African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African folklore 30
only one or two tunes. Wolof “middle tuning” is related to the way that the tidinet was
played by their enemies for 150 years; thus the practice is a testament to cultural
exchange.
African Songs
In 1789, the African Equiano said, “We are a nation of dancers, musicians, and poets.
Thus every great event…is celebrated in public dances which are accompanied with
songs and music suited to the occasion.” The Ashanti, for example, thought it “absurd” to
worship in any way other than with chanting or singing. The dances might last for half an
hour, and some individual did special dances in the center of the group circle. Sometimes
the Ashanti celebrated a successful hunt or a special seasonal festival, such as the “Yam
Customs.”
African music is especially improvisational, conversational, and interactive. The
aesthetic is more rhythmically complex and diverse, and less melodically intricate, than
Scottish or Irish music. Music of Africa especially emphasizes singing. Nevertheless, in
1623, Captain Richard Jobson wrote in his The Golden Trade or a Discovery of the River
Gamba [Gambia] and the Golden Trade of the Aethiopiam that he observed during his
travels that the griot offered a “perfect resemblance to the Irish Rimer.” Before 1800, the
Scottish surgeon Mungo Park recited the duties of the singing men (Jillikea) encountered
in the land of the Mandingos and the Minkes. By improvising texts and tunes to earn
money, the griots create “extempore songs” to honor kings, to “divert the fatigue” of the
traveling group, or to obtain “welcome from strangers” (Southern).
Enslaved West African griots arrived in the Carribean in the seventeenth century, and
the American South in the eighteenth century. African gourd seeds had preceded the
musicians across the waters to the New World. These memory keepers, praise singers,
and healers played the creole bania in Dutch Guiana with a short thumb string tuned as a
low bass drone. Before 1701, the songsters invented the strum strump in Jamaica, and by
1744 decorated their similar calibash merrywang with carving and rib-bands. Perhaps
inspired by the English cittern or Spanish guitar, the tuning pegs and flat neck of the
strum strump easily permitted the sliding and bending of notes. Another account from
Jamaica written before the end of the eighteenth century describes slaves arriving with
African instruments actually in their hands en route to Savannah, Georgia: They “were
made to exercise, and encouraged, by the music [‘of their beloved banjar,’] to sing and
dance.” For “this purpose, such rude instruments are collected before their departure”
from Guinea.
Written records express few of the thoughts of Africans upon being forcibly removed
from their homeland, undergoing the treacherous Middle Passage, and being put to work
as slaves in the Caribbean and the American colonies. Folksongs, however express and
preserve these crucial memories. Enslaved songsters and musicianers sang
improvisational, sometimes satirical songs. Signifying songs offer clues as to what
Africans thought of being forced to submit to, and adopt the ways of, the predominant
white culture. “The Guinea Negro Song” about Virginia was also sung in North Carolina
by former slaves: