Importance Of Drums In African Music History

Traditionally, the drum was the soul of most African communities. Drums have been an innate part of African life for centuries and for countless generations, an ancient instrument used to celebrate all the facets of life.
In Western culture, drumming is most often about entertainment. In Africa, drums hold a deeper, symbolic, and historical significance.

They herald political and social events attending ceremonies of birth, death, and marriage. They spark courtships, they profess home-coming and going and they accompany religious rites and rituals, calling up ancestral spirits.

Drums are used as an alarm or a call to arms stirring up emotions for battle and war. They can also provoke passion and excitement and even cause trances, a momentary loss of consciousness to either the drummer or the listener. They symbolize and protect royalty and are often housed in sacred dwellings.

They are also about communication and making music, two fundamental characteristics of community life. For centuries the ‘talking drums’ were a major source of communication between tribes, it was used to transmit messages sometimes across great distances.
The Djembe drum is possibly the most influential and essential of all the African drums, originally It dates back to 500 A.D. The

Types Of African Drums.

While there is a wide variety of drums used in Africa, there are a few drums that are extremely popular like The Djembe Drum, Bata, and The Talking Drum.


The Djembe Drum


The djembe is one of West Africa's best-known instruments. This goblet-shaped drum is traditionally carved from a single piece of African hardwood and topped with an animal skin as a drumhead. In western understanding, the drum belongs to the membranophone class of instruments in the percussion family.

Djembe was originally created as a sacred drum to be used in healing ceremonies, rites of passage, ancestral worship, warrior rituals, as well as social dances. The drum rhythm of the djembe is performed in the evening for most celebrations, especially during a full moon, spring, summer, and winter harvesting time, weddings, baptisms, honoring of mothers, immediately after Ramadaan (the month of fast for all Muslims) or countless other celebrations.


The Talking Drum


The use of talking drums as a form of communication was noticed by Europeans in the first half of the 18th century. Detailed messages could be sent from one village to the next faster than could be carried by a person riding a horse.

In the 20th century, the talking drum became a part of popular music in West Africa. It is used in playing Mbalax music of Senegal and in Fuji and Juju music of Nigeria.

Drums have always been of intrinsic importance to the African culture and they have engraved themselves into African lifestyle and African music history.