Dance and song call on the benevolent spirits to
bring blessings into the community or to restore
peace and harmony where chaos was disrupting
the rhythms of nature or the balance between the
people and the universe of their lives. They also
are part of the community’s rites of passage:
births, marriages, and funerals. Music and dance
are also there to help the community deal with the
great threats that have to be met in everyday life.
Such ceremonies usually take place in the
common grounds of the compound or the forest
nearby. The women, men, and children of the
community, along with their guests, form a circle,
and inside it, the drummers and the dancers take
the floor. In some cases, the community also joins
in singing and clapping; in other cases, the active
participation of the community is not welcome, as
is the case with the Mossi religious ceremonies.
Ana Monteiro-FerreiraSeealsoRituals
Further Readings
Asante, M., & Abarrry, A. (1996).African Intellectual
Heritage. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Ibitokun, B. M. (1993).Dance as Ritual Drama and
Entertainment in the“Gelede”of the Ketu-Yoruba
Subgroup in West Africa. Ilé-Ifè, Obafemi: Awolowo
University Press.
Kisliuk, M. (1998).Seize the Dance. BaAka Musical Life
and the Ethnography of Performance. Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press.
Soyinka, W. (1973).Myth,Literature and the African
World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
DAUSI
The Dausi represents a massive complex of histori-
cal and mythological dramas associated with the
development of the peoples of the Sahel region in
Northern Western African. These oral traditions
and songs were ancient in the area long before Leo
Frobenius, the German ethnologist, visited the
Sahel from 1899 to 1915 and collected some of
them for translation into German. What is clearly
revealed in the corpus of African oral traditions
from this region is the relationship between the
ancient Garamante people found in the writings of
Herodotus in the 5th century BC. Actually, the
ancient city of Ghana seems to have been linked to
the current city of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso,
through a series of historical events.
According to the Dausi, there was a twin-city
called Garama. One section of the city was for
women and the other section was for men. During
a great annual festival, the men and women could
come together for social and physical interactions,
and after that time, the women would become
pregnant. This twin-ness of the city lasted until a
great king named Ghasir ascended the throne and
decreed that the city should become one.
There is a legend that Alexander, the conqueror
of Egypt, visited this region, where he met the
great warrior women of Africa. He was informed
by one of the sages of the region that if he
attacked the women and won, the people would
say that he was a coward who only fights women.
However, the sage told him, if he attacked the
women and lost, the people would say that he was
a weakling because he was defeated by women.
The Dausi record the history of the
Garamantes who controlled a region from Libya
to Niger. It is said that the Garamantes founded
the town of Agada and other cities in the Sahel
and moved closer to Niger when the Arabs
invaded the region after the 9th century AD. In
the Dausi, one learns that there was an ideal city
(it might have been Ouagadougou) that was com-
posed of the four cities of the epic: Agada, Jerra,
Ghana, and Silla. Some have speculated that the
namesGhana,Jenne,Guinea, andGaramarefer
to the same town. It is not clear in the Dausi that
these towns are one city. We know, of course, that
the four cities were founded one after another.
The city of Ouagadougou was built and destroyed
four times. The fact that it kept coming back
meant that it was a miraculous city that prospered
and grew wealthy.
In the Dausi, the story is told that every year in
this great city a girl was sacrificed to Bida, the
serpent deity who lived in a pond near the Niger
River. Every year Bida would fly over the great city
and spew gold out of its mouth like a golden dust
storm. One year, the girl who was to be sacrificed
was called Sia Yattai-Bari. She was the most beauti-
ful of the girls in the city. She had a lover whose194 Dausi