Ancient Text Messages of the Yoruba Bata Drum: Cracking the Code

The bata is today one of the most popular and representative of African percussion traditions and is now learnt and performed around the world. In Cuba, their own bata tradition derives from the Yoruba bata from southwest Nigeria yet has had far more research attention than its African predecessor. Although the bata is one of the oldest known Yoruba drumming traditions, the drum and its unique language are now unfamiliar to many contemporary Yoruba people. Amanda Vincent provides the first academic study of the bata's communication technology and the elaborate coded spoken language of bata drummers, which they refer to as 'ena'.Vincent explains how the bata drummers' speech encoding method links into universal linguistic properties, unknown to the musicians themselves. The analysis draws the direct links between what is spoken in Yoruba, how Yoruba is redacted in to the coded language (ena), how ena prescribes the drum strokes and, finally, how listeners (and which listeners) extract linguistic meaning from what is drummed. The description and analysis of this unique musical system adds substantially to what is known about bata drumming specifically, Yoruba drumming generally, speech surrogacy in music and coded systems of speaking. In this way, the book will appeal not only to ethnomusicologists and anthropologists, but also to linguists and those interested in African Studies.