Burundi

Burundi shared with Rwanda a single creator, Imana, whose favour was courted through ancestors and through Kiranga, the spirit lord served by possessed mediums in the kubandwa cult. Religion and monarchy were fused: the mwami was a sacral king, his enthronement and the yearly sorghum festival of umuganuro were religious events, and the royal drum called karyenda stood for the kingdom's covenant with heaven.

German and then Belgian rule brought the White Fathers, and by independence in 1962 Burundi held one of the largest Catholic majorities in Africa, with mission schools educating the elite of both Hutu and Tutsi. The church's entanglement with power cut both ways. Catholic and Protestant institutions were caught up in the mass killings of 1972 and 1993, sometimes as refuges and sometimes as targets, and the 1993 assassination of the first democratically elected president opened a civil war in which clergy repeatedly acted as mediators.

Under Pierre Nkurunziza, a born again evangelical who led prayer crusades while in office, politics took on a strongly Pentecostal colouring, and the government sparred with the Catholic bishops over disputed elections. Today the country remains among the most observant in the region, its hills dense with parishes, revival churches and the older obligations owed to ancestors.

In the old kingdom of Burundi the drum was not an instrument but a regalia of the sacred order. The karyenda, the great drum of the mwami, embodied the kingship itself; it sounded only for the great moments of the realm, the enthronement of a king, the umuganuro sorghum festival that opened the agricultural year, and the funerals of rulers. Around it stood a whole hierarchy of named drums and hereditary drummer lineages, keepers of sanctuaries such as Gishora, founded after a nineteenth century victory, where the drums rested on sacred ground and were fed and honoured like living dependents of the court. When the monarchy fell in 1966 the karyenda lost its royal master but not its meaning. The drum had already been placed on the flag of the short lived kingdom, and the drummers of Burundi, the abatimbo, carried the tradition into national life, performing the leaping, thunderous ensemble drumming that has become the country's best known cultural export.

In 2014 UNESCO inscribed the ritual dance of the royal drum on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and the state now regulates who may drum and where, a modern echo of the old rule that the great drums never sounded for private occasions. What survives is the conviction that some sounds belong to the sacred and not to entertainment.