Reflections off a "Dark Continent" Part 2

Wonder Without Understanding 

In many instances, visitors’ reports of marvel and astonishment revealed only a superficial understanding of the complex processes that undergirded everyday life in the African interior. Applications of natural principles that sustained harmony within local ecologies were often understood with misleading simplism or misunderstood altogether. 

Humans everywhere apply knowledge of natural principles as technology to improve the human condition. Yet such technologies are not always easily appreciated by outsiders. The local conditions that produced them may no longer be visible, and unfamiliar systems are often filtered through existing assumptions. European visitors, encountering technologies grounded in scientific principles they did not recognize, frequently interpreted them through limited or prejudiced frameworks. 

Yet Stanley and many other European visitors mistook the talking drum for little more than noise or menace. 

During his travels in the Congo basin in the 1870s, Stanley became accustomed to hearing drums over long distances. Responding with his early military sensibilities, he soon made the connection that these drums transmitted information of his movements well ahead of his expeditions. He noticed that messages forewarned of his arrival, the messages traveling much faster than human couriers, and wide regions coordinated their actions without any visible movement of human couriers. 

Telegraphy might have been conceived, but Europe was yet to develop an elaborate communication network at that time; hence, Stanley did not have sufficient experience to imagine an elaborate network of communication sites. Even though he recognized a transmission of information over long distances in these drumming routines, he assumed that the system operated, at best, on a simple dichotomous coding system.  

His early reports suggest that he thought drumming always signaled hostility in an expression of primitive excitement on the one hand, and absence of drumming signified peace on the other. He viewed the drums and their sounds as superstitious instruments of warfare. He found the drumming menacing, chaotic and emotion-driven, with the sounds being more noise than information. He perceived and reported the whole procedure as ritualistic, lacking in any form of coherent processing, and based merely on instincts rather than intelligence. How wrong! 

Cognitive and Technological Bias

This initial perception of the talking drum suffered from the cognitive bias of familiarity — a subconscious favoring of the familiar over the unfamiliar. He assumed that all languages have the same structure as English, in speech and writing. He could not fathom that any language could allocate sufficiently high semantic value to pitch as an acoustic feature of speech to make it possible to communicate by complex manipulation of pitch on drums. 

His perception of the talking drum as a telecommunication technology also suffered from technological bias. He was aware of telegraphy and was comfortable with it as a technological innovation. Telegraphy became available in the Western world by 1840. With technological bias based on his familiarity with tele-graphy — the transmission of information in the form of graphical symbols — he could not wrap his head around the idea of tele-phony — the transmission of information in oral form.  

While he was exploring Africa, Europe was yet to experience telephony. It was toward the tail end of his exploration of Africa in 1877 that Alexander Graham Bell managed to summon his assistant, Thomas Watson, over the telephone in 1876. Hence, telecommunications by the transmission of oral signals must have been too advanced for him to imagine. Layered upon these biases were deep-seated prejudices that made Europeans of that age see African cultures through a prism of assumed primitive intentions. He therefore could not have seen the talking drum as the highly sophisticated telecommunication technology that it was at that time.

Stanley and other contemporary travelers started taking note of the complexity, sophistication and efficiency of the technology, even though they still often referred to it as "bush telegraph" and referred to professional technologists who worked the system as "initiates." They noted the typical transmission speed of over 100 miles in less than two hours through a relay system from village to village. By now, Stanley had started reporting the technology with more scientific exactitude, noting that the drums could be heard from five to seven miles away, particularly at night when sound carried better over water or from hilltops. These observations led to the recognition of the utility of the talking drum and its adoption as a standard means of communication between the colonial authority of King Leopold II and distant chiefs of various colonized communities. 

By the time Stanley published his autobiography in 1909, the telephone had become an experience in the U.S. and Europe. Stanley, having spent time in Europe after his 1874 to 1877 expedition, must have experienced the telephone. He now had a frame of reference within which he could contextualize the talking drum as an elaborate telecommunication technology — a technology based on the transmission of information in the form of sonic, rather than graphemic symbols, over long distances. Having now added the word "telephone" to his vocabulary, he wrote in his autobiography, "At every curve and bend they 'telephoned' along the river the warning signals," in describing the drum sounds he had earlier said to be menacing, chaotic and emotion-driven. This is in contradistinction to the time he saw them as more noise than information, signaling hostility in an expression of primitive excitement. 

The Sophisticated Science Behind the Talking Drum

To be fair, Stanley could not have imagined that the communication system he encountered encoded complete sentences through tonal patterns that mirrored spoken language. Nor was he equipped to understand how carefully designed formulaic phrases reduced ambiguity and allowed complex information to travel clearly across long distances. 

These messages could convey specific names, events and requests, as well as warnings, celebrations and everyday exchanges of goodwill. From his standpoint, however, a message announcing a marriage or expressing gratitude between distant communities might easily have sounded like a menacing signal of impending conflict. 

There were many impediments that made it difficult for Stanley to properly contextualize the telecommunication technology employed by these African communities. He spoke English, a language in which tones carry little or no semantic value. In contrast, many African languages are tone languages in which it takes the manipulation of the pitch of speech as tones, in addition to the articulation of consonants and vowels to make meaning. The semantic load of tones in some of these languages is so high that the tones alone, in the absence of consonants and vowels, are still intelligible. Hence, the production of appropriate pitch sequences on drums can mimic human speech sufficiently intelligibly, taking due advantage of information redundancy. 

Sound travels at a speed of about 1,234 km/h. The sounds of a drum with a suitable resonator, on an appropriate hill on a quiet night, can travel up to 10 km comfortably discernibly. Strategically arranged networks of these drums as repeater sites easily covered distances of over 100 km. This could well have been the only available system capable of transmitting information at such a high speed over such long distances before the development of telegraphy.  

Hence, when Stanley was exploring the African interior between 1874 and 1877, there was no known means of carrying speech sounds over such distances at such speed in Europe or any other part of the Western world. Stanley was already aware of telegraphy. He did compare it to the telecommunication system he encountered in Africa. As earlier noted, tele-graphy is the transfer of information in graphic form over long distances. The transfer of information as sound over long distances as tele-phony was yet to be developed in Europe. It would have been difficult, therefore, for Stanley to comprehend the novelty of Africa's elaborate network of communication sites, akin to present-day wireless telephone networks. This explains why Stanley viewed the system as menacing, chaotic and emotion-driven, the sounds being more noise than information to him, and the whole procedure as ritualistic, lacking in any form of coherent processing, based merely on instincts rather than intelligence. 

Misapplication of Ockham’s Razor 

Humans often rely on heuristics — mental shortcuts that help make sense of unfamiliar or complex situations. One of the most widely cited is Ockham’s Razor, which advises choosing the simplest explanation that adequately accounts for the evidence. Properly applied, it favors clarity and economy. Misapplied, it can reduce complex realities to misleading simplifications. 

Stanley’s general attitude toward Africa reflects such a misapplication. His “Dark Continent” narrative — portraying Africa as unknown, chaotic and without history — offered a simplistic explanation. A more accurate conclusion would have acknowledged European ignorance of African histories long documented in African, Arab and Islamic sources. His interpretation of the talking drum followed the same pattern: declaring its sounds to be noise and menace provided an easy answer, but one that failed to explain what the drumming clearly accomplished. 

Information Theory and Cognitive Science 

One useful lens for understanding this system comes from Claude Shannon’s Information Theory, which quantifies the minimum information required for reliable communication. Any capacity beyond that minimum is known as information redundancy — a feature that increases resilience and clarity in transmission. Information Theory was only formalized in 1948, long after Stanley’s encounters in Africa. Had such concepts been available to him, he might have better understood how tonal patterns alone could convey meaning. 

Many African languages are tone languages, in which pitch carries significant semantic weight alongside consonants and vowels. Talking drums exploit this feature by reproducing tonal contours of speech. By relying primarily on tone, they draw upon the redundancy built into spoken language to transmit meaning across distance. 

This process can introduce ambiguity, which is mitigated through carefully structured formulaic phrases designed for clarity. These compact statements often convey names, events and intentions with precision. Their structure reflects an intuitive understanding of cognitive limits. In some traditions, such phrases typically fall between five and nine syllables — aligning closely with psychologist George Miller’s 1956 observation that human short-term memory reliably processes about seven units of information, plus or minus two. 

Technicians of the talking drum were therefore working with principles of information processing and cognition long before these ideas were formally described. Stanley, encountering the system in the 1870s, had no framework through which to interpret its sophistication.