Asadata Dafora

John Warner Dafora Horton was born on the fourth of August 1890 at Freetown, Sierra Leone, the son of Henry Warner Horton — a senior member of the Sierra Leonean Krio elite of the late-Victorian Freetown — and Henrietta Casely-Hayford Horton, a niece of the principal Gold Coast intellectual of the period J. E. Casely Hayford. He was raised in the Krio Methodist Freetown of the closing decade of the colonial period.

He was placed at six at the Wesleyan Boys’ High School at Freetown and at sixteen at the Wesleyan Methodist Mission School at Freetown for the closing portion of the secondary education.

He took further study at the Royal Academy of Music at La Scala at Milan from 1910 to 1913 — among the early African students at the Royal Academy of Music — completing the lyric-tenor opera diploma in 1913. He sang at the principal Milanese operatic-and-recital circuit of the closing years of the European war from 1914 to 1918 — under the stage name Asadata Dafora.

He served the British West African Frontier Force during the war from 1915 to 1918 — and at the close of the war undertook the principal European concert and travel circuit of the 1918–1929 period at London, Paris, Berlin and the principal continental capitals.

He relocated to Manhattan in 1929 at thirty-nine and entered the Harlem African expatriate community. He founded at Manhattan in 1932 the Shogola Oloba dance company — the first Sierra Leonean dance-and-music company at New York — and at the same year the African Opera and Dramatic Society, both at 156 West 53rd Street, Manhattan.

He completed in 1934 the principal dance-drama of his early career — the four-act Kykunkor (or the Witch Woman) on the Mende-and-Mandé folk wedding-and-witchcraft drama — at the Little Theatre at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-Fourth Street, Manhattan, on the eighteenth of May 1934. Kykunkor opened with a sustained run that moved on the strength of the principal-press reviews to the Chanin Auditorium at the Chanin Building at Forty-Second Street on the eighteenth of June 1934 and to Carnegie Hall on the twentieth of October 1934. Kykunkor was at the time and is now recognised as the first major African dance-drama on the American concert stage and the principal foundational work of the post-war Black-American concert-dance tradition.

He choreographed across the following thirty years over twenty further dance dramas and operas — among them Zunguru (1938), Bassa Moona (1940), and Africa (1957) — and trained the principal early concert-dance students of his Shogola Oloba programme: Pearl Primus (placed in this archive), Katherine Dunham (placed in this archive), Esther Rolle, Talley Beatty (placed in this archive), and Charles Moore.

He returned to Freetown in 1960 at the time of the Sierra Leonean independence and was a senior advisor to Prime Minister Milton Margai across the closing years of his life.

He died at Manhattan on the fourth of March 1965 of complications of cancer, at seventy-four.

He is honored here as the choreographer of Kykunkor.