Sub-Saharan African Music Traditions - Regions

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.

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. that speak over 400 dialects, Afro-Asian, Nilotic and Niger–Congo. The state of Sudan takes its name from the northern sub-saharan savanna which makes, with the Nile, a great cross-roads of the region.

It is the remaining four regions that are mainly thought typical of 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 exoansion of the Niger–Congo-speaking people that began around 1500 BC: the Urewe nucleus of the Eastern Bantu was formed in Central Africa by 1000–500 BC and the Congo nucleus 500 BC–0, from where there was a southward advance. 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.

• West African music (yellow on the map) includes the music of Senegal and the Gambia, of Guinea and Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone and Liberia, of the inland plains of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso.

• 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 north of this region also includes Nilo-Saharan peoples such as the Zande.

• 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 Comor.

• The southern region (brown on the map) includes the music of South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana, Namibia and Angola.