Akan drum

The wooden body widens beneath a skin head held by pegs and fibre cord. Its goblet-like shape and construction place this eighteenth-century drum within an Akan tradition of West Africa. The drum was acquired in colonial Virginia. African materials and techniques connect its making with one side of the Atlantic, while the collection history places it on the other. The complete earlier chain of ownership is unknown. It would be too certain to name a particular voyage or owner from those facts alone. It reached the Museum through the bequest of Hans Sloane in 1753. Sloane was a physician and collector whose objects helped form the new institution. A drum brought into a European collection can lose much of its history of use, even while its material construction remains clear. Follow the cord and pegs around the head. They show the practical work of holding the skin in place on an instrument whose full journey has not survived.