Where does Shekere (beaded gourd rattle) come from?
The shekere comes from Yorubaland, the home of the Yoruba people in southwest Nigeria and neighbouring Benin. It is a dried gourd wrapped in a net of beads or cowrie shells, and it crossed the Atlantic to become a sound of Cuban and Brazilian music.
A Yoruba rattle
The name is Yoruba: ṣẹ̀kẹ̀rẹ̀. In 1852 the Yoruba scholar Samuel Ajayi Crowther published A Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language, and it already lists the sekere as a 'calabash covered with cowries plaited in net-work, and used as a drum'. Today the instrument is common throughout West Africa. In Ghana it is called axatse, and the Penn Museum in Philadelphia holds a Ghanaian shekere made from a bottleneck gourd, its string net fitted with four rows of shells.
Gourd, net and beads
A shekere begins as a gourd from a vine that grows along the ground, and the shape of the gourd decides its sound. The gourd is dried for several months, then the pulp and seeds are taken out and the shell is scrubbed before the beadwork and colour are added. Players shake it or strike it against a hand. With a twisting wrist the gourd turns while the beads stay put, and the friction makes a sound quite unlike a plain shake.
Why people say Cuba or Brazil
Many people first hear the shekere in Latin music. In Cuba the chekeré, also called aggué, is a large gourd about 50 cm long, almost entirely covered by a network of cords strung with coloured beads, and it is widely played in Afro-Cuban music; Cuban gourd ensembles grew out of the cabildos, societies of enslaved Africans brought to the island. In Brazil the same rattle is the xequerê, a gourd wrapped in a net of beads or small plastic balls.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Shekere ↗ · archive.org ↗ · collections.penn.museum ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Abwe ↗
