31/12/2025
Fagha and the Hanging Drums
The four drums hung from a single blackened stake like hunted bush meat drying slowly over smoke. Their bodies were dark red, black and white, polished by years of hands and heat, their skins stretched tight and burnished by age until they carried a shine that did not belong to the present. The stake itself was scorched from countless fires and blackened by time, standing like a silent witness to every gathering that had ever formed around it. Even the drumsticks were dark, slim bamboo rods stained deep by sweat and motion, as though something alive had seeped into the wood and refused to leave. To anyone passing by, this arrangement looked strangely simple, almost too plain for the reverence it commanded, but anyone who had witnessed the drums in life knew better than to measure them by appearance.
To the untrained ear, what emerged from them sounded like disorder. There was no clear beginning, no familiar rhythm, no easy tune for the body to follow. The sound did not rise politely or settle itself into predictable shapes. It collided, fell apart, and reassembled itself in strange ways that defied explanation. A visitor might stand watching in polite confusion, wondering what all the movement meant, why people swayed when there was no melody, why feet moved when nothing recognizable seemed to guide them. But those who understood did not listen for music. They listened for meaning. They listened with memory, not with habit. The drums were not made to entertain; they were made to remember, to speak where human language stammer.
That afternoon, the dust had already begun to rise before Fagha lifted his sticks again. People gathered without signal, responding to something older than announcement and stronger than curiosity. Old men leaned on staffs at the edge of the crowd, their eyes reflecting flame as though seeing far beyond the present. Young people arrived restless and uncertain, drawn as if by invisible cords they could not resist. Children moved in and out of legs and laughter until the air itself felt crowded with anticipation. Smoke drifted lazily overhead, carrying the smell of firecrackers, to***co, alcohol, and Indian incense.
Fagha stood at the center, facing the hanging drums the way one faces a sacred thing without daring to name it so. He had been drawn to them as a boy, not because anyone called him, but because something inside him never quite allowed peace when the sound was elsewhere. He had crept from home as a child when he should have been sleeping, sitting just beyond the lamplight, watching men older than his father speak with their hands. He had swept the ground after gatherings, carried water, cleaned the drum skins, and learned not to interrupt silence. He learned early that sound had seasons and silence had moods. He learned that some things were said only once in a lifetime and must be heard with the whole body when they came.
By the time his voice deepened, the drums were already teaching him answers. His hands grew strong in ways that did not come from lifting but from listening. And when the elders quietly stepped back one evening and did not take the sticks from his hands, he understood without ceremony that something had been passed to him that did not belong to him at all.
When Fagha struck the first drum, he did not do so loudly. He did not announce himself with force. The sound he drew out was low, steady, deliberate, like a knock on an invisible door. He waited, not with impatience but with certainty, and the answer came from another drum at his side like a voice clearing its throat before speaking. The third entered with defiance, sharp as thunder on tin. The fourth followed with a sound so deep it seemed to rise from the earth itself.
And then the talking began.
Not as a conversation, but as a confession of sorts. They seem to say to one another, let me bare my heart to you.
The drums spoke as four voices speaking at once, interrupting, accusing, supporting one another, calling out names that did not belong to any living person and those absences no one dared mention aloud. The crowd felt it all before they understood any of it. People shifted on their feet, not as dancers but as listeners being physically reshaped by sound. A woman near the front pressed both hands to her chest, as though something heavy had just been both placed and lifted inside of her. A young man swayed backward, startled by a sorrow and joy he could not explain. Someone else shouted in laughter suddenly and then covered their mouth in bewilderment. Backs begin to bend, waist begin to turn, lines begin to form.
The drums were in a hurry. The rhythm never settled into comfort. It bent and turned and broke itself the way memory does. It recalled grief without warning and lifted it without apology. The dust thickened under moving feet as the gathering turned into a breathing mass, no longer a group of individuals but a single body sharing pulse and emotion. Feet moved backward, then sideways, then inward, as though being guided along invisible paths only the heart could see. There was no pattern to memorize, no correct movement to imitate. Each body found its own truth inside the sound and followed it without instruction.
Fagha’s hands were no longer gentle. The bamboo sticks were fierce beneath his fingers now, leaping and striking with the urgency of messages long delayed. The drums cried out curses and praises in the same breath, rebuking old wrongs and blessing nameless births. They spoke of betrayal and reunion without ever naming either. They told stories not with words but with weight, accessing grief buried deep in ribs and shoulders, exposing joys so old they felt like secrets even to their owners. The other drummers did not follow him blindly; they challenged him musically, answering, resisting, and affirming like elders disputing truth in the open air. Their dialogue was raw, undiluted. It was not performance. It was testimony. It was awakening.
The dust climbed higher around their legs, swirling and drifting until ankles vanished and feet seemed to float. Voices rose from the crowd like smoke staggering upward from untrained fire, misinformed, unmanaged, loose. Some were tuneless, others broken, but all of them necessary. This was no choir or a troupe orchestrated. This was confession in sound, discord and understanding. Somewhere in the thick of it, two old friends locked eyes and laughed through tears, unsure whether they were remembering or forgiving. Somewhere else, a boy who had come to idle found himself holding his breath, sensing that something inside him had just been called awake. Somewhere broken fences are mended with a warm brotherly hug.
Then the air changed.
A figure moved forward without calling attention to himself. Nwaotam did not part the crowd; the crowd parted itself around him. His head was black and wrapped in white cloth that caught and held the light over a face wearing an expressing cut over a century go. His body wrapped in black and gold moved as though carried by wind rather than muscle, swaying in a rhythm too quiet to be measured by speed. He did not dance for the drums. He surrendered to them.
The drums felt his presence immediately. The tone shifted, not in power but in depth. The four voices ceased arguing and spoke as one. The sound grew strong, warm, and whole in a way no voice ever could. The dust began to settle as though obeying the music. People did not collapse or scream or cry out. Instead, something quieter happened. Breathing softened. Shoulders loosened, bated breath. And Nwaotam will dance with one group and another and stray stowaway or one impetuous youth or a group of youths. Not judging, not questioning. Not declaring, but belonging. Not instructing but recognizing. Nobody said the words. No body needed to. Everyone was one.
Every person standing there knew the same truth without hearing it aloud: they were not lost, no matter how far they had traveled in life. They had not failed to return, even if they had never come home. Everything that had abandoned them had also kept them. Everything that had ended had also begun. And everyone who walked away carried something they could not describe but would never lose.
The Music rises to a tempo, the dancers pour away every burden and weight.
It never ends here at the Ikuba Square.
Like a shadow that knows every corner of the past, Nwaotam moves through the winding paths of the town, drawing a living river of people behind him until they reach the old marketplace where stories once traded alongside salt and pepper. This is the final arena, the old rooftop.
A sea of people, a pulsation of colours, a cacophony of gangs assemble. The hanging drums find their way to the marketplace to resume their story telling until the restless spirit rises on the rooftop. Fagha leads his men again above the tremor.
Nwaotam rises above the silence and begins to lead them, not back to their homes, but deeper into memory. With a final surge of spirit, he dances against the coming night itself, his body twisting with grace, defiance, and remembrance. He contents with his companion, they agree, they disagree, they fight, they hug each other, they tumble from edge to edge. It is the joy and sorrow of life, man and wife, brother to brother, freeborn and stranger, community. He directs the crowds below, they sway to his right and to his left, he jumps, they jump, and bend when he bends. His companion joins him dancing ahead of him lost to the embrace songs. But Nwaotam stops him, grabs him by his wrapper strings and slams him on the rooftop floor. He points sternly and repeatedly at him as if to say, “mind your place!” The crowd agrees and roars their approval. The drums climb a crescendo.
Then he pulls him up and hugs him fiercely again. He races on the rooftop to the edge as if chasing an unseen bandit. The companion pulls hard on the restraint. He walks back, his walk is a dance, his feet strike the roof like drums calling ancestors from sleep, his arms, stretched wide with a primeval broom, cutting through the air like a man fighting time itself, and then, in a breath, without warning the canon sounds for the last time and he descends. The noise and tempo, the loud cries and high pitch singing and dance descend with him.
The big black gong calls him, "gome, gome, gome, gome" and he leaves with it down the road back the way he came. The multitude follow him as he returns to the past to come again another year.
Fagha lifts both hands, the drums say their last farewells and went silent. He shared a drink with his men, pours a generous portion on the drums and brought them down.
(c)HMGPepple
Nwaotam, The Grand Bonny Carnival Bonny Island Magazine Bonny Fm Bonny Kingdom Boat Regatta
