A case for drums festival

By Edozie Udeze

IN a few months from now, the Abeokuta International Drums Festival will hold. It was established during the tenure of Ibikunle Amosun, the immediate past governor of Ogun State. As the name implies, it is a festival where Africans, home and abroad, converge to play drums, listen to the sounds and messages of drums. They eat together, wine as a race and rediscover the values and intrigues and intricacies of the drums. The drums have different messages to give and this is what inspires almost everybody that comes there. It is usually a beautiful moment to hobnob and ensure that the drum tradition does not go into extinction.

However, the fear now is whether it can hold come April this year. As more states, nations and individuals gear up for the show, will Ogun State government, feel duty bound to host it? The festival is already on the map of history where drums count a lot to Africans and to the black race. It is a moment that has become indelible in the cultural lives of artists, stakeholders, planners, and indigenes. Indeed many locals look forward to it as a moment to make money, meet their friends, kit and kin from all over the world. For them, this moment must not pass them by.

The history of the drums festival has recorded the participation of Haiti, Jamaica, and some South American countries that have used the occasion to visit mother Africa. They too look forward to visiting Nigeria every April to enjoy the sounds of the drums. They usually compare it with what they now have in their respective countries as a result of Trans Saharan Slave Trade movement. They know that the drums, the beatings, the sounds, and the evocative tendencies of the instrument helped them in their moments of psychological squalor. For this reason and more they are usually eager to come home.

So, it is a moment also when Abeokuta wears a new look and Ogun State generally comes alive. The streets are beautified with cultural emblems, posters, and pictures. You see artisans bubbling with life because it is their time to make money. Pure water sellers, adire makers and other cloth weavers also make quick money and smile to the banks. Foreign currencies exchange hands carelessly. Foreigners equally mix with locals, eating their foods, playing hosts to a lot of interviews talking about their countries and trying to make notes

The festival is time for tourism. And since cultural elements inform tourism, people want to feel these cultural elements. Drums fascinate a lot of people and so they come to see them and feel them in their rudimental stages. When the bata drum, for instance, beats, it sends a kind of strange message to the uninformed. They gyrate to the sounds and become merry. They shake their heads, twist their waists and wish that the music never stopped.

But to the initiated the message goes beyond the surface. It evokes the ancestral spirit, the unseen powers of what the people stand for. It is time to know whether it is for peace or for war. Or whether it is calling on a king to dance naked, to abdicate or call for a festival. The palace people understand the use and importance of the drum and so it makes them go crazier when they hear it. That is exactly what Abeokuta stands to gain if the festival is allowed to continue now and in the years to come.