Getrade Ghana
It is Sunday afternoon in the Okroase Region of Ghana, and from far you can hear the monotonous sound of the "asinkuma" and "soso" hitting a wood log. Okroase is the centre of drum body production in Ghana nowadays. Ten years ago, this location had only a small population of carvers, making cooking utensils and households items. Today some 1,000 carvers in the area are employed in the drum-making business.
Drum making has brought much work to Okroase, and with it transport, electricity, improved living conditions and an end to the crippling migration to Accra. But this transformation has also contributed to depletion of forests in the area. Within the next 20 years the wood resources would be exhausted if production and depletion continued at the same rate. To address this problem, Getrade started a re-afforestation program in 1992, planting special carving trees, and the Ghana Forestry Department began controlling all logging.
To make a djembe, the centre of a piece of Tweneboa wood is roughly chopped out using a soso (a long stick with a round gouge attached). After this, the outside is shaped, sized and smoothed. All the wood that is cut from the drum is used as firewood. The raw body then leaves Okroase to workshops in Eastern Ghana or Accra. Here small cracks are repaired, holes in the wood are filled and pores are sealed before a final sandpapering completes the raw body for drum making. Carved designs, and sometimes pieces of brass, tin, aluminum or cloth are added as decoration.
After this, the welder cuts iron rods for the three rings of the djembe, and bends and welds them onto the drum. On these rings the drum tuner fixes his strings and the leather, usually an untanned hairy goatskin soaked in water. The hair is removed later with a shaving blade. When the skin is dry it is tightened and tuned using the strings, and the drum given a further polish and sanding. The whole process takes about 6 to 10 hours, depending on the design. Materials form about 30% to 45% of the cost of a drum, and the makers can earn up to 10,000 Cedis per hour, considerably more than the government minimum wage of about 5,000 Cedis per day.
