Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects from BBC Radio 4.

The famous recruitment poster has him pointing straight at us in full uniform.

Finger in the foreground, Handelbaum was star not far behind, and the words your country needs you. He is Horatio Herbert

Kitchener, first Earl Kitchener and one of the media stars of the First World War.

By then kitchener was already legendary as Kitchener of Khartoum.

He'd captured the city in 1898, after the murderous Battle of Onderman, which had left 11,000 Sudanese soldiers dead.

After the battle he presented to Queen Victoria a wooden drum from Central Africa and that drum

is the object for this program.

I think it does signify the fusion between black Africa, Sub-Zayana Africa proper and the Arab world.

It looks like the kind of drum you would see in Central Africa and yet it's etched with Arabic script.

When you look at the origins, the markings, and the eventual destination of this item,

you see the whole struggle for the Nile Valley in the 19th century and by extension the nature of the European

conquest of Africa in the late 19th century.

A history of the world in a hundred objects. Central African slip drum.

Slit drum. Probably made in the 19th century.

This week's programmes are about the world in the 19th century and the great shifts in the

balance of imperial power which had enormous consequences for every continent and particularly for Africa.

But this program is also about internal struggle, in this case between Egypt and Sudan, and

within Sudan itself between the North and the South.

The slit drum began its life in Central Africa,

in the region where the Sudan and the Congo share a frontier,

and it would once have been part of the court orchestra of a powerful chief.

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