Mwalimu Baruti Speaks:drums & Us

[Baba Ahmed]

"We must remember that over most of the time of Afrikans on this planet, music has exclusively served positive culturally enhancing functions. It called us to perform ritual festival and ceremony, to celebrate our rites and to gather at our sacred places to confirm and rejuvenate any neglected connection with the ancestors, our guardian deities and the Creator.

It summoned us to village meetings to decide communal issues and to the courts to decide disagreements between individuals within families. When necessary, it even called us as a community into war with others.

We must remember that drums have always been at the center of our music. As the heart, they beat out the time that regulates the pulse of our constant movement toward equilibrium and perfection in spite of the disorder created around us by incomplete beings. They marked cadence during the marches those who broke from their enslavement made from town to town after victorious revolts. They rolled down from our Maroon, Quilombo and outlier strongholds announcing coming war and retaliation. They speak of universal rhythm, of balance, of justice, of order. We have never given up our music for reason. We know the message that it carries.

As timeless dielis, the drums told of our births, lives, deaths, cycles, victories, defeats and lessons learned. The vibrations that their music gives off nurtures the communion of our community. It is no wonder that Europeans were driven to try to silence them. Europeans sought to tear us from spirit; to be as they, vulnerable and lost. They knew that we could not have lived without the music, without the beat, the bass, the drum. And we have never lived without it, even though now to a much lesser extent than our ancestors. And this leaves us with no choice but to work to beat out even more of our truth. Without this we can never regain our full humanity.

We can still feel our drumming on the hull of the many enslavers' ships like those they misnamed Bom Jesus, Egalite adn Liberte as clearly as those two brothers heard each other beating out their pain on their cell wall in the movie Slam, as closely as the elder calling us home in the movie Sankofa.They have not silenced us, for they cannot.

Yet, their attempt to silence our drum was not without cause. They had every reason to outlaw and severely punish drumming during our enslavement, reasons as equally powerful as their prohibiting the practice of Capoeira, communal economic relations such as the Esu Esu, the speaking of our native tongue and naming ourselves for ourselves. All of these, but especially the drums, give Afrikans a power that Europeans cannot see, predict or control. "The power of the Afrikan drum is inescapable.

Why is it that we so love the bass? Why is hard rock more suitable to the european's soullessness while rhythm and blues more to ours? Why is the screeching, high pitched, chaotic cacophony more conducive to yurugu's ear? Why is it that sounds are not music to us unless we can feel the vibrations shake our very soul? Why do only violent, painful, death marches suit them? There is no denial. We cannot live without the bass. Rhythm is a necessary anchor when one floats in a disordered reality. It temporarily gives us peace.

So far, in this battle, our music has kept us sane. And it will continue doing so unless we allow them to bring our music in line with their chaos, unless we allow them to steal our drum and fully infuse their turmoil into it. Only by disrupting our rhythm could they prevent us from hearing the drum's calling us back to our Way.

Only then would we lose sight of the path, and our way back become eternally confused. We must slow down, stop and reverse this process even though it will be a long and arduous task. "Freedom is not free." It is an honorable struggle, worthy of the sanity of the coming seventh generation. Afrikans are known for waging war against seemingly insurmountable odds and winning when the cause is just.

Every member of the Afrikan community must wake up to the fact that our music is now being used as an agent against us. Even beyond the violent and materialistic extremes it is used to promote, our children are being programmed into sexual predators. Their own music pushes sexual perversion and excess. By blending/mixing more and more of other's chaos into our rhythm, the music we listen to is made to convey their confusion and insanity as desirable. The rhythm drumming was designed to bring us is deadened to allow chaos to be confused with peace. Their thoughts accumulate in our minds as the bass temporarily removes the weight of our oppression exchanging one form of control for another. We put down our guard when we think we recognize a friend. Our children run to the bass only to be caught up in an even more elaborate mentacidal genocide.

We cannot get around this reality. It is the creation of those who diligently seek to continue to be our destroyers; yet, at the same time, we cannot get caught up in their destructive cycle. We must bravely return to the drum and dance of our ancestors daring to embrace our Way of rhythm. The Universe is rhythm. Rhythm weaves order into the relationships we will ever call community. It keeps discord at bay. And we are a people who have made a ritual of that rhythm.

Therefore, "we must act as if it is impossible to fail." But we must follow only those drums which lead the way home.

In making this choice, there must be a connection between thought, word and deed. We must build. We must build institutions. We must secure and maintain many Fihankras; safe, sacred places where other's discord cannot enter, even through us. In these places, there must be free spaces where sisters can perform the ritual dances of the Orisa with love. By their very existence, Afrikan women here have earned every right to openly express their deepest emotional beauty as their sisters do in Ghana, Senegal, Guinea, in all West Afrika and throughout the Continent. In these uncorrupted and protected communal areas, stools must always be made ready for the brothers to beat out loudly on their djembe, dunumba, sangba, kenkeni, kutiro and sabar drums for their sisters. Sisters must give life. And brothers must give momentum to that life. All rhythm, thought, movement and sound, all nommo, is in homage to the ancestors who forever remain Afrikan. All is in unqualified respect and adoration of the Creator."

Baba Note: This is an unpublished piece written and copyright by Mwalimu K. Bomani Baruti; with his permission I post this. Medase

[Im The Truth]

....Hence the name, The Talking Drum Collective.