Colonial prohibition of drumming

node · earth · British mainland North America, principally the Carolinas

The legal suppression of African drumming across much of the English-speaking Americas, and one of the clearest cases in this Journey of law shaping sound. After the Stono Rebellion of 9 September 1739, in which a group of enslaved people led by a man named Jemmy marched from the Stono river with drums and banners, the South Carolina assembly passed a comprehensive slave code on 10 May 1740 — the Negro Act — which among many other restrictions barred enslaved people from assembling and from using drums, horns and other loud instruments. The stated reasoning was that drums were a signalling technology capable of assembling people across distance, which is accurate: that is one of the things a West African ensemble drum does. Comparable prohibitions spread through other British mainland colonies. The musical consequence is structural rather than incidental. Where drums were banned, the ensemble's timeline and interlock had to be rebuilt on whatever was legal — clapping, stamping, the body, a stringed instrument, a voice — and traditions that grew up under prohibition are string-led and percussion-poor in exactly the way the drum-permitting Catholic colonies of Cuba and Brazil are not.