to their new home and inter-mixed with peoples and tribes from other parts of Africa. A melting pot of cultural and dance traditions was born.
~ Life in America:
By the 1800’s, offspring of the original African born slaves were dominant in numbers and a large quantity of them had now been relocated to America to the Greater Chesapeake area – to states such as Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina. Many of these slaves worked on the plantations of the American South and were initially prohibited from dancing due to the strict morality of the Protestant religion. A form of shuffling dance was invented by the black workers to overcome the rule of not being allowed to lift one’s feet high off the ground. The African rhythms and dance moves inherited from the past were mixed with European dance styles and a new African-American dance began to evolve.
In time, some plantation owners began to allow their workers to perform dances and competitions were arranged to determine who was the most skilled and agile of the dancers. Some slave owners gave out a small trinket as a prize to the winner; a new form of couple’s dancing called the cake walk was started – originally named as the best dancers were presented with a cake to award their efforts.
White society began performing dances like the cake walk in caricature form as part of minstrel shows. Although the manner of performance was largely an effort to ridicule the African