The Use of African Drums
Drums are wonderful instrument, and they have beautiful sound. In Gambia drums are very important in peoples daily life. They use drums in many different ways, some for sending massages to the people in town or some time to send massage to the next village. There are drums for ceremonies like weddings, and there are also drums for healing people who are sick. Drums are instruments that played, you feel something inside your body like a supper natural power that touches your soul and wakes your spirit. That is because a drum beat is the same as a heartbeat with the same pulse, so when you hear the spirit of the drum move within you, there is an immediate reaction to the sound of the beat. There are some people who cannot stand still when they hear the sound of the drum beat and their whole body starts begin to dance to the drum.
The persons spirit and the drum come together as one spirit. Also that person will have a very high spiritual communication with drum and the drummer. There becomes a connection between the musician during a concert and the audience when they begin to dance to the tribal drum beats. A feeling that the drummer is getting the drum language through to the people all around them. So those kinds of people know how to use their spirit, because drum rhythms are an international language, in any culture or tradition, they have a drum rhythm in their society. And there are other kinds of people when they hear a drum, they will immediately put their fingers into their ears because they cannot stand the drum spirit making them uncomfortable.
They are afraid of their own spirit and energy they have, so the sound that comes out of the drum remains free within their spirit. They must learn to let their body surrender to the sound of the drum that they hear and let the sound get into their body very deeply, it is a another way of drum healing. The best way to get drum healing is to lay down and close your eyes and let only the drum spirit go in to your body. In Gambia some times you can see a person go into a trance, they let the spirit of the drum control their feelings.