Sub-Saharan African music traditions

In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the use of music is not limited to entertainment: it serves a purpose to the local community and helps in the conduct of daily routines. Traditional African music supplies appropriate music and dance for work and for religious ceremonies of birth, naming, rites of passage, marriage and funerals. The beats and sounds of the drum are used in communication as well as in cultural expression.

African dances are largely participatory: there are traditionally no barriers between dancers and onlookers except with regard to spiritual, religious and initiation dances. Even ritual dances often have a time when spectators participate. Dances help people work, mature, praise or criticize members of the community, celebrate festivals and funerals, compete, recite history, proverbs and poetry and encounter gods. They inculcate social patterns and values. Many dances are performed by only males or females. Dances are often segregated by gender, reinforcing gender roles in children. Community structures such as kinship, age, and status are also often reinforced. To share rhythm is to form a group consciousness, to entrain with one another, to be part of the collective rhythm of life to which all are invited to contribute.Sebastian Bakare, ''The Drumbeat of Life'', WCC Publications, Geneva, Switzerland. 1997.

Yoruba dancers and drummers, for instance, express communal desires, values, and collective creativity. The drumming represents an underlying linguistic text that guides the dancing performance, allowing linguistic meaning to be expressed non-verbally. The spontaneity of these performances should not be confused with an improvisation that emphasizes the individual ego. The drummer's primary duty is to preserve the community. Master dancers and drummers are particular about the learning of the dance exactly as taught. Children must learn the dance exactly as taught without variation. Improvisation or a new variation comes only after mastering the dance, performing, and receiving the appreciation of spectators and the sanction of village elders.

The music of the Luo, for another example, is functional, used for ceremonial, religious, political or incidental purposes, during funerals (Tero buru) to praise the departed, to console the bereaved, to keep people awake at night, to express pain and agony and during cleansing and chasing away of spirits, during beer parties (Dudu, ohangla dance), welcoming back the warriors from a war, during a wrestling match (Ramogi), during courtship, in rain making and during divination and healing. Work songs are performed both during communal work like building, weeding, etc. and individual work like pounding of cereals, winnowing.

Regions

Alan P. Merriam divided Africa into seven regions for ethnomusicological purposes, observing current political frontiers ''(see map)'', and this article follows this division as far as possible in surveying the music of ethnic groups in Africa.

* Music of the northern region of Africa'' (red on the map)'', including that of the Horn of Africa ''(dark green on the map)'', is mostly treated separately under Middle Eastern and North African music traditions.
* West African music ''(yellow on the map)'' includes the music of Senegal and the Gambia, of Guinea and Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone and Music of Liberia, Liberia, of the inland plains of Mali, Niger and also the coastal nations of Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon and the Republic of the Congo as well as the islands of Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe.
* Central African Music ''(dark blue on the map)'' includes the music of Chad, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia.
* The Eastern region ''(light green on the map)'' includes the music of Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe as well as the islands of Madagascar, the Seychelles, Réunion, Mauritius and Comoros. The eastern region has received south Asian and even Austronesian influences via the Indian Ocean.
* The Southern region ''(brown on the map)'' includes the music of South Africa, Lesotho, Eswatini, Botswana, Namibia and Angola.

Sahel and Sudan

* The music of Sudan ''(turquoise on the map)'' indicates the difficulty of dividing music traditions according to state frontiers. The musicology of Sudan involves some 133 language communities.Gordon, Raymond G. Jr. (ed.)
''Languages of Sudan''
, Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 15th ed., Dallas: SIL International, 2005 that speak over 400 dialects, Afro-Asian, Nilotic and Niger–Congo.

Sudan takes its name from that of the sub-Saharan savanna which makes, with the Nile, a great cross-roads of the region. South of the Sahara the ''Sahel'' forms a bio-geographic zone of transition between the desert and the Sudanian savannas, stretching between the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea. The Nilotic peoples prominent in southern Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, and northern Tanzania, include the Luo, Dinka, Nuer and Maasai."Nilotic", The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition.
Many of these have been included in the Eastern region.

* The Dinka are a mainly agro-pastoral people inhabiting the Bahr el Ghazal region of the Nile basin, Jonglei and parts of southern Kordufan and Upper Nile regions. They number around 1.5 million, about 10% of the population. of Sudan.
* The Arabian ''rebab'' has found a home among the Nuba peoples.

The Senegambian Fula have migrated as far as Sudan at various times, often speaking Arabic as well as their own language. The Hausa people, who speak a language related to Ancient Egyptian and Biblical Hebrew, have moved in the opposite direction. Further west the Berber music of the Tuareg has penetrated to Sub-Saharan countries. These are included in the Western region, but the music of Sub-Saharan herders and nomads is heard from west to east.

Western, central, eastern and southern territories

These remaining four regions are most associated with Sub-Saharan African music: familiar African musical elements such as the use of cross-beat and vocal harmony may be found all over all four regions, as may be some instruments such as the iron bell. This is largely due to the expansion of the Niger–Congo-speaking people that began around 1500 BC: the last phases of expansion were 0–1000 AD. Only a few scattered languages in this great area cannot readily be associated with the Niger–Congo language family. However two significant non-Bantu musical traditions, the Pygmy music of the Congo jungle and that of the bushmen of the Kalahari, do much to define the music of the central region and of the southern region respectively.

As a result of the migrations of Niger-Congo peoples (e.g., Bantu expansion), polyrhythmic culture (e.g., dance, music), which is generally associated with being a common trait among modern cultures of Africa, spread throughout Africa. Due to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, music of the African diaspora, many of whom descend from Niger-Congo peoples, has had considerable influence upon modern Western forms of popular culture (e.g., dance, music).

West Africa

The music of West Africa must be considered under two main headings: in its northernmost and westernmost parts, many of the above-mentioned transnational sub-Saharan ethnic influences are found among the Hausa, the Fulani, the Wolof people, the Mande speakers of Mali, Senegal and Mauritania, the Gur-speaking peoples of Mali, Burkina Faso and the northern halves of Ghana, Togo and Cote d'Ivoire, the Fula found throughout West Africa, and the Senufo speakers of Côte d'Ivoire and Mali.

The coastal regions are home to the Niger-Congo speakers; Kwa, Akan, the Gbe languages, spoken in Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria, the Yoruba and Igbo languages, spoken in Nigeria and the Benue–Congo languages of the east.

Inland and coastal languages are only distantly related. While the north, with its ''griot'' traditions, makes great use of stringed instruments and xylophones, the south relies much more upon drum sets and communal singing.

Northern

Complex societies existed in the region from about 1500 BCE. The Ghana Empire existed from before c. 830 until c. 1235 in what is now south-east Mauritania and western Mali. The Sosso people had their capital at Koumbi Saleh until Sundiata Keita defeated them at the Battle of Kirina (c. 1240) and began the Mali Empire, which spread its influence along the Niger River through numerous vassal kingdoms and provinces. The Gao Empire at the eastern Niger bend was powerful in the ninth century CE but later subordinated to Mali until its decline. In 1340 the Songhai people made Gao the capital of a new Songhai Empire.

* The Hausa people are one of the largest ethnic groups in Nigeria, Niger