Word: rumbas
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Bloodstained panga knives and a slashed tribal drum lie in the middle of the dusty main street. A huge stork pecks for grubs in a gutted drygoods store, and weasels scurry in the debris. The main square is littered with broken rumba phonograph records-and an empty, bloodstained black shoe. From a pole at the town water pump flies the red-and-white flag of the Jeunesse Révolutlonnaire, the paramilitary youth groups who did most of the killing. The youth groups are run by the Tutsis' Party of Unity and National Progress (Uprona), which in effect rules...
...feathers, vines, ivy and snakeskins. Dr. John's music is a pulsating blend of African and Caribbean rhythms and dry-throated incantations. As it turns out, Dr. John comes from New Orleans, and his latest ATCO LP, Gumbo, is a personal nostalgia trip, a rollicking pastiche of voodoo, rumba, Dixieland and good old Mardi Gras stomp. If his high skill shows the inventive, assimilative style of a virtuoso studio musician, it is because Dr. John used to be just that under his real name, Mac Rebennack...
...those gags! The political jokes ("I greatly appreciate music. You know that's one place I'm like Harry Truman--I used to play the Piano myself.") the bilingual wisecracks ("We have to quit thinking of Latin America in terms of siestas, manana, Rumba, Samba, and Cha-Cha-Cha." Cha-Cha-Cha!), the self-deprecating quips ("I'm a dropout from the Electrol College. I flunked debating...
...that spilled over into the alleys. Inside the Centennial Ballroom, a babel of people in long white Moslem robes and colored bubus (tribal gowns) mingled with those in formal tie and tails wearing rows of medals. Guided by Tubman and his daughter Coocoo, they marched, then switched to a rumba, a quick step, the Lindy hop, a quadrille. "Faster, faster!" shouted the President, roaring with laughter. For 50 minutes the crowd of nearly 1,000 stomped to John Philip Sousa marches. Leaving most of his guests wilted, the 73-year-old President finally strode back to his table...
...years ago, Pearl Sydenstricker Buck hired Theodore F. Harris, a ballroom-dancing instructor, to teach her the rumba. Widow Buck, now 74, took a motherly interest in Harris, now 36, named him president and executive director of her tax-exempt Pearl S. Buck Foundation, which since 1964 has raised $155,000 to help care for about 1,000 of the hundreds of thousands of rejected, mixed-blooded "Amerasian" youths who since 1945 have been fathered by American servicemen from Korea to Viet Nam. Mrs. Buck and Harris swung across the U.S. last year on a fund-raising tour that actually...