Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects

from BBC Radio 4. We think of jazz as the music of joyous rebellion and cool, the syncopated swing of an African-American musical tradition that came to dominate the 20th century.

But this music goes much further back. It has dark roots in the terrible days of the

Atlantic slave trade of the 18th century. The mix of musical influences in jazz

echoes the triangular trade in slaves between Europe, Africa and America.

Drums were at the heart of this early history, brought on slave boats from Africa to the Americas, and the music that the enslaved

Africans brought with them gave them a voice for their condition, a new language that offered

solidarity and solace.

Today's object is one of those drums and its biography is a brief chapter in the story of slavery. The drum itself

the drum itself represents to me the idea of voyage and crossing. I crossed the Atlantic

to be here and the drum did too. It represents for me that passage of my ancestors and the ancestors of a good

number of black British citizens as well. If you were able to get one with you and

take it with you to the new world,

there would have been a kind of source of memory which you could take with you,

and that's one of the things that people taken into slavery tried to hold on to.

A history of the world in a hundred objects. A-Can drum, from the early 18th century, made in West happened when Europeans encountered non-Europeans all over the world. Not one of the objects that I've chosen is from Europe itself,

but all in some way reflect the great European Enlightenment Project, both its ambitions and its failures.

It's often a troubling history since many of these dialogues between Europe and the world

ended in oppression and destruction, the fracturing of whole societies.

One side wrote down what was happening, the other could not.

So if we want to hear the story from the non-European side,

to recover the voice of the silent people,

...