Music

In Africa music and dances is a serious business. They accompany official ceremonies at ruler’s courts and the most important events in a person’s life: birth, initiation, wedding, and death. The main peculiarity of African music is its rhythm. The first president of Senegal, poet and philosopher Leopold Senghor thought that African sense of rhythm equals all technical achievement of the European civilization. That is why the most important musical instruments in Africa are the percussions, drums and xylophones. There are many types of them, different in sound, size, shape and function. For example, the Manding people enjoy dancing parties to the sound of the jembe drum, although the position of a jembe player is not very prestigious. Casted bards, or griots, play a sandgalss=shaped ntamanin drum to encourage workers in the fields. And if the big tabale drum is heard, that means: a war began. The people whose languages are rich in musical tones use special drums instead of telegraph, transmitting the news to large distances. There are also very unusual drums, for example, the violin-drum chong in West Cameroon: a stick bow is inserted into a hole in the membrane and is drawn. Secret societies use the chong drum to arouse fear in the non-members.

Apart from the drums, there are many other musical instruments in Africa. There are even castes of professional musicians and bards, the griots, the keepers of an ancient musical tradition of royal court. The traditional rhythms and tunes can be easily traced in modern popular music.

Old musician.  Cote d'Ivoire. The Kla-Dan. V. F. Vydrin. 2002.		Musicians at the village festivity on the occasion of the zee belt. Cote d'Ivoire. Kla-Santa. Vydrin V.. 2002.		Musicians are taking a rest after dancing. Conakry Perekhvalskaya E., 2006.
A family of musicians at home. Cote d'Ivoire. The Kla-Dan. V. F. Vydrin. 2002.		Program in “Drummology” in the Cocody University. Cote d'Ivoire. Idiatov D., 2002.		5-stringed lyre. Sudan. The Mittu. The Baka, mid. 19th c.