In the case of percussion, with many bigger and smaller instruments, an “own style” can apply to both choice(s) of instrument(s), as patterns/playing style for each instrument (e.g. congas or bells).
OWN STYLE
I love Reggae music, so that is an influence. Afro-Cuban music and percussion – having been several times to Cuba – another one. African traditional music also had my interest, partly as part of the wider African Diaspora approach I take to music. I always found the African retentions in Black American music genres, and in folk music in the Caribbean and Latin America, intriguing. Obvious in music of Vodou, Santeriá, or Jamaican Kumina, more subtle – in gradations - in popular or “secular” music genres as Rumba, Samba, Salsa, Cumbia, Merengue, Reggae, Calypso, Blues, etcetera.
AFRICAN DIASPORA
This African Diaspora approach made me look at Africa as a direct percussion source. Personally, I got most interest in music from Southern Nigeria – Yoruba and Igbo -, and a bit less (though not absent) for the Guinea and Senegambia regions.
Other percussionists I know specialized more in “Guinea/Senegambia”, mostly Djembe enthusiasts. I, in turn, specialized a bit more in Southern Nigeria, percussion-wise, you might say. Neither this is exclusive, and more parts of Africa I studied (notably Congo and Uganda, besides Guinea), but somehow it was easier to find information on, say, Yoruba music, and bordering areas. Patterns, playing styles, and instruments from roughly South Nigeria, all helped to find my own style. Illustratively of my particular path, I got and played an Ashiko drum (drum of Yoruba origin), before I started (about a year later) playing the better known Djembe (Mande/Guinea/Mali origin).
This influence shows not so much in instruments, but in patterns. Congas I play regularly, and are of Afro-Cuban origin, with strong Congo/African influences, but patterns for other drums can be played on them too, of course. Similarly “round” shaped, open-bottom drums can moreover be found in large parts of sub-Saharan Africa (also in e.g. Benin and Ghana).
This being said, South Nigeria’s percussive influence on me, a question imposes itself. Why specifically South Nigeria, and not other parts of Nigeria, like the North-Centre parts, where the Hausa are a large ethnic group. What about Hausa music?
It is kind of odd, since I received some Guinea influences, having had in time Djembe lessons, learning patterns from Guinea and South Mali, yet I did not really got into Hausa music directly.
HAUSA
The Hausa consist of a large ethnic group, mostly Sunni Muslims, in a.o. Northern Nigeria and Niger, speaking an own Afro-Asiatic (Chadic) language. They are however largely of African descent, according to genetic studies related to Nilotic groups (such as in South Sudan). Some geneticists assume alongside this about 45% of the DNA of Hausa from Afro-Asiatic language speakers, others assume less (estimating more Nilotic DNA), and only regionally, suggesting thus cultural over ethnic influences. Some sources state that “Hausa” refers not so much to a race or nation, but rather to a common language and culture.
Anyway, degree of racial mixture aside, the Islamic influence became strong on the Hausa, shaping – some say: “de-Africanizing” - their culture. The Hausa live in quite a wide area of Northern Nigeria, but are also important in Niger, and are substantial minorities in other countries like Ghana, Chad, Benin, or Cameroon, sometimes mixed with the also Islamic Fulani. Northern Nigeria (Kano state) and Southern Niger are either way the strongholds of Hausa culture.
Negatively put, as described in some (South) Nigerian sources, the stronger influence of/conversion to Islam of the Hausa, limited the traditional African heritage in favour of Islamic norms and prohibitions. Positively put, you can say that Islam and Arab influences mixed uniquely with local, present African culture, into a new culture.
Culture is after all not just about heritage and authenticity – however crucial -, but also about creativity and innovation.
The truth is in fact something in between, I think. Islam limited and destroyed parts of the traditional African culture (and music), but only partly, and incorporated some of it into a new mix. The conquerers‘ religion got hierarchically the upper hand, though, as did later colonizers, the British, bringing Christianity.
IRONIES
Traditional African music in Northern Nigeria was thus more affected/conscribed (“Islamicized”) than e.g. Yoruba or Igbo music in Southern Nigeria, at least in an earlier stage. There was of course a strong British colonial and Christian influence in South Nigeria, but in a later stage in history, and more indirectly.
There are some interesting ironies here, and some “painful” ones too. The Islamic conversion since mainly the 13th c. among the Hausa, created a stronger central rule before the British came, than in the South, seemingly representing a cultural “defense”. This Hausa culture was however not fully indigenous, bearing strong influences of pre-European, but non-African Arab invaders bringing the Islam. This same Islam historically also could work on occasion against “African solidarity”, as the history of Yoruba enslavement shows.
When the (Hausa-Fulani) Jihad – Islamic conquests - spread southwards in the early decades of 19th c., many Hausa conquered non-Islamic Yoruba in SW Nigeria, enslaving them. While Britain had by then formally abolished the slave trade (some illegal trade continued), France, Spain and Portugal still needed slave workers, especially in Cuba, where plantations increased, being the reason why many Yoruba ended up in Cuba and Brazil, especially brought by Portuguese slave traders (also for Spanish colonies), but often bought from Hausa middle-men, holding Yoruba as war captives. That is the painful part, I guess.
The irony is that in present-day Nigeria, superficially the South (with big cities like Lagos and Ibadan) seems more Christianized and thus Anglicized/Westernized – in part -, while the largely Hausa North seems to have maintained an own strong (Islamic-based) culture as seeming counterweight to the colonial influence.
As shown, though, the influence of earlier external conquerors (Arabs), already diluted and limited, its indigineous Africanness.
HAUSA MUSIC
To focus on the positive: what is maintained or perhaps reworked interestingly, of the traditional culture, including musical forms, in Hausa-land? One can focus on “traditional purity”, but of course the mixing of cultural influences resulted throughout history, and on different continents, in interesting new musical genres. “Black music” in the Americas, I already mentioned (think e.g. also of Jazz), but “different cultures mixing”, one also finds in e.g. (South Spanish) Flamenco music, Italian Tarantella, Greek music, Turkish influence on Balkan (Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Albanian) music, some genres with mixed influences in India or Madagascar, and some Ethiopian genres. Perhaps being something like the process of “taking the best of both worlds”.
Did interesting “own” musical genres arise among the Hausa, perhaps also percussively interesting for someone like me?
Besides this, folk culture has the inherent beauty of resilience against authorities, and against all odds, I love so much. The totalitarian, prohibitive aspects of organized religion (Christianity or Islam) need not wipe out or even dominate local indigenous culture, only limiting it maybe.
The also nominally Islamicized Guinea, South-Mali, Northern Ghana, Northern Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast and Senegambia (Sahel Africa), often Mande-speaking, regions, definitively have developed an own interesting culture, also regarding percussion, with the Djembe instrument as prime example, only the djembe’s goblet shape (similar to the Darbuka’s) betraying Middle Eastern influences, but further part of an African-based mixture, with Islam only an element. More “swing” besides polyrhythm, Islamic adaptations, but a same focus on rhythm, dancing, and communal story-telling, such as through travelling “griots” (folk musicians, “jeli’), as in other parts of Africa.
There is also some beauty in the creativity of culture: the popular inventiveness to create something new from what is there, without remaining “stuck” in inherited traditions. This can also be organically and collectively, especially in Africa, for cultural reasons.
INSTRUMENTS AND PATTERNS
Drums are used in Hausa culture, at times dominantly (especially the Talking Drums), but not in an extensive or very multifaceted way. Not always dominant in the sense of “central” to the musical piece, as more to the South in Africa (with combined drum rhythms). Drumming serves more to underline vocals or other instruments, and at most helps “meander” the main musical accompaniment. The hourglass-shaped ‘Kalungu’ Talking Drum is nonetheless a steady accompanier of both urban and rural music, as some other kettle drums, usually somewhat high-pitched and often played with sticks, rather than with hands, and some other percussion instruments. Playing styles tend to be “meandering”, as said, and not “staccato” or “straight” rhythms (as in Congo/South Nigeria), but more akin to Darbuka playing styles in the Middle East and North Africa.
TALKING DRUM
The Talking Drum (called "Kalungu" among the Hausa) is typically African, and in fact as common among the Yoruba in SW Nigeria, as well as elsewhere (Guinea/Mali/Senegambia and Ghana). It is found in both regions with or without Islamic/Arab influences, so is indigenous to Africa, mimicking often the tonal languages in parts of Africa (at least the Yoruba language). The Kalungu among the Hausa is relatively big: the Yoruba know bigger and smaller sizes Talking Drums, Dagomba in Ghana bigger ones, Mande-speaking peoples (Guinea a.a.) in turn smaller sizes. The difference is that the Talking Drum (known as Gangan) is among the Yoruba (and Mande-speaking people) only one of several drums with prominent roles - drowning in wider drums, you might say - and remains more dominant/audible among the Hausa.
Other instruments among the Hausa are the Goje (one-stringed fiddle), trumpets, and flutes. The Goje is somewhat similar to the Ethiopian Masenqo instrument, also one-stringed. So, apart from a Middle Eastern influence, it can be an Eastern African one too, in light of the genes from Nilotic (South) Sudanese people found in the Hausa.
Interestingly, but explainable, the “bells” seem less common – though not absent - among the Hausa, being more crucial in both Yoruba and Igbo music in South Nigeria. The same applies to shakers. On some occasions the bell types of neighbouring peoples like the Yoruba or Igbo are “borrowed”.
In more rural parts of Hausa-land, ancient spiritual traditions are kept alive, including the invoking of ancestor spirits, besides nominal Islam. Here more African aspects and even bells are used in the music. Yet, even in “mainstream” Hausa culture, such as with urban songs for the Emir, African culture remains, such as the Kalungu “talking drum”, also found among the Yoruba, and in Guinea, which has no original equivalent in the Arab world, and is thus African.
Less pitch changes or polyrhythm than more to the South, but still a focus on drumming, as with some kettle drums, also used in Hausa celebrations. Other aspects of Hausa culture, like trumpet and flute use, or the importance of horses, show other influences, so there is an own, not uninteresting cultural mix.
I find as percussionist the most interesting – and potentially educational - the importance of the Talking Drum – relatively big ones - among the Hausa -, kept underneath the arm to change the pitch, played with bent stick. I play a smaller talking drum (from another part of Nigeria), sometimes, in the same way (one hand a bowed stick, other hand hitting on skin too).
Remnants of call-and-response singing are also there in official Hausa celebrations, as elsewhere in (also non-Islamic) sub-Saharan Africa, again pointing at mixture, and cultural survival.
DANCING
About "dancing" - of course related to musical structures - and differences between the Hausa or Yoruba, Igbo or other dancing, I found less information. Characteristically African, exuberant, hip and pelvic movements among the Yoruba and Igbo confirm what many people imagine of Black African dancing, along with at times acrobatic moves, and indeed dancing is important in these cultures. There is common dancing among Hausa too, but it seems more modest/contained or "stiff", which might relate to different male-female relations, and Islamic inhibitions regarding too free female dancing, seeming sensual, even if the hip and buttocks follow the rhythms, as a way to enjoy the music in the African tradition. They are not always as "sexual" as they seem.
Nonetheless, there are some dances known as "acrobatic" among the Hausa too.
TWO THEORIES
Musically and historically the Hausa are thus interesting. Some theories I studied before (and partly discussed on this blog) seem relevant to further contextualize Hausa music.
GRIOT AND FOREST AFRICA
The distinction between “Griot (Sahel) Africa” and “forest, polyrhythm” Africa, made by Western anthropologists like Robert Farris-Thompson, is certainly relevant here. The Islamic influence shared with Guinea/Mali/Senegambia created a “swing” aspect in musical patterns, i.e. going/gliding “around” a basic beat (like guitars/strings), and not straight drum-based rhythms as in “forest Africa” (South Ghana, South Nigeria, Benin, Congo), several simultaneously, around a clave (“key”). This lack of this “key pattern”, explains also the scarcer use of bells or shakers in Hausa music. This type of “time-keeping” was simply less needed, in the meandering, Arab-influenced music, less focused on combining multiple rhythms.
Rather, Griot African music (including Hausa music) is swinging around a beat like string instruments (e.g. the Kora) do, distantly related to the vocal melisma (stretching syllables to different notes) of singing in Islam-influenced cultures (including Flamenco), or perhaps best known for the muezzin’s calls for prayer at mosques. Even the Talking Drums follow partly this meandering pattern.
Echoes of music from “polyrhythmic”, forest Africa can be found in Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latin American genres, and echoes of “swing”, Griot/Sahel Africa in Blues and Jazz. Interestingly: that whole “shuffle” and “swing”, reached Jamaica too, via radio stations playing Black US music like Blues, R&B, Jazz), partly influencing Reggae, though mixed with local, as scholars call it, "forest Africa" (Congo, Ghana, Igbo) musical aspects and accents, adapting that shuffle input according to Jamaican norms.
This makes Reggae a representative, varied representation of the wider African Diaspora, and thus also fit for varied percussion.
ISLAMIC CONVERSION
Quite different, but also relevant, I consider the work of the Dutch scholar (of Arabic and Islamic studies at Leyden University, Netherlands) Hans Jansen, about religion. Jansen wrote a book with the somewhat provocative title Het Nut Van God (The Use, or Function, Of God), in Dutch. I read it in Dutch. It was published in 2001.
Not all in this book by Jansen I found interesting, but parts of it – when he went deeper, beyond news or topical issues – I certainly did, even making me look differently at certain things. Religion served, Jansen argues, for people in certain places or cultures to provide them what they lacked in their environment, their real world.
According to Jansen, the chaos and lawlessness in war-ridden areas where Arabs and the later Islamic converts lived (Arabia, Middle East, parts of Africa), had religion serve the function of bringing “order” and “structure” by the good example and instructions from God (Allah). By contrast Judaism and Christianity of the Old Testament (with enslaved Jews) emphasized more “justice”, and New Testament Christianity, in materialist, money-driven societies, “love” (beyond interest). With the Saul-to-Paul conversion, he also contends, the emphasis in Christianity came more on “believing” than just practice.
Islam went a bit in a different direction. Believing mentally – or being able to “read” a holy book – seemed less important than clear, practical rituals, which were easy to adopt: praying 5 times a day, fasting in a part of the year, food prescriptions.. All once present in Christianity too, but diluted in favour of more abstract “belief”. Due to Islam’s clear, easy-to-adopt rituals, partly fitting local customs (polygamy, for instance), many people converted to Islam more willingly, even convincingly, if not always deeply. Added to this, the idea of “order” and a “high – if abstract - moral norm” of Islam was welcomed in violent, chaotic environments.
All this might explain why the Hausa so readily embraced Islam, and some among them even quite fanatically. The emphasis on rituals, though, still left some space, hidden or not, for own indigenous interpretations or survivals, clear in the Guinea region, as in other parts of Africa.
In Hausa-land, also with the recent Boko Haram fanaticism, this maintained, freer “own” Africanness, seemed less clear than e.g. among the more “flexible” Guinea or Ethiopian Muslims (or Somalian Muslims, before a conservative jihad there), but is still there.
CONCLUSION
I mentioned the African (not Arab) Talking Drum in common use among Hausa, and some other African musical aspects. Sure, the Middle Eastern “mono-rhythmic” focus is there, but Africanized rhythmically with a “swing” focus, and still some call-and-response, as elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa.
It is precisely this cultural resilience of Africanness which still makes the Hausa music interesting for a percussionist like me.
Percussionists are by definition “multicultural”.. they have to be. Me too, playing African drums and percussion instruments (from different regions), Cuban drums, Brazilian shakers, Spanish castanets, the Middle Eastern Darbuka, North African Bendir frame drums, bells, Western tambourines, modern “pop” jamblocks, etc.
I thought a period that an interest in Africa – as most percussive continent –, or the African Diaspora, was inevitable – even required - for a percussion player, but I later heard about percussionists strictly playing Middle Eastern or Indian instruments. That is them: I prefer to focus on the African Diaspora and Africa, and Hausa music is an affected, yet enigmatic and interesting part of it..
Historically, the Hausa were (relatively) less affected by the European slave trade, especially when compared to the Yoruba and Igbo in South Nigeria (or the Coromantee in Ghana, Ewe in Benin, and Congo peoples). The beauty of resilience of Yoruba cultural retentions in the Americas shows in Yoruba-derived instruments in Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian music, from there internationalizing: the Shékere (common in both Brazil and Cuba), and its modernized version invented in Brazil, the Cabasa shaker. The Ganza shaker, the Agogo double bell, the double-sided Bata drums survived in the Afro-Cuban (largely Yoruba-based) Santería faith, etcetera etcetera.
Congo music influenced Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian music (with clear echoes in Samba, Salsa and Son), and even influenced Reggae music from Jamaica, alongside Ghanaian influences. Congo drums even influenced the Afro-Cuban “inventions” of the by now well-known drum types the Conga and Bongó. Igbo ended up in Jamaica, Barbados, and parts of the US too.
Escaping (more) enslavement by Europeans can partly be explained by the inland, non-coastal location of Hausa-land, but also the Arab enslavement – likewise affecting millions of Africans – affected Hausa a bit less, probably due to their early conversion to Islam. In Islam, Muslims were formally not allowed to enslave other Muslims.
The book about ‘The Use (or Function) Of God’ by Hans Jansen I mentioned, thus also sheds light on this: how “modern times” and expansion and conquest through military means of both European Christianity and Arab Islamic expansion – and the inherent hypocrisy of exploitation, under the guise of “holy faiths” – apparently needed an organized religion to make sense of this, to structure this.
Within and despite this, “free” indigenous, original (“African”) culture and music still survived, also among the Hausa. Again: the beauty of cultural resilience, against all odds.
Also, the nice creativity of combining sources into “new art”, in this case Arab/Middle Eastern and African influences. The prominent drums, call-and-response of Africa, but the monorhythmic meandering of Arab music, yet “swung” in an African way.
Not uninteresting, but I always felt more attracted to polyrhythm of other parts of Africa: South Nigeria, but also the Congo region. Rhythms responding to each other, and intertwining. Evident in Yoruba, Igbo, and Congo music, more subtly in Afro-American genres like Reggae, Calypso, Samba, Merengue, or Salsa.
This does not mean that I love only that, as I see interesting aspects in most of authentic folk music, even if not very rhythmical, only less.
The continuous and fluid, meandering/swinging, talking drum-led drumming among the Hausa I find somewhat appealing, also as a change from my usual approach (clave, dialoguing and intertwining separate drum patterns), as well as the “intense” singing over it, fitting it due to its “melisma” (“trembling”) influences.
Perhaps this appeal increases into "inspiration" one day, who knows..
