On the 3rd anniversary of the start of this newsletter, I wanted to reshare the very first thing I ever wrote for it. It’s one of my favourite stories about communication. Given that about 2000 new people have signed up to this newsletter since I first sent it, I thought it might be fun to share it again - I hope you enjoy it. It is based on a story I read in James Gleick’s The Information.
Across west Africa, drums rumbled relentlessly. The base of all music and dance, they were a feature of the countryside. The early colonists could not conceive of their true function. Through centuries of social engineering, tribes across western Africa had achieved something that had eluded the “great civilisations” of Europe - a wireless broadcast system to communicate complex information across vast distances.
The Narrow Mind
The reasons they couldn’t conceive of this were manifold - racist and narrow minded discussions of the “native mind” not least among them. It would have been hard of them to conceive of these civilisations achieving something they hadn’t managed. There had been experiments with long distance communication (mostly for military manoeuvres) in Europe for centuries, but they had not achieved the complexity, ubiquity or communicative capability of the talking drums.
One of the reasons for this is that when Europeans experimented with long distance communication - flags, trumpets, smoke, fire, drums - they would usually create an intermediary code. For example, with Morse Code, the alphabet would be translated to code at one end by a specialist (“J” would become “_-_-”) and at the other end a specialist would translate it back again (“_-_-” would become “J” again). There was no scope for someone not trained in Morse to just pick it up. The talking drums, in contrast, spoke in language itself.
Language Without Words
The talking drums had a number of things going for them. On a physical level, drumbeats are low-frequency and travel a long enough distance to make it from one village to another - far enough for another drummer to pick up and pass on the message. The availability and flexibility of materials helped too. Drums could be big, small, narrow, wide - as long as they produced two tones they could get the job done.
The other thing they had going for them - coincidentally one of the key reasons that Europeans couldn’t conceive of the world of information swirling around them in Africa - were the native languages. Spoken languages of Africa are tonal - a feature missing from most Indo-European languages. Thai, Igbo, Punjabi, Zulu and many varieties of Chinese have vocabulary where words can mean completely different things depending on the tone with which they are said.
Example of importance of tonality in Mandarin Chinese.
In Africa, tone was elevated to such a critical level, that the language could almost be understood on the basis of tone alone. However, if you strip away the words from a language and only leave the tone, that still leaves a lot of room for ambiguity and confusion. This was solved through providing context.
Oral Cultures
One of the features of an oral culture is that to pass along stories, their form must be memorable. In the Homeric epics of the Iliad and the Odyssey, time and again you will see the same phrases repeated. Sometimes they came as epithets like “the wine-dark sea” (sidebar: allegedly, the colour blue did not exist in those days), “rosy fingered dawn” and “swift-footed Achilles”. Other times entire passages were repeated. These probably functioned both as memory aids for poets learning and retelling the stories, as well as cultural touchstones.
It is these cultural touchstones that the drums used to create context. Single words could be confused, but whole phrases - taken from familiar poetry, prayers, jokes - were much more recognisable. Many drummers would use different wording, but certain phrases appeared again and again. Drummers would not say ”Come back home”, but they would say:
“Make your feet come back the way they went,
Make your legs come back the way they went,
Plant your feet and your legs below,
In the village that belongs to us.”
Words themselves became more elaborate, but through this became more clear in their meaning. A corpse would become “which lies on its back on clods of earth”. Phrases became formulaic and familiar, but their intention became obvious. Instead of saying not to be afraid, a drummer would tell you to “bring your heart back down out of your mouth, get it back down from there”.
The First Broadcast System
This meant that while not everyone could communicate with the drums, nearly everyone could understand them. They were used not only for warnings and instructions, but for passing around news. Gleick draws a number of examples from John Carrington’s Talking Drums of Africa (1949).
Birth announcement in Belgian Congo:
“Batoko fala fala, tokema bolo bolo, boseka woliana imaki tonkilingonda, ale nda bobila wa fole fole, asokoka l’isika koke koke.”
English translation:
“The mats are rolled up, we feel strong, a woman came from the forest, she is in the open village, that is enough for this time.”
Call to a fisherman’s funeral in the town of Bolenge:
“La nkesa laa mpombolo, tofolange benteke biesala, tolanga bonteke bolokolo bole nda elinga l’enjale baenga, basaki l’okala bopele pele. Bojende bosalaki lifeta Bolenge wakala kala, tenkendake tonkilingonda, tenkendake beningo la nkaka elinga l’enjale. Tolanga bonteke bolokolo bole nda elinga l’enjale, la nkesa la mpombolo.”
English translation:
“In the morning at dawn, we do not want gatherings for work, we want a meeting of play on the river. Men who live in Bolenge, do not go to the forest, do not go fishing. We want a meeting of play on the river, in the morning at dawn.”
Why this matters
I love this story because it exemplifies so many things I love about communication.
Communication is a human activity, about people connecting on both small and large scales - something that as a storytelling species we have been doing since the dawn of time.
It also shows the arrogance of the view that technology and new ways of doing things are always better.
Finally, it shows the blindness of a closed mind - something that it is important for an individual as for a society.
The blue thing has been super debunked btw! Sometimes wine is dark. And sometimes the sea next to a battle is full of blood. And sometimes poets write poetically!