The Distant Drums

The drums came first.

Before I knew anything about the musicians, before I knew where their music had begun its journey, there was only the sound.

It was two in the afternoon, and the drums were loud—almost alarmingly loud. Their rhythm seemed to push everything else away: the conversations around me, the summer afternoon, even Toronto itself.

The sound seemed to reach a part of my memory that had been asleep for years. Something somewhere in my mind—somewhere I could not quite locate—stirred awake. It was as though the drums had knocked on a door I had forgotten was there.

And from behind that door came a book.

A novel I had read many years ago.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Harriet Beecher Stowe published the novel in 1852. A white American woman writing about slavery, she created a book that travelled far beyond literature. It became an extraordinary publishing phenomenon, entered homes and political conversations, and helped bring the brutality and human cost of slavery before a vast reading public.

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Years after reading it, I discovered something that brought the book unexpectedly close to home.

Among the real-life accounts connected to Stowe’s work was that of Josiah Henson.

Henson was born enslaved in Maryland in 1789. His family was torn apart by slavery, and he endured violence and separation before eventually escaping with his wife and children in 1830.

Their destination was Canada.

Not Canada as an idea. Not the Canada on a modern map.

Upper Canada—today’s Ontario.

Henson later became a leader in the Black settlement of Dawn near Dresden, where he helped establish a community built around education, work and independence. He also became a conductor on the Underground Railroad, helping others escape slavery.

His life became a story. His story became a memoir. And that memoir travelled again: Harriet Beecher Stowe later acknowledged that Henson’s account had provided some of the conceptions and incidents that found their way into Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Perhaps this is one of literature’s strangest powers: a life becomes words, words enter strangers, and strangers begin to see the world differently.

Then the drums stopped.

And Toronto returned.

The smell of grilling meat began to overpower the memory of the music. People wandered between food stalls. Conversations resumed. The afternoon carried on as if I had not just travelled backward through two centuries.

A few metres away, closer to the water, another performance was about to begin.

At four o’clock, Zale Seck took the stage.

This time the road led to Senegal.

Seck comes from the Lébou griot tradition of Senegal—a tradition deeply connected to music, storytelling and oral memory. His music had travelled a long way before reaching the edge of Lake Ontario.

Watching him, I found myself thinking of another journey from Senegal.

Not one I had made, but one I had once followed on a screen.

Djibril Diop Mambéty’s 1973 film Touki Bouki follows two young people, Mory and Anta, through Dakar. They dream of Paris. France exists in their imagination almost as another word for possibility: somewhere richer, freer, elsewhere.

They spend the film trying to find a way to leave.

Eventually, they reach the ship.

Anta leaves.

Mory does not.

At the last moment, he turns back.

I remember the strange contradiction the film left in me: the desire to leave and the invisible force that pulls a person back. And beneath it, an even more unsettling question: What happens when colonial rule ends, but the former colonizer continues to inhabit the imagination of those who remain? When the place that once ruled you is still imagined as the place where the future might be?

But the music in front of me offered no answer.

It simply continued.

One person stood up to dance. Then another. Soon, people who had been sitting quietly were moving to a rhythm that had crossed an ocean before reaching them.

I wondered how music that had travelled through so much history could arrive carrying so much joy.

And now it is the next day.

I am sitting at my desk, writing this story.

The festival is over. The musicians are gone. The drums have been packed away. The smell of food has disappeared from the air.

Yet strangely, I can still hear the drums.

Not with my ears.

Something of their rhythm seems to have remained inside me, as if those distant drums had awakened something that had been sleeping there.

Perhaps this is another kind of journey.

A sound travels thousands of kilometres. It reaches a city beside Lake Ontario. It enters a stranger sitting in the crowd. And the next morning, it becomes words.

It sends him back to an old novel.

Then to a man who escaped slavery and found freedom in Ontario.

Then to a film made in Senegal more than half a century ago.

And finally, to the keyboard beneath his fingers.

The drums are still beating somewhere inside me.

Toward another book, perhaps.

Toward another story.

Toward another journey.

And who knows—

perhaps, one day, toward Africa.

YF, August 10, 2026