The little drummer boy is a fictitious visitor to the newborn Jesus. His only gift: the beat of his drum. But the story does not reach far from truth: The drum is deeply embedded in story of the church.
David featured its use in praise. Sometimes called a “timbrel,” it appears in the band that Samuel prophesied to precede the anointed Saul’s conversion. Miriam and an assembly of women led the celebration of God’s drowning of Pharaoh’s army after the Israelite’s successful crossing of the Red Sea.
And, before the Bible, there was the ngoma lungundu, the legendary drum of the Lemba of South Africa. It was carried into battle on poles that were fitted into rings on either side of the drum. Inside were sacred ritual objects. The ngoma was considered too sacred to be touched by anyone but priests and too holy to touch the ground. Called “the drum that thunders,” it was known to explode in battle killing hundreds of their enemies.
In 2007, Tudor Parfitt, a professor at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, found remains of the ngoma in a dark corner of a cobweb-filled storeroom of the Harare Museum of Human Science in Zimbabwe. Coincidentally, he noted a large hole in the bottom of the drum “resembling the explosion of a canon blast.”
With Parfitt’s discovery, I see connections to the Israelite Ark of the Covenant and the many stories in which it appears. The audio-visual of a booming bass drum is certainly helpful in my own understanding of David’s uncontrolled dance rave upon the ark’s return.
The drum continues to show up in stories of those who oppose God’s righteousness. When enslaved African people were brought to America, their captors de-humanized, de-personalized, de-socialized and even de-sexualized them. Finally, in de-culturizing them, they took away their drums. “Slave codes” later revealed the rationale for these bans — pure unadulterated primal fear:
“It is absolutely necessary to the safety of this Province, that all due care be taken to restrain Negroes from using or keeping of drums, which may call together or give sign or notice to one another of their wicked designs and purposes.” – Slave Code of South Carolina, Article 36 (1740)
The drum communicated escapes and uprisings. With each beat, men and women, “sick and tired of being sick and tired,” first spoke of liberation and revolution. To a land of freedom, it bid them, come.
From Africa, they brought the ability to invoke the presence of God and to conjure the spirits of technology, war and peace. The drum connected cosmic vibrations in the present with the ancestral realm. For supplication, for thanksgiving and for worship, the drums bid God and the ancestors, come.
Without access to instruments, the drum was replicated in hand claps and foot stamping. These sounds kept timing in soulful spirituals and the ritual ring shout. For lamentation and for praise, they bid us, come.
Jazz owes its genesis to the black church and to the addition of those rhythms to European classical styles. To the outdoor ambiance of New Orleans’ Congo Square and to dance clubs around the world, for celebration, the drums bid us, come.
I hear it in the wind outside my hotel window; it matches the beat of my heart. There is a rhythm in the twinkles of the starry night. Below, there is a world that desires justice and seeks the righteousness of God. I hear the voices of my ancestors, the enslaved who fought their captors, even unto death. I hear the footsteps of those who marched for justice in decades past. I hear the drums. To the forefront of the fight. To the continuation of the battle. Come they told me. Come.
CARLTON JOHNSON is the operations officer for Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary in Atlanta and associate minister at the First African Presbyterian Church in Lithonia, Georgia. He also serves as president of the Atlanta chapter of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.
