HISTORICAL AND

CULTURAL BACKROUND
OF LATIN AMERICAN
MUSIC
It is widely acknowledged that African music has undergone frequent and decisive
changes throughout the centuries. What is termed traditional music today is probably
very different from African music in former times. Nor has African music in the past been
rigidly linked to specific ethnic groups. The individual musician, his style and creativity,
have always played an important role.
The material sources for the study of African music history include archaeological and
other objects, pictorial sources (rock paintings, petroglyphs, book illustrations, drawings,
paintings), oral historical sources, written sources (travelers accounts, field notes,
inscriptions in Arabic and in African and European languages), musical notations, sound
recordings, photographs and motion pictures, and videotape.
In ancient times the musical cultures of sub-Saharan Africa extended into North Africa.
Between circa 8000 and 3000 BC, climatic changes in the Sahara, with a marked wet
trend, extended the flora and fauna of the savanna into the southern Sahara and its
central highlands. During this period, human occupation of the Sahara greatly
increased, and, along rivers and small lakes, Neolithic, or New Stone Age, cultures with
a so-called aquatic lifestyle extended from the western Sahara into the Nile River valley.
The aquatic cultures began to break up gradually between 5000 and 3000 BC, once the
peak of the wet period had passed. The wet climate became more and more restricted
to shrunken lakes and rivers and, to a greater extent, to the region of the upper Nile.
Today remnants survive perhaps in the Lake Chad area and in the Nile swamps.

The cultures of the Green

Sahara left behind a vast gallery of iconographic documents in the form
of rockpaintings, among which are some of the earliest internal sources on African
music. One is a vivid dance scene discovered in 1956 by the French ethnologistHenri
Lhote in the Tassili-n-Ajjer plateau of Algeria. Attributed on stylistic grounds to the
Saharan period of the Neolithic hunters (c. 60004000 BC), this painting is probably one
of the oldest extant testimonies to music and dance in Africa. The body adornment and
movement style are reminiscent of dance styles still found in many African societies.
Some of the earliest sources on African music are archaeological. Although musical
instruments made of vegetable materials have not survived in the deposits of subSaharan climatic zones, archaeological source material on Nigerian music has been
supplied by the representations of musical instruments on stone or terra-cotta from Ife,
Yorubaland. These representations show considerable agreement with traditional
accounts of their origins. From the 10th to the 14th century AD, igg bndrums (a set of
footed cylindrical drums) seem to have been used. The dndnpressure drum, now
associated with Yoruba culture and known in a broad belt across the savanna region,
may have been introduced around the 15th century, since it appears in plaques made
during that period in the kingdom of Benin. The Yorubadndn drums are now used as
talking drums in accompaniment to oriki (praise name) poetry (see Oral traditions).
The double iron clapperless bell seems to have preceded the talking drum. Pellet bells
and tubular bells with clappers were known by the 15th century.
Other archaeological finds relating to music include iron bells excavated in the Katanga
(Shaba) region of Congo (Kinshasa) and at several sites in Zimbabwe. Benin bronze
plaques represent a further, almost inexhaustible source for music history, since musical

instrumentssuch as horns, bells, drums, and even bow lutesare often depicted on
them in ceremonial contexts.
Among the most important written sources (though superficial analytically) are accounts
from the 14th-century Arab travelers Ibn Bat t
ta
hand Ibn Khaldn and from the
European navigators and explorers Vasco da Gama, Jan Huyghen van Linschoten,
Joo dos Santos, Franois Froger, and Peter Kolbe. Early attempts at notating African
music were made by T.E. Bowdich (1819) for Ghana, Karl Mauch(1872) for Zimbabwe,
and Brito Capelo and Roberto Ivens (1882) for inner Angola.
Major and minor migrations of African peoples brought musical styles and instruments
to new areas. The single and double iron bells, which probably originated in Kwaspeaking West Africa, spread to western Central Africa with Iron Age Bantu-speaking
peoples and from there to Zimbabwe and the Zambezi River valley. Earlier migrating
groups moving eastward from eastern Nigeria and central Cameroon to the East African
lakes did not know the iron bells or the time-line patterns associated with them.
Consequently, both traits were absent in East African music until the recent introduction
of the time-line patterns of Congolese electric guitar-based music. With the intensifying
ivory and slave trades during the 19th century, the zeze (or sese) flatbar zither, a
stringed instrument long known along the East African coast, spread into the interior to
Zambia, the eastern half of Congo (Kinshasa), and Malai.
Beginning in the 17th and 18th centuries, lamellaphones with iron keys, a prominent
feature of ancient Zimbabwe and neighbouring kingdoms and chieftainships, spread
from the Zambezi valley northward to the kingdoms of Kazembe and Lunda and to the
Katangan and Angolan cultures. In the course of migration, some models became
smaller, because they were used as travel instruments; others were modified and gave
rise to the numerous types present in western Central Africa during the first half of the
20th century. (For a further description of the lamellaphone, see Idiophones.)
A small box-resonated lamellaphone, called the likembe in Congo, traveled in the other
direction, from the west to the east, northeast, and southeast. It was invented in the
lower Congo region probably not earlier than the mid-19th century, and thereafter it
spread upriver with Lingala-speaking porters and colonial servants to the northern
Bantu borderland. The Zande, Ngbandi, and Gbaya, who speakAdamawa-Ubangi
languages, adopted the likembe.
Stylistic traits of likembe music linking it to its region of origin were only gradually
modified in the new areas to suit local styles. At the beginning of the 20th century
the likembe distribution area extended farther to the northeast into Uganda, where the
Nilotic Alur, Acholi, and Lango adopted it. It was later introduced to southern Uganda by

northern Ugandan workers; there the Bantu-speaking Soga and Gwere adopted it and
began to construct models entirely from metal, even with a metal resonator.
The likembe also spread southward from the lower Congo, penetrating Angola from the
Kasai region of Congo and being adopted as recently as the 1950s by the Khoisanspeaking !Kung of Kwando Kubango province in southeastern Angola.
As a result of migrations and the exchange of musical fashions both within Africa and
with foreign cultures, specific traits of African music often show a puzzling distribution.
Extremely distant areas in Africa may have similar, even identical, traits, while adjacent
areas may have quite different styles. The multipart singing style in triads within an
equiheptatonic tone system of the Baule of Cte dIvoire is so close, if not identical, to
the part singing style of Ngangela, Chokwe, and Luvale peoples in eastern Angola that
the similarity is immediately recognized by informants from both cultures. Why this is so
is a riddle. The two areas are separated by several countries with different approaches
to multipart singing. Another historical riddle is the presence of practically
identical xylophone playing styles and instruments among Makonde and Makuaspeaking peoples of northern Mozambique and among certain peoples of Cte dIvoire
and Liberia, notably the Baule and the Kru. Thejomolo of the Baule and the log
xylophones of northern Mozambiquefor example, the dimbila of the Makonde or
the mangwilo of the Shirimaare virtually identical instruments.
Diffusionist theories of various kinds have been offered to resolve such riddles. The
English ethnomusicologist A.M. Jones proposed that Indonesian settlers in certain areas
of East, Central, and West Africa during the early centuries AD could have introduced
xylophones and certain tonal-harmonic systems (equipentatonic, equiheptatonic,
and pelog scales) into Africa. Ethnohistorians, on the other hand, have tended to
accentuate the importance of coastal navigation (implying the traveling of hired or
forced African labour on European ships) as an agent of cultural contact between such
areas as Mozambique, Angola and Congo, and the West African coast.
Existing historical sources on African music and dance are more abundant than might
be expected. Sometimes historical data can be obtained indirectly from contemporary
observation outside Africa, especially in Latin America. It was a rule rather than an
exception that people brought as slaves from Africa to the New World often came from
the hinterland of the African coastal areas. Between the European slave traders
established on the coast and the hinterland areas were buffer zones inhabited by
African merchant tribes, such as the Ovimbundu of Angola, who are still remembered
by eastern Angolan peoples as vimbali, or collaborators of the Portuguese. In the 18th
and 19th centuries the inland areas of Angola were not directly accessible to
Europeans. But the music and dance of these areas became accessible indirectly, as

European observers saw African captives playing musical instruments in New World
countries. In Brazil the music of the Candombl religion, for example, can be directly
linked to 18th- and 19th-century forms of orisha worship among the Yoruba. In a similar
manner, Umbanda religious ceremonies are an extension of traditional healing sessions
still practiced in Angola, and vodun religious music among the Fon of Benin has
extensions in the voodoo of Haiti and elsewhere in the Caribbean. African instruments
have also been modified and sometimes further developed in the New World; examples
are the Central African friction drumand the lamellaphone (in the Cuban marimbula).
African music as it is known today was also shaped by changes in the ecology of the
continent, which drove people into other lands, thus producing changes in their art. With
the drying of the Sahara, for example, populations tended to shift southward. When
settled populations accepted the intruders, they often adopted musical styles from them.
Thus, the choral singing style of the Masai had a fundamental influence on vocal
music of the Gogo of central Tanzania, as is audible in
their nindo andmsunyunho chants.
It is only relatively recently that scholarly attention has focused on the various urban
popular styles, reflecting a blend of local and foreign ingredients, that have emerged
during the last 50 years or so. The best known of these are West African highlife,
Congolese dance music, tarabu of East Africa, and South African styles. With the
widespread adoption of Christianity in Africa since the 19th century, many new varieties
of African church music have risen and continue to evolve. For example, with altered
words, hymnsas well as secular songsare quite often adapted as protest songs in
order to rally opposition to political oppression.