Betabel (Beta Vulgaris L)

Trade between Brazil and Lagos expanded greatly during the first half of the nineteenth century. A permanent Lagos embassy is thought to have been set up in Brazil in the 1830s.1_{Freed slaves from Brazil began arriving in Lagos in}

1838. Many settled in the middle of Lagos Island, in a district known variously as Popo Aguda, Popo Maro, Portuguese Town, and the Brazilian Quarter. Others settled in Badagri, as well as Agoué, Cotonou and Porto Novo in Dahomey and Anécho in Togo.2_{These were Yorubas and crioulos (people born in Brazil) who}

had bought their freedom from their Brazilian owners. They were followed by freed slaves from Cuba. The Brazilians, known as Aguda or Amaro, took with them ‘rich experience and expertise in craftsmanship’, and their community contributed much to the development of Lagos. Within 50 years there were 3,221 Brazilians in Lagos, many of them skilled artisans:3 masons, surveyors, carpenters, joiners, tailors, goldsmiths and barber-surgeons.The women among them were renowned as dressmakers and specialist cooks (quituteiras).4 It was these resettlers who introduced the celebrated Brazilian architectural style to be seen in Lagos, Ibadan and Oshogbo, whose main features are ‘flamboyant floral designs on doorways and portals, bas-relief decorations on the lower half of the outer wall, and a verandah in front of the house’.5

The resettlers also brought to Nigeria various Brazilian popular festivals, notably the careta masquerade celebrating Easter and Christmas;6_{the Bumba-}

meu-boi dramatic dance, lightly disguised as a masquerade called burrinha; an d the Bonfin festival. In the 1880s there were complaints in Lagos about dances by ‘semi-nude’ women and ‘bawdy’ songs known as Pandero:7 _{these too may}

have been introduced by the resettlers from Brazil, where the tambourine is called pandeiro. In neighbouring Dahomey towards the end of the nineteenth century, Francisco da Souza, ‘wishing to revive Brazilian entertainments under African skies’,8formed an orchestra called Bourrillan to provide the music for the Bonfin festival in Agoué, Ouidah and Porto-Novo. At the head of the procession went a torch topped by a star, followed by a series of wooden animals: bull, horse, camel, giraffe, elephant and ostrich. Then came the master of ceremonies, two singers and the musicians, playing three drums of Brazilian

origin as well as a drum called palma and one or two pairs of tchèkèlè castanets. The Brazilian-derived drums were the bane, a double-headed drum 22cm high and 55cm in diameter, the sinéga small frame drum 15cm high and measuring 36cm along each side; and the sámbà drum, a hand-beaten single-membrane drum with a square or rectangular frame, 9.5cm high, 20cm long, and 11cm wide. Another Dahomey orchestra of Brazilian origin, called Wolo, which provided music for popular celebrations in Ouidah, consisted of one bane drum, two sinéga frame drums and one or two gan gongs.9

The most important of these drums that the Brazilians took to Nigeria, the sámbà frame drum was often used later in jújù music and sometimes also as part of the accompaniment in palmwine music.10 _{Such drums are still made}

today – ‘by carpenters and not by specialized instrument makers’.11_{Unlike, for}

instance, the bàtá drums used in the worship of S.ò.ngó, the sámbà drum had no association with Yoruba traditional religion and accordingly, together with the tambourine, became the chief percussion instrument played in Christian churches in Nigeria.12

The as.ikó dance style, which preceded the emergence of jújù in the mid- 1930s, used three sámbà drums, a wooden box struck by the player’s heel and a wood-cutting saw that served as a notched scraper.13_{Christopher Waterman}

says that elderly informants, pointing to a relationship between as.ikó rhythms and the African-Brazilian samba, sometimes used the terms as.ikó and sámbà interchangeably.14 According to Frank Aig-Imoukhuede, ‘up till the 1940s in Lagos, the samba and many Brazilian dances were still prevalent’.15_Waterman

points out that as.ikó was ‘a local variant of a type of syncretic street drumming found in port towns throughout Anglophone West Africa’; similar ‘neotradi- tional dance musics using wooden frame drums (kpanlogo, gombe, konkomba) were also found in towns along the West African coast from Fernando Poo to Bathurst’.16

The Brazilian resettlers’ musical influence in Nigeria was not confined to the sámbà drum or to African-Brazilian rhythms. ‘From samba and Bonfin type cel- ebrations’, writes Aig-Imoukhuede, ‘developed another musical form which later evolved into the highlife – a musical expression common to West Africa in which western popular forms got fused with traditional entertainment music’.17According to Waterman, they also ‘introduced Catholic sacred music, Portuguese and Spanish song forms and guitar techniques’, as well as such ‘neo- African’ dances as the samba de roda:

Tambourines, guitars, flutes, clarinets, and concertinas were used to perform

serenatas, fados, and polkas at weddings and wakes in the Brazilian Quarter. The

most distinctive Aguda performance traditions were the burrinha, an adaptation of the Afro-Brazilian bumba-meu-boi … tradition with elaborate masquerades called calungas, and the caretta or Fancy Dance, a syncretic fusion of West African ring dance and European country dance patterns which involved dancers gesturing with a handkerchief in their hand. The caretta was eventually adopted

by other black immigrant groups in Lagos, and became a mode of competition between various quarters of the city … Although the Aguda constituted only a small part of the total population of Lagos by the outbreak of World War I, their syncretic musical styles profoundly influenced popular music in Lagos. The Brazilians and Cubans, along with other Afro-American migrants from the United States and British West Indies, introduced a range of mature syncretic styles, providing local musicians with aesthetic and symbolic paradigms that could be adapted to African urban tastes.18

The caretta was called ‘Fancy Dance’ to describe ‘the flair and flamboyance embodied in the wearing of colourful costumes and often face masks’. With the caretta

came the band music developed in imitation of music supplied by members of the Hausa constabulary. Here, however, was free musical expression unhampered by the strictness of keeping to notated beat with which most popular musicians of the time were unfamiliar. The beat of the caretta or fancy group was the basic

kere-re-re gbamgbam. This type was soon followed by the Calabar Brass Band whose

repertoire included the most exciting pieces in which cornets and bugles were played with great verve as the Lagosians ‘steamed’ from one end of the island to the other. ‘Steaming’ was free – a sort of dance parade which gathered crowds as it went along and halted at road junctions to allow members of its procession to dance ‘face to face’ with handkerchiefs held high and waving in the air.19

Appendix D