EsoteriaA library of sacred & hidden knowledge
Liber XXXIV · Vodou & Hoodoo

Liber XXXIV · Vodou & Hoodoo · Chapter IV: Louisiana Voodoo

Congo Square, New Orleans: African Dance, Drums and Voodoo

The history of Congo Square in New Orleans: Sunday gatherings of enslaved Africans, the bamboula and calinda, Latrobe's 1819 account and the Voodoo legends.

8 min read 1,759 words Updated

Congo Square is an open plaza in the Tremé neighbourhood of New Orleans, just outside the old French Quarter, where enslaved and free Africans gathered on Sunday afternoons in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to trade, drum, sing and dance. It is one of the best-documented places in North America where African music and dance were performed openly under slavery, and it later became bound up with legends of Louisiana Voodoo and of Marie Laveau.

Place des Nègres: The Origins of Congo Square§

In colonial New Orleans the open ground behind the town, just beyond the line of fortifications that later became Rampart Street, served as a commons for markets, grazing and gatherings. Local tradition holds that Native Americans used the spot for gatherings before and after French settlement, though the evidence is thin. By the late eighteenth century enslaved Africans were meeting there on Sundays, and the place was known as the Place des Nègres and popularly as Place Congo, a name that reflects the many people from West-Central Africa, the Kongo and Angola region, in the city's enslaved population.

Louisiana's population had several African layers. The historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall showed that under French rule many captives came from Senegambia, while in the Spanish period after 1769 larger numbers arrived from the Bight of Benin and West-Central Africa. A further wave came in 1809–1810, when about ten thousand refugees from Saint-Domingue, expelled from Cuba, arrived in New Orleans: white planters, free people of colour and enslaved people in roughly equal numbers. They roughly doubled the city's population and brought with them the music, dance and religion of the Haitian world (see Haitian Vodou).

Sunday Gatherings Under French, Spanish and American Rule§

The legal basis for the gatherings lay in the Louisiana Code Noir of 1724, which required that enslaved people be given Sundays and Catholic holy days free from labour. Many used this time to sell produce and goods, to visit family on other plantations and to gather for music and dance. Under Spanish rule (1769–1803), when enslaved people could more readily earn money and even purchase their freedom, such markets and dances flourished in several places around the city.

After the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, American officials and Anglo-American residents viewed these gatherings with growing suspicion, particularly after the 1811 German Coast uprising, the largest revolt of enslaved people in United States history. In 1817 a city ordinance restricted dances of enslaved people to Sundays and to a single place appointed by the mayor, which in practice meant the Place Congo. The square thus became, by regulation, the one public site where enslaved Africans could legally gather to dance, watched by police and by curious visitors.

What Latrobe Saw in 1819§

The most valuable eyewitness description comes from Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the architect of the United States Capitol, who was in New Orleans to build the city's waterworks. On a Sunday afternoon in February 1819 he came upon the gathering and recorded it in his journal. He estimated that five or six hundred people were assembled, formed into separate circular groups, each with its own musicians and dancers.

Latrobe described drums of several sizes, one played by a man sitting astride it, and a stringed instrument whose body was made from a calabash, a type of gourd lute that historians regard as an ancestor of the banjo. Women sang in call-and-response in what he took to be an African language, while dancers moved slowly in the centre of each ring. He made small sketches of the instruments, which survive and are reproduced in later editions of his journals.

Latrobe was not a sympathetic observer. He found the music harsh and the scene alien, and like many visitors he described it in disparaging terms. Yet the precision of his notes makes them indispensable: they show organised groups, probably based on shared African origins, keeping distinct musical and dance traditions alive in an American city two generations after the trade had carried their ancestors across the Atlantic.

Bamboula, Calinda and the Music of Congo Square§

Later accounts name several dances associated with the square. The bamboula took its name from a drum of the same name; the calinda (kalenda), a dance known across the French and Spanish Caribbean, sometimes involved stick-fighting; and the congo and chica were known from Saint-Domingue, where colonial writers had described them in the 1790s. All emphasised drums, polyrhythm, call-and-response singing and dancers encircled by a participating crowd.

Much of what is popularly said about these dances comes from George Washington Cable's essay "The Dance in Place Congo" (1886), illustrated by E. W. Kemble. Cable wrote decades after the dances had ended, relying on older people's memories and his own imagination, and historians read him with caution. The New Orleans-born composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk drew on Creole melodies in his piano piece Bamboula of the late 1840s, one of the earliest uses of Afro-Caribbean material in American concert music.

The square is often called the "birthplace of jazz". Historians such as Ned Sublette and Freddi Williams Evans prefer to place it within a longer lineage: the rhythms, instruments and performance styles nurtured there fed into later Black musical life in New Orleans, including brass bands, the masking traditions of Mardi Gras Indians and, eventually, jazz, but no direct line can be drawn from a single plaza to a single genre.

Congo Square and Voodoo: History and Legend§

Because many dancers came from Kongo, Fon and Yoruba backgrounds, the gatherings carried religious meanings as well as social ones: songs addressed African spirits, and dance and drumming were, in many African traditions, the means by which spirits came among the living. In that broad sense Congo Square was part of the world from which Louisiana Voodoo grew. Yet the dances were public, policed and attended by spectators, quite unlike the closed ceremonies described in later Voodoo sources.

Popular books, especially Robert Tallant's Voodoo in New Orleans (1946), claimed that Marie Laveau and other Voodoo queens presided over rites in the square, and guided tours still repeat the story. Historians such as Carolyn Morrow Long and Martha Ward found little contemporary evidence for this. The ceremonies attributed to Laveau in nineteenth-century newspapers took place elsewhere: in private houses, and in large public gatherings on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain and along Bayou St John, especially on St John's Eve (23 June). A memoir published in the 1890s describes an earlier Voodoo priestess, said to have come from Saint-Domingue, holding ceremonies in the city in the 1820s, but such recollections are late and difficult to verify.

The Voodoo of Congo Square is therefore best understood as a mixture of history and legend. African religious music was performed there, while the image of a Voodoo queen ruling the dances belongs to the folklore that grew up around Laveau (compare the wider myths discussed in What Is Voodoo?).

From Beauregard Square to Congo Square Today§

The Sunday dances declined in the decades before the Civil War as American slave law hardened and city authorities restricted gatherings; no date is recorded for the last one, but they seem to have ended by the 1850s at the latest. The site was variously called Place Publique and Circus Square, and in 1893 it was officially named Beauregard Square after the Confederate general P. G. T. Beauregard, though many residents kept the old name.

In the 1960s urban renewal demolished a large part of Tremé to make way for a cultural complex, and the square was eventually incorporated into Louis Armstrong Park, which opened in 1980. Congo Square was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1993, and in 2011 the New Orleans City Council officially restored the name Congo Square. Since the late twentieth century, drummers have revived Sunday gatherings there, and festivals of African and diasporic music use the square as a place of remembrance.

For practitioners of Voodoo and of African diasporic religions in New Orleans, Congo Square is a sacred landmark: a place where ancestors kept their traditions alive, where libations are poured and drums are played in their honour. It connects the city's history of slavery, its music and its spiritual traditions, including the conjure practices described in Hoodoo and Rootwork and documented by Zora Neale Hurston in the 1920s.

Frequently asked questions§

What happened in Congo Square?§

From the late eighteenth century into the 1840s or 1850s, enslaved and free Africans gathered in Congo Square on Sunday afternoons to sell goods, drum, sing and dance. An 1817 ordinance made it the one place in New Orleans where enslaved people could legally gather to dance.

Did Marie Laveau hold Voodoo ceremonies in Congo Square?§

This is a popular legend, repeated in mid-twentieth-century books and on tours, but historians have found little contemporary evidence for it. Nineteenth-century reports place the ceremonies associated with Laveau in private houses and at Bayou St John and Lake Pontchartrain, especially on St John's Eve.

Is Congo Square the birthplace of jazz?§

Not in a simple sense. The square kept African rhythms, instruments and dances alive in New Orleans, and these fed into the city's later musical culture, but jazz emerged around 1900 from many sources, including brass bands, blues, ragtime and church music.

Where is Congo Square today?§

Congo Square is inside Louis Armstrong Park on Rampart Street, on the edge of the Tremé neighbourhood and opposite the French Quarter. The city officially restored its historic name in 2011.

Sources and further reading§