The history of the djembe

[James]

I wonder what we could come up with if tried to draw a time line of the history of djembe music

What are the estimates on the origin and older history of this music?

Modern history
It first made an impact outside West Africa in the 1950s due to the world tours of Les Ballets
Africains led by the Guinean Fodeba Keita.

In the U.S. interest in the jembe centered around Ladji Camara, a member of Les Ballets Africains in the 1950s, who since the 1960s has trained a generation of American players.

The death of Guinean President Sekou Toure in 1984, after two and a half decades of strong patronage of the arts and increasingly severe repression and international alienation, opened the doors for foreigners to visit, and also forced some Guineans to look abroad to fill the void left by sharply reduced patronage.

[the kid]

It'd be a long winding line for sure

We'll have to go to timbuktu and check the library



Interestingly Toumani Diabate claims to be the 72 generation kora player which would make it at least 1000 years back into history. The susu bala is at least 600 years old but it looks and sounds excatly like todays bala. I'm sure that style bala was hundreds if not thousands of years in development. The sound engineering inside those things is phenomenal.

I'm sure there was also atelope skin drums back thousands of years ago.

Interesting topic

[Paul]

Sounds interesting, I've been intermittently searching academic databases on the subject for the past few years, and found very little and what there is is in French, or some incredibly racist account of ceremonies by some former colonial officer... However having met some ethnomusicologists lately I doubt they would make life as easy as to call it a Djembe and would probably search for a name from some obscure village of two people where they call it a hkghglgbkrg..

However I did find this... Sounds like you really...

L'ordinateur et le djembé : entre rêves et réalités : Burkina Faso = The computer and the jembe : between dreams and realities : Burkina Faso / Sylvestre Ouédraogo.

[michi]

None of my books go into any detail on the time of origin of the djembe. Pretty much all of them say that it originated with the Numu (blacksmiths), but none of them give any dates. They do mention the Mali Empire and its origin in the 13th century. But that's in the context of the history of Mandingue, not the history of the djembe.

It's probably safe to assume that djembe-like drums reach back several hundred years. But I suspect we won't ever know the origin in any real detail.

Michi.

[bkidd]

Agreed that an origin story made be hard to pin down for such an old instrument. The ethnomusicologist Eric Charry speculates that drumming and hunter's music predates the rise of the Mali empire (Mande Music, Eric Charry, 2000). One article by Charry that discusses the history of the djembe was published in 1996 http://echarry.web.wesleyan.edu/jembearticle/article.html

Cheers,
-Brian

[davidognomo]

I'm sure there was also atelope skin drums back thousands of years ago.

Famoudou has antelope skin djembes. I think they are meant more for bass djembe, if I'm not mistaken. "archethypo" has shown a djembe she bought from Famoudou that has an antelope skin, on the "show off your axe" thread

[Michel]

What I've been told is that bush-antelope skins are the original skins for djembe's. I brought some from Mali last winter, yesterday I reheaded one of my drums with one. After drying and tuning I hope to show it off in the show off your axe-section...

[Afoba]

Interestingly Toumani Diabate claims to be the 72 generation kora player which would make it at least 1000 years back into history. The susu bala is at least 600 years old

my calculation would be: 72 generations = up to 2000 years
Soso bala: 800 years (the story says it already had some reputation in 1234, so it was probably some years older).

Funny to see Cherry accusing the French of spelling african words in a french way just to establish an english spelling/writing in the next sentences ("jembe" ). It is very obious that he's an english speaking person that has a look at Bamako ("manjani")! Still he has read a lot about other styles, too ("dundunba").
Important: "dy" or "di" or "dj" is not a (strange) french way to write something that sounds like the english "j"! It's more the other way around: english speakers produce a "j" sound every time it has to be "dy". Then it depens from the local dialect (changing from dy to j from Kouroussa to Bamako) and from the local writing system: official guinean maninka: dy, official bamana alphabeth: j.
Diallo (Guinea) is Jallow in Gambia, Jalloh in Sierra-Leone, might be Diallo AND Jallo in Mali, I think there's Gallo, too. "Correct" versions would be Dyalo and Jalo, but no one uses them.

The author of "L'enfant noir" is called Laye Camara, not Camara Laye. I don't think you can see the Camara as a traditional numunkèla lineage dating from the Sundyiata time or earlier. They were a clan (or two clans at that time). The class sytem only has been established in a long process during the mixing of the different clans at the same places, I think. Take Kantè (Kanté), they were not even maninka people at that time (but Soso), and today they are considered as classical maninka blacksmiths (at least in some regions). If it's right, what people told me in Hamana, that the Kanté have been blacksmiths before the Kourouma (Kuruma, Koroma, Doumbouya, Dumbia, Fakoly, Fakoli), this means that they haven't been a group of blacksmiths around 1250 either (this seems logical to me, it was just clans, geographically seperated).
Has anyone of you heard about Camaras being blacksmiths (real blacksmiths, not the class) apart from Baro, Fissadou and Laye Camara's father in Kouroussa? I would be really interested.
Btw. Camara's father was a blacksmith, but it was his mother who was a blacksmiths child (Daman), as LC explains in "L'enfant noir".

I hope this mail is not too confusing.
In general: it's quite easy to say why something is probably wrong. Much harder to say what is probably true and why d;-)

Greets

[bkidd]

In general: it's quite easy to say why something is probably wrong. Much harder to say what is probably true and why d;-)

So true.