where did twerking originate

Twerking originated in traditional West and Central African dance, and in modern form it emerged from the Black bounce music scene in New Orleans in the early 1990s.

Quick Scoop: Where did twerking originate?

• Deep roots in West and Central Africa : Movements very similar to twerking appear in dances like Mapouka from Côte d’Ivoire, as well as other African diaspora dances that emphasize isolated hip and buttock movements for ritual, spiritual, and celebratory purposes rather than purely sexual ones.

• Enslaved Africans carried these dance traditions to the Americas, where they evolved in the Caribbean and the American South into hip-focused social dances seen at gatherings and festivals long before the term “twerk” existed.

Modern twerking in the U.S.

• The modern pop-culture version of twerking is widely traced to the New Orleans bounce music scene around 1990, where dancers (often Black women) performed fast, rhythmic hip shaking in clubs and block parties.

• The word “twerk” itself is linked to inner‑city New Orleans slang; one early documented use in music is DJ Jubilee’s 1993 track “Do the Jubilee All,” which includes a call to “twerk.”

• Linguistically, the Oxford English Dictionary notes related forms like “twirk” for jerking or twisting movements as early as the 1800s, showing that the word family is old even though the specific dance sense took off with 1990s bounce.

Not invented by recent pop stars

• While Miley Cyrus’s 2013 VMA performance pushed twerking into mainstream and online “latest news” cycles, the dance and its name were part of Black Southern club culture decades earlier and grow from much older African movement traditions.

In other words: twerking didn’t suddenly appear in the 2010s—it’s a modern label for a style of hip‑driven dancing that has been evolving across African and African‑diaspora communities for centuries.

TL;DR: When people ask “where did twerking originate,” the historical trail leads back to West and Central African dances (like Mapouka) and, in its modern named form, to 1990s New Orleans bounce culture—not to any single recent celebrity.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.