BEFORE WIRELESS.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXV, Issue 4761, 8 October 1924, Page 2

BEFORE WIRELESS.

AFRICA'S ‘TALKING DRUMS.” The African native uses the drum more than does any other sort of man. The thing is easy to make, easy to play, easy to carry, and it makers no end of a row ; with a drum you can make more noise, for 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 his farm he hires a man to drum to him; he drums when he is angry, when he is glad, and . when sorrow claims him. What will happen, what the country will be like, when he hears ,about the saxophone, one shudders to think. African natives have no method of writing or otherwise recording anything ; therefore no code, Morjse or other, is possible for them. Further, in place of common language, there are hundreds of local tongues, a different one every few miles, so that once a man gets a day’s walk from his home town he is apt to find himself amongst other Africans whom he can neither understand nor talk to. So that all the tales about the death of So-and-so, the result of the Battle of This, the issue of the prize fight between the two Thafe having, thanks to drumming, been known to the inhabitants of the village of Gannawarri, or some similar place in the bush, a week before the electric telegraph brought the news, is just nonsense. It does not happen, because it can’t happen.

Africans, and 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 noitse, 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 the drums, that there is war. The size and composition of the force, the direction and rate of its movement, these details they have to learn by some other means. Civilised man can make a drum “talk”; the African native can’t. —J. Fitzpatrick, in the “Daily News.”