The Beat of My Drum: An Autobiography (review)

The Beat of My Drum is not focused primarily on Africa, nor is it, strictly speaking, an autobiography. These are two big problems with this book. But it is a nice memoir of aspects of the development of the world music genre. It is also an interesting, though skeletal and spotty, account of pan-Africanism and the American civil rights movement, as Babatunde Olatunji inserts himself, Gump-like, into every major happening in the twentieth century. I can't decide whether this last aspect is a weakness or a strength.

Of little use to the student of Africa are the three sketchy and unspecific chapters on Babatunde Olatunji's beginnings in Nigeria. It is wonderful, though, to have an African voice in print; African studies suffers from this lack. And this voice is quite intriguing, although I wished that he had fleshed out the brief glimpses of a young African man in multiple situations: during the beginnings of pan-Africanism in West Africa, in the corrupt Nigerian civil service, in the Jim Crow American South, and in the context of the sticky relations between Africans and African Americans in the middle of the twentieth century. He lived most of his life outside of Africa and seems to have had an impact on the consciousness-raising of Americans about Africa. He appears in print and photographs to be easy-going and smiling, but also sharply critical of Western exploitation of the material and human resources of Africa, and of African acquiescence in that exploitation.

Most of the book concerns his sojourn in the United States promoting the healing powers of the drum and the importance of African culture. We witness Olatunji's encounters with major figures of the century: Martin Luther King, Kwame Nkrumah, Bill Lee (Spike's father), Alvin Ailey, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, John Coltrane, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Tito Puente, Tom Mboya, Max Roach, Alex Haley, Pete Seeger, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Randy Weston, Richard Nixon, Quincy Jones, James Brown, Bob Marley, Larry Bird, Mickey Hart, The Grateful Dead, Carlos Santana, and Maya Angelou.

It is not a very meaty book, however, and seems to have been transcribed from recordings of Olatunji's memories, spliced with a smattering of historical context. The splices are not seamless and the result is a book lacking a consistent voice, resembling a series of separately published articles on different themes. The repetition of events and facts makes for clumsy and confusing reading in places. But I kept going to see the author place himself everywhere: at pan-African conferences, at the March on Washington, at Kent State at the time of the massacre, in Jamaica when Bob Marley died. Olatunji claims to have been instrumental in the founding of major institutions and movements: the U.N., the Peace Corps, the Black Arts/Black Power movement, the Smithsonian Museum of African Art. He claims to have invented the High Life beat.

This montage is ultimately tiresome—as even Robert Atkinson admits in his afterword—and it somehow cheapens the presentation of a life that was clearly a prominent force in world music. But the book is delightful when Olatunji expresses wonder at the world and its possibilities. I smiled at his testimony about the transformative power of Peoples Express airline, whose low prices allowed him to get his whole drum company to the American West Coast. This sweet reflection on the democratic nature of the airline exemplifies the way in which the book manages to transcend all the name-dropping. We see here the humility that is characteristic of the few people with access to the resources that enable them to travel outside of Africa. His is the glee of one who is launched from a sea of deprivation onto a world tour, however shaky and disorienting the journey is. Olatunji's smiling face in the photos seems to say: How can I...