Nancy Francois aka Aquarius Dawn Nancy

Photo from Yanoula Drum School of the Rada Drum 

Excerpt Brief on the Rada drum we learned from Boukman Lit. :

• Named after a region in West Africa 

•Rada drums is an alternate pronunciation of the city of Allada in Dahomey, now called Benin. 

•Rada drums are generally a set of 3 drums. 

•Name of each of the 3 drums are also derived from Dahomean languages. • Wooden pegs are used to hold the cowhide to the body of the drums. 

• Boula (Kara drum) in Haiti and banboula elsewhere in the Caribbean. 

highest pitch, and is about 

18 inches tall and is 

played with two straight sticks 

person playing the boula called a boulaye or a katalye.

There are two others that are larger providing lower pitch sounds as they are played. 

"ò rele hountò o, lele e¨ Let the mother drum shout, let it shout." - Boukman Lit Rada and Petwo  Hountò is a Dahomean word for drum and for spirit. 

In Haiti, people who play the drums in devotion to the spirits are called Hountògi. 

By virtue of its large size, the manman drum has the lowest pitch, and its sound travels the furthest. It is played by the most skilled drummer of the assembly using one hand and one drumstick called Bagèt Ginen, meaning West African drumstick. It is the player of the manman drum who improvises, as time and the background rhythm is maintained by the other drums. (All this great information about the beauty in Voodoo, a way of life was found at  Boukman Lit )

We search online and share with you HAY Online great websites by those who are truly sharing the culture. Popular to us means you are online presenting as you should and had your website sharing Haitian anything over three years. It takes much for a website to come up in a Organic Search, so we HAY Online Search to see who is really online, not just on social media. Set criterias are used to determine which ones to share. Our goal is to share all else not presented currently through popular mediums. All else do their thing among their partners, we just share based on longevity criterias. Boukman Lit is one spot learned of a few years back and as we searched Rada drums, their information came up. 

We at HAY love to share those online longest and always coming up under search sharing Haitian anything. So there are criterias of whom we share for good reason. After the emails from some asking why we feature a online entity then to see another allowed to share made it clear there were underlying rules we guessed as in engaging with just sharing. So to not partake in the "Cherry Picking" we stick to what a HAY Online Search brings up and share those we follow doing amazing things online. Some just happened to be doing awesome things they allow us to share of course. 

Stay tuned for more daily additions of sites, people and movements to share HAY Online!

#RadaDrum #Voodoo #HaitianFolklore