Musical Instruments of the Indigenous People of South Africa. Percival Kirby
the drum was not originally employed by the Bushmen. In spite of thorough investigation I have not been able to find any reference to it in the earliest records, and those which appear later seem to me to indicate clearly that the instrument was borrowed from the Hottentots. Borcherds1 described a drum which he saw played by the Bushmen near the Orange River in 1801: ‘The Bushmen were enjoying themselves with playing their native music, produced by beating on a pot covered with skin, a rude drum known as the rommelpot.’ He pointed out that the name is that known to the colonists, and also stated that drum-beating, as well as dancing and loud outcries, were indulged in by the Bushmen during thunder-storms and on moonlight nights. The name rommelpot, however, was that by which the colonists described the Hottentot drum; the origin of the application of this name to the instrument I shall deal with when discussing the drum of the latter race. The drum observed by Burchell2 in the hands of Bushman performers at Kaobi’s kraal in 1812, and called by him a ‘water-drum’, appears to show the Hottentot influence distinctly. It is a great pity that Burchell did not obtain the name given by the Bushmen to this instrument, as thereby the question would probably have been cleared up. According to Burchell,
This drum was nothing more than a bambus or wooden jug having a piece of wet parchment strained over the top, and containing a little water. This instrument was occasionally inverted for the purpose of wetting the parchment, as often as it became dry. It was beaten with the right forefinger, by one of the women; while she regulated the pitch or quality of the sound by placing the forefinger and thumb of her left hand, upon the parchment. It seemed to be accurately in tune with the voices of the assembly; a concordance which could hardly be accidental.
The instrument had, in Burchell’s opinion ‘a mellow sound’. He further noted down the words and music of the song executed by the performers, together with the part for the ‘water-drum’.
Now the bambus was the characteristic wooden jug of the Hottentots, used by them for storing milk; it was not typical of the Bushmen, who had no cattle and therefore no milk to store. Again, with regard to the use of the water, I would suggest that it was not so much meant to keep the parchment damp as to wet it so that the heat of the sun’s rays would tighten it afresh and thus keep it up to pitch. The regular African method of tuning drums of this kind is by wetting the head and then heating it, either in the sun or before a fire.
Stow (1880)3 described a drum ‘formed from a portion of a shell of the great bush-tortoise, the bottom being cut away, and its place supplied with a skin stretched over it’. But a footnote to his original manuscript,4 deleted by Theal, his posthumous editor, is very illuminating. ‘Among the musical instruments which Mr. Backhouse saw used by the Bushmen was one formed of the shell of a tortoise, with a skin stretched over it.’ Now this was pure invention on Stow’s part, and the suppression of his footnote only made matters worse. What Backhouse actually wrote was:5 ‘A portion of a Bushman’s fiddle was thrown out with the mud; the sounding part was formed of the shell of a tortoise, which had probably had a skin stretched over it.’
A vernacular description of the method of making and playing upon a Bushman drum of similar type appears in Bleek and Lloyd’s Bushman Folklore.6 This text was obtained in 1878. The drum was made by tying a ‘bag’ (of skin) over the mouth of a pot (!kwa) by means of sinew. The bag, or skin, was then pulled tight. The skin was from the thigh of a springbok, and it was put over the pot while wet. The women were the manufacturers and also the performers. One woman would beat upon the drum, and the others would clap their hands, while the men danced. Now it must be remarked that this description is relatively recent, and does not reflect the Bushman practice of olden times. Moreover, the use of pots is not typical of the Bushman, who did not require such vessels for cooking, and used ostrich egg-shells in which to store water. A still more recent description of the use of such a drum by Bushmen is given by Miss D. F. Bleek.7 ‘The Auens also remembered a skin being tied over a pot to make a drum for big festivities.’ The locality in this instance was Sandfontein, in South-west Africa.
The use of a drum by Hottentots has been noted again and again by African travellers, though a curious position has been arrived at through a strange mistake in nomenclature which appears to date from the early part of the eighteenth century. The true Hottentot drum consisted of either a bambus or wooden milk-jug, or a clay pot, over which a piece of sheepskin or buckskin was tied. This instrument was made and played by women as an accompaniment to the dancing of the men. The earliest description of a Hottentot drum that I have met with is that of Dapper (1668),8 who wrote: ‘They have also a pot, with a skin stretched tightly over it, after the manner of the Lenten rommelpots of this country, which is continually struck by the hand.’ Dapper, who was never in South Africa, wrote his work in Holland, but took the trouble, as he himself admits in his preface, to obtain accounts from eyewitnesses as far as possible. The section dealing with the Hottentots, from which the above extract is quoted, was undoubtedly based upon information obtained from some one who had been on the spot. Unfortunately his name is not known. It is, however, very necessary to examine carefully what Dapper actually said about this Hottentot drum, since he first introduced the word rommelpot, although I am of the opinion that the adoption of this name for the Hottentot drum was not due to his description, but rather to that of Kolbe in 1719. Dapper’s description of the manner of making and of playing upon the drum was quite correct; a skin was stretched over a pot, and the instrument so formed was struck by the hand of the player. He also compared the manner of making it with that of the rommelpot of Holland, which likewise consisted of a pot or jar, the open end of which was covered with a piece of skin or bladder; but he did not suggest that the method of playing the two instruments was the same. As a matter of fact the Dutch rommelpot was an instrument of an entirely different character, and I shall discuss it fully when dealing with Kolbe’s account of the Hottentot drum. The next description is that of Schreyer (1669–77).9 ‘They take a pot and bind a skin over it, and on this pot the women beat with their hands and fingers, for these are their drums [trummeln] and kettledrums [paucken].’ Grevenbroeck (c. 1689)10 described the drum of the Cape Hottentots thus:
Their women sing an old song, nearly always the same, and to accompany it they strike their hands on a skin which is stretched over a pot and which is made fast by bands and riems, which does not make a pleasant impression upon European ears. The tambourine players [sic]
A similar instrument has been described by Thunberg (1795).11 He gave it the name seckoa, and stated that it was made from a pot covered with sheepskin well moistened and secured by a thong. The players pressed the four fingers of the left hand upon the edge of the drum with the thumb in the middle, and struck upon the other edge with the first two fingers of the right hand. Other eighteenth-century writers, including Kolbe (1719),12 Le Vaillant (1780),13 and Sparrman (1775),14 have also described the same instrument, Kolbe giving an illustration of it which has given rise to the curious mistake already referred to. Although Kolbe is in many ways most unreliable, it seems to me to be desirable to quote his description fully in order to clear up the point in question. In the original German edition of his Description of the Cape of Good Hope, he said,
In addition to the gomgom (vide p. 234) they [the Cape Hottentots] have yet another musical instrument which consists of a clay pot of such a form as they themselves make which has been described elsewhere, great or small as chance dictates. That pot they span with a sheepskin from which the hair has been removed, and it is prepared in the following fashion. They bind it [the skin] to the pot with riems or sinews very fast and very tightly strained. It is only the women who play—never the men—with a finger, and they strike upon it just as in Brabant and likewise in Thuringia and in Saxony they play upon the Rommelpot [Rommel-Topff ]