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Article on "Wooden Drums and Environmentalism"

The co-author:  Ms. Johanne Lauzon  jlauzon@refer.qc.ca
Japanese Translation

Subject:
        Djembe Threatens the Forest ?
  Date:
        Sun, 04 Oct 1998 21:32:10 -0700
  From:
        Maurice Labelle <labellem@rocler.qc.ca>
    To:
        Djembe-L <djembe-l@u.washington.edu>


In its edition of Saturday September the 26, 1998, "La Presse", a daily French newspaper in Montreal, Canada, had a short article entitled "Le tam-tam menace la forêt", which means "The Tam-Tam
Threatens the Forest".  The article was written by Johanne Lauzon and Aïda Soumaré Diop", from the press agency SYFIA, specialized in African matters. The Tam-Tam in question is no other than the
djembe, and the Country concerned is Senegal.

A quick search on Altavista returned me a few other articles from the same authors and a SYFIA Web page, http://www.francophonie.org/syfia/index.html
but not this specific article. For this reason, I will try to deliver the essence of it to Djembe-l listers. My effort should not be seen as a professional, complete neither exact translation. It is only a
personnal detailed summary, made in my own words, of parts of the article which I find more important or relevant to the list. I did not verify the exactitude of the information. I took off all the names of specific persons mentioned in the article. I do not assume any responsability toward its content.

Remarks before starting:

(1)  Maybe the article was not clear about this, or maybe even after reading it a few times I just did not understand well, but it may make believe that, in some cases, workshops use pre-carved drum shells on which they do the finishing and heading, and that, in other cases, the djembes are all made at
     the same place. The ambiguity is reflected in the following.

(2)  Senegal is located just South of Sahara desert, on the Atlantic coast. Vegetation and forests are important to contribute to stop a gradual invasion by the sand into the land, which is a problem in the Country;

(3)  The article does not specify if the djembes shipped from Dakar are all made in Senegal or if they are all made with wood taken in the Country. Dakar is an important transit point in West Africa. Therefore, it becomes possible to wonder if completed djembes comming from other West African countries, or djembes made in Senegal with wood comming from other West African counties, might also be sent off from Dakar.

(4)  Please, do not ask me for more details about this subject: I do not know more and have no more information about it.

(5)  My first language being French, I offer my appologies in advance for my mistakes in English.

_____________________
Maurice Labelle
labellem@rocler.qc.ca
_____________________


....................................................

The Tam-Tam Threatens the Forest
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dakar, Senegal's Capital, is taken by a frenzy of making wooden tam-tams, called djembes, which are shipped by full containers to Europe and North America while deforestation in this Sahel Country
accelerates.

Everywhere in Dakar djembe confection workshops multiplied themselves during the last few years. Today, there are hundreds of them. As an example, this one workshop where about seven young men
scrape goat skins, sand empty wooden shells and skin drums. No time for playing the drums: orders from France, Italy or United-States have to be done, a container sitting nearby.

Wearing rasta braids, in front of his small shop in one of the most important production point near Dakar, a young man swears: «Many do it for the money. But not me... I do it for the passion of music.
I wish that one day I will, like my friends, go to the United States or somewhere else, and finally be able to live from this art.»


Profitable for the exporters

In fact, small djembe makers hardly evaluate their revenu. They sell the drums between $35 to $45 for the lowest quality, and $60 for the «professional» quality. But they have to buy stock: emptied tree trunks, goat skins, rope, varnish and metal rings. The profit margin is narrow.

Profits are bigger for the intermediates. Wearing a nice suit, cellular phone in hand, a woman is looking for 127 djembes. She touches the instruments and discusses before buying. Living in Spain, this
Senegalese woman, whose treated skin appears paler, does big business. From Dakar, every two months, she ships containers filled with African art objects, mostly djembes. Destination: Spain,
Portugal and United-States.

In France or in Canada, a djembe may be sold between $200 and $250 to the retailer. A container which holds 1,300 djembes costs about $2 125 (8 500 FF) for transportation to Havre in France,
which represents about $1.63 per drum, including the transit fees and the cost of the circulation permit delivered by the Waters and Forest Department of Senegal.

Since one exporter alone cannot send as much djembes all at once, expeditors group themselves to fill a container. One company, which ships containers for exporters, sent off by itself no less than
20,000 djembes during the month of May. This transit company is not the only one shipping that kind of freight. There are at least three other companies also doing it.


Smaller forests
On every piece of art, djembes being included in this category, an exporter should pay a tax of $4 (1 500 F CFA). But, with the complacency of some custom officers, this tax is totally avoided
for entire shippments. Taxes perceived on 100 djembes would suffice to replant one hectare of forest. It is not the djembes exporters who will finance afforestation in Senegal!

Djembes largely contribute to the deterioration of the forests. They are made from big trees which are theorically preserved from being cut.

The exploitation of the forest in Senegal is from 100 to 300 times faster than the afforestation. The few afforestation programs only had a weak impact. None less than 800 000 hectares of forest have
been lost in only 10 years: 12,7 millions hectares in 1981 against a remaining 11,9 in 1991, according to official datas. Observers think that these figures are underestimated.

Under a specific regulation, only dead standing trees can be exploited. Small entrepreneurs who easily obtain exploitation permits benefit from individual quotas. There is only one restriction: trees bigger than 25 cm (about 10 inches) should not be cut. Of course, djembes are made with bigger logs.

It becomes hard for the agents to control the content of a 30 tons logging truck. On paper, everything looks fine at the time of the controls: the diameter and the quantity. But logging entrepreneurs,
with the complicity of countrypeople, hide the bigger logs in the bottom of the truck and cover them with smaller wood. Agents simply cannot unload the truck.

The Dakar departemental Inspection of Waters and Forest, which only have three agents working without a vehicule or a phone, cannot do much to face the situation. One of the agents admits that they only can solve cases that appear by luck.

.............................................


Subject: Djembe Threatens the Forest? mass export threatens even more  than
that??
From: Rainer Polak <raipol@gmx.de>
Date: Mon, 08 Mar 1999 12:19:58 +0100
X-Message-Number: 2

Thank you, Mabelle, for your re-offering the inspiring summary of the article on jembe export and forest reserves. It gives a significant, a shocking counterpoint to the traditional story told by many numu-
(forgeron/blacksmith) jembe or mask carvers and jembe players all over Mali and Guinea: "formerly one had to sacrifice a chicken before cutting a lenge tree in order to ask the spirit  living in the tree (spirits love lenge [afzelia africana] and jala [khaya senegalensis; french:cailcedrat] more than many other trees) whether he/she/it would accept that. If the dying chicken, throat cut, would lie down in this and this position, the tree-spirit had accepted being cut, if the chicken would lie down in that and that position, the carver had to look for anoother tree.

This story still is given by Famoudou Konate from Guinea, it is exactly the same way given by Brett-Smith's informants (in: Brett-Smith, Sarah C., 1994: The Making of Bamana Sculpture, Creativity and Gender. Cambridge), and it is told by elder urban drummers in Bamako, Mali, too. It seems to be part of greater Manding folklore. But what about practice? Jembe export business surely is not compatible with individual relations between carvers and trees.

Nowadays almost all jembe carvers in Bamako have specialised on export or in selling downtown to tourists or travellers. This has several consequences (an obvious one: Before 1990 there were no carved ornaments on any Bamako carved jembe, and now there is almost no single one jembe produced in Bamako without ornaments that were first introduced by definite exporteurs' demands) which I of course do not survey, but I want to touch a few aspects which concern the carvers' and local drummers' perspectives.

One has to differ between those two groups, because in Bamako (maybe this is different in places like Dakar and Abidjan, where commercialisatioin is that intensive as it is   now for a longer time) there is no such profession as a jembe maker, but this task is until today devided along the "traditional" lines: numu (forgeron/blacksmith), specialised in iron,wood and healing/magic-crafts, doing the carving, drummers themselves doing the skinmounting. Traditionally a drummer individually ordered a such and such
drum shell at a numu's.

Professional urban carvers work incredibly fast: to carve one jembe from barking the trunk to finish the surface, to them it takes only about 6 hours (of partly very hard work, to be sure). This tempo is even heightend by working with labour division: many carver patrons have about 5 - 10 people working for them, each spezialised in different steps of the carving process.

The drums are carved out of freshly cut trunks when the wood is still not hardenend and thus easy to manufacture. But the carvers have no time to let the carved drum dry slowly, and very little stockroom space. So they dry very fast in the sun. This will produce different types of cracks in the shell in the different seasons.

The carvers need trees with big diameters. Because these are very difficult  to buy in Bamako, the carvers look for them themselves. They go up to 200 and 300 round Bamako to look for it, this of course being limited to the sides of roads and the landscape knowledge of the carvers. So a carver from Segu will all do his searching for trees and cutting in the narrow stripes of some kms to the both sides of the Bamako-Segu asphalt road.

Between around 1990, when export business started to increase to a now considerable amount in Bamako, between 1990 and 1998 the drums available in Bamako have changed a lot. One thing is that now it is almost impossible to find one jembe with a diameter of 35 cm and more which is all made up of
heartwood. Heartwood jembe are better than those with outer-wood parts in the upper part of the bowl. (with many trees you are able to differ dark-red-brown heartwood and lighter-yellow-sandy "outer"wood; what is the English term for the outer-part-close-to-the-bark-wood?).  This clearly comes because the carvers no longer easily find trees big enough: those are definitely running out, around Bamako at least.

One effect is that local drummers, too, are affected by this. For them, too, big first class shells are no longer easily available because of the large quantity of export - carvers tend to sell what they can sell and to not hold back special, first class shells for locals. On the other hand, drummers normally earn very
little for doing the skin-mounting on export drums (2000 CFA, about 4$, is a normal price for the mounting and pre-tensioning of one skin by a "ordinary" festival drummer whoe does this as a side-job; compare that exporters pay 1000 CFA, 2$, and less, for one pair of 3 segesege made of milk powder tins, to drummers who produce this in their spare time) while the profit is the exporteurs'.

A hand full of the top stars, of the famous ex-ballet drummers (Francois Dembele, ex ballet national, and Ibrim Sarr, ex-Oumou Sangare, for example) are among the exporters, but the "typical" local drummer (most of them illiterate and not speaking French) is far from making big money out of that business. The rest of the exporteurs are Malian and other African entrepreneurs and European-jembe-players-teacher-dealers, many of them dealing with amounts of 30 - 150 jembe per shipping.

Another thing is that the shape of Bamako style jembe, rather compact (with vertical cylindical lower part), has considerably changed towards the more goblet like (with trumpet like lower part) jembe which I before recently would have tended to call typical for "Southern jembe", that is Abidjan/ivorien (and maybe guinean) jembe. I think it is worth observing on the long run whether exportation does not result in some homogenisation of greater WestAfrican jembe style. More asymetrical, individual shapes and different proportions, so typical of many rural jembe and jembe older than 15 or 20 years, to me seem to vanish.

What I want to say: there is not only the question concerning the values and meanings of "African" jembe versus "industrial" jembe. there is another one, too: concerning the local, individual African jembe and the global, manufactural African jembe, which has many (who is to judge? but I would guess: both positive and negative) effects in Africa, surely negative on the forests, more ambivalently on the local, individual actions of carvers and drummers, thus on the socalled tradition.

To come back to environmentalism and sustainability: I think that we have to accept that the jembe has become a (semi-industrial) mass product. This for me implies that we would be wise to accept a certain lower degree of quality for the mass product or accepting a very high price for the last few individual pieces (I hope this thought is not going into elitarianism of the kind of the prices for art and antiquities). This should take away my reluctance (fears?taboos?) about alternative materials other than
endangered woods. Sooner or later, it will have us do so, anyway. Believe me, I am feeling strange in getting close to  a position advocating plastic jembe in this spontaneously argued list post. Maybe - I have no ideas about forestry - it would be possible to use other, faster growing woods. Or is this unrealistic?
By the way, another related topic: almost everyone in the last decades, and definitely every urban WestAfrican and every out-of-Africa drummer has accepted that goat-skin is not as good as antelope, but will do for the existing needs. This is reasonable of course, and a simple matter of fact, too, since antelopes simply are overhunted in the rural areas and non-existent in cities. Yet on the other hand this had as a precondition that either live-stock in "traditional" breeding had increased (which is true, but in some Malian places this had caused enourmous environmental losses by over-grazing) or "industrial" goat-raising had been introduced.

And since a couple of years they are taking away truck loads full of all kinds of skin, people say they are exported to southeastasian industries for I do not know what - anyhow, it has grown harder again to get hold of female goat skin without badly healed wounds or brands in Bamako commercialisation and mass production .... arghh ... is there no way out of vicous circles?

greetings
ps: has anbody experiences with European deer? I tried several with different results, but one German doe's skin shot with, I think, about 15 months in May (after the breeding season in middle-European spring), gave a suberb jembe sound.
Rainer Polak

----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "orida diabate" <omdiabate@email.msn.com>
Sunday, October 22, 2000 8:18 PM
Subject: [djembe-l] Re: prefer non-african wood!!!        

To Ritva,

        Djeli Moussa Diabate would like to express his gratitude to all of those concerned about deforestation in W.A. Deforestation is bad whether in the North or the South of the planet.
        Guinea is a country set mostly on a tropical forest land.
I have gone to the forest with a men to have trees cut for my drums, since I was concerned about deforestation and wanted to follow the process. The tree in the Guinea Forest is so full of life from bugs, to other plants, animals and...genies. The wood cutter has followed an initiation and knows how to chose his tree. He prayed in front of the tree for his protection (since he is taking habitat from so many entities) before cutting the tree. Out of one tree, he could get four Djembes. Him and his team  worked every other day.
        It takes a lot of your energy to cut this very dense wood. Three days for one tree! When I saw the trees bleeding their red sap I cried. It looks just like our blood. I learned to respect Djembes, chairs and mostly any tree.
As Djeli Moussa remembers the words of former Guinea President Ahmed Sekou
Toure: "any Guinean who plants a tree, gives life to a human being". No
ambiguity here.  He set the law that any tree cut has to be reported  and replanted.
Any art object that leaves Guinea has to be reported at the National Museum
in Conakry and taxes payed for.  That is the law. Also I was told by officer
there that the International Environment Protection agency is keeping a close eye on Guinea wood.
       Now it would be great if foreigners who go there to buy djembes would
understand the impact of these laws on Nature and respect them.The Guineans
do. It is just not ethical to go to a developing country and bring back drums made from tropical wood and not pay any taxes to that country and not follow the laws, whether it is for your own drum or for drums for sale.
        We also should not dislike a drum because it has a little irregularity which
doesn't affect the sound in any way. Sometimes if Nature has made a little hole in the wood, the craftsman uses glue made from resin to cover it. We should regarded it as good as any. Let's do like the African drummer who chooses his drum from its voice and not from its look.
        Do not keep it to adorn your living room. Play it. We have to respect trees.
Aren't they one with our lungs? Respect your wooden Djembe it is the sacrificed life of a tree and a goat in your hands.

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