From the Kingdom of Kongo to Congo Square: Kongo Dances and the Origins of the Mardi Gras Indians

By Jeroen Dewulf

From the Kingdom of Kongo to Congo Square: Kongo Dances and the Origins of the Mardi Gras Indians presents a provocatively new interpretation of one of New Orleans’s most enigmatic traditions—the Mardi Gras Indians. By interpreting the tradition in an Atlantic context, Dewulf traces the “black Indians” back to th

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press
• Release date: Oct 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781946160188

Jeroen Dewulf

Jeroen Dewulf is associate professor of Dutch studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of Berkeley's Institute of European Studies. For his research on the early Dutch history of New York and the first slave community on Manhattan, he was distinguished with the Hendricks Award, the Clague and Carol Van Slyke Prize, and the Robert O. Collins Award in African Studies.

Book preview

FROM THE

KINGDOM OF KONGO TO CONGO SQUARE

FROM THE

KINGDOM OF KONGO TO

CONGO SQUARE

Kongo Dances and the Origins of the Mardi Gras Indians

Jeroen Dewulf

2017

University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press

© 2017 by University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press

All rights reserved

ISBN 13 (paper): 978-1-935754-96-1

ISBN 13 (EBook): 978-1-946160-18-8

http://ulpress.org

University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press

P.O. Box 43558

Lafayette, LA 70504-3558

Printed on acid-free paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Dewulf, Jeroen, 1972- author.

Title: From the Kingdom of Kongo to Congo Square : Kongo dances and the origins of the Mardi Gras Indians / Jeroen Dewulf.

Description: Lafayette, LA : University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016049901 | ISBN 9781935754961 (paper : acid-free paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Mardi Gras Indians--History. | African Americans--Louisiana--New Orleans--History. | Congo Square (New Orleans, La.)--History. | Dance--Louisiana--New Orleans--History. | Dance--Louisiana--Religious aspects--New Orleans--History. | Dance--Kongo Kingdom--History. | Catholic Church--Louisiana--New Orleans--History. | New Orleans (La.)--Social life and customs. | Kongo Kingdom--Social life and customs.

Classification: LCC F380.N4 D49 2017 | DDC 976.3/35--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016049901

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I. Louisiana

Louisiana’s Black Population

Congo Square

The Kongo Dance

Congomania

II. The Kingdom of Kongo

Sangamentos

Kongolese Catholicism

Portuguese Influence in Kongo

Moors and Christians

Kongolese Diaspora

Parallels to New Orleans

III. São Tomé & Príncipe

Brotherhoods

The Danço Congo

Moors and Christians

Parallels to New Orleans

IV. Latin America

Kongo King Elections and Celebrations

Black Indians

Moors and Christians

Carnival

Parallels to New Orleans

V. Haiti and the Caribbean

Mutual-Aid and Burial Societies

Afro-Iberian Substratum

Haiti

VI. From Congo Square to Mardi Gras

Brotherhoods

Mardi Gras

Zulu Kings and Mardi Gras Indians

VII. Tangos in New Orleans

Tangos

Vodou

King of Zulu and Chief of the Indians

VIII. Black Indians in New Orleans

The Desert

Devils and Indians

Wild Indians

Kongolese Warriors

Conclusion

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

This book grew out of an earlier research project on the slave community in Manhattan during the Dutch era and a festive tradition among New York and New Jersey’s Dutch-owned slave community known as Pinkster. When writing The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo (2017), I realized that brotherhoods and mutual aid are key concepts in understanding the cultural and social behavior of slave communities in the Americas. This conclusion triggered my interest in the development of mutual aid in slave societies elsewhere in North America, which ultimately shifted my interest from New York to Louisiana. There I found several traces of brotherhood structures that allowed me to connect the famous dances in Congo Square to New Orleans’s Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club and Mardi Gras Indians.

This research would not have been possible without generous grants provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the UC Berkeley Committee of Research and the UC Berkeley Portuguese Studies Program. Equally important for my research was the financial and moral support that came with the Louisiana Historical Association President’s Memorial Award for my article From Moors to Indians: The Mardi Gras Indians and the Three Transformations of St. James (2015).

At my university, I would like to thank James H. Spohrer for his editing work and his help in understanding the unique character of the city of his youth, New Orleans. My gratitude also goes to Claude Potts and Elaine C. Tennant for facilitating my use of the Hispanic Collections at the UC Berkeley Doe Library and Bancroft Library respectively. I would also like to thank my colleague Jocelyne Guilbault from the UC Berkeley Department of Music, who encouraged me to connect my research on Louisiana to the broader Caribbean.

I am especially grateful to Cécile Fromont for organizing the 2015 symposium on Afro-Christian Festivals of the Americas at Yale University, which allowed me to discuss my work on New Orleans’s slave community with Dianne M. Stewart, Linda Heywood, John Thornton, Lisa Voigt, and other experts on Kongolese performance culture in the diaspora. I would also like to thank the Núcleo de Apoio à Pesquisa Brasil-África at the University of São Paulo, in particular Marina de Mello e Souza and Márcio Vianna Filho, for allowing me to present my research to a select group of Brazilian experts.

My gratitude also goes to Patricia Quaghebeur, for her help in my research of the archives of Jean Cuvelier at the KADOC Documentation and Research Center at the Catholic University of Leuven, to Hein Vanhee and Jadinon Rémy for sharing their knowledge on Kongo’s Afro-Catholic heritage preserved at Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa, and to Koen Bostoen, Sebastian Dom, and Birgit Ricquier from the KongoKing Research Group at Ghent University for their help in translating sources in Kikongo. For the translation of texts in Louisiana Creole French, I was helped by Manuel Meune from the University of Montreal and Ingrid Neumann-Holzschuh from the University of Regensburg. With the help of Leão Lopes, Inocência Mata and Gerhard Seibert, I learned about the historical and contemporary importance of mutual-aid societies in the Cape Verde Islands and São Tomé. I would also like to thank Eric Brasil from the Grupo de Estudo e Pesquisa Cultura Negra no Atlântico at the Federal University Fluminense of Rio de Janeiro for sharing his knowledge on the Rio de Janeiro and Trinidad carnivals, to Eurípedes Funes from the Federal University of Ceará, Glaura Lucas from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, and Fr. Francisco van der Poel, OFM, for their help in understanding the role of brotherhoods in Brazilian society. I am also thankful to Melissa Lindberg and Judith Gray from the American Folklife Center in Washington, D.C. for making Melville and Francis Herskovits’s audiofiles from Trinidad available.

My greatest thanks go to a person I unfortunately never had a chance to meet: Michael P. Smith. It was his research and, in particular, his unique photographic work that triggered my interest in the Mardi Gras Indians. I dedicate this book to him, with deep respect and gratitude.

Portions of this book have previously appeared in chapter 4 of my book The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2017) and the article From the Calendas to the Calenda: On the Afro-Iberian Substratum in Black Performance Culture in the Americas (Journal of American Folklore, No. 519, 2017). I thank the publishers for their license to republish parts of this chapter in revised form in this book.

Introduction

Nobody ain’t never gonna find the code, Big Chief Larry Bannock once defiantly argued about the secrets of the Mardi Gras Indians.¹ These powerful words of the Golden Star Hunters’ former chief reveal a painful truth: after years of research and dozens of studies on the topic, the origin and meaning of the performances of New Orleans’s black Indians have remained a mystery. Famously described by the historian Henry Rightor in 1900 as bands dressed up as Indians running along the streets of New Orleans on Fat Tuesday, whooping, leaping, brandishing their weapons and, anon, stopping in the middle of a street to go through the movements of a mimic war-dance, chanting the while in rhythmic cadence an outlandish jargon, the Mardi Gras Indians are still today among the Crescent City’s most enigmatic traditions.²

The New Orleans carnival has a long tradition of people dressing up as Indians. In a description of the 1838 Mardi Gras parade, we read about a masquerade company on horseback and in carriages, from the fantastic Harlequin to the somber Turk and the wild Indian, and in 1846, people dressed in a variety of costumes—some as Indians, with feathers in their heads.³ It is clear, however, that masking Indian has a deeper significance for the black Mardi Gras Indians than just entertainment. Speaking about the black Indians in 1945, Lyle Saxon, Edward Dreyer, and Robert Tallant acknowledged in their legendary Gumbo Ya-Ya collection of folktales that contrary to the casual observer’s belief, these strangest of Mardi Gras maskers are extremely well-organized groups, whose operations are intricate and complicated.⁴ Since references to Mardi Gras Indian culture before 1900 are sketchy, the performances raise many questions. Why do black men wear such impressive headwear on Mardi Gras Day and St. Joseph’s Night? What is the meaning of their songs and rituals? Why does their performance resemble a war dance? And why do African Americans dress up as Indians in the first place?

For several decades, scholars have been searching for answers to these questions. Basing themselves on accounts from members of the community that the Mardi Gras Indian founding father Becate Baptiste was of mixed black-Indian descent, Maurice Martinez and James Hinton interpreted the tradition in their documentary film The Black Indians of Mardi Gras (1977) as a statement of solidarity between historically oppressed people. The film had a strong impact and changed the reputation of the Mardi Gras Indians. While many people, including members of the black community, had traditionally shied away from the rowdy Mardi Gras Indians, their performances now came to be embraced as an expression of cultural resistance in accordance with the new norms and values of the civil rights movement.

However, claims of authentic Native American heritage have never been substantiated with evidence other than that obtained by the members’ own accounts. Whether such accounts are trustworthy is an open question. David Draper, one of the first to seriously investigate Mardi Gras Indian culture, acknowledged that whenever his informants did not know what to say, they would invent some answer, whether plausible or not, in order not to appear ignorant.⁵ Not surprisingly, we find conflicting evidence in statements made by members of Indian gangs regarding the origin of the tradition. George Lipsitz, for instance, quotes the example of a member admitting that we’re not real Indians, we just masquerade as Indians really.⁶

Although there can be no doubt that numerous examples of interracial solidarity between blacks and Native Americans can be found in Louisiana history, truth also obliges us to recognize that this relationship was not always a friendly one. When Louisiana governor Étienne Périer claimed in 1731 that there had always been a great aversion between the Native American populations and the black slaves in Louisiana, this was not just wishful thinking. After all, Périer and successive governors of Louisiana frequently employed black militiamen in their fights against Native American tribes, just as they employed Native Americans to hunt down African runaways.⁷

Larry Bannock, Chief of the Golden Star Hunters, on Mardi Gras. Photograph by Michael P. Smith (1983). Courtesy of the Historic New Orleans Collection.

Moreover, there exists no credible data to substantiate parallels between the Indian outfit of the Mardi Gras Indians and how real Native American tribes in the area used to dress. If, as Martinez and Hinton have argued, the Mardi Gras Indian performances developed out of mixed black-Indian relationships and honor the heroism of these groups in Louisiana, one would assume to find concrete traces of Natchez, Choctaw, Caddo, Tunica, Muskhogean, or Chitimacha culture. However, the Indian elements of the New Orleans tradition clearly point at the Cheyenne, Comanche, and Apache culture of Plains Indians that Buffalo Bill once stereotyped and popularized in his shows.

Due to the lack of alternative theories, it is tempting to relate the origin of the Mardi Gras Indian tradition to Buffalo Bill’s touring Wild West shows. This show arrived in New Orleans in December 1884, at the time when the city hosted the prestigious World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition. A reporter from the Daily Picayune witnessed the street parade that opened Buffalo Bill’s shows and highlighted a whole band of whooping red-devils in their semi-civilized garb . . . and native war paint and the weird dances of their race. To thank the city’s population for its hospitality, Buffalo Bill also presented a Grand Performance to the general public on Mardi Gras Day 1885.⁸ According to Michael P. Smith, a number of black New Orleanians masked as Indians on that occasion, which may have inspired Baptiste in forming his Creole Wild West gang.⁹

The adoption of certain elements from these shows in local performance traditions should not surprise. Even as far away as Europe, we find examples of how Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows influenced popular culture. In 1891, for instance, Buffalo Bill performed in Karlsruhe, Germany, in the Südstadt Quarter. To this day, local inhabitants are nicknamed Indianer, German for Indians. Something similar happened in the city of Ghent, in Belgium, where a visit from Buffalo Bill inspired fans of the local soccer team to nickname their club The Buffalos. Fans of the Ghent soccer team still dress up as feathered Indians and cheer the players by shouting buffalo, buffalo! These examples show the tremendous fascination for Buffalo Bill in the late nineteenth century and caution us from spontaneously interpreting the adoption of elements of his shows in popular culture as a conscious decision to express empathy with Native American culture.

Although there can be no denial that Buffalo Bill’s late nineteenth-century shows are part of the stream of influences that shaped the Mardi Gras Indians, it can be doubted that the tradition started as a mere imitation of this circus-like attraction. There are two reasons for this. One is that long before William Frederick Buffalo Bill Cody (1846-1917) was born, we find descriptions of street scenes in New Orleans that are remarkably similar to those of the Mardi Gras Indians today. I therefore subscribe to the assumption by Samuel Kinser, Reid Mitchell, and Ned Sublette that the dances of the Mardi Gras Indians were long in gestation, must have been cultivated within the black community long before, and gave form to something that was already going on.¹⁰ As I will show in this book, there are strong indications that Buffalo Bill’s shows did not initiate the tradition but rather reinforced and stereotyped a much older black custom to dress up with feathered headwear at festive occasions.

A second reason to question the assumption that the history of the Mardi Gras Indians started with Buffalo Bill is that highly similar performances to those of the New Orleans black Indians have been observed in parts of the Americas where these Wild West shows were never performed. In fact, blacks parading with Indian-like headwear is by no means unique to Louisiana. More than a century before Baptiste masked Indian with his Creole Wild West Indian gang, the French writer Léon Beauvallet observed in Cuba how some blacks in a Catholic procession on the holiday of Epiphany had transformed themselves into South American savages, Red Skins, or Apaches.¹¹ While it may disappoint some, it is nonetheless true that New Orleans’s black Indians are not a uniquely Louisianan product. Rather, they represent a specific variant of a much broader phenomenon that has been observed in many other parts of the Americas.

This assumption is not new. Several scholars before me have pointed out parallels to Caribbean carnival traditions. My study broadens the scope of this comparative analysis to South America and Africa, which allows me to present a new theory on the origin and meaning of the Mardi Gras Indians.

My point of departure is that these performances developed out of the dances that used to take place in New Orleans’s Congo Square, known as the cradle of jazz. The square’s popular name corresponds to the type of dances that could regularly be observed on the site: Congo dances.¹² I relate these Congo dances to the ancient Kingdom of Kongo in Central Africa with the argument that the performances of New Orleans’s black Indians can be traced back to Kongolese warrior dances. This theory builds on the work of the largely forgotten scholar Robert Goffin (1898-1984). In his native Belgium, Goffin is primarily remembered for his role in the resistance against the Nazi occupiers during the Second World War. His true passion, however, was jazz. Goffin is credited with writing one of the first serious books on jazz, Aux frontières du jazz, in 1932. He later also dedicated a study to New Orleans, calling it the capital of Jazz in a book that was translated in 1944 as Jazz: From the Congo to the Metropolitan. Goffin urged his American readers to finally take pride in jazz and in those who will surely rank high on the honor roll of artistic immortality: Louis Armstrong [and] Duke Ellington. He wrote this study at a time when Congo was still a Belgian colony. Reading the sections on Congo Square in the works of Lafcadio Hearn and George Washington Cable, the sounds and gestures they described were not foreign to Goffin. He recalled vividly the stories friends who lived in the Belgian colony had told him about the rhythm of Congolese drum music and the physical motions of the dancers. Goffin took the early reports on the music and dances in Congo Square seriously. He rejected the then still widespread assumption that the African chants were nothing more than fumbling transpositions [of ] French and Spanish songs and lullabies the slaves had heard in Hayti, San Domingo, or Louisiana and presented a credible theory that the roots of New Orleans jazz were to be found in Central Africa.¹³

Despite the fact that Goffin published his study several decades ago, his ideas are of crucial importance to my research. Like Goffin, I am convinced that the use of the word Congo in relation to African-American performance culture in New Orleans should not be understood metaphorically as a reference to Africa in general. While it is true that in nineteenth-century Louisiana, the term Congo was often used in reference to any full-blooded African, I am convinced that when dancers themselves identified their performance as a Congo dance, they did not use this term in reference to the entire African continent. Rather, they referred to a specific Central African tradition. As we will see, the comparison of descriptions of Congo dances in New Orleans to those elsewhere in the Americas reveal that the parallels overwhelming point in the direction of the Kongo kingdom.

My focus on the Kongo region admittedly narrows the understanding of black dancing, music, and performance culture in New Orleans since it excludes to a large degree the equally important influences from other parts of Africa. The focus allows me, however, to trace back in history one stream of major importance to the development of black performance culture in New Orleans. As Sublette confirms, the largely uncomprehended legacy of the Kongo permeates the popular music the world listens to today. It is perhaps the strongest link between the musics of Havana and New Orleans, which is to say, between Afro-Cuban and African-American music.¹⁴

When used in the context of transatlantic slavery, the word Congo relates to the once powerful Kongo kingdom. The kingdom’s heartland was located in the northwestern part of today’s Angola and the southwestern part of the modern Democratic Republic of Congo. Yet from the late-fifteenth until the late-seventeenth century, its influence extended as far as the Cabinda region from where some three hundred members of New Orleans’s first generation of slaves originated. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the Kongo kingdom was the strongest political entity in the Central part of Africa that, in total, accounted for about 40 percent of the victims of the transatlantic slave trade.¹⁵ The Portuguese, who initiated the slave trade from the Kongo kingdom to their sugarcane plantations in Brazil, considered all those who originated from that region to be members of the nação do Congo. This was translated into English as the Congo nation, although Cable claimed that the term commonly used in New Orleans was not nation but gang, whereas the black abolitionist William Wells Brown recalled in his memoirs that people in Louisiana used to speak of slave tribes instead of slave nations.¹⁶ The term is important. As John Charles Chasteen has argued, black nations are a key to understanding dance in the African diaspora.¹⁷

Today, scholars prefer to write Kongo instead of Congo in order to distinguish between the ancient Kingdom of Kongo and the later Belgian and French colonies in the region that achieved independence in 1960 and are today known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (capital: Kinshasa) and the Republic of the Congo (capital: Brazzaville). The prestige of the once mighty Kingdom of Kongo accounts for the fact that large numbers of slaves in the Americas identified themselves and their identity markers such as dance, music, language, and food as Kongo, followed by a more specific denominator that identified among themselves the clan, tribe, or region (Kongo Mpangu, Kongo Bakongo, Kongo Musundi, Kongo Kabinda, etc.). In his famous essay on Congo Square, Cable distinguished between two Kongo groups in New Orleans—Congoes and Franc Congoes. We do not know if such a distinction ever existed since Cable took this reference from Médéric L.E. Moreau de Saint-Méry’s late eighteenth-century description of the island Saint-Domingue, the later Haiti. Moreau de Saint-Méry used the term Franc Congoes in reference to those who came from the Kongo heartland in opposition to those who originated from the broader Kongo region.¹⁸

This distinction helps us avoid the illusion that these slave nations were ethnically homogeneous groups. In fact, slave nations lumped together people from vast areas of Africa, who were forced to construct a common identity in the diaspora. Although most of them did, not all slaves who identified themselves as members of the Kongo nation necessarily originated from the broader Kongo region. In Cuba, for instance, one subgroup of a local Kongo nation consisted of Africans who identified themselves as Congos de Cabo Verde, which may relate to the fact that these Cape Verdians preferred to associate themselves with the geographically distant Kongolese with whom they shared familiarity with Portuguese Catholic customs rather than with the predominantly Muslim community from nearby Senegambia.¹⁹ Research by Paul Lovejoy revealed, in fact, that religion sometimes played a more important role than ethnicity in slaves’ identification with a certain nation.²⁰ Group identification in slave societies could, however, also occur for purely opportunistic reasons. By becoming part of a nation, one could count on solidarity and protection, which must have convinced slaves who otherwise would be a small minority to associate themselves with one of the larger nations. Yet membership of the Kongo nation required obedience to the group’s local community leader, known as the king, whose election occurred on the basis of rituals that can be traced back to the Kongo kingdom. Referring to this nation’s performance rituals as invented traditions can therefore be misleading since it might reinforce the outdated assumption that African culture could not be conveyed to the Americas because of the heterogeneity of the enslaved populations. Since they were based on authentic Kongolese rituals, performance traditions of the Kongo nation were neither the product of imagination nor a mishmash of elements from all over Africa. They were recognizably Kongolese and had to be so in order to maintain group identification. It is true, however, that the diversity of the nations and the constantly changing realities Africans and their descendants were experiencing in the Americas required continuous adaptations of their rituals. Kongolese performances should, therefore, be understood as a balancing act between traditionalism and adaptability. In this respect, they were more inventive than invented traditions.

The focus on slave nations encouraged me to analyze the history of black performance culture from a different perspective than the traditional one in American academia. To illustrate the difference, I can refer to Eileen Southern’s classic study The Music of Black Americans (1971) and her observation that the once prevalent ‘myth of the Negro past’—that enslavement caused them to lose their every vestige of the African heritage—is nowhere more firmly refuted than in the areas of music and dance.²¹ While I subscribe to Southern’s words, I do wish to point out that her reflections on African musical heritage in the diaspora ignored the impact of early European—primarily Portuguese—influence along the African west coast in earlier centuries. Documents relating to the Kingdom of Kongo show that musical instruments from Portugal—drums, bells, trumpets, even bagpipes and church organs—circulated in Central Africa since the fifteenth century and had a major influence on the development of local music and performance culture.²² It would thus be wrong to assume that only upon arrival in America did Kongolese and other Africans become exposed to European music. When Duke Ellington famously played a church organ in his Blues for New Orleans, he used an instrument that can directly be traced back to the sixteenth-century Kongo kingdom. In fact, jazz did not begin in America. This unique mixture of African and European musical elements is the result of a syncretic process that initiated in Africa long before the first enslaved Africans arrived in North America.

This does not only apply to music but also to other black performance traditions. Consider, for example, the following parallels between the funeral march organized by a nineteenth-century black benevolent society in New Orleans and that of a seventeenth-century fraternal order in the Kingdom of Kongo. When the black Captain André Cailloux passed away in 1863, the Friends of Order and Mutual Assistance organized a funeral procession with a marching band with trumpeters and drummers, representatives of fraternities carrying their respective banners, and a flag-draped coffin on top of which his sword, belt, uniform coat, and cap had been placed. In the report about the funeral of King Álvaro III of Kongo in 1622, we read that the King was taken to the Chapel of St. James, where he was buried by the members of his brotherhood in the following way: In front of the procession walked Governor Ando, then the trumpeters and drummers followed, then one would see the flag of the Holy House of Mercy with its fraternity, the crosses of the brotherhoods, the clergy and dignitaries, and six nobles who carried a litter with the king’s weaponry and his corpse covered with a pall of the Order of Christ.²³

The fact that much of what we consider unique to Louisiana already existed in the ancient Kingdom of Kongo requires differentiation of Kinser’s assumption that the black people in Louisiana, as in the Caribbean basin generally were the first to create festive forms which were an original amalgam of old and new customs, of European and African ways of life.²⁴ In reality, this amalgam of festive traditions already existed in Kongo and other parts of Africa long before the first African slaves arrived in Louisiana.

I, therefore, wish to distance myself from a tendency of selective nostalgia that traces black performance and musical culture back to an untouched, virgin African motherland. While the first scholars working on black culture in a North American context were primarily interested in an assumed process of assimilation according to European standards and later generations rightfully pointed out the need to look for indigenous African continuities and for the formation of syncretic cultures and innovations in the New World, my research convinced me that the syncretic mixture of African and European elements is a phenomenon that did not begin in the Americas but rather on African soil. Thus, in order to understand the dances in Congo Square, we also need to focus on the amount of contact Africans had with European music and performance culture before they were shipped as slaves to the Americas.

As this book will show, historical documents about sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European influence in Africa tend to be more useful to understand African-American performance culture than nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropological studies that have analyzed African traditions as culturally isolated phenomena. In this respect, my approach differs from that of Robert Farris Thompson, who also connected Caribbean and Louisianan carnival traditions to the Kongo kingdom but used an anthropological rather than a historical perspective and relied heavily on African informants such as Fu-Kiau Bunseki.²⁵ Whereas Thompson’s research