A percussion instrument which makes use of the special sound-conducting qualities of water. There are two types: this article discusses the type without a membrane; for discussion of the type with a membrane, see Drum, §I, 2(iv). Water-drums without a membrane are found in Africa and the African diaspora and New Guinea. The commonest type, used mostly by women over a wide area of the West African savanna region, is made by floating a half-gourd with its concave side face downwards in water within a larger vessel (half-gourd or pail); the floating piece is then beaten with a small spoon or stick. The instrument is often played in pairs. The resultant sound, which is used rhythmically, sometimes in ensemble with other percussion instruments and usually as an accompaniment to song, combines the concussive click of two hard objects with a soft low-pitched tone. Sometimes water-drums are beaten by hand, as in reported cases where calabash hemispheres are simply laid floating face down in the shallows of a river. One origin tale relates that they were sounded thus by hunters to attract crocodiles and water lizards.
Examples of water-drums are the assakhalebo of the Tuareg, the tembol of the Kotoko people of Chad and the dyi dunu of the Bambara of Mali, last named being played by young women for domestic calendar rituals and at the death of an aged woman. Use for funeral rites has also been reported among the Kurumba of Upper Volta (Griaule and Dieterlen), in Haiti and in Cuba where the instrument is known as jícara de jobá (Ortiz).
In New Guinea the instruments have a hollow wooden body shaped like an hourglass drum, but with open ends. They are used like a stamping tube and are sounded against the surface of water during male initiation ceremonies in the Chambri Lakes.
F. Ortiz: Los instrumentos de la música afrocubana, i (Havana, 1952), 203–4
M. Griaule and G. Dieterlen: ‘La mort chez les Koroumba’, Journal de la Sociéte des Africanistes, xii (1942), 12
G. Dieterlen and M. Ligers: ‘Notes sur les tambours-de-calebasse en Afrique Occidentale’, Journal de la Sociéte des Africanistes, xxxiii/2 (1963)
PETER COOKE