China-Africa Stories | Forty drummers, three dunun and a Zhejiang University new year

The programme for Zhejiang University's New Year carnival on 31 December 2018 carried a blank. One act had no title, no performers and no time slot, and even its rehearsal venue was kept secret. The club has played every New Year carnival since the first, but this time its members learned two days earlier that their slot fell just before midnight. When it came, 40 of them walked onto the stage at Ziyun basketball court on the Zijingang Campus, and were joined by Wu Zhaohui, then president of the university, who took his place at one of the drums and played through to the first bell of 2019.

The club started in 2010 with three drums and two students. Chen Long, one of its founders, and a fellow student each paid 4,000 yuan for three dunun, tall cylindrical drums struck with sticks, and those three have stood at the back of the stage ever since. Members call the trio "Sandun", three dunun.

West African Mandingue music works in layers. The djembe, the goblet-shaped hand drum, carries the changing pattern; the dunun family of kenkeni, sangban and dununba holds the pulse underneath. Members liken the djembe to a group of singers and the dunun to the backing music behind them. The hand drum itself is traced to the Mali Empire of the 13th century, in what is now Mali and Guinea, and it is struck with bare hands: three tones, high, middle and low, depending on the hand's shape and where it lands.

Rehearsing was harder than buying drums. The sound is too large for an ordinary room, and space was a constant worry before the club found a basement by Qizhen Lake on the Zijingang Campus. Members joke that they drum at the bottom of the lake. The room also hosts a beginners' class: basic strokes first, then rhythms, then a complete traditional piece by the end of six sessions. Instruments are provided, and no musical training is needed.

Huang Fang, a doctoral student in philosophy, has played with the club for seven years and still travels between the Xixi and Zijingang campuses every Friday. The 2018 carnival was his fifth. "At first it was only a way to unwind," he said. "Later I began to feel the pleasure of the drum. It gives me a kind of energy, the strength to keep going, and you feel it as soon as you are inside it."

Zhang Shubo, a statistics major, says the club holds together because it has no internal divisions. "Everything is done by all of us, and the cohesion is very strong," he said. They arrange the programmes, build the props, carry the drums and take outside bookings to raise money for the club. Members come in from the Yuquan, Xixi and Huajiachi campuses and go back to their rooms in the dark. The instrument explains part of it: a pianist can perform alone, but a djembe player needs other people in the room. "Some rhythms are hard and you cannot play them at first," said Yang Junhao, a biotechnology major. "You learn to keep at it, and each performance makes you more confident."

In 2019, its ninth year, the club was rated a four-star student society for culture and art at Zhejiang University, named an outstanding student club among Zhejiang's universities and schools, and counted among the university's five demonstration clubs. It describes itself as the first djembe club founded by university students in China. Members have played the 2016 World Industrial Design Conference, Alibaba's charity week and campus music festivals. Their slogan is three phrases: "Be djembe, be together, be happy." On the last night of 2018 the three dunun stood at the back of the stage as always, and the president was again among the drummers.