The body is a site bearing multiple signs of cultural inscriptions. People’s postures, use of space, dress codes, speech particularities, facial expressions, tone qualities, gaze, and gestures are codes that send messages to observers. These messages differ across cultures and times. Some of these non-verbal messages are taken to be conscious or subconscious projection of a sense of personal or collective identity. The various forms of “body talk” may flag personal distinction, style, uniqueness or politics, in which case, the body and its presentations become stances of the self. Different from this, body talk may exhibit a society’s or culture’s standardized norms of valuation with respect to what conforms or deviates from expectations. In this chapter, the volume editor outlines the field of study and the contents of the volume. The subject of this anthology is non-verbal communication signals with contributing studies from societies and cultures of Africa and African Diapora. The goals are to document popular gestures, explore their meanings, and understand how they frame interactions and color perception. The anthology is also aimed at offering interdisciplinary perspectives on the problematics of non-verbal communication by making sense of the various ways that different cultures speak without “voice”, and to examine how people and groups make their presence felt as social, cultural and political actors. This ensemble demonstrates the vast scope of non-verbal communication; as such, it employs different but theoretical and disciplinary approaches. Some of the contributions include case studies, descriptive codification, theoretical analyses and performative studies. The issues highlighted range from film and literature studies, gender studies, history, religion, popular cultural, and extends to the virtual space. Other studies provide a linguistic treatment of non-verbal communication and use it as means of explicating perception and stereotyping.

The uneven historical record has little enough to tell us about which African ethnic groups lived in areas of the Caribbean as a result of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. While their African linguistic heritage is notably different, in both Puerto Rico and Trinidad words such as bomba, bamboula, and kalinda survive, as do contemporary versions of the dances they refer to. Once banned in various locales, the dances are now performed in government-sponsored venues of “high culture.” Yet, what the dances reveal about African-Caribbean ethnicity remains in dispute. Adapting the linguistic model presented in Salikoko Mufwene’s (2001) The Ecology of Language Evolution, this chapter proposes that the contradictory claims made about the Puerto Rican and Trinidadian dances’ provenance reflect an insufficient appreciation of the degree to which individual cultural features have been selected and creatively recombined. It disentangles the ethnic influences in these Caribbean dances by comparing historical depictions and current practice to the characteristics of contemporary dance forms in West and Central Africa, supplemented by etymological information regarding the dance names. Despite the passage of hundreds of years, the movements in these dances have much to communicate and contribute to our understanding of the Caribbean, past and present.

Upon his return to Nigeria from the United States in 1970, Fela Kuti had absorbed much of the ethos of the Black Power Movement (BPM). In addition to assimilating the philosophies of the movement, Fela had come to appreciate the significance of the Black Power salute as a symbol of solidarity and resilience; and subsequently incorporated it into his Afrobeat performances. Recent scholarship on Fela has drawn primarily on his musical output in theorizing the man and his works. This extensive focus on his music means that scant attention has been paid to the ways in which his body, as a communicative apparatus, enacted the complex ideologies that he advocated. This paper examines the significance of Fela’s double “Black Power” salute as a performative gesture in the evolution and circulation of his political ideologies. It analyzes the ways in which Fela’s salute con versed with, augmented and even preserved Afrobeat and its politics. In addition, it examines how, embodied by protesters in the 2012 Occupy Nigeria movement, the salute acquired nuanced political meanings. The chapter employs a close reading of images, lyrics and Fela’s stage performances where the salute was enacted and put them in conversation with its employment in the Occupy Nigeria movement to argue that Fela’s double “Black Power” salute figured critically in the evolution of his art as well as in the posthumous appreciation of his legacy

The costuming of gangster films of the 1940’s had a profound effect on disaffected youth in the townships of South Africa. In Sophiatown, a designated “black spot” for demolition by the apartheid regime, thugs known as tsotsis would pack the popular bioscopes in order to emulate the latest film noir fashion portrayed by Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, and Edward G. Robinson.A case in point is the film The Street with No Name (1948) which had a following among tsotsis whose secret male language and behavior was motivated by criminal activity. The film starred Richard Widmark as a crook named Stiles under investigation by the FBI. Widmark’s thug became all the rage as tsotsis dressed to kill in double-breasted suits, colorful ties, and wide-brimmed hats. Comparing film of the Hollywood gangster genre and photographs of residents of Sophiatown, the chapter traces a social phenomenon that still lingers in the townships and shows the ways in which the donning of gangster stereotypic dress gave brief identity to a generation of neglected young men whose lives had already been obliterated by a racist system “rotten with injustice.”

Dress is generally discussed in the literature as cloth and clothing tradition while body arts and decoration are either treated as appendages to cloth and clothing tradition or submerged in the general discourse. This study, drawing on the biological and symbolic interaction theories, moves body arts and decoration from the periphery to the center of the discussion on dress, as any addition and supplement to the human body. Body arts and decoration, as conceived in this study, includes facial marks and scarification, tattooing and incisions, use of henna and other forms of permanent or impermanent artistic expressions done to or on the human body as beautification or for identification purposes. Using Yorubaland as example, the study examines the place of body arts and decoration in the construction of group and individual identity among Yoruba people of Nigeria. Among other things, the study aims at situating these items of dress within the broader understanding of dress as some of the material expressions of a people.

If as the title suggests “the body is a site bearing multiple signs of cultural inscriptions,” it would seem that artists deploy the body in a variety of ways either to articulate various positions of power or to negotiate states of identity, belongings, and relationships. One such example is Nigerian playwright Tess Onwueme who infuses her plays with dramatic movements and gestures which signal the cultural location of her characters and of her plays. Using a combination of feminist theory/criticism, cultural, and performance criticisms, this paper examines three plays by Tess Onwueme: Shakara, What Mama Said, and Tell It To Women, paying attention to how the playwright uses her characters’ bodies to register their socio-economic and political marginalization as well as to protest such disempowerment. In almost all of her plays, Onwueme uses movement, especially dance, as a trope to interrogate her women characters’ identities, thus engaging in what Helen Gilbert describes as “an active self-constituting process” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 304). This contribution examines how the body becomes representative of the site for cultural (colonial and postcolonial) struggles of identity and “authenticity?” How and of what does the body signify either non-verbally through gestures, including dance, facial expressions, hand motions, and body movements?

Natural language is composed of multiple modes of utterances, including spoken words and gestures, the spontaneous movements of the hands and other parts of the body. Is there a relationship between gestures that accompany speech and non-linguistic movements of the body that occur during routine activities such as cooking, fishing and farming? Drawing from video recordings of elicited and spontaneous speech of chiTonga speakers in ), I show that gestures reflect culturally specific habits of how speakers in a particular community use their hands and bodies to perform everyday activities. For example, bundling the fingertips of the right hand while moving the hand close to the mouth forms the gesture for “food.” The semantic value of this gesture comes from the local method of consuming nsima, a thick porridge typically made of cassava or maize flour. The eater removes a small portion of the porridge with his or her hand, molds the small portion into a ball with the palm of the hand and transports the porridge into the mouth. Using evidence from a chiTonga speaking society in Malawi, this paper presents further evidence about the relationship between language and a speaker’s knowledge of the physical interaction with the world.

The Hamar are a semi-pastoralist society living in the south western Ethiopia close to the lower Omo valley. Although the Hamar are predominantly pastoralists keeping cattle near the Omo Valley, their economy is characterized as a mixture of pastoralism and shifting agriculture. The population of the Hamar, according to the 2007 national census, is 46,532. Nevertheless, the Hamar dominates the region because of the high tourist attraction associated with their unique cultural practices such as bull jumping, Evangadi dance, clothing, hairstyle, and body paintings. The Hamar uses an intricate system of nonverbal communication system including body scar, body paintings and object language (clothing, hairstyle, necklaces and decoration with animal skins) in order to communicate various social, cultural and political meanings that are largely conscious acts. A person’s social status (married, unmarried, engaged, hero, wealthy, etc.), political rank as well as cultural values, norms and expectations are communicated through a range of nonverbal codes. This study examines the linguistic encoding of the nonverbal communication system and looks into the structure, function and evolution of the nonverbal codes. The study further investigates the impact of modernity, tourism and the global economy on the nonverbal communication coding of the Hamar society.

This paper examines the Yoruba cultural practice of body/facial marking, a culture that is believed to be dying out as a result of the influence of modernity. In the past, Yoruba people marked their bodies with culturally cognitive semiotics for dual purposes of collective identification and beauty; the former was an especially important protection against the abductions that occur during war and slave raiding. For a people who were under the constant threat of being kidnapped, the body became a site for mapping consanguinity and a strategy for ensuring survival and/or retrieval. The other purpose, beauty, is realized through the designs of the markings. With modernity, the culture of facial/body marking has greatly waned and even in certain places, an illegal practice. Yet Yorubas realize the dual purposes of collective identity and beauty that facial/body marking serves through the emergent culture of Aso-Ebi. The Aso-Ebi practice is a relatively modern practice one in which members of a family, along with their friends choose a particular material to wear during a ceremony. While on one hand, the Aso-Ebi is a modern evolution of facial/body marking; on the other hand, its practice is complicated by the fluidity of modernity.

Every society attributes certain significance, meaning to appearance and non-aural symbolic expressions. As non-verbal signal, the view, use, meaning and interpretations of hairstyles are culturally rooted and specific, while reflecting varied approaches to cultural globalization. This paper is a systematic study of the judgments that a society and individuals make about non-verbal signals, exemplified using hairstyle. Specifically, it aims at understanding those internalized values that trigger the judgments that invariably inform actions (positive or negative) directed at the person. More specifically, it is interested in understanding the source of “beliefs” that drive perception, judgment and invariably action. The point of departure for the discussion will be Yoruba people with respect to the way they perceive and treat people with dreadlocks.

Based on ethnographic research carried out in the Repentance and Holiness Ministry (RHM), a Neo-Pentecostal Church founded by self-proclaimed Prophet, Dr David Edward Owour, this paper examines Neo-Pentecostal practices and discourses on gender, sex and women bodies in Kenya. In this ministry women are taught to embody holiness through a unique dress code supposedly designed to materialise and enflesh holiness, piety, chastity and modesty. As if feminising holiness as “women-only virtue”, this ministry teaches that women’s bodies are ‘temples of the Holy Spirit’ and through dressing in specific ways women must frame purity so as not to tempt men/brothers into ‘sexual immorality’. Sexual sins are also framed as “sin against the Holy Spirit, the unforgiveable sin to be dreaded at all cost. As sources of ritual impurity, contamination and danger, but also as saved daughters and holy women’, women are prohibited by church teaching from wearing ‘trousers, mini-skirts, short dresses, spaghetti tops, sleeveless shirts or tops and skirts with a cut/slit. This paper argues that the discourse of holiness and purity as well as dress code for the female body are a pointer not only of how women’s bodies are perceived, constructed and understood but also how gendered connotations of women’s dressing and bodies become sites of debates and discourses about moral decay in Africa and how women bodies are purveyors of social and moral lapses. Through a critical analysis of women’s dress codes and the doctrines attaching to this in RHM, the paper seeks to ethnographically illustrate how women bodies are constructed and their sexualities negotiated, controlled and navigated in Pentecostal churches in Kenya. The paper concludes that the discourse and praxis of female dress code as illustrated in RHM reinforce gender roles and patriarchal dominance over women’s bodies and sexualities and in turn create negative views and images of women’s sexual health and bodies.

The body is a site bearing multiple signs of cultural inscriptions. People’s postures, use of space, dress codes, speech particularities, facial expressions, tone qualities, gaze, and gestures are codes that send messages to observers. These messages differ across cultures and times. Some of these non-verbal messages are taken to be conscious or subconscious projection of a sense of personal or collective identity. The various forms of “body talk” may flag personal distinction, style, uniqueness or politics, in which case, the body and its presentations become stances of the self. Different from this, body talk may exhibit a society’s or culture’s standardized norms of valuation with respect to what conforms or deviates from expectations. The subject of this anthology is non-verbal communication signals with contributing studies from societies and cultures of Africa and African Diaspora. The goals are to document popular gestures, explore their meanings, and understand how they frame interactions and color perception. The anthology is also aimed at offering interdisciplinary perspectives on the problematics of non-verbal communication by making sense of the various ways that different cultures speak without “voice”, and to examine how people and groups make their presence felt as social, cultural and political actors. This ensemble demonstrates the vast scope of non-verbal communication; as such, it employs different but theoretical and disciplinary approaches. Some of the contributions include case studies, descriptive codification, theoretical analyses and performative studies. The issues highlighted range from film and literature studies, gender studies, history, religion, popular cultural, and extends to the virtual space. Other studies provide a linguistic treatment of non-verbal communication and use it as means of explicating perception and stereotyping.