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Sub-Saharan African music traditions

Traditional sound-based art forms developed by sub-Saharan African peoples

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African dances are largely participatory: there are traditionally no barriers between dancers and onlookers except with regard to spiritual, religious and initiation dances. Even ritual dances often have a time when spectators participate. Dances help people work, mature, praise or criticize members of the community, celebrate festivals and funerals, compete, recite history, proverbs and poetry and encounter gods. They inculcate social patterns and values. Many dances are performed by only males or females. Dances are often segregated by gender, reinforcing gender roles in children. Community structures such as kinship, age, and status are also often reinforced. To share rhythm is to form a group consciousness, to entrain with one another, to be part of the collective rhythm of life to which all are invited to contribute.

Yoruba dancers and drummers, for instance, express communal desires, values, and collective creativity. The drumming represents an underlying linguistic text that guides the dancing performance, allowing linguistic meaning to be expressed non-verbally. The spontaneity of these performances should not be confused with an improvisation that emphasizes the individual ego. The drummer's primary duty is to preserve the community. Master dancers and drummers are particular about the learning of the dance exactly as taught. Children must learn the dance exactly as taught without variation. Improvisation or a new variation comes only after mastering the dance, performing, and receiving the appreciation of spectators and the sanction of village elders.

The music of the Luo, for another example, is functional, used for ceremonial, religious, political or incidental purposes, during funerals (Tero buru) to praise the departed, to console the bereaved, to keep people awake at night, to express pain and agony and during cleansing and chasing away of spirits, during beer parties (Dudu, ohangla dance), welcoming back the warriors from a war, during a wrestling match (Ramogi), during courtship, in rain making and during divination and healing. Work songs are performed both during communal work like building, weeding, etc. and individual work like pounding of cereals, winnowing.

Regions

Alan P. Merriam divided Africa into seven regions for ethnomusicological purposes, observing current political frontiers (see map), and this article follows this division as far as possible in surveying the music of ethnic groups in Africa.

  • Music of the northern region of Africa (red on the map), including that of the Horn of Africa (dark green on the map), is mostly treated separately under Middle Eastern and North African music traditions.
  • West African music (yellow on the map) includes the music of Senegal and the Gambia, of Guinea and Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone and Liberia, of the inland plains of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso and also the coastal nations of Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon and the Republic of the Congo as well as the islands of Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe.
  • Central African Music (dark blue on the map) includes the music of Chad, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia.
  • The Eastern region (light green on the map) includes the music of Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe as well as the islands of Madagascar, the Seychelles, Réunion, Mauritius and Comoros. The eastern region has received south Asian and even Austronesian influences via the Indian Ocean.
  • The Southern region (brown on the map) includes the music of South Africa, Lesotho, Eswatini, Botswana, Namibia and Angola.

Sahel and Sudan

  • The music of Sudan (turquoise on the map) indicates the difficulty of dividing music traditions according to state frontiers. The musicology of Sudan involves some 133 language communities. that speak over 400 dialects, Afro-Asian, Nilotic and Niger–Congo.

In contrast to traditional Arabic music, most Sudanese music styles are pentatonic, and the simultaneous beats of percussion or singing in polyrhythms are further prominent characteristics of Sudanese music.

Sudan takes its name from that of the sub-Saharan savanna which makes, with the Nile, a great cross-roads of the region. South of the Sahara the Sahel forms a bio-geographic zone of transition between the desert and the Sudanian savannas, stretching between the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea. The Nilotic peoples prominent in southern Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, and northern Tanzania, include the Luo, Dinka, Nuer and Maasai. Many of these have been included in the Eastern region.

  • The Dinka are a mainly agro-pastoral people inhabiting the Bahr el Ghazal region of the Nile basin, Jonglei and parts of southern Kordufan and Upper Nile regions. They number around 1.5 million, about 10% of the population. of Sudan.
  • The Arabian rebab has found a home among the Nuba peoples.

The Senegambian Fula have migrated as far as Sudan at various times, often speaking Arabic as well as their own language. The Hausa people, who speak a language related to Ancient Egyptian and Biblical Hebrew, have moved in the opposite direction. Further west the Berber music of the Tuareg has penetrated to Sub-Saharan countries. These are included in the Western region, but the music of Sub-Saharan herders and nomads is heard from west to east.

Blues historian and historian of African American music such as Paul Oliver and Samuel Charters an American music historian, have suggested that the essential elements of the blues originated in the Sahel region of West Africa, brought over by Africans via the slave trade. Whereas the African slaves brought to South America and the Caribbean were largely from percussion-based cultures in southern coastal west Africa (like southern Nigeria), central Africa and Bantu-speaking parts of Africa lacking in many elements that created the blues, many of the slaves brought to North America were from the Sahel region and much more familiar with stringed instruments, basing the banjo on string instruments from the Sahel like the akonting. Charters found that many Sahelian slaves were from Muslim cultures and favored stringed instruments, melodic, and solo melismatic singing, which differed from the drum-based music of other African regions who generally favoured drumming and group chants. These traditions, which were sometimes permitted by plantation owners who feared drums as tool of rebellion and thus evolved into the blues.

The historian Sylviane Diouf and ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik identify Islamic music as an influence on blues music. Diouf notes a striking resemblance between the Islamic call to prayer (originating from Bilal ibn Rabah, a famous Abyssinian African Muslim in the early 7th century) and 19th-century field holler music, noting that both have similar lyrics praising God, melody, note changes, "words that seem to quiver and shake" in the vocal chords, dramatic changes in musical scales, and nasal intonation. She attributes the origins of field holler music to African Muslim slaves who accounted for an estimated 30% of African slaves in America. According to Kubik, "the vocal style of many blues singers using melisma, wavy intonation, and so forth is a heritage of that large region of the western Sahel that had been in contact with the Islamic world via the Maghreb since the seventh and eighth centuries, and the eastern Sahel, modern day Sudan, since the 9th century." The blues with its origin in the American south has likely evolved as a fusion of an African just intonation scale with European 12-tone musical instruments and harmony. The result has been a uniquely American music which is still widely practised in its original form and is at the foundation of another genre, American jazz.

Blue notes, a hallmark of blues music, and rhythm and blues, characterised by flattened thirds, fifths, or sevenths—have deep roots in the musical traditions of the Sahel region of West Africa, making African American popular music like the blues having a Sahelian based origin in contrast to the more percussion based Afro-Brazilian music and Afro-Cuban music which have more of a southern coastal west African, Central African and Bantu influence where the blue note is absent and non-Muslim slaves who generally favoured drums and group chants. The Griot tradition of the Sahel also may have influenced Talking blues and by extension Hip hop, The Griot tradition is also absent in Bantu speaking central , Eastern and Southern African cultures, Again pointing to a Sahel core origin of African American music

Western, central, eastern and southern territories

These remaining four regions are most associated with Sub-Saharan African music: familiar African musical elements such as the use of cross-beat and vocal harmony may be found all over all four regions, as may be some instruments such as the iron bell. This is largely due to the expansion of the Niger–Congo-speaking people that began around 1500 BC: the last phases of expansion were 0–1000 AD. Only a few scattered languages in this great area cannot readily be associated with the Niger–Congo language family. However two significant non-Bantu musical traditions, the Pygmy music of the Congo jungle and that of the bushmen of the Kalahari, do much to define the music of the central region and of the southern region respectively.

As a result of the migrations of Niger-Congo peoples (e.g., Bantu expansion), polyrhythmic culture (e.g., dance, music), which is generally associated with being a common trait among modern cultures of Africa Including Nilo-Saharan speakers in Sudan, spread throughout Southern Africa. Due to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, music of the African diaspora, many of whom descend from Niger-Congo peoples, has had considerable influence upon modern Western forms of popular culture (e.g., dance, music).

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