As I am going through a Rwanda reading binge (I’ve got Dallaire‘s Shake Hands with the Devil and Ilibagiza‘s Left to Tell checked off my list), I recently picked up Gilbert Tuhabonye‘s This Voice in My Heart at the library. Turns out that Mr. Tuhabonye’s story comes out of Burundi, not Rwanda, and that anti-Tutsi massacres took place there too, a few months before the more well-known genocide in Rwanda.

Nevertheless, it’s a great chance to learn a little about Burundi, a place I only knew through one of my favourite postage stamps when I was a junior philatelist.

About halfway through the book, there are a few pages on the drumming of Burundi: athletic men balance 25-pound drums on their heads, beat it with drumsticks and dance!

Mr. Tuhabonye explains:

In Burundi and other East African countries, the lead player uses a drum called the ngoma. Unlike the goblet-shaped drum of West Africans, the ngoma is more like the typical Western drum – a simple cylinder. It is made of a soft wood and covered with cow skin. To accompany the lead drummer, who has to be the strongest member of the group because of the size of the drum and his central role in the dancing, we play the ibishikizu, a single-headed peg drum, similar to what many people refer to generically as a bongo drum. The third place of the ensemble is the amashako, slightly larger than the ibishikizu, with which we play the basic rhythm line. In a sense, our drumming is three-part harmony, with a rhythm line, a melody, and an accompaniment. (Page 140)

Well, I am one of the least musical people on the planet, so I really have no idea what any of that means. It’s the next part that made more sense:

For a while in the early eighties, Burundi drumming enjoyed popular attention in the world music scene, thanks to Western groups such as Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow, who incorporated authentic Burundi beats and drum lines into their songs. Because a group called the Burundi Drummers recorded an album in the United Kingdom, every now and then a group will sample some of that album into its records. Even today, the Burundi Drummers (sometimes referred to as the Drummers of Burundi) perform around the world and their CDs are available in the United States. (Page 141)

As soon as I read that, I had to verify for myself:

and

So I had to check out the real thing. Here are a teasing seventeen seconds:

But really, you should spend the seven minutes it takes to see the whole thing: here’s a German documentary on Burundi’s drumming, showing the performance as the drummers parade down the street.

(By the way, I really hate YouTube and it’s been so annoying, this is probably the last of videos I’ll mess with.)

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