The Drum That Waited

About this book

The talking drum of Nkwantia is not an instrument, or not only one. It is a record. For as long as the town has existed, the master drummer has kept the town's whole history in the drum, the lineages and the founding and the great events, drummed at the yearly gathering in a speech the drum makes that the elders can read, a spoken history with no paper, passed master to apprentice down the generations, the deepest memory the town has. And sixty years ago the master was Afua, the finest drummer in living memory and, unusually, a woman, who knew the whole of it, the full history, the long form that took a night to drum.