Asadata Dafora

Austin Dafora Horton — known to the world as Asadata Dafora — was born on 4 August 1890 in Freetown, Sierra Leone, into the Krio elite of the late-Victorian city. His father, John "Johnnie" Warner Horton, served as a Freetown city treasurer, and his mother was a trained concert pianist. Educated at the Wesleyan School, the young Dafora absorbed both a European classical schooling and a lifelong reverence for indigenous African music, dance, and language.

As a young man he traveled to Europe, refining his voice in the opera houses of Italy, and journeyed through West Africa gathering the rhythms and movement traditions he would later carry to the stage. In 1929 he settled in Harlem, supporting himself as a concert singer while devoting his hours to building authentic African dance-dramas from the traditions he had studied.

His masterwork, Kykunkor (The Witch Woman), opened in May 1934 at the Unity Theatre in New York — the first African dance-drama mounted on the American stage. Drawn from West African folklore and performed largely by African-born artists, it drew such acclaim from critic John Martin of the New York Times that it moved to larger houses to meet the crowds. Dafora is credited with pioneering the integrated dance-drama and later produced landmark African dance festivals at Carnegie Hall for the African Academy of Arts and Research.

In 1960 he returned to a newly independent Sierra Leone to serve as its cultural director, and he died in Harlem on 4 March 1965. He gave the African body its dignity and its rightful place on the world's great stages — and the honored dance of a continent found, in him, its first American voice.