By Amy Eddings
The end of the academic year brings many goodbyes, and that includes a farewell to Benjamin Obido Ayettey.
He returns to his native Ghana in June after spending the academic year in Ada teaching African drumming and dance at Ohio Northern University as a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence.
"Every single person has rhythm," he insisted, joining the Ada Icon for an exit interview of sorts at Northern On Main cafe with Dr. Sarah Waters, an associate professor in music who wrote the Fulbright grant to bring Ayettey to ONU. "The first thing we ever did was singing and dancing. Our cry as an infant was a song. When we kicked, we were dancing. It depends on how you teach that rhythm."
The "how" for Ayettey during his time at ONU wasn't as straightforward as it would seem to be for someone who's artistic director of the Ghana Dance Ensemble and a fellow at the Institute of African Studies.
In those roles, the 55-year-old native of Osu is typically imparting his knowledge to men and women who share his culture, people who are already steeped in what Ayettey called "the language of the drum."
"It's what you dance to," he explained. "If you are not good in the drum language you are confused."
There was, indeed, a language barrier that Ayettey and his students had to overcome. But it wasn't a barrier of spoken or written language.
"Ghana was an English colony," said Dr. Waters, so English wasn't the issue. "But culturally and musically, we don't speak the same language. If I say, 'one, two, ready, go,' the first beat is Beat One. That doesn't exist [in Ghanian drum language]. I can talk about Beats One and Two, and he says he doesn't know what that means."
For Ayettey, the percussive beats of a drum can be understood like the spoken word. Each strike of the drum can draw out a different sound, depending on what part of the hand is used, what shape the hand takes as it strikes the drum head, and what part of that stretched, circular piece of animal hide is struck.
He provided an example, beating out a rhythm with his hands on the top of the cafe table.
"Ga dag TOO TOO grdabag cha," he said, mimicking the sound that he was coaxing from the table.
To the unenlightened, it sounded like one-two, THREE! FOUR! One-two-three FOUR.
"Where did he get 'grdabag?'" I thought.
"The foreigners, they find it difficult, because they hear the same thing, even though there are differences," he said, seeming to read my mind. He said he learned to adapt his teaching methods so that ONU's student dancers could hear the drum talking to them and directing their movements.
Dr. Waters met Ayettey when she and her husband took part in a teaching fellowship in Ghana in 2014. She audited one of his classes on traditional dance.
"I sat on the drummer's bench until they let me play," said Dr. Waters, a percussionist who explained she's "too old" to dance. "I realized that it would be amazing to bring him to ONU."
It was supposed to be for one semester, but Dr. Waters and Ayettey agreed on one year. The year's effort culminated in a performance last March by the ONU African Drumming and Dancing Ensemble at the Freed Center for the Performing Arts.
Students demonstrated dances like the kpatsa, the tokwe, and the gota, their movements dictated by the pattern language coming from the drumming ensemble that sat in a row near the back of the stage. The music came from a rich array of instruments and drums like the atsimevu, the lead drum which Ben Ayettey played that evening, and response drums like the sogo, the kidi and the kagan.
"He shipped them over, a week after he arrived," said Dr. Waters of the instruments. "We went down to Columbus to pick them up. There were so many drums, we didn’t think they’d fit in the van."
Dr. Waters will take a sabbatical next year to write a book that is, in essence, a dictionary of Ben Ayettey's drum language.
"We’re going to devise a manual, so that people like me read a drum pattern and see how it goes with the dance," she said. "We are going to take what's in Ben's head and translate it for Western-educated people."
And Ben Ayettey will return to his native Ghana, free from Ohio's cold winters and chilly springs, and with a deeper understanding of the universality of music.
"They [the ONU students] gave me the opportunity to get more experience adapting a new strategy of teaching them," he said.
