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Traditional music in Africa
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For as long as humans have been banging sticks together, Africans have been using music to celebrate, mourn, pray, and communicate. Where undisturbed by the uprooting pressures of globalization, music continues to hold the same revered place as the preferred medium to express joy, sadness, worship, and much else. In most African societies, where values are communicated through oral tradition, musicians such as the griots of Burkina Faso double as society’s keeper of collective knowledge and tradition. There is no parallel in Western societies to the role that music still to this day plays in many African societies; at times full of joy, and at other times haunting, the untarnished music of traditional Africa is always beautiful, and exceptional for its unstudied purity.
Africa is an enormously diverse continent: certainly more so than Europe. As such, musical traditions vary significantly from region to region. Along with the cora, a stringed instrument made with a calabash, the drum is the most common instrument in Africa. Still you will find completely different types of drumming within a region. Despite being neighbors, Ghanaians favor the kpalongo style of drumming, while the Burkinabe prefer the Djembe.
Where drumming is prominent, each village typically has a drumming troupe: men who farm during the day, but when the excuse arises for music and dancing lay down their shovels and pick up drums. The music that they play is pure. Their songs have been passed down from generation to generation for centuries. There is no sheet music; in fact, many of the drummers are illiterate. Nor is the drumming simple; Your Correspondent attempted to learn traditional Ewe drumming and made little headway due to its complexity. Traditional drumming is more than intricate rhythms; in many ways, it is a community’s soul, carrying in its beats a people’s values, traditions, and history. To the outsider, observing African music in its traditional form can be a reminder of the potent differences between cultures; likewise, joining the festivities reminds us that the human thread that binds us is yet more powerful than the gulfs which would separate us.
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