Ashiko drums – or variants thereof – are traditionally found in West Africa, as well as part of the Americas.

The origins of the ashiko drum are traced to the Yoruba culture in (mainly) present-day Nigeria and Benin, West Africa.

Perhaps because Yorubaland and surrounding areas were strongly involved in (affected by) the Atlantic slave trade, drums with similar forms and characteristics are historically found in Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latin American cultures and traditions.

The drum he commissioned in the United States is in the collections of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the NYPL.

His ensemble of Montego Joe, Chief James Hawthorne Bey, and Baba Taiwo DuVall, and Julito Collazo, were all students of Miannes who played with Olatunji, and disseminated the technique.

After Olajuni opened for the Grateful Dead in the 1980s, the ashiko spread from its Afro-based constituency, and became part of the European-American growing local drum movement in the US and elsewhere in the Western world.

Some call the ashiko a "male" counterpart to the djembe, though this is contradicted by references to the relatively matriarchal Yoruba culture.