A151 Making sense of things: an

introduction to material culture

The Akan drum
Commentator
Akan drum, from the early eighteenth century, made in West Africa, found in
Virginia, USA.
Neil MacGregor
This week were looking at the eighteenth century and especially at what
happened when Europeans encountered non-Europeans all over the world. Not
one of the objects that Ive chosen is from Europe itself but all in some way
reflect the great European Enlightenment project; both its ambitions and its
failures. Its often a troubling history since many of these dialogues between
Europe and the world ended in oppression and destruction, the fracturing of
whole societies. One side wrote down what was happening. The other could
not. So if we want to hear the story from the non-European side to recover the
voice of the silent people, we must go to their objects and in this programme
luckily the object can speak.
If it werent too fragile to be played this is roughly the sound the Akan drum
would make. Its the earliest African-American object in the British Museum,
indeed possibly the earliest African-American object anywhere. From this
drum, made in Africa, taken to America, and then sent on to England, we can
trace the story of one of the biggest forced migrations in the history of the
world, when millions of Africans were shipped to America as slaves. These
utterly dispossessed people were allowed to bring no things with them. But
they brought of course the music they already had in their heads and one or
two instruments came as well. And with these came the very beginnings of
some of the worlds most vibrant sounds African-American blues and jazz.
The Enlightenment enterprise of gathering the worlds knowledge was in full
swing when the British Museum opened its doors for the first time in 1759.
The founding collection was mostly the legacy of the Irish doctor Sir Hans
Sloane and it included scientific instruments, plants and minerals, stuffed
animals and various intriguing objects from all round the globe, gathered to
allow a comparative study of societies.
It was Sloane who had the drum brought to England and here it is in front of
me. Its about the size of a small keg of beer so a bit over a foot high and the
wooden sides have been carved with simple decoration of striped bands. It was
collected in Virginia around 1730 and in the eighteenth century it was labelled
by the British Museum as an American-Indian drum. And an American-Indian
drum it remained until 1906 when a curator in the museum realised that it
couldnt be any such thing. It looked to him much more like a drum from West
Africa. Seventy odd years later his hunch was confirmed through scientific
examination, carried out by colleagues at Kew Gardens and here at the
museum. And we now know that the main body of the drum is carved from

wood from the tree Cordia africana, which grows in West Africa, while the
pegs and the cord that hold the skin of the drum taut derive from wood and
plants also from the same region. This is unquestionably a drum that was made
in West Africa and then somehow travelled from there to Virginia.
The first African slaves arrived in British North America in 1619, brought to
the American colonies on European-owned ships to provide labour for the
ever-expanding plantations. At first they were put to work cultivating sugar
and rice, later tobacco and finally and most famously cotton. By the early
1700s the trade in enslaved people had become the most lucrative business
between West African rulers and European traders.
Anthony Appiah, who teaches at Princeton University in the United States, has
heritage from both sides.
Anthony Appiah
I always like to tell people I have slave traders on both sides of my family.
Both my English ancestors and my Ghanaian ancestors were involved in the
slave trade, or some of them. You have to understand that it was a trading
relationship. Most of the Africans who went into the slave trade were either
slaves or were captured and enslaved by other Africans. As the trade
developed by the eighteenth century in a place like Asante where I grew up
and where the drum comes from, they had become very dependent on slave
trade as a form of trade and they were going out in warfare and capturing large
numbers of people and sending them down to the coast and exchanging them
for the goods that they were getting from Europe which would have included
guns, which made it possible for them to then proceed with more warfare.
Neil MacGregor
Overall its estimated that around twelve million Africans were transported to
America from the trading stations of West Africa. And both Europeans and
Africans profited from the trade. This is one of those moments in history when
we are truly united by a common inhumanity. The drum comes from the Akan
people, a group which includes the Ashanti and the Fante kingdoms. It was
probably part of a chiefs drum orchestra, a key element in the music and
dance that were fundamental ingredients of court ceremonial and social life.
We assume that the drum was taken on a slave ship but not by a slave. Slaves
took nothing. It may have been a gift to the captain or taken by an African
chiefs son. We know that they sometimes sailed with the slavers to America
as part of their education. Once on board the drum would have had little to do
with the joy of communal music-making. Drums like this were used for what
was grotesquely called dancing the slaves.
Actor reading
As soon as a ship has its complement of slaves it immediately makes off. The
poor wretches while yet in sight of their country fall into sickness and die. The
only sure means to preserve them is to have some musical instrument play to
them be it ever so mean.
Neil MacGregor
Slaves were taken up to the decks and there forced to dance to the rhythms of
the drum to keep them healthy and to fight depression, which the slave

captains knew could lead to suicide or to revolt. Drumming was a useful

instrument of control. Once in America on the plantations the slaves were
allowed to drum and to make music for themselves but slave owners soon
grew anxious that drumming, once again used to forge community, would not
prevent rebellion but incite it. In South Carolina in 1739 for example drums
were used as a call to arms at the outbreak of a violent slave rebellion. It
prompted the colony to prohibit drums by law and to classify them as
weapons. Hans Sloane who had this drum brought to London was himself a
slave owner in Jamaica and he published one of the first transcriptions of slave
music. Its a precious document. Heres a taste of it.
[music]
Sloane described the slaves instruments and explained why the authorities in
Jamaica had also banned them.
Actor reading Sloane
Slaves, formerly on their festivals, were allowed the use of trumpets after their
fashion and drums made of a piece of a hollow tree. But making use of these
in their wars at home in Africa it was thought too much in inciting them to
rebellion and so they were prohibited by the customs of the island.
Neil MacGregor
This Akan drum, collected for Sloane around 1730, might well be one of these
confiscated drums. The material stretched over the drum is deer skin, almost
certainly North American, and this opens up another intriguing possibility for
our drum. The complicated relationships between Native Americans and
African Americans in the eighteenth century are often overlooked. But there
was in fact a great deal of contact including intermarriage. Some Native
Americans owned their own plantations and had their own slaves, both Native
American and African. Its a history thats rarely mentioned but it adds
another intriguing dimension to that eighteenth-century museum label,
describing this as an American-Indian drum.
The story of this drum is the story of global displacement. Enslaved Africans
transported to the Americas, Native Americans forced westward by slave
plantations. The drum itself taken from Africa to Virginia and in the latest
phase of its life taken by a slave owner to London. And here in London an
extraordinary thing has happened. For like the drum, the children of the slaves
have now also come to England. Descendants of those once involved in the
slave trade British, West African, African-American and Afro-Caribbean
now all live together in the same cosmopolitan city. The Akan drum has in a
way become a typical twenty-first-century Londoner. The American-born
playwright and critic Bonnie Greer, is now a British citizen.
Bonnie Greer
As a person of African descent and also having Native American ancestry as
well, it represents those two strands of myself and of many African-Americans
and many people from the Caribbean as well. The thing thats remarkable
about these objects for us who were taken enforceably from our environment
was that these objects have travelled with us and theyve actually become
what we have become and they have accompanied us here to live in this place

and to thrive in this place and because we are part of that object and it is part
of us, it is quite right that it is here.
Neil MacGregor
This drum is a record of many dialogues. Today I want to leave Anthony
Appiah with the last word on the drum to consider how we all British,
Africans and Americans might now view this painful shared history.
Anthony Appiah
When you see an object like this it invites interpretation but it doesnt require
any particular interpretation. And so you can think of it as an object that
condenses the memory of all the horrible ghastly wicked things that happened
in the slave trade. Or you can think of it as an emblem of the possibilities of
holding on through all that trauma to something worth holding on to and
coming out of it with an object thats both old, because it comes from Africa
and has a history in Africa, but also new because its now a New World thing
which has a new meaning in the New World drawing on the old meanings but
moving beyond them.
And that optimistic way of breeding the object I think is the one that Id like to
hold on to and leave with because its what the New World needs to do. Its
what the whole world needs to do.