Ethiopians lay claim to “Harlem Shake”

The "Harlem Shake" has taken over the world, for good and for bad.

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 As a group of young Ethiopian university students prepped the camera and began to blast the new international sensation Harlem Shake’s music, one of the students jumped out of the crowd, yelling, “for Ethiopia so the world sees where the dance originated.”

He, like many in Ethiopia, believe that the origins of the dance date back to historical Ethiopia and the Abyssinian era, but like all modern dance crazes, many groups are staking claim.

“We are the country where this really began many years ago,” Muhammada, 23, a history student in Addis Ababa, told Bikyanews.com as she began to gyrate and groove to the music. “This is the Harlem Shake and we Africans do it best.”

The biggest dance craze right now is the Harlem Shake dance and it’s taking over the internet in viral video format. It is on pace to pass the hit “Gangnam Style” from last year, which earned over one billion views on the video-sharing site YouTube.com. But it has also seen controversy.

In Egypt over the weekend, a group of youth who performed the dance were arrested by police after complaints by local residents and have been charged with “scandalous activity,” highlighting how dance can leave concerns over human rights and police crackdowns on free expression.

Here in Ethiopia, police joined the students, who were making enough noise to be heard for streets away. One police officer told Bikyanews.com as he moved and laughed with the young kids, “this is fun, why would we arrest them. We just tell them to be calm and not go crazy and respect others, but this is fun and that is what is important.”

Not in Egypt and other Arab countries currently battling the rise of conservative Islamist sentiments.

But in Ethiopia, the students and others enjoyed an afternoon of relaxing and dancing, joining the international “Harlem Shake” movement.