Sub-Saharan African music traditions

In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the use of music is not limited to entertainment: it serves a purpose to the local community and helps in the conduct of daily routines.

[3] Dances help people work, mature, praise or criticize members of the community, celebrate festivals and funerals, compete, recite history, proverbs and poetry and encounter gods.

[10] The music of the Luo, for another example, is functional, used for ceremonial, religious, political or incidental purposes, during funerals (Tero buru) to praise the departed, to console the bereaved, to keep people awake at night, to express pain and agony and during cleansing and chasing away of spirits, during beer parties (Dudu, ohangla dance), welcoming back the warriors from a war, during a wrestling match (Ramogi), during courtship, in rain making and during divination and healing.

South of the Sahara the Sahel forms a bio-geographic zone of transition between the desert and the Sudanian savannas, stretching between the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea.

The Nilotic peoples prominent in southern Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, and northern Tanzania, include the Luo, Dinka, Nuer and Maasai.

The Hausa people, who speak a language related to Ancient Egyptian and Biblical Hebrew, have moved in the opposite direction.

While the north, with its griot traditions, makes great use of stringed instruments and xylophones, the south relies much more upon drum sets and communal singing.

The Sosso people had their capital at Koumbi Saleh until Sundiata Keita defeated them at the Battle of Kirina (c. 1240) and began the Mali Empire, which spread its influence along the Niger River through numerous vassal kingdoms and provinces.

The Gao Empire at the eastern Niger bend was powerful in the ninth century CE but later subordinated to Mali until its decline.

600 BCE – 1380 CE[41] encompassed much of Chad, Fezzan, east Niger and north-east Nigeria, perhaps founded by the nomadic Zaghawa, then ruled by the Sayfawa dynasty.

These spoke the Kanuri languages spoken by some four million people in Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Cameroon, Libya and Sudan.

The East African musicological region, which includes the islands of the Indian Ocean, Madagascar, Réunion, Mauritius, Comor and the Seychelles, has been open to the influence of Arabian and Iranian music since the Shirazi Era.

In the south of the region Swahili culture has adopted instruments such as the dumbek, oud and qanun – even the Indian tabla drums.

[53] The kabosy, also called the mandoliny, a small guitar of Madagascar, like the Comorian gabusi, may take its name from the Arabian qanbūs.

Taarab, a modern genre popular in Tanzania and Kenya, is said to take both its name and its style from Egyptian music as formerly cultivated in Zanzibar.