Chapter 02
Ússua, Socopé, Puíta and Bulawe Organize São Tomé's Social Floor
7 min
Ússua begins with restraint. Partners wear formal clothing, maintain a composed upper body and place their feet into a complex binary rhythm. A deep drum gives the dance weight. A sharper drum or scraped canzá troubles the obvious beat with syncopation. The result can look smooth while the feet perform demanding countertime. Elegance is part of the technique: the dancer keeps the rhythmic work from becoming agitation.
What to listen for
Historical writers saw echoes of European quadrilles, lancers and minuets in the formation and clothing. Islanders living under colonial hierarchy could observe elite dances, select movements and rebuild them with local instruments and timing. That is a persuasive way to understand the form, but it is not an origin certificate. No secure year marks ússua's beginning, and resemblance cannot explain every accent. The music heard on São Tomé is the outcome of local arrangement, rehearsal and bodily knowledge.
Filipe Santo's “Ussua Lecado” gives this history a modern recording. Guitar and studio arrangement can carry the composed grace of ússua without pretending to reproduce one old yard performance. Listen for how the pulse leaves room for the body to complete the phrase. Santo has spent decades moving among island traditions, electric groups and diaspora stages. His track makes inheritance an act of present composition.
Socopé is a society in sound
Socopé asks for a wider frame. The word has been used for the organized body of participants, the public presentation, the dance and the musical genre. A group could include a captain or other ranked figures, male and female dancers, singers, percussionists, banners and carefully planned clothing. Local societies had individual names and styles. Their performances enlivened parish festivals, independence celebrations and competitions, and the form spread across São Tomé, Príncipe and some roça communities.
The rhythm becomes legible through feet. Drums and scrapers establish a recurring base while lines of performers keep a shared step. Songs can carry jokes, topical comments and observations that reward local knowledge. Lead and response allow words to travel through a large group without dissolving the pulse. Clothing and banners are not decorative extras; they make the society's internal order public while music coordinates its movement.
Socopé was clearly active by the early twentieth century and reached a high point in the years before independence. It should not be presented as a simple child of ússua. The two forms differ enough in musical and choreographic organization that a direct family line cannot be assumed. Their coexistence is more revealing: São Tomé communities developed several ways to turn paired or collective motion into social identity.
The decline of many socopé societies after independence had practical causes. Members aged, complex organization became harder to maintain, and new performance choices competed for time and resources. Rádio Nacional's tape catalogues preserve names from many localities, but an archive list is not a living company. When a group returns for a public event, the listener should attend to who has rebuilt the roles, taught the footwork and recovered the songs.
Raíz de Nós made one such return audible in “Vedé Vedé,” recorded with Socopé Santomense and Jalego. It is a modern recording, not a transparent window onto 1911, but it gives the social form named voices and feet. Hear the chorus enter as a body, then follow how percussion keeps collective step available beneath the lead. The value of the track is specificity: socopé is no longer merely explained between two other genres.
Puíta begins at the membrane
The puíta instrument produces one of São Tomé's most distinctive timbres. A rod fixed to the centre of a membrane is rubbed, and the friction makes the skin vibrate. The resulting tone can growl, hum or pulse underneath drums and rattles. It occupies a space between bass instrument and voice. Because its sound persists as texture, other percussion can carve faster patterns around it.
The performance forms a circle. Singing establishes a collective field; percussion holds an insistent groove; dancers enter the centre, often as couples, and answer the beat with hips, feet and close bodily dialogue. The music can accompany remembrance of the dead and touch relations with spirits. Context is decisive. A festive public puíta and a private rite may share instruments while asking different things of participants.
The strongest historical line connects puíta to people brought from Angola as contracted workers and to their descendants. On the roças, the practice marked community as well as recreation. Over the twentieth century, other people learned it. After independence, groups with varied origins performed puíta, and it became understood as national culture. That widening is audible social change. It does not mean the form had always belonged equally to everyone.
Rádio Nacional's archive names Puíta Samangugu de Cabeça Água, Puíta Sal de São Marçal, Puíta Liberdade and several other companies. Garrido and Banda da Ilha place “Kêkôlô Láto” at the end of Total Transe, an album whose sequence moves through djambi, socopé, rumba, ússua and puíta. The band setting creates a listening bridge: a friction-drum lineage can meet guitar and recorded arrangement without losing its rough centre.
The catalogued recording by Puíta Samangugu de Cabeça Água supplies the direct communal side of that comparison. Its surviving archive identity names both company and locality even where a commercial-style song title is absent. That is more honest than inventing one. Access depends on the continuing Rádio Nacional digitisation project, but the recording establishes a real company before modern studio references enter.
Camilo Domingos's “Puíta Cuá Telá” carries the word into a commercial career shaped by Príncipe, São Tomé, Cape Verdean family history and Lisbon production. It should not be used as field evidence for an old ceremony. It is evidence that puíta could become a composed reference inside modern dance music.
Djambi requires another kind of attention
Djambi is a healing rite conducted by a knowledgeable leader. Music helps organize a relationship among illness, spirits, participants and place. Drums, friction rhythm, voices and repeated movement can intensify over a long session, but sonic intensity is only one dimension of an event whose meaning depends on trust and specialist knowledge.
The field album Musiques de l'île du milieu includes “Kassaf wenda kimundo wéréra,” identified with puíta and djambi. It is valuable performance documentation. The recording cannot carry the whole rite into a listener's room, and it should not be treated as an invitation to seek a private ceremony. Its best use is comparative: hear how repetition gains density, then remember that the recorded excerpt once belonged to a relationship larger than sound.
Bulawe makes a party from portable resources
Bulawe became prominent around independence and flourished through the 1980s. Its basic resources are direct: voices and percussion can generate enough momentum for a family celebration or public festivity without an electric band's equipment. Drums create a dense, danceable base. A lead singer launches phrases; a chorus answers; rattles and hand percussion keep the upper surface alive. Dancers have more freedom than socopé's fixed choreography demands.
People remember its emergence differently. Some locate early practice among Angolares in southern São Tomé. Others explain it through the decline and cost of electric conjuntos: when a band could not be hired, percussion and voices kept the party moving. Older listeners sometimes compared it with loosely organized socopé. These memories reveal how communities understood change. The music itself deserves description without forcing those accounts into one origin story.
Bulawê N'Guli Fala of Quinta das Palmeiras gives the form a splendid recorded example in “Tira a mão da minha xuxa.” The groove is long enough for repetition to become physical. Voices sit inside the percussion instead of floating above it, and small shifts in attack change the dance pressure. It is one named group, not a sample labelled only by genre.
Ússua, socopé, puíta and bulawe therefore offer four social clocks. Ússua disciplines elegance. Socopé makes organization visible. Puíta turns friction and circle into a deep communal pulse. Bulawe builds immediate festivity from portable instruments and collective voice. Their histories cross, but each gives São Tomé a different way to gather.
