African Drum Language

This will be of interest to fans of The Last Samurai, as well as people who like language:

James Gleick’s first chapter has the title “Drums That Talk.” It explains the concept of information by looking at a simple example. The example is a drum language used in a part of the Democratic Republic of Congo where the human language is Kele. European explorers had been aware for a long time that the irregular rhythms of African drums were carrying mysterious messages through the jungle. Explorers would arrive at villages where no European had been before and find that the village elders were already prepared to meet them.

Sadly, the drum language was only understood and recorded by a single European before it started to disappear. The European was John Carrington, an English missionary who spent his life in Africa and became fluent in both Kele and drum language. He arrived in Africa in 1938 and published his findings in 1949 in a book, The Talking Drums of Africa.1 Before the arrival of the Europeans with their roads and radios, the Kele-speaking Africans had used the drum language for rapid communication from village to village in the rain forest. Every village had an expert drummer and every villager could understand what the drums were saying. By the time Carrington wrote his book, the use of drum language was already fading and schoolchildren were no longer learning it. In the sixty years since then, telephones made drum language obsolete and completed the process of extinction.

Carrington understood how the structure of the Kele language made drum language possible. Kele is a tonal language with two sharply distinct tones. Each syllable is either low or high. The drum language is spoken by a pair of drums with the same two tones. Each Kele word is spoken by the drums as a sequence of low and high beats. In passing from human Kele to drum language, all the information contained in vowels and consonants is lost.

You Might Also Like:

More from Conversational Reading:

1. New Translation of The Tin Drum At Three percent, Chad discusses the exciting news that we'll be reading a new translation of The Tin Drum later this year. To celebrate the...
2. Why to Read African Literature The Brooklyn Rail reviews a title that we'll also be covering later this month (when the new issue to TQC publishes). The title is Gods...
3. A Basket of Leaves — Recent African Fiction Over at WWB, Geoff Wisner, author of the book A Basket of Leaves: 99 Books That Capture the Spirit of Africa, offers a list of...
4. The African “Literary Boom” and Beckett’s Letters I've got to agree with Michael Orthofer's take on James Gibbons's piece in the new Bookforum, Clout of Africa. Michael writes: James Gibbons does review...
5. 99 Essential African Books That's what you'll find in my interview with Geoff Wisner at The Quarterly Conversation. He's the author of A Basket of Leaves: 99 Books that...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.