African Drums Quotes

There was a saying in Umuofia that as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.

The drums of Africa still beat in my heart. They will not let me rest while there is a single Negro boy or girl without a chance to prove his worth.

Music is a complete evocation – like a smell. It can bring an entire memory and feeling back to you in a rush. Much more complete than even a photograph. You allow yourself a certain visual distance with photos – not music. It envelopes you – there’s no way to escape it. It’s a great test of sensitivity – the degree of reaction to music. I use it all the time. I call it my ‘Music Test.’ People today don’t want to hear the truth. They’re really afraid of tranquility and silence – they’re afraid they might begin to understand their own motivations too well. They keep a steady stream of noise going to protect themselves, to build a wall against the truth. Like African natives, beating on their drums, rattling their gourds, shaking the bells to scare off evil spirits. As long as there’s enough noise, there’s nothing to fear – or hear. But they will listen. Times are changing.

When the drum beat comes to an end, you shall not hear the drum beat again, but you shall remember how it sounded, and you shall understand clearly how you should or should not have danced to the drum beat

As the native drum kept rhythm with the nighttime symphony of the African bush, the cry of a hyrax (a small, furry animal that sounded a lot scarier than it looked) pierced the night. A hyena howled. A warthog ran through our camp. What was he running from? Sitting in front of my tent, I tried to figure everything out. I wouldn’t have called what I did prayer but maybe wonder.    Night after night, I’d listened to the rush of a river or watched my own personal light show as lightning spider-webbed across the heavens, danced in the distance, and serenaded me with a muffled growl. Until a crash—so loud it seemed to break the sky—caused me to twitch as a shiver ran up my spine.    “You know how it is when you feel someone staring at you from across the room?” I said to Truth. “You turn to meet the gaze. It was like that, but I saw no one. I just felt a comforting presence as we sat together in silence.”    “You think it was God?” she asked.    “Yeah, but I called him Fred. Not so overwhelming, more personal.” 

My lips swelled with red freshness, my chest heaved proudly with a pair of pointed African drums, my face tempted with its sweetness like Kilimanjaro waters and my height spoke a language only a Maasai warrior knew.

We are hardwired to hear and make music. Yes, we will sigh with pleasure when we hear a favorite theme played by an orchestra, and who hasn’t felt a stab of nostalgia, or even brushed away a tear, when hearing a song reminiscent of youth or a lost love? However, such exquisite moments notwithstanding, the musical experience represents something far deeper. Broadly defined, music is sound in time. Sound is nothing less than our perception of the vibrations, the movement, of the universe around us. Music is an intensification, a crystallization, a celebration, a glorification, of that movement and those vibrations. Pretty heady stuff. Far beyond spoken language—which, with its sounds in time, might rightly be considered a low-end sort of music—music is a universal language; one need not speak Ashanti in order to groove to West African drumming; or German in order to be emotionally flayed by Beethoven; or English to totally freak when listening to Bruce Springsteen. Say it with flowers? Nah. If you really want to get your expressive point across, say it with music. No human activity

he knew that reverting to this “twilight consciousness” was no answer. The Africans he met seemed to lack an ego, and to be moved by impulse and emotion alone. They lacked the ability to reflect on their experience, to intend something, to will, to act independently. They lived and worked as a group, prompted by ritual, beating drums, and shouting. Western man paid heavily for his independence—the coin was alienation from the unconscious—but Jung knew it was indispensable. Yet the attraction to what Jung called “archaic man” remained and would become a central theme in his work.

Almost a hundred years earlier, to the day, Samuel Smiles had written the final pages of his book Self-Help. It included this moving tale of heroism as an example for the Victorian Englishman to follow. For the fate of my great-grandfather, Walter, it was poignant in the extreme. The vessel was steaming along the African coast with 472 men and 166 women and children on board. The men consisted principally of recruits who had been only a short time in the service. At two o’clock in the morning, while all were asleep below, the ship struck with violence upon a hidden rock, which penetrated her bottom; and it was at once felt that she would go down. The roll of the drums called the soldiers to arms on the upper deck, and the men mustered as if on parade. The word was passed to “save the women and children”; and the helpless creatures were brought from below, mostly undressed, and handed silently into the boats. When they had all left the ship’s side, the commander of the vessel thoughtlessly called out, “All those that can swim, jump overboard and make for the boats.” But Captain Wright, of the 91st Highlanders, said, “No! If you do that, the boats with the women will be swamped.” So the brave men stood motionless. Not a heart quailed; no one flinched from his duty. “There was not a murmur, nor a cry among them,” said Captain Wright, a survivor, “until the vessel made her final plunge.” Down went the ship, and down went the heroic band, firing a volley shot of joy as they sank beneath the waves. Glory and honor to the gentle and the brave! The examples of such men never die, but, like their memories, they are immortal. As a young man, Walter undoubtedly would have read and known those words from his grandfather’s book. Poignant in the extreme. Indeed, the examples of such men never die, but, like their memories, they are immortal.

The crystallized opposition of the segregationists was not unexpected; but we had only dimly foreseen the resistance that came from another quarter. Victor Hugo has spoken of the "madmen of moderation" who are "un-paving hell." The descendants of Hugo's moderates appeared in the fall of 1963, bearing banners inscribed with the message: Order Before Justice. For the most part, these moderates counted themselves as friends of the civil-rights movement; certainly they were in no sense moral bedfellows of the forces of segregation and violence. But they were now wrestling with a logic that an earlier, more passive, movement had never forced them to question. They had long settled on a simple compromise, one easy to accept and to live with. They could countenance token changes, and they had always believed these would make the Negro content. They were not asking him to stay in his old ghetto. They were ready to build a brand-new ghetto for him with a small exit door for a few. But the breath of the new movement chilled them. The Negro was insisting upon the mass application of equality to jobs, housing, education and social mobility. He sought a full life for a whole people. These moderates had come some distance in step with the thundering drums, but at the point of mass application they wanted the bugle to sound a retreat.

Inside McClintic Sphere was swinging his ass off. His skin was hard, as if it were part of the skull: every vein and whisker on that head stood out sharp and clear under the green baby spot: you could see the twin lines running down from either side of his lower lip, etched in by the force of his embouchure, looking like extensions of his mustache. He blew a hand-carved ivory alto saxophone with a 4 ½ reed and the sound was like nothing any of them had heard before. The usual divisions prevailed: collegians did not dig, and left after an average of 1 ½ sets. Personnel from other groups, either with a night off or taking a long break from somewhere crosstown or uptown, listened hard, trying to dig. 'I am still thinking,’ they would say if you asked. People at the bar all looked as if they did dig in the sense of understand, approve of, empathize with: but this was probably only because people who prefer to stand at the bar have, universally, an inscrutable look… …The group on the stand had no piano: it was bass, drums, McClintic and a boy he had found in the Ozarks who blew a natural horn in F. The drummer was a group man who avoided pyrotechnics, which may have irritated the college crowd. The bass was small and evil-looking and his eyes were yellow with pinpoints in the center. He talked to his instrument. It was taller than he was and didn’t seem to be listening. Horn and alto together favored sixths and minor fourths and when this happened it was like a knife fight or tug of war: the sound was consonant but as if cross-purposes were in the air. The solos of McClintic Sphere were something else. There were people around, mostly those who wrote for Downbeat magazine or the liners of LP records, who seemed to feel he played disregarding chord changes completely. They talked a great deal about soul and the anti-intellectual and the rising rhythms of African nationalism. It was a new conception, they said, and some of them said: Bird Lives. Since the soul of Charlie Parker had dissolved away into a hostile March wind nearly a year before, a great deal of nonsense had been spoken and written about him. Much more was to come, some is still being written today. He was the greatest alto on the postwar scene and when he left it some curious negative will–a reluctance and refusal to believe in the final, cold fact–possessed the lunatic fringe to scrawl in every subway station, on sidewalks, in pissoirs, the denial: Bird Lives. So that among the people in the V-Note that night were, at a conservative estimate, a dreamy 10 per cent who had not got the word, and saw in McClintic Sphere a kind of reincarnation.

Music plays a very important part in the life of the American Indian. From the time he is born until he dies, his life is marked by dancing, and the drum is the keynote of it all. There are three major types of drums—the small hand drum, usually with one head, commonly called the tom-tom and shown here. Other types (not shown) are the larger two-headed drum made from a hollowed-out log or keg, and the water drum, with a single removable head. The drum heads are usually of rawhide, made from calf or deerskin. The drums are usually decorated with painted symbols and designs having religious or protective meanings. The American Indian never plays the drum by tapping it with his fist or hand—this is an African method. A drumstick is always used.

I'd been told that Catholic masses were stable and cold with dull organ music so I was surprised when the choir broke into song. They sang in Shona, with African drums and rattles, ngoma ne bosho. The women;s voices merged with men's bass producing an effect that was confusing but beautiful. At Forward with Faith Ministries we only used guitars, western drums and a keyboard, because Pastor Mavumba preached against using African Traditional instruments. He said that before the missionaries came, our people engaged in devil worship, so the instruments they used were the devil's instruments. We sang in English and he preached in English too, when he was not speaking in tongues. I was a bit confused; maybe the Catholic Church was the devil's church after all, but I couldn't stop my foot from tapping along to the music. [88]

He pointed out that the so-called just wars between Africans were actually instigated by European slave-traders drumming up demand for captives.4 Meanwhile,

All along that beach I saw what looked like the abandoned remnants of an outdoor training gym—bench presses, a manual elliptical, pull-up bars. Time and the elements seemed to have gotten the best of the equipment, and in the blur of our passing I saw yellow paint peeling from the machines to reveal the rusting metal beneath. I assumed that these pieces were the remains of some public works project gone wrong, and the sight of this ostensible failure immediately became a sign of our collective dysfunction, of the “Negro race’s” irredeemably savage state. And hearing that voice in my mind, I came to a terrible realization: After all the work of my parents, all the Ashanti to Zulu and Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain, after all the drums and dance classes, after all the African names, after the entire arsenal of vindication, I was still afraid that the Niggerologists were right about us.

A GLOSSARY OF IGBO WORDS AND PHRASES agadi-nwayi: old woman. agbala: woman; also used of a man who has taken no title. chi: personal god. efulefu: worthless man. egwugwu: a masquerader who impersonates one of the ancestral spirits of the village. ekwe: a musical instrument; a type of drum made from wood. eneke-nti-oba: a kind of bird. eze-agadi-nwayi: the teeth of an old woman. iba: fever. ilo: the village green, where assemblies for sports, discussions, etc., take place. inyanga: showing off, bragging. isa-ifi: a ceremony. If a wife had been separated from her husband for some time and were then to be re-united with him, this ceremony would be held to ascertain that she had not been unfaithful to him during the time of their separation. iyi-uwa: a special kind of stone which forms the link between an ogbanje and the spirit world. Only if the iyi-uwa were discovered and destroyed would the child not die. jigida: a string of waist beads. kotma: court messenger. The word is not of Igbo origin but is a corruption of “court messenger.” kwenu: a shout of approval and greeting. ndichie: elders. nna ayi: our father. nno: welcome. nso-ani: a religious offence of a kind abhorred by everyone, literally earth’s taboo. nza: a very small bird. obi: the large living quarters of the head of the family. obodo dike: the land of the brave. ocbu: murder or manslaughter. ogbanje: a changeling; a child who repeatedly dies and returns to its mother to be reborn. It is almost impossible to bring up an ogbanje child without it dying, unless its iyi-uwa is first found and destroyed.

You can run from those old African goddesses, but they find you when they ready.

Apocalyptic Negroes in a stream Of moving torches, marching from the slums, Beating a band of garbage pails for drums, Marching, with school-age children in their arms, Advancing on the suburbs and the farms, To integrate the schools and burn the houses...

The roots of jazz and blues extend back through slavery to the collective rhythmic patterns of indigenous tribes in West Africa, where cannabis had thrived for centuries. Thrown upon bonfires, marijuana leaves and flowers augmented nocturnal healing rituals with drum circles, dancing, and singing that invoked the spirit of the ancestors and thanked them for imparting knowledge of this botanical wonder. It was only natch that Satch, the musical savant and dagga devotee, felt right at home as soon as he set foot on West African soil. “After all,” he explained, “my ancestors came from here, and I still have African blood in me.

Martin (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) gave no quarter to compromise, to the accommodation of evil, to caprice or calumny. I often think of him now when I read newspaper columns written by prominent black conservatives, like Dr. Walter Williams and Dr. Thomas Sowell, who are partners with those who consistently try to keep black people from pursuing simple fairness. With their scholarly cant they cloud the issues and drum on themes that draw applause from their cynical sponsors. I wonder if they are ever frightened when they look around and notice who is applauding them.

We ripped off anyone who made a record, whether it was dripping paint on our clothes, sticking zips on our T-shirts… even down to our first drummer, Craig Newnham (whose brother Shaun was briefly the very first singer for the band), having a rat in his bass drum. It wasn’t that punk tho’, ’cos he told his mum it was a giant African mouse or she would have thrown him and it out of the house!

brought back by their masters. Still, in Congo Square sessions were said to have included many African songs that were supposedly banned by the whites for being part of the vodum or voodoo rites. The slaves also danced French quadrilles and sang patois ditties in addition to the more African chants that they shouted above the ‘great drums.’” Ibid., 72. 82 “A

Nation hosted community events with Bronx youth, organizing local music and dance movements into a single cohort that, over time, produced the formative language of hip hop, encompassing everything from beat-making to emceeing (MCing)—acting as the “master of ceremonies” following the West African griot practice of rhythmically telling stories and sharing oral traditions over drum beats. The success of “Planet Rock” was a slow burn; first received as a type of funk music, it could slip onto the radio at a time when mainstream stations were convinced that the entire genre of hip hop was a fad that would soon pass. The release landed the same summer as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious