The Call-Drum

EVERY one of the Bulu tribe among whom I live has a drum-name, and so, I suppose, has every member of all the interior tribes of this West African forest of the Kamerun. By this phrase, beaten out on the call-drum, the individual is summoned from the forest to the village, or from town to town.

A bote tells me that her ndan or drum-call is, ‘ Don’t laugh — I am dead!’ (Te woé — me juya!)

‘My ndan,' says Esola, ‘is, “ The little parrot has eaten all the palm nuts”; which is a way of saying that I am small but able.’

‘And mine,’ says Zam, ‘is, “Don’t walk in the towns, your husband is jealous. ”’

One looks at Zam and wonders why. Not tattoo, nor careful frettings of the skin of her body into designs in a low relief, nor a brass collar weighing a good four pounds, nor any other of the artful resources practiced by this forest people, have repaired in the person of Zam the ‘irreparable outrage of the years.’ Then one remembers that her drum-name may be the history of her youth, — the seal of a day when she carried her elaborate headdress above a young body, and when her proud walkings abroad were notable.

But that would be long ago now, and before we made our clearing on this hill among the many hills of the forest, or built our little brown settlement of bark houses and thatched them with leaf-thatch.

From the shade of our house I see our own call-drum, a hollowed log four feet long, trimmed to an oval and with blind ends. It stands on a frame under its hood of thatch, overhanging, from the rim of our clearing, our world of crowding hills and the climbing tide of the forest. Lost to the eye in that green flood, little villages sleep, and every little village has its tongue. Now and again from the deep of the forest rises the staccato beat of a call-drum, — the voice of the village speaking across the uninhabited places, calling the women in from the garden ‘for the guests are many,’warning an absent hunter that ‘your wife has run away,’or ‘your wife has borne a child.’ Presently Sakutu our drummer will put his hand in the fissure that runs the length of the drum and will bring out his sticks; striking the drum with these, he will abruptly and terrifically shatter the afternoon. Then the voice from the thick lip of the drum that is the man-voice, and the voice from the thinner lip that is the woman-voice, will cry out articulately to the rim of our horizon. Everywhere the villages will give ear to a message from the white man’s town, until seventeen miles from here, in the neighborhood of Njabilobe, the last vibration dies.

To the trained ear the drum actually syllabizes; the inflection of a phrase, its cadence, are perfectly transmitted; and a Bulu speaking his ndan speaks curiously like a drum.

The drum is as noncommittal, as evasive, as the Bulu. Sakutu calling up the women of the neighborhood to barter for food will beat the conventional phrase, ‘Since morning I have not eaten,’ or ‘Hunger is in my stomach,’or — most subtle and reproachful of suggestions — ‘As I was yesterday, so am I to-day.' Of a Sunday, before the late tropical dawn has dimmed the morning star, he will beat a Sunday morning call: ‘The promise we promised is fulfilled to-day’; a phrase that is a whole engagement-book in itself, and that is ratified in this case, by the interested parties, with calculations upon certain notched sticks, or the moving up of wooden pegs into the last of seven holes.

Thus to all primal facts of life have been fitted phrases for the call-drum; and these phrases, long traditional, have shaken the hearts of this forest people for generations. Yesterday I sat chatting with a group of men who fell silent at the beat of a drum from a village in the forest below us. ‘Obam has died,’ one told me; and the drumname of Obam rose to us in the blue afternoon, coupled with the old poignant call to mourning, ‘Ba, ba, mo toé!’ (Cross, cross his hands on his breast.)

Thus to the members of this tribe since the memory of man has the death of their fellows been announced; and through unnumbered years the hearts of men have halted under the immediate stroke of this phrase.

The drum is indeed very powerful with the human heart. When it is beaten in rhythm — and the dancedrums of this country are beaten with an incredible perfection of rhythm — the heart, the white man’s heart, is troubled and guesses at secret meanings, at obscure and hurrying agitations, at ignoble lassitudes and latent despairs —not so much of the senses as of the spirit. But when the call-drum gives tongue, sudden and violent tongue, to the sudden and violent disasters of our uncertain life, the heart is stricken and halts. I have wakened at night with the clamor of the night alarm falling from many drums upon my heart in a rain of terror: ‘Abroad — abroad — let no man sleep!' And no man slept. The memory of this midnight panic has long outlived any memory of the simple explanation which came to us with morning.

Drums are not all of equal power, nor indeed are their voices more alike than the voices of people are. So I am told by my friends, who could never — say they — fail to locate a drum by its voice. Ekom, the famous craftsman, is dead, but his drums yet speak; and it was he who made for Ngem his great drum — the one that never lied. For so brave was Ngem and of such an infallible cruelty, that a warning once beaten by him was speedily fulfilled. His exceeding joy, say my friends, was the killing of men. A most admirable man. He died, to the long grief of his tribe, and for him too, I suppose, was beaten the call to mourn. But not on his own drum. ‘For who,’ ask my friends, ‘should beat the drum of so great a man ? ’ ‘At the voice of it many would remember and grieve,’ say some; and others say, ‘Might it not be that the people, hearing the drum, would say in their hearts that Ngem had returned ?’

Into the daylight of our little clearing how many miseries are brought, of the body and of the mind, and how many obscure terrors! For here is always some one to speak comfortable words, like the words of a mother in the dark. So what should certain poor bodies do, when they heard a dead man’s drum-call, but rise with the dawn and make their way by the little paths of the forest to Efulen.

‘For he died you understand and we put him in the grave, all that was finished. Yet we hear his ndan, — not from any village, but from the uninhabited places of the forest where no town is, — the beating of a drum that calls him by his name. So we said in our hearts we will arise and go to Efulen; and now we have come we ask you: What are we to think of this ?’