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The Language of Drums: Africa's Traditional Broadcast Technologies
| Article
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10926 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1993 |
3,551 Words |
| Author
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Robert W. Nicholls
Robert W. Nicholls is a media specialist with the Howard
University Research and Training Center in Washington, D.C. |
On his journey across Africa from 1875 to 1877, the explorer Henry Stanley encountered the Ba Ena, who lived on the banks of the cataracts that would come to be called Stanley Falls. He observed that they "have not yet developed electric signals but possess, however, a system of communication quite as effective. Their…drums by being struck in different parts convey language as clear to the initiated as vocal speech."
The African past sometimes is depicted as a technological wasteland, devoid of any significant practical inventions. For millennia, however, talking slit-drums like those Stanley saw have relayed messages across equatorial Africa, from Ivory Coast to Uganda. Today, a growing number of scholars of mass communications argue that such indigenous communications systems should be taken seriously and not dismissed as "quaint" or "folk technology." They believe that traditional communications technologies, such a speech-reproducing instruments, could provide rural development efforts with a cost-effective communications system that is emotionally acceptable to rural audiences. Unfortunately, few if any policies have been implemented in any African country to systematically integrate traditional with modern communications and telecommunications systems, or to encourage the use of traditional communications media for Africa's development.
Surrogate speech probably originated during warfare or other emergency situations and was used to extend the range that people could communicate. Many African communities installed a large drum in the village square to warn of invasions or to report missing persons or bush fires. Members of the major warrior societies would be summoned by its drummed alarm and by rallying signals blown on war horns, another kind of talking instrument. Babe of Karo, a Hausa woman of northern Nigeria, remembers the drum that was used during her childhood (1890-1904): "In times of war… the chief would order the drummer to climb upon a high place and beat the deep drum so that the villagers and people in the surrounding hamlets should come inside the town walls. The drum rhythm said 'Come in, come in, come in.'" When war broke out among the Annang of southeast Nigeria, a village drummer would position himself in a tall tree, and through the language of two small membrane drums tied together, he would indicate the tactics of the enemy and command the movements of his own forces. The drummer also would sound retreat and order reassembly.
Some groups, like the "hill tribes" of Nigeria's plateau state and peoples of the Serengeti plain in Tanzania, historically used "gong rocks" (lithophones) in emergency
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