Candombe, an ancestral beat.

• Author: Bonilla, Oscar
• Position: Uruguayan carnival festival

With exuberant rhythm and pageantry, Montevideo's African community celebrates its deeply rooted cultural heritage

During the nights of mid-February, when the multicolored lamps that snake throughout Montevideo's Barrio Sur are lit, the aroma of roasted meats and wine fills the air and the drums begin to beat. The stage is now set to relive the Llamadas - one of the most authentic expressions of Carnival in South America.

The Llamadas signifies a calling of the drums to celebrate. This Afro-Uruguayan festival has its roots in the religious rituals and cultures of Angola, Mozambique, and the Congo, the countries of origin of most present-day Afro-Uruguayans. Today this festival celebrates a true mix of European and African cultures, constituting one of the clearest examples of syncretism in modern-day Uruguay.

The first Africans came to Uruguay as a result of the slave trade instituted by Spain. In the eighteenth century Montevideo was the only port of entry for slaves coming to the continent's southern cone, and until the early 1800s slaves made up one-third of Montevideo's growing population. Men and women worked on haciendas as field laborers and domestic servants, respectively. The need among these displaced peoples to maintain links among themselves and to continue their own cultural heritages and religious rituals drove them to find meeting places where dance became an expression of both religious worship and of freedom.

To the invitation "vamos a tango," African men and women came together to dance the bambula, the chica, and other dances, all of which came to make up Candombe. In etymological terms, the Creole term candombe appears to derive from the word chindombe, of the African dialect Kimbundo, meeting a "man who entertains women and children." The dance, however, has evolved to include parts for both men and women.

According to Uruguayan musicologist Lauro Ayestaran, "what we know today as Candombe from the writers of the nineteenth century is nothing more than the second stage of evolution of the black dances on the continent. In it, the black man adds some parts of the contra dance, or white man's square dance, to his own personal choreographic moves."

In 1760 the Council of Montevideo signed a decree requiring blacks to participate in the Celebration of Corpus Christi. This followed the age-old custom in which the faithful assembled in professional troops and performed for the crowds, dancing to the beat of the military...