Drums in African American History
Drums and the Stono Rebellion
On Sunday September 9, 1739 a rebellion erupted twenty miles from Charleston, South Carolina. It was led by enslaved men from the Kongo Kingdom (present-day Angola.) They seized a store of firearms and marched with two drums beating and banners flying, burning down plantations and killing slaveholders. After the group became large enough, numbering about 60, they “set to dancing, Singing and Beating Drums to draw more Negroes to them.”
The insurgents had had military training in the Kongo Kingdom as historian John K. Thornton stressed “They marched under banners like the unit flags that African armies flew in their campaigns, and they used drums to encourage the rebels…. Military dancing was a part of the African culture of war. In African war, dancing was as much a part of military preparation as drill was in Europe….Dancing in preparation for war was so common in Kongo that “dancing a war dance” (sangamento) was often used as a synonym for “to declare war” in seventeenth-century sources.” The Stono rebellion was one of the largest in the United States.
The New Orleans Uprising
On January 8, 1811, Charles Deslondes, originally from Haiti, and several hundred men took part in the largest slave uprising in the history of the United States. It happened north of New Orleans. Defiant but poorly armed, they were headed for the city to procure firearms and turn it into a safe haven for enslaved people. Governor Claiborne wrote to Secretary of State Robert Smith, “The Negroes in the County of German Coast . . . are in state of Insurrection; their numbers are variously stated from 180 to 500. A detachment of U.S. Troops and two Companies marched against the Insurgents.” The men “advanced down the River Road with flags flying and drums beating, and “On to New Orleans was their cry.” Deslondes and twenty men were beheaded.
Benjamin H. Latrobe, Impressions Respecting New Orleans 1818-1820
February 1819
Description of drumming by African slaves in Place Congo, New Orleans:
The music consisted of two drums and a stringed instrument. An old man sat astride of a cylindrical drum about a foot in diameter, and beat it with incredible quickness with the edge of his hand and fingers. The other drum was an open staved thing held between the knees and beaten in the same manner. They made an incredible noise. The most curious instrument, however, was a stringed instrument which no doubt was imported from Africa (* It was a kora, a Mandingo instrument from Mali, Guinea and Senegambia.)
On the top of the finger board was the rude figure of a man in a sitting posture, and two pegs behind him to which the strings were fastened. The body was a calabash. It was played upon by a very little old man, apparently 80 or 90 years old….[Another instrument] which from the color of the wood seemed new, consisted of a block cut into something of the form of a cricket bat with a long & deep mortice down the center. This thing made a considerable noise, being beaten lustily on the side by a short stick. In the same orchestra was a square drum, looking like a stool, which made an abominably loud noise; also a calabash with a round hole in it, the hole studded with brass nails, which was beaten by a woman with two short sticks.
George Washington Cable, “The Dance in Place Congo”, Century Illustrated Magazine, February 1886.
Description of African drums and drummers in action as witnessed in Place Congo, New Orleans:
The drums were very long, hollowed, often from a single piece of wood, open at one end and having a sheep or goat skin stretched across the other. One was large, the other much smaller. The tight skin heads were not held up to be struck; the drums were laid along on the turf and the drummers bestrode them, and beat them on the head madly with fingers, fists, and feet, with slow vehemence on the great drum, and fiercely and rapidly on the small one. Sometimes an extra performer sat on the ground behind the larger drum, at its open end, and beat upon the wooden sides of it with two sticks. The smaller drum was often made from a joint or two of very large bamboo, in the West Indies where such could be got, and this is said to be the origin of its name; for it was called the Bamboula. In stolen hours of night or the basking hour of noon the black man contrived to fashion these rude instruments and others. The drummers, I say, bestrode the drums; the other musicians sat about them in an arc, cross-legged on the ground. One important instrument was a gourd partly filled with pebbles or grains of corn, flourished violently at the end of a stout staff with one hand and beaten upon the palm of the other. Other performers rang triangles, and others twanged from jaws-harps an astonishing amount of sound. Another instrument was the jawbone of some ox, horse, or mule, and a key rattled rhythmically along its weather-beaten teeth. At times the drums were reinforced by one or more empty barrels or casks beaten on the head with the shank-bones of cattle.
Drum and Freedom
The story of the “last survivor”, Cudjo Lewis and his drum of freedom:
On April 12, 1865 as the Confederates were leaving Mobile, a group of youngsters decided to do something “African” to celebrate their regained freedom. They carved a drum, beat it and its powerful throbbing took them back home. As one of them, Cudjo Lewis, told famous author Zora Neale Hurston, “After dey free us, you understand me, we so glad, we makee de drum and beat it lak in de Affica soil.”
Five years earlier, on July 8, 1860, he and his 109 companions had arrived in Alabama after forty-five harrowing days on the slave ship Clotilda. They were the last of the half million Africans the Transatlantic Slave Trade had brought to the United States.
As their drum symbolized, freedom to them was directly linked to Africa and their first wish was to return to their families in Benin and Nigeria. Unable to do so, they established a settlement north of Mobile, called it African Town, ruled it according to customary laws, and there raised their children, some of whom spoke African languages well into the 1950s. Cudjo Lewis, the last survivor, passed away in 1935 and people who knew him are still alive today. Renamed Africatown, the young Africans’ settlement is still home to their descendants.