This Kenyan drummer is fighting to make more space for women in percussion
In October, Burundi banned all women from playing its renowned royal drums. Kenyan percussionist Kasiva Mutua says this is an indefensible step backwards.
Kasiva Mutua is pissed off. It’s 9pm in Nairobi and news has recently broken that Burundi’s President Pierre Nkurunziza had banned all women from playing the country’s renowned royal drums. While Mutua, a percussionist, is from nearby Kenya, she is taking the news personally.
“To be honest, my initial reaction is, ‘What the hell?’” she says. “How can this be happening in this day and age, an era in which the world is about women? How can they dare do such a thing in the name of culture?”
According to the AFP, the decree reads as follows: “It is strictly forbidden to those of the female sex to beat drums. They can however carry out female folk dances accompanying the drums.” The decree, which was signed by President Nkurunziza on October 20, 2017, is an effort to regulate and preserve traditional drumming in the country — considered so culturally significant that it was placed on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list back in 2014. And while the drums have become popular at weddings, baptisms, graduations and other celebrations, the decree now requires that drummers performing at such “unofficial events” first get government permission, and pay the government treasury a fee equivalent to $280.
For centuries, the Burundian royal drums have been symbolic of the royal kingdom. In fact, in Kirundi, the Bantu language spoken in Burundi, the word for drum is the same as that for kingdom: ingoma. These drums can be enormous, with a diameter of over one meter, and are extremely heavy. They are played during important national ceremonies and have indeed traditionally been played by men.
“Yes, these drums have cultural functions. But the big question is, aren’t women part of these cultures?” Mutua asks. “I deeply think this is a tactic to disempower women.”
Mutua, just 29 years old, has been fighting gender barriers and cultural stereotypes in the field of percussion her entire career. In Kenya, in Africa, and around the world, percussion is dominated by men, and typically outright hostile to women who want to drum. “Drumming is associated with a lot of energy, a lot of strength, a lot of power and a lot of masculinity,” Mutua says. “People were stunned to actually see me play.”
Mutua first got interested in percussion under the influence of her grandmother, who encouraged her to listen closely and deeply to the wide world of natural sound around her. Mutua started by beating pots and pans at home as a child, and then desks and notebooks in primary school. In high school, she started to play in school music festivals. “That’s when I realized that drumming was not a woman’s thing per se, because of the comments that the boys used to make to me,” she says.
Mutua was called names behind her back and to her face. She faced harassment. She was told she would never make it as a drummer because she was a woman, and then, once she started to play bigger and bigger shows, that the only reason she was getting any attention was because she was woman.
Then, when she was a teenager, she came back to her rehearsal space and found her djembe forcibly ripped. “Drums are not cheap, and when somebody destroys them, it’s basically starting from scratch,” she says. “When your gear is destroyed, it’s like somebody driving a sword right into your heart.”
Mutua felt as though all the money and time and hard work she had invested in the art of percussion had suddenly been taken from her. “It was so hard to find a space to actually exist in the music industry,” she says. “Everything that was being said finally got to me.”
So she quit drumming altogether — a break that lasted only two weeks. “I was the saddest, saddest human being on the streets of Nairobi,” she says, laughing. “I felt lost. And I discovered that drumming is actually who I am. It’s not what I do. It makes me. It completes the name Kasiva.”
Mutua fought her way back. She is now a TED Fellow and a One Beat Fellow. She has toured the world with The Nile Project and joined The Giant Steps Music Action Lab and Coke Studio Africa this year. And while for years she was the “only female percussionist probably in the whole of Kenya,” she is now fiercely dedicated to making the profession more inclusive to other women. “It’s important to give women the space and chance to be who they want to be without going through so much hardship, like I went through,” she says. “Very few people gave me that opportunity.”
In 2015, Mutua co-founded Motra, an eight-member, all-female percussion band based in Nairobi. They released their debut EP “Safari Yetu” earlier this year. Mutua says that Motra — derived by combining the words “modern” and “traditional” — has not only inspired these percussionists to finally tell their stories through music, but that it’s also helped them be bold in their pursuits outside of drumming, inspiring one of the girls to start her own fashion design business, for example.
“I’ve seen that when a woman is empowered, she’s like a bomb,” she says. “She’s unstoppable. Some of these traditions were basically put there to take women and put them in their place, and this drumming is one of those kinds of cultural practices. A group of women assembled, singing, chanting and drumming, is a sign of power. It’s powerful to just watch them.”
Mutua says that many of the male drummers from Burundi she’s talked to since the October ban have generally agreed with the decree, and have pointed out that women are not strong enough to carry such heavy drums. Mutua knows that’s ridiculous.
Burundian drummers have also argued that because the drums are said to be shaped to resemble a woman — the body of the drum represents the womb, the sticks symbolize two breasts, and the opening at the bottom of the drum, the birth canal — that women shouldn’t be allowed to play them. “If anything, if the drum is actually built to resemble a woman, then what stops a woman from playing the same drum?” Mutua asks.
And without a systematic way for the government to enforce such a broad ban, Mutua worries that the decree will only empower male drummers to oppress the women around them, “turning the men themselves into the system of putting everybody in check.”
Mutua also worries that the crackdown on women drummers in Burundi could spread to other areas of East Africa, especially Rwanda. “I’ve read about a women’s group in Rwanda that drums as therapy to forget about the genocide and its aftermath,” she says. “That’s very special, and if the ban in Burundi affects Rwanda too, then we have a problem. Because if there’s nothing else you can run to other than that drum, and you take it away, what happens to you?”
In Burundi, female drummers are reportedly already losing their jobs. And while Mutua doesn’t personally know any female drummers there who have been impacted by the decree, she is planning a trip to Burundi to connect with drummers and get to the bottom of the ban. “There could be a Kasiva down there, and somebody’s signature basically just took her life away,” she says. “If I wasn’t Kenyan, if by sheer luck I was born in Burundi, this would have been the end of me.”
Mutua ultimately sees the whole effort as a big step backwards, a dangerous attempt to fossilize a beloved tradition that has been evolving beautifully on its own. “Culture doesn’t make the people. It’s the people who make the culture, and live with it,” Mutua says. “Culture evolves, culture keeps changing. And if women want to play drums, let them play.”
The TED Fellows program hand-picks young innovators from around the world to raise international awareness of their work and maximize their impact.
