Batuku

Batuku is the oldest documented music and dance tradition of Cape Verde, from the island of Santiago. A circle of women, the batukaderas, beat a polyrhythm on the tchabeta, a cloth cushion held between the knees, while a lead singer, the kantadera proféta, improvises verses, the finaçon, of proverb, praise and social comment that the circle answers in chorus, until the dance climaxes in the dá ku torno. Practised by enslaved Africans and their descendants, batuku was stigmatised and suppressed under Portuguese colonial rule, and after independence in 1975 it was reclaimed as a founding emblem of Cape Verdean identity.