Refuting the myth that Black American music/culture is "Europeanized".

[Bawon Samedi]

@IllmaticDelta @Supper @Poitier @K.O.N.Y

Lets go beyond music...

Lets talk about African American fighting styles/Martial Arts. YES African American MARTIAL ARTS! The most common one being known as "knocking and kicking" or sometimes "Teke" or "Kugonga Na MaTeke" founded in low county South Carolina and Georgia. Its very similar to Brazilian Capoeira, but unlike Capoeira it utilizes more body parts such as head, knees and elbows.

A good video.


05:07-He highlights about knocking and kicking.

36:20-He even highlights the black influence on modern boxing!

Some stuff on Knocking and Kicking from his book:

Knocking and Kicking influence on modern day boxing?

 

[Bawon Samedi]

Knocking and Kicking secret society seemed to have a big influence on the slave plantations...

And it also seems people who practiced Knocking and Kicking moved up the ladder in the slave population. They were considered "different" from the others.

All from:
http://books.google.com/books?id=HN...ce=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

[K.O.N.Y]

@IllmaticDelta @Supper @Poitier @K.O.N.Y

Lets go beyond music...

Lets talk about African American fighting styles/Martial Arts. YES African American MARTIAL ARTS! The most common one being known as "knocking and kicking" or sometimes "Teke" or "Kugonga Na MaTeke" founded in low county South Carolina and Georgia. Its very similar to Brazilian Capoeira, but unlike Capoeira it utilizes more body parts such as head, knees and elbows.

A good video.


05:07-He highlights about knocking and kicking.

36:20-He even highlights the black influence on modern boxing!

Some stuff on Knocking and Kicking from his book:

Knocking and Kicking influence on modern day boxing?

Never knew this

this thread turned into some college level aa history shyt

 

[Bawon Samedi]

Modern day demonstrations of Knocking and Kicking/Kugonga Na MaTeke and other African American martial arts.

 

[Bawon Samedi]

Some more

 

[Bawon Samedi]

When research AA martial arts, some of these "martial arts" are really just Asian ones with Swahili/African names being proclaimed as AA/African MA...

 

[Bawon Samedi]

Also I like in the video the guy explains the difference between African vs Asian martial arts. How Asian MA is more stance based while African is more rhythmic/dance.

IMO I think African Americans should make this fighting style more known. It would be neat if we opened up some academies.

 

[Bawon Samedi]

Now compare to Caperira!!


This is why we NEED more K&K practitioners to go beast mode like our Afro-Brazilian cousins...

 

[Supper]

Okay, you convinced me. lol Fine, lets do move away from music for a min......,Plus, we can always come back to ;)

I want to dedicated this post to African influences in architecture in America.

The Holland homestead in Glade Hill, VA,

Our small community of Glade Hill in Franklin County is an agricultural region in the southern part of the state. Tobacco was once the king crop. The county earned its reputation during prohibition as the moonshine capital of the United States. We also claim Booker T. Washington, the great educator, as one of our own.

Our hand-hewn log home was built in 1821 by slaves who brought building techniques with them from West Africa. Daubing, a process utilizing natural earth as the main source for chinking between logs, was used. Family friends from present-day Nigeria verified the African roots of construction techniques such as this during a recent visit to Glade Hill. Based on my 2009 visit to Igboland, I can also attest to the style’s authenticity.

The home originally housed the Sermones family and their slaves. After the Civil War the Metts family came to own the house. During part of this time, my great-grandmother, Sally Walker, lived in the house with her children. A freed slave, she worked as a midwife and, according to family lore, delivered over 500 babies of African-American and Caucasian descent!
(Read More Here)

(Sorry guys I'm going to have to break this series into multiple post so see next post for continuation.)

 

[Supper]

Tabby Construction and its African Origins

The three extant tabby slave cabins on Ossabaw Island in Savannah, Georgia are rare vestiges or artifacts of 19th century African American architectural heritage rising out of a people's cultural memory. They are the tangible evidence of African technology embodied in memory - African memory. The material and architectural construction behold two of Africa's contributions to the field of architecture, archaeology, historic preservation, and history - the tabby construction material and the Shotgun House type.

Tabby, a mixture of oyster shells, lime, sand, and water, was found throughout the southern Atlantic Coast plantations as an inexpensive building material in predominant Spanish strongholds. It should not be mistaken that tabby is a Spanish technology, nor a pure African technology. For there were other cultures that utilized this type of architectural technology. However, its presence and prevalence along the southeastern coastal colonies from the 1750's to the late 1800's is due largely to the proliferation of slavery in the Spanish colonies of Coastal Georgia and Florida.

It is critical to understand that enslaved Africans did not arrive on the shores of North America as empty vessels waiting to be filled with foreign knowledge. They arrived as full, adequate, competent human beings embodying and engendering scientific, spiritual, and universal knowledge of the cosmos, agriculture and botany, mathematics, metallury, medicine, and commerce.

Spanish participation in the despoliation and exploitation of Africa's most glorious resource, its people, in the sixteenth century privied the Spanish to the communal and residential architectural types and styles along the African coastal regions, including building materials. As the trans-atlantic slave trade accelerated during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Spanish appropriated the African tabby technology (and, thus early African enviromental conservation traditions) to the Atlantic world, including southeastern North America, West Indies, and South America.



The Ossabaw Island tabby dwellings highly resemble the Double/Shotgun House, an vernacular, urban architectural type found predominantly in the American south in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. This residential structure, which gained its name from the unobstructed door-to-door vantage point of a shotgun, facilitated living in the sweltering zones of the region. Thus, the floor plan of a typical shotgun house type is characterized by a narrow one-story dwelling without halls, a roof ridge that is perpendicular to the street, a frontward-facing gable, rooms lined up one behind the other where typically the living room is first, then one or two bedrooms, and finally a kitchen in back. Chimneys tended to be built in the interior, allowing the front and middle rooms to share a chimney with a fireplace opening in each room. The kitchen usually has its own chimney. The house is almost always close to the street, sometimes with a very short front yard, and no porch. Camelback house, also called Humpback, a variation of the Shotgun that has a partial second floor over the rear of the house.

In the post-Civil War urban context through the 1920's, the shotgun house evolved into an inexpensive residential form that encompassed a small narrow lot. In numerous cities throughout the South shotgun houses line densely populated areas. As southern cities transitioned to industrialized factories, owners facilitated housing needs of the urban labor force, to some extent, by building mill houses situated in close proximity to the workplace. Oftentimes, these structures were shotgun houses, which had a realitively simple and inexpensive floorplan.



In predominantly African American residential areas, like Mechanicsville and Pittsburgh in Atlanta, generations of African Americans rotated their existence in communities comprised of various house types, especially the shotgun house. Owners and landlords would overcharge rental prices for ill constructed, dilapidated structures giving the appearance that African Americans thrived in such inhumane dwellings. John H. Lienhard, author and voice of The Engines of Our Ingenuity, and M.D. Anderson Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering and History at the University of Houston, postulates that "[shotgun houses] were the houses of the poor, they were houses of people forced to be poor. They're an adaptation of homes the slaves had left behind. They're an African technology carried into the new world. But they came by an indirect route.



In the West Indies, antecedents to the shotgun house may be found in Haiti where the type closely resembled the "bohios" of the native Arawak peoples. Historical archaeological and sociological conjecture support the premise of encounter and cultural cross-fertilization theories that explain some relative hybridization of knowledge including architectural technology.



Most important in this qualitative research is the idea of cultural memory. According to German archaeologist Jan Assmann, cultural memory is an "outer dimension of human memory", embracing two different concepts: "memory culture" and "reference to the past" ). Memory culture is the way a society ensures cultural continuity by preserving, with the help of cultural mnemonics, its collective knowledge from one generation to the next, rendering it possible for later generations to reconstruct their cultural identity. References to the past, on the other hand, reassure the members of a society of their collective identity and supply them with an awareness of their unity and singularity in time and space—i.e. an historical consciousness—by creating a shared past.

The legacies of cultural memory were present and are present in many African American communities today. They are present in rituals pertaining to festivals, religion, art, and architecture. This is a birthright. This is the heritage of Africans in the diaspora. Unbeknownst to many African Americans, this is the mixed heritage of Africans in America. And because several plantations in the American South (i.e. Kingsley, Spalding) utilized this construction type this is an African American contribution to the greater story of American heritage and the diversity of cultures that America likes to boast about, but continues to

LINK

 

[Supper]

THE AFRICAN INFLUENCES OF NEW ORLEANS ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM.

While much has been made about New Orleans’ unique architecture and urbanism, questions about architectural authenticity and the role of preservation continue to be re-hashed in the context of post-Katrina redevelopment, with concerns of a static mimicry of old architectural styles. Looking at the cultural origins and evolution of New Orleans’ creole architecture and urbanism is critical to its continued evolution, particularly in the post-Katrina rebuilding context. And, while West African influences on creole religion, music, food, and language have been well-documented, architectural and urban analysis have been more elusive.


Linked to this is the reality that discussions of Black communities in the discourses of planning, design, and urbanism are often framed in the problematic: their correlation with poverty, crime, public housing, lack of access to services, and so on often frames and controls the discourse. Of course, this correlation points to significant structural issues that need to be addressed. However, consistently missing from the conversation is a mention of contribution. I believe that by analyzing the significant contributions of Black people in this American city, we can continue the long history of innovation, creation, and fusion in new New Orleans architecture post-Katrina and in American architecture and urbanism generally — much in the tradition of what it means to be a creole society.

The origins of African Urbanism in New Orleans

The first Africans to arrive at the basin of the Mississippi brought with them the experience, knowledge, and spatial understandings of urbanisms that already existed in West Africa. While the slave trade undoubtedly spurred urban growth along the coast, a long history of development had existed prior to that, particularly in the late pre-colonial kingdoms of Mali, Niger and Benin. The majority of the slaves that the French and Spanish imported to Louisiana were funneled through Senegambia and the Bight of Benin from the interior of the continent where Black Africans had been building cities for over 3,000 years (Dawdy 80).

Colonial development on the Mississippi coincided with a period of urban development in the Senegambian region of Africa, and Africans played vital roles in both processes (Usner, 1979, p. 36). Slaves headed for Louisiana were collected in the coastal port-cities of Saint-Louis and Gorée in present-day Senegal, Badagri in present-day Nigeria, Ouidah in present-day Benin, and the inland port of Juffure in present-day Gambia (Dawdy, 2008). Some cities, such as Elmina in present-day Ghana, had a population of 15,000-20,000 at the time and “were significantly more urban and urbane than New Orleans in the French period” (Dawdy, 2008, p. 80). Slaves originating from areas near the coast or along major inland rivers would have been familiar with cosmopolitan port towns where people mingled to trade in an already global market (Dawdy). As such, the slaves that were brought to Louisiana generally had experience living in or nearby urban settlements, and brought this influence to the growing port-city of New Orleans.


Shotgun architecture

Of the many architectural typologies in the Mississippi River Delta, the shotgun is of the most recognizable, to which West Africans are attributed for their introduction to American architecture. The shotgun home is one room wide, one story tall, and several rooms deep.

LINK

FYI Here in Houston there is the Project Row Houses which is a preservation/Development group for preserving Houston's 19th century style African influenced shotgun row-house in houston for low-income tenants.
http://projectrowhouses.org/

 

[Bawon Samedi]

THE AFRICAN INFLUENCES OF NEW ORLEANS ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM.

LINK

FYI Here in Houston there is the Project Row Houses which is a preservation/Development group for preserving Houston's 19th century style African influenced shotgun row-house in houston for low-income tenants.
http://projectrowhouses.org/

I thought New Orleans architecture was purely French... Good info!

 

[Supper]

The African House on the Melrose Plantation

The African House (c. 1800), a strange-looking construction reminiscent of the straw-thatched huts found in the Congo, was built as a combination storehouse andjail for rebellious slaves. The African House has been called the only structure of Congo-like architecture on the North American continent dating back to colonial times. The lower level of the unique building is constructed of brick baked on the place, while the upper story is fashioned from thick hand-hewn cypress slabs with eaves that slope almost to the ground. The walls of the upper story is contain murals painted by folk artist Clementine Hunter.

 

[Supper]

Parting Ways settlement in Plymouth, MA

first suggestion that an African American mind-set was at work. One measurement runs through all of the excavated structural remains, that of a basic twelve-foot dimension. We have seen that sixteen feet is the Anglo-American standard. At this site, a twelve-foot unit appears to have been used in the same fashion. The Burr house is made up of two twelve-foot modules. The second cellar may actually be the entire footings for a small structure identical to the first build at the Burr house. However, to suggest the use of tiny, twelve-foot-square dwelling houses at Parting Ways in its early occupation, raises the question of a heat source, since no archaeological evidence of fireplaces was found. Yet, even though the photograph of the Burr house shows a small chimney projecting from the roof, there was neither evidence nor space for a hearth and chimney of the sort seen in American houses of the period. Lacking such evidence, it is difficult to determine how the chimney was supported and what general sort of stove or fireplace was employed. But the negative evidence is strong, so there had to be some accommodation for one within the building.


We might suggest that the difference between twelve and sixteen feet is slight, within the range of normal variation. To be sure, there are Anglo-American houses even smaller than twelve feet in one direction, as witness the John Alden foundation of 1630. However, this latter building was quite long, so that the amount of square footage available is almost identical to that observed in the twentyfoot-square Allerton foundation plan. The difference in square footage in a twelve-foot square as opposed to a

- 202 -

sixteen-foot square is appreciable, 144 in one case and 256 in the other. This is critical if we are thinking of space in terms of the proxemic relationship between it and its occupants. Yet, if it could be shown that the twelve-foot unit is more broadly characteristic of African American building, a much stronger case could be made. Happily, such a relationship can be clearly demonstrated.


In an article on the shotgun house, John Vlach compares these houses in the American South with those of Haiti, and both with West African house types.(1) The shotgun house is acknowledged as a true African American architectural form. Not only does the Burr house plan conform to the ground plans of shotgun houses, the dimensions are remarkably similar. Beyond this, there are differences. Shotgun houses have end doorways and distinctive windows, while the photograph of the Burr house shows a rather typical New England exterior. Again we see a case of using the material available but arranging it in a way that subtly and more deeply reflects the maker's cultural roots. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy calls the shotgun house an architecture of defiance, in that it is a case of blacks stating their heritage through their building tradition in the face of the dominant culture.(2) The little houses at Parting Ways were probably no less, yet because of the poverty of their builders and the scarcity of material, perhaps the statement was not as blatantly made.

LINK

 

[Supper]

BTW guys that was the last one in that series. lol