All about Ngoma

In March I undertook a three-week safari in Morocco, where spring days were clear and cold and a strong Sirocco wind blew. I loved Moroccan music, especially the blend of African and Islamic traditions that is known as gnaoua (gnawa). No matter where I stayed in Morocco, the tam-tam or drums made a regular appearance after dinner and the same men who prepared and served our meals or drinks would settle down for a long drumming session. They lost themselves in their playing, beating out repetitive rhythms with closed eyes, unaware when weary travelers headed off to bed leaving them alone to their music. One young man told me that he suffered from insomnia if he didn’t play the drums before bed. On the night we undertook a camel safari into the Sahara Desert, a sandstorm obliterated the clear skies that my traveling companions and I hoped to sleep under. We had to take shelter for the duration of the night under a tent buffeted by strong gusts and swept by blowing sand. Our Berber hosts attempted to make the best of it for us by entertaining us with percussion instruments fashioned out of a couscous strainer and plastic water jug.

In Tanzania the word for drum - ngoma - and the act of drumming is shared. I have attended some exhilarating ngoma in Tanzania, when bonfires flared and dancers swayed in their light to the beats pounded out by drummers literally drenched in sweat from their exertions. Ngoma however is a threatened practice throughout Tanzania. My first awareness of this occurred on a safari I made to Lake Nyasa (also known as Lake Malawi) when I unwittingly incurred the wrath of the Lutheran manager of the guesthouse where I stayed. All day I had heard the distant beat of drums. Seeking out their source, I had persuaded the drummers to call an impromptu ngoma that evening, an event attended by nearly everyone it seemed who lived by the lakeshore. The following morning I faced the guesthouse manager’s disapproval, learning that the stance he took against ngoma was unchanged from that taken by Africa's very first missionaries - that Africans are driven to self-destruction by the hedonistic beats of their drums.

The Makonde are a tribe from southern Tanzania and Mozambique and are among Dar es Salaam's oldest residents. They brought their love of ngoma and costumed dance to Dar. Twenty years ago, it is said that Makonde drums were a familiar sound in Dar. An old Makonde woman who lived in my Dar neighborhood told me that a group of drummers continued to play at weddings, but it consisted of young men who played only for money. Nor did these young drummers make their own instruments as the elders used to do, many of whom had died.

When drumming was discouraged by Christian missionaries, the art of drum-making declined too, which explains why the most beautiful drums that I have seen in Tanzania weren't made by an African at all but by a Frenchman, Jeji Bruno, who I met at Dar's Alliance de Francaise where he exhibited them. A musician and cabinet-maker, Bruno wandered the African continent for years studying its music before finally settling in Tanzania. He devoted himself to drum-making because he couldn't find anyone who knew how to make the drums he wanted for his own compositions. He searched the forests south of Dar for wood left behind by wood-cutters, like mninga - African teak - rosewood and ebony, and he learned to carve elaborately decorated drum bases as the Makonde once had. He fashioned his drums' tympanums from an assortment of natural materials, among them cobra, python, impala, bushbuck, cow and goat skins, and bound them to their bases with twine made from tree bark. Bruno's drums were magnificent, but none of the 70 in his collection was for sale. He intended to take them into the schools and instruct Tanzanian children in the ways of their own music.

Bruno remembers falling ill once. A witchdoctor was called, who told him that his illness resulted from making drums - tribal ritual objects - without undergoing the required purifying ceremonies first. The West African shaman Malidoma Patrice Some explains that indigenous people believe that drums and masks are inhabited by invisible spirits which, if not respected appropriately, can be powerful and dangerous energies to contend with. In the case of Bruno's illness, the mganga was so concerned about the enormity of Bruno’s offence to the unseen world that he refused to treat him.

In My Heart is Africa: A Flying Adventure, author Scott Griffin writes that in Kenya there is an ancestral spirit among Bantu peoples called Ngoma who is called upon in times of illness and who greatly affects the success rate of recovery.

I may have more to write on the subject of ngoma when I spend time over the next year in Congo-Brazzaville. (I am very excited to have this opportunity!) Other than Bruno’s drums, the next most inspiring drums I have encountered in Tanzania come from the Congo. I owned one myself, an old one purchased from a Congolese in Western Tanzania, but it never emerged from the container in which it was shipped home. In preparation for going to the Congo, I found through an out of print book seller, a copy of Mboka, The Way of Life in a Congo Village. Published in the early 1970s, it recounts Lona B. Kenney’s adventures in Western Congo as an expat wife. Bored of tedious post life, she follows the beating of drums into the jungle to find their source, the mboka, which literally means "village". On this first visit to the village, she arrived shortly before nightfall and disturbed inebriated villagers at a funeral. "This was Isongo", Kenney wrote, "the dance of joy and mourning. Some of the women were practically naked, their bodies painted bright red. A few wore brass necklaces and bracelets on arms and ankles, and short raffia skirts at the hipline. None among them had on pagnes - the unmistakable badge of the inroads of civilization, let alone regular dresses, generally indicating the proximity of a mission"…  "The whole crowd, with me in their midst, [slowly shifted] toward the center of the mboka. It was hard to tell how many people there were. We [moved] towards the big fire which threw up bright sparks above the thatch of the huts"… "As the men and women walked, they whirled to the explosive beats of the tom-toms." I wish I had attended an ngoma such as this! Lona made it home later that night with the help of a village elder. "Awakening the next morning," she wrote, (with a hangover from the local liquor), "I was not certain at first whether my adventure of the previous evening had been real or nothing but a dream."

28-05-2007