Browse Titles - 22 results

There was once a man who used to work very hard from sunrise till sunset out in his fields. His wife used to cook many different kinds of food and as soon as it was ready she would send her young son to go out to the fields to call his father. This he did by singing him a song each time, when the father would stop working and come home.

Story of the baboon who kept on jumping on and off a drum till he died. There was a man who had the brilliant idea of putting a pole across the path by which a baboon entered his fields, and a drum on the far side. The baboon leaping over the pole landed on the drum and did a back somersault over the pole again. The sound so delighted the baboon that he went on the leaping and back somersaulting until he died of exhaustion.

The story was told by a woman sitting in a hut with several others including children, many of whom continued their conversations while she spoke.-- Dogs, cattle and sheep were all around the hut at the time.

This recording of the sound of genuine talking drums was made on the banks of the Congo River near Stanleyville, where the river steamers coming up-stream from Leopoldville, 1000 miles away, are held up by the first rapids named after H. M. Stanley, the great explorer. He first saw them in 1876 on his famous first journey across Africa from East to West. The Lokele people of this region have always been famous for their drum messages. Stanley, wr... This recording of the sound of genuine talking drums was made on the banks of the Congo River near Stanleyville, where the river steamers coming up-stream from Leopoldville, 1000 miles away, are held up by the first rapids named after H. M. Stanley, the great explorer. He first saw them in 1876 on his famous first journey across Africa from East to West. The Lokele people of this region have always been famous for their drum messages. Stanley, writing about them said "They have not yet adopted electric signals but possess a system of communication quite as effective. Their huge drums by being struck in several parts convey language as clear to the initiated as vocal speech." The drum messages can still be heard up and down the River although now-a-days with modern communication methods the people do not need to use their drums as they used to, and consequently it is said to be dying out, as so many other African crafts. A missionary, the Rev. John Carrington, from the Baptist Mission at Yakusu wrote an excellent book on these Lokele drums that Stanley heard. For years he had been studying the Lokele language of the people around the mission at Yakusu, but at the time of recording he was many miles down the river, and not available. His colleague from the Yakusu Mission, Mr. W. H. Ford, who had also made a keen study of the language, here explains something of the theory behind the sending of drum messages in central Congo, as experienced by both himself and by John Carrington. Show more Show less