Remarkably thorough and wide-ranging.
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Despite Buenos Aires and Montevideo being the whitest cities of the Americas, their characteristic dances, tango and milonga, are at root deeply and, according to this remarkably thorough and wide-ranging piece of investigation, inescapably African..
Thompson is expertly equipped to make the case, being both a tango enthusiast and, in his other hat, a scholar of African art and deeply knowledgeable of the Bantu language Ki-Kongo, spoken by the Bakongo people in the tropical forests of Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola. Ki-Kongo was spoken by many Africans who were taken into slavery and sold in the Americas. Creolized forms of the language are found in the ritual speech of African derived religions in Brazil, Jamaica and Cuba. Thompson argues that Ki-Kongo is "the main ancestral idiom of black Buenos Aires." In the course of a detailed history of the evolution of tango, with potted biographies of dozens of dancers and musicians, Thompson traces dance steps to antecedent body moves in the cultures of Central Africa at the moment the slave ships transported them across the Atlantic and created an overarching Afro-Atlantic culture.
Wonderful stuff, passionately argued, with some charming lyrical flourishes - `...some milongas are tinctured with yearning...'; `To follow its motions, steps and offbeats is to learn to connect roots with new voices.'
One or two minor blemishes in the argument: on occasion, word derivations we suspect are hypothetical are stated as fact. At times the thinking behind renderings of porteño in Black `yoof' English (`homegirl' for `compadrita,' for instance) beg for some justification. On the editorial side, two passages on the derivation of canyengue, and two passages about there being no African instruments in tango, should each have been melted down to one. And, strangely, the original Ki-Kongo follows his translations from that language, but not so verses and aphorisms first cast in Spanish, for instance, or German. Lastly, I'm against celebrity prefaces a priori: they suggest a lack of confidence in the book that follows. Don't let David Byrne's put you off: it could cost you an enriching, horizon-expanding read.
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