Sub-Saharan African music traditions

In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the use of music is not limited to entertainment: it serves a purpose to the local community and helps in the conduct of daily routines. Traditional African music supplies appropriate music and dance for work and for religious ceremonies of birth, naming, rites of passage, marriage and funerals. The beats and sounds of the drum are used in communication as well as in cultural expression.
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.
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.
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 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.
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, spread throughout 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).
The music of West Africa must be considered under two main headings: in its northernmost and westernmost parts, many of the above-mentioned transnational sub-Saharan ethnic influences are found among the Hausa, the Fulani, the Wolof people, the Mande speakers of Mali, Senegal and Mauritania, the Gur-speaking peoples of Mali, Burkina Faso and the northern halves of Ghana, Togo and Côte d'Ivoire, the Fula found throughout West Africa, and the Senufo speakers of Côte d'Ivoire and Mali.
The coastal regions are home to the Niger-Congo speakers; Kwa, Akan, the Gbe languages, spoken in Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria, the Yoruba and Igbo languages, spoken in Nigeria and the Benue–Congo languages of the east.
Inland and coastal languages are only distantly related. While the north, with its griot traditions, makes great use of stringed instruments and xylophones, the south relies much more upon drum sets and communal singing.
Complex societies existed in the region from about 1500 BCE. The Ghana Empire existed from before c. 830 until c. 1235 in what is now south-east Mauritania and western Mali. The Sosso people had their capital at Koumbi Saleh until Sundiata Keita defeated them at the Battle of Kirina (c. 1240) and began the Mali Empire, which spread its influence along the Niger River through numerous vassal kingdoms and provinces. The Gao Empire at the eastern Niger bend was powerful in the ninth century CE but later subordinated to Mali until its decline. In 1340 the Songhai people made Gao the capital of a new Songhai Empire.
The music of Cape Verde has long been influenced by Europe, Instrumentation includes the accordion (gaita), the bowed rabeca, the violão guitar and the viola twelve string guitar as well as cavaquinho, cimboa and ferrinho. Styles include batuque, coladera, funaná, morna and tabanca.
The central region of African music is defined by the tropical rain-forests at the heart of the continent. However Chad, the northernmost state, has a considerable subtropical and desert northern region.
Early kingdoms were founded near Lake Chad: the Kanem Empire, ca. 600 BCE – 1380 CE encompassed much of Chad, Fezzan, east Niger and north-east Nigeria, perhaps founded by the nomadic Zaghawa, then ruled by the Sayfawa dynasty. The Bornu Empire (1396–1893) was a continuation, the Kanembu founding a new state at Ngazargamu. These spoke the Kanuri languages spoken by some four million people in Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Cameroon, Libya and Sudan. They are noted for lute and drum music. The Kingdom of Baguirmi (1522–1897) and the Ouaddai Empire (1635–1912) were also centred near Lake Chad.
The East African musicological region, which includes the islands of the Indian Ocean, Madagascar, Réunion, Mauritius, Comor and the Seychelles, has been open to the influence of Arabian and Iranian music since the Shirazi Era. In the south of the region Swahili culture has adopted instruments such as the dumbek, oud and qanun – even the Indian tabla drums. The kabosy, also called the mandoliny, a small guitar of Madagascar, like the Comorian gabusi, may take its name from the Arabian qanbūs. Taarab, a modern genre popular in Tanzania and Kenya, is said to take both its name and its style from Egyptian music as formerly cultivated in Zanzibar. Latterly there have been European influences also: the guitar is popular in Kenya, the contredanse, mazurka and polka are danced in the Seychelles.
Drums (ngoma, ng'oma or ingoma) are much used: particularly large ones have been developed among the court musicians of East African kings. The term ngoma is applied to rhythm and dance styles as well as the drums themselves. as among the East Kenyan Akamba, the Baganda of Uganda, and the Ngoni people of Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia, who trace their origins to the Zulu people of kwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. The term is also used by the Tutsi/Watusi and Hutu/Bahutu. Bantu style drums, especially the sukuti drums, are played by the Luhya people (also known as Avaluhya, Abaluhya or Luyia), a Bantu people of Kenya, being about 16% of Kenya's total population of 38.5 million, and in Uganda and Tanzania. They number about 6.1 million people. Abaluhya litungo.
The Southern Bantu languages include all of the important Bantu languages of South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana, and several of southern Mozambique. They have several sub-groups;
Gerewol. Dan people masked dance. Yoruba gelede. Hausa asauwara Ewe dances: agbadza – Gadzo. Mande include the Mandinka, Maninka and Bamana Dances: bansango – didadi – dimba – sogominkum. Dagomba dance: takai – damba – jera – simpa – bamaya – tora – geena. São Tomé and Principe dance: danço-Congo – puíta – ússua. Cape Verde Dance = batuque – coladera – funaná – morna – tabanca. Kasena Dances: jongo – nagila – pe zara – war dance. Akan dances: adowa – osibisaba – sikyi. The Ashanti Nzema people dance: abissa – fanfare – grolo – sidder