BEFORE WIRELESS

Hokitika Guardian, 13 October 1924, Page 1

BEFORE WIRELESS

AFRICA’S “TALKING DItUAIS.”

The African native uses the drum more than does any other sort of man. Tho tiling is easy to make, easy to play (I), easy to carry, and it makes no end of a row, with a drum you can make more noise, lor a longer time, with less expenditure of effort, than anything else will help you to. The African drums when anybody is born, or dies, or is married; when working on Ids' farm he hires a man to drum to him; he drums when he is angry, when lie is glad, and when sorrow claims him.

AVlia’t will happen, what tho country will he like, when he hears about tho saxophone, one shudders to think. African natives have no method of writing or otherwise recording anything; therefore no code, Arorse, or other, is posssiblc for them. 1' urther, in place of common language, there arc hundreds of local tongues, a different one every few miles, so that once a man gels a day’s walk from his home he is apt to find himliclf amongst other Africans whom he can 'neither understand nor talk to. So that all the tales about the Death of So-and-So ,tho result of the Battle of This, the issue of the prize fight between the two That's haring, thanks to drumming has been known to the inhabitants of the village of Canawarri, or some similar place in the hush, a week before tho electric telegraph brought the news is just nonsense. It does not happen, because it can’t happen. Africans, and the people of average intelligence who live in the African’s country, can, it is true, tell pretty well from the drum sounds what is going on, in a general way. The noise at a funeral, e.g., differs from that at a wedding, the farm work noise from the dance noise, and so on. And the “alarm” noise is different. But that is the beginning and the end of it, the limit of the thing. Thus, if an armed force moves into an area all the people concerned know very soon, thanks to tho drums, that there is war. The size and composition of the force, tho direction and rate lof its movement, ,those details they have to learn from sonic other means. Civilised man can make a drum “talk”; the African illative can’t.—.T. Fitzpatrick, in the “ Daily News.”