Excerpts from my manuscript "The Africans talking drums

Africans & Americans Lost History

African Heritage: African Drums

The Africans were the first people to invent the drums. Today the drums a
re inherent
by people around the world to create rhythmic sounds in music an important fact
is
Africa is the only continent and place on earth where the talking drums are use
d,
because of this Africans music, songs, dance even fore-lore, literature and Afri
can art all
resembles and are preserved.
There are two types of talking drums The message drums are made of large logs to
send
messages over long distances from village to village they are actually and compl
etely
different, message drums are slit gongs. A huge log drum that can be heard miles
away,
and their messages are usually in some kind of code, although the code may be ba
sed on
spoken sentences most message drums developed in Africa by African tribes in cul
tures
in Africa.
Talking drums are not made from big logs. They are a kind of drum called a
waist
drum, they are called "waist drums" because they have an hourglass shape with a
waist in
the middle like a person's body has a narrow waist in the middle, skins are stre
tched over
the ends of the drum, held in place by many cords, when the cords are tightened,
the skin
gets pulled tighter and the sound of the drum gets higher, when cords are relaxe
d, the
sound goes lower. The player holds the drum between his upper arm and left side
and
uses his arm to squeeze and relax the cords while he is striking the drum with a
curved
stick in his right hand. Today the talking drums are found throughout west Afri
ca.
English is not a tonal language, it is difficult for English speakers to a
ppreciate how
important inflection is in tonal languages, in a tonal language an adult saying
bye bye,
what a smart girl or no sweetie are times when English can sound like a tonal l
anguage.
Can you imagine an excited preacher singing out loud Amen or do you believe ima
gine
what these phrases sound like -pretend that you hear someone call you from a lon
g
distance away. What does it sound like, do their voice adopt a kind of sing-song
quality
in which the last syllable sounds about a minor third lower than the rest of the
name this
is close to the type of sounds in some tonal languages, here is a short example,
hopefully,
it will help you to appreciate the Africans drums culture.
If English was a tonal language as tribal languages, for example; Lets us
e the word
hat saying the syllable hat while your voice rises might mean something you put
on your
head; saying it while your voice falls might mean you took the hat off your head
, saying it
while your voice rises then falls might mean, come see my hat and saying it even
ly might
mean the hat blew off your head.
Again using a major or minor sound if your voice stays even, it might sound as
if you
really love the hat but in every case you are talking about something that goes o
n your
head, some words in some African dialects are so precisely tonal that you could
write out
the notes for a particular word on a musical staff, peoples of west Africa, for
example the
Ashanti people of Ghana and the Yoruba people of Nigeria both use talking drum
s and
speak tonal languages, imagine a player of the talking drum with his left arm h
e can
control very precisely the tone of each syllable of his talking drum, what comes
out of the
drum is not the alphabet sounds of the words, all the other things that go into
a phrase
-lengths, rhythms, pitches, rising and falling syllables.
In a very tonal language, that is enough. The people who speak the same dialect
as a
drummer will be able to hear what his drum is saying. If they are from a village
speaks
with a different accent, they may not be able to understand his drum at all - th
e simplest
way to demonstrate this is with rubber bands. stretch a rubber band between two
fingers
while your friend plucks it listen to the sound the rubber band makes; the tigh
ter it is
stretched, the higher the sound. If it is stretched relaxed quickly immediately
after being
plucked, you may even be able to hear the pitch slide up or down, just like it d
oes in a
talking drum. Try saying the word "here" in many different ways: slowly or crisp
ly, with
the voice rising, falling, monotone, rising and then falling, etc, then make up
some short
phrases.
Which one means do you want it here which means yes, I want it here, do d
ifferent
tones seem to mean you called my name and I'm here or come stand over here, I'm
here
or ha ha, you missed me. here I am! you can make here mean different things, you
can try
the same game with other words like: there, this, that, what, Ok, cool, hey, now
.
If by chance you re in a black history class or having a discussion on black hist
ory and
someone ask you to name something major our African ancestors contributed to soc
iety
and the world, stand up tall and say proudly the Africans gave the world rhythmi
c
sounds and Africans gave all nationalities of people and ethnic groups the drum
s.