Boomlay

When John F. Carrington of the Baptist Missionary Society of London reached his new post in the Belgian Congo 14 years ago, one thing struck him especially: though there was neither telephone nor telegraph around, everyone in the village seemed to know exactly when he and his wife would arrive. The experience so impressed him that Carrington embarked on a second career of his own. Today he is the world's top white expert on the language of the Congo drums.

Last week TIME Correspondent Israel Shenker found Carrington at Yalemba, a jungle outpost in the Congo. There Carrington and his wife run a thriving mission school and are the guiding spirits of a community of some 500 natives. But John Carrington, 40, is now a missionary of another sort. Since only one pupil in ten knows how to speak on the drums, he has planned a special course to keep the ancient art alive.

The Moon Looks Down. As Carrington well knows, the art is not easy. Drum talk is not a code like Morse. It is actually an attempt to reproduce language. Every syllable has its own tone, which the drummer must be able to catch by striking the hollow log at exactly the right spot. In some Bantu dialects, a single tone pattern may have different meanings, as in the pattern for moon and jowl. Thus, a drummer must know enough to add a qualifying phrase: moon becomes "the moon looks down on the earth" and fowl turns into "the fowl, the little one that says kiokio."

The Carringtons have come to depend on the drum. At 5:30 in the morning the mission awakes to it (da dee da da dee da da dee da--sukola sukola sukola--wash wash wash). Often when her husband is in the jungle, Mrs. Carrington beats out a quick tattoo to summon him back to lunch (da da da da dee dee da dee . . . bosongo olimo konda . . .).

When she is through drumming, her message reads: "White man spirit in forest come come to house of shingles high up above of white man spirit in forest. Woman with yams awaits. Come come."

Crocodile & Leopard. How accurate is drum talk? Wrote Correspondent Shenker: "The drums of the village three miles across the river are heard regularly at the Yalemba mission, and the native pupils are always coming up to Carrington with messages from the other side. One reported: 'My father is on the other side with food.' How did he know? 'The drum said so.' Just to make sure, Shenker asked Carrington to station two drummers 200 yards apart and put them to a severe test: "The sentence I dictated to Carrington was: 'The Giants beat the Indians in the World Series.' Carrington was unsure about 'Indians,' so we agreed to change it to 'Redskins.' 'World Series' seemed to be asking a bit too much of the drummers, so Carrington made it 'competition.' The message was thereupon relayed to one drummer as 'The Giants beat the Redskins in the competition.' The old drummer practically split the lips of his instrument beating out the message, and we walked over to the other drummer to ask what he had heard. His answer: 'The crocodile got the better of the leopard.' In the Congo, where crocodiles come big and leopards have tawny skins, that seemed close enough. My last doubts vanished."

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