Talk:Zaouli

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Unsourced OR moved from the article

Here is completely unsourced OR in case somebody want to rework it.Artem.G (talk) 17:42, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

Explanations of Zaouli history and the meaning of the dance are contradicted among sources and mostly conjecture. The conventional idea incorrectly asserts Zaouli dance began in the 1950s. This explanation is highly problematic in terms of how long folk cultures take to emerge and evolve from ancient traditional ritual. My extensive experience in West Africa has taught me that Africans typically provide Westerners with cultural misinformation. They often tell Westerners (without overt malicious intent) what the inquirer wants to hear, inclusive of fabricating imaginative and fanciful explanations of indigenous cultural phenomenon which are alienated from the truth and provided mockingly in response to suspicions about the Westerner's purpose or intent for the inquiry. 

Its highly possible that the dance's origins in precolonial indigenous spiritualism and myth are forgotten by the people. I found this to be true in discussing indigenous cultural dishes with local people. many ingredients in the dishes are foreign in origin. Regarding Zaouli, this loss of cultural memory likely resulted from the effects of French colonialism's implementation of direct rule, which systemically eradicated indigenous cultures as part of a systemic agenda to create an imperialist inspired greater French culture. This explanation coupled with decades of cohort replacement best explains the confusion in explaining the cultural origins of Zaouli and the dating to the 1950s.

Taking a deeper dive into Zaouli origins, one of the possibilities may be that the indigenous cultural groups of Ivory Coast are members of the Bantu linguistic group originated in West Africa around 4,000BP. They then migrated east and south. The cultural curiosity of this particular West African dance is the stiffness of the upper body torso and concentration on leg gyrations and rotating footwork. This style of dance is uncommon to Sahelian, eastern and southern indigenous Bantu cultures which use stiff legged hopping motions, in contradiction to indigenous sub-Saharan West African Bantu cultures, which concentrate on hip and upper body gyrations. It is possible that the origins of the Zaouli style began in Sahelian Bantu populations, then fused with sub-Saharan ritual dance cultures or emerged in the Sahel then migrated to eastern or southern Africa, and then re-migrated back into this sub-Saharan West African region as a result of intraregional long-term population migrations.

Another stronger possibility is Zaouli dance emerged from a common ancestral dance which incorporated both styles for different rituals. The original ritual dance may have diverged hundreds or even a couple thousand years ago into a West African genre and Sahel, eastern and southern African genre based on different cultural material bases. Evidence for this phenomenon is the Sahelian cattle herding culture of the Hausa-Fulani people of northern Nigeria. They use a stiff upper body dance style, while the agrarian Yoruba and Igbe cultures in southern Nigeria use hip gyration.

Taking now an even deeper dive into Zaouli origins, as the inland African sea dried up creating the Sahara, the people domiciled around the inland sea migrated to the banks of the Nile bringing with them the cattle cult. The cattle cult predated Dynastic Egypt and was incorporated in a proto-Dynastic Egyptian culture at least a thousand years prior to the emergence of the empire. The horns on the Zaouli mask are important indicative clues of this cattle cult origin. Sahelian, eastern and southern indigenous African cultures are typically cattle herders. With the Zaouli, the stiff upper body position was maintained as a vestige of the cattle cult, while the hopping dance was dropped and replaced by hip, leg, and foot gyrations as the vestige of agrarian dancers. In other words, agrarian culture's upper physical gyration migrated downward from the hips to the feet. Moreover, the stiff upper body position of the cattle cult remained in Zaouli dance while losing the hopping motion of the legs and stiff foot position. Based on this possibility, Bantu migrations and forces of dialectical materialism evolved two dance genres from a single very ancient source resulting from economic determinism.

Asians migrated into northern Africa sometime around 6-7,000BP. The Asian herders brought with them the cattle cult. The agrarian cultures they encountered and overwhelmed around the great African inland sea (which became the Sahara) possibly fused culturally with the cattle cult creating cultural innovations in ritual and dance. What we recognize as West African gyration dance remained among agrarians as a collective memory predating the migration of Asians into what is now the Sahel, and the stiff upper torso cattle cult dance became incorporated with the emergence of indigenous Sahelian herding cultures to produce Zaouli. Zaouli appears to be a fusion of cattle herding mysticism and agrarian mysticism.

The cobra on the Zaouli mask is further evidence of the cattle cult contribution to its origin. The cobra may be interpreted as a manifestation from collective memory of ancient Egypt mysticism representing the symbol of sovereignty and rule. The cobra is one of the oldest deities of ancient Egypt along with the cattle cult. There should be little doubt that the cobra deity predated ancient Egypt. The bird on top of some of the masks seems to manifest a collective memory also originating in ancient Egypt. It likely represents the secretary bird which is the symbol of Pride. therefore, the cobra and bird represent the pride of sovereignty and rule. The Zaouli dance mask evidently has very ancient origins in mystical symbolism. The idea that Zaouli dance artifacts are coincidental or independently created in isolation of a deeper history is quite a stretch.

The yellow face is curious ... but is unlikely to represent a "race" implying an ancient Asian cultural groups migration into the region in the distant past. That interpretation is inappropriate and implies a gross racist ideation. On the other hand, light, brown-skinned Africans are described in West Africa as yellow. Going red in the face is called by many West Africans by the term "yellow mo-mo" and associated with Europeans eating very hot pepper. For example, during colonialism Nigerian children would circle European missionaries and playfully chant "Oh you po' po' bebe, if you take-a peppa, you go yellow- mo-mo."" The red-faced masks have nothing to do with satanism and the black faced masks have nothing to do with "racial" identity. The face color of the masks is purely stylistic.

However, the idea of the mask representing feminine beauty is highly questionable. In stark reality to the assertion, West Africans widely consider extreme almond-shaped eyes as unappealing as a measure of beauty, to put it mildly. The shape of the eyes on the masks are inexplicable, but confounds general attitudes of West African feminine beauty criteria. In my opinion, the idea underpinning the face of the mask was more likely represented by something else entirely in the past which has been lost to time but projected something protected and hidden from Westerners and foreign African cultures. Its meaning and significance has more than likely been substituted with a more pleasant storyline for marketing Zaouli. One must consider the fact that Zaouli dance was revealed to the world during the oppressive and exploitative era of French colonialism and the 1950s benchmark of its a priori presumed "origin" occurred concomitant to the African national liberation movements. That should tell us something, indeed.