Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects from BBC radio four.
We think of jazz as the music of joyous rebellion and cool,
the syncopated swing of an African-American musical tradition that came to dominate the 20th century.
But this music goes much further back.
It has dark roots in the terrible days of the Atlantic slave trade of the 18th century.
The mix of musical influences in jazz echoes the triangular trade in slaves between Europe, Africa, and America.
Drums were at the heart of this early history,
brought on slave boats from Africa to the Americas,
and the music that the enslaved Africans brought with them
gave them a voice for their condition,
a new language that offered solidarity and solace.
Today’s object is one of those drums,
and its biography is a brief chapter in the story of slavery.
The drum itself represents to me the idea of voyage and crossing.
I crossed the Atlantic to be here, and the drum did too.
It represents for me that passage of my ancestors,
and the ancestors of a good number of black British citizens as well.
If you were able to get one with you and take it with you to the new world,
it would have been a kind of source of memory which you could take with you
and that’s one of the things that people taken into slavery tried to hold on to.