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How Do the Drums Talk?
The use of talking drums as a form of communication was noticed by Europeans in the first half of the eighteenth century. Detailed messages could be sent from one village to the next faster than could be carried by a person riding a horse. In the nineteenth century Roger T. Clarke, a missionary, realised that "the signals represent the tones of the syllables of conventional phrases of a traditional and highly poetic character." Like Mandarin and Cantonese the African languages were tonal, that is the pitch is important in determining the meaning of a particular word. The problem was how could complex messages be communicated without the use of vowels or consonants and simply using tone? The answer was explained by an English emigrant to Africa, John F. Carrington, in his 1949 book The Talking Drums of Africa explained how african drummers were able to communicate complex messages over vast distances. He found that to each short word beat on the drums was an added an extra phrase, which would be redundant in speech but provided context to the core drum signal.

An Example The message "come back home" would be translated by the drummers as "Make your feet come back the way they went, make your legs come back the way they went, plant your feet and your legs below, in the village which belongs to us." The extra phrases provide a context in which to make sense of the basic message or drum beats. The extra drum beats reduce the ambiguity of the meaning. The irony was that by the time the West understood the mechanism of the drums they began to diminish in use in Africa.