A Licence to Beat a Drum
In October 2017 Burundi issued a decree setting out who may beat a drum, on whose authorisation and at what kind of event. Very few countries have written a musical instrument into administrative law, and the reasons here are less strange than they first sound.
The drums arrive on the drummers' heads. That is the part nobody warns you about at Gishora, on a hill seven kilometres north of Gitega: the men come up the slope in a line, each carrying a hollowed trunk weighed with a cowhide head, and they are already playing — one hand on the drum above them, the rhythm running the whole way in. Then the drums come down into a semicircle around a single central one, the inkiranya, and the noise goes from loud to physical.
What you have paid to see is regulated by presidential decree. Since 20 October 2017, a drum performance in Burundi outside an official state ceremony requires the authorisation of the minister responsible for culture, is subject to a fee, and may not be given by a woman. The instrument of the piece is not the drum. It is Decree 100/196, which the government titled, in French, a regulation of the exploitation of the drum at national and international level.
Ingoma means two things
In Kirundi the word ingoma means drum. It also means kingdom, reign, dynasty. This is not a poetic coincidence dug up by a tour guide; it is the actual constitutional arrangement of the pre-colonial state. The karyenda was the dynastic drum, held to have a semi-divine character, and it stood for the mwami the way a crown stands for a European monarch — kept in a sanctuary rather than played at parties, guarded by families who had the hereditary right to make, keep and beat the drums and to bring them to court when required. They were called abatimbo, from a root meaning to strike hard. Gishora is one of those sanctuaries, founded under Mwezi IV Gisabo in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the two drums in the sacred hut there are still not played by anybody. When Burundi became independent in 1962, the flag hoisted on 1 July carried the karyenda and a sorghum plant on a white disc. The monarchy was abolished in November 1966; the drum came off the flag, and the version adopted on 28 June 1967 put three stars where it had been. The instrument outlasted the institution it stood for, which is exactly the problem the state has been managing ever since.
How the rhythm left the country
In 1967 an ethnomusicologist, Michel Vuylsteke, recorded Burundian drummers in the field; the tapes came out as Musique du Burundi on Ocora, the French label Charles Duvelle ran. Four years later a French arranger and producer, Michel Bernholc, took that recording, laid guitar and bass over it, released it under the name Burundi Steïphenson Black, and reached number 31 in the British singles chart. Joni Mitchell used the drummers on The Jungle Line in 1975. By 1980 and 1981 the same figure had become a recognised commercial sound in British pop — the Burundi beat, audible on Adam and the Ants' Kings of the Wild Frontier and then on Bow Wow Wow, the band Malcolm McLaren assembled around the sound after leaving the Ants and taking their musicians with him. None of this money reached the hill it came from. A generation of Burundians first heard their national instrument sold back to them off a European record.
The word in the decree is exploitation. Read it as French does, as the working of a resource, and the complaint underneath the law becomes legible: the drum has been worked by nearly everybody except the people it belongs to.
What the October decree does
The 2017 text is short and it is administrative. It reserves the drum for official ceremonies as its default setting, and makes any other exhibition — a wedding, a dowry ceremony, a hotel courtyard, a stage abroad — conditional on written authorisation from the culture ministry and payment of a fee. Troupes performing outside the country come under the same regime. Breaches carry a fine; reporting at the time put the ceiling at around US$500, which in Burundi is not a symbolic sum. It arrived four months after a separate decree of 9 June 2017 instituting a national week for the drum dance, umurisho w'ingoma, and three years after UNESCO inscribed the ritual dance of the royal drum on its Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2014. The sequence matters. A listing creates an international market for a performance, and the state that applied for the listing then finds itself the only body in a position to police what is sold into it.
The clause that travels badly
One article of the decree states that women are forbidden to beat the drums and may only perform the accompanying dances. This is the provision that made the international wires, and the defence offered for it is that the exclusion is old, sacred and not the government's invention. The objection, raised by Burundian women's organisations and by researchers who work on the practice, is narrower and harder to answer: a convention observed unevenly across a country, negotiable village by village, is a different kind of thing from a national decree with a penalty attached. Writing a custom down does not preserve it unchanged. It freezes one reading of it, hands enforcement to a ministry, and closes the argument that communities had previously been having among themselves. Burundian women have played drums, in the diaspora and in the country, before and since — which is the ordinary fate of prohibitions written to stop something that was already happening.
What the ticket at Gishora buys
The practical effect of the decree has been to make drumming a licensed trade rather than a common one. Before it, a family with money marked a wedding by hiring drummers; hundreds of troupes across the country earned from that, and the skill spread through the ordinary demand for it. Afterwards, the paying occasions are state ceremonies, authorised commercial performances and visitors. It is a smaller and more formal market, and the people who lost most from it are not the ones the decree named — they are the second-tier troupes with no connection to a sanctuary and no operator sending them bookings.
Which is the frame worth carrying up the hill at Gishora. You are not watching a survival. You are watching an institution that has been through a monarchy, a republic that scrubbed it off the flag, a European pop cycle that took the rhythm and paid nobody, a UNESCO listing, and now a licensing regime — and is still, unmistakably, the most serious thing in the country. The men come up the slope with the drums on their heads and start playing before they arrive, and every argument in the paragraphs above is going on somewhere behind that sound, unresolved, while it happens.