Although music in Africa is such a communal activity, the individual musician, their style, and their creativity have always played an important role in African music. Particularly in how instruments have been shared and spread throughout the continent. As a result of migrations and the exchange of musical fashions both within Africa and with foreign cultures, specific traits of African music often show a puzzling distribution. Extremely distant areas in Africa may have similar, even identical, traits, while adjacent areas may have quite different styles.
Britannica.com says, “Major and minor migrations of African peoples brought musical styles and instruments to new areas. The single and double iron bells, which probably originated in Kwa-speaking West Africa, spread to western Central Africa with Iron Age Bantu-speaking peoples and from there to Zimbabwe and the Zambezi River valley. Earlier migrating groups moving eastward from eastern Nigeria and central Cameroon to the East African lakes did not know the iron bells or the time-line patterns associated with them. Consequently, both traits were absent in East African music until the recent introduction of the time-line patterns of Congolese electric guitar-based music. With the intensifying ivory and slave trades during the 19th century, the zeze (or sese) flatbar zither, a stringed instrument long known along the East African coast, spread into the interior to Zambia, the eastern half of Congo (Kinshasa), and Malaŵi.”
Some of the earliest sources on African music are archaeological. One example is a rock painting of a vivid dance scene discovered in 1956 by the French ethnologist Henri Lhote in the Tassili-n-Ajjer plateau of Algeria. Attributed on stylistic grounds to the Saharan period of the Neolithic hunters (c. 6000–4000 BC), this painting is probably one of the oldest surviving testimonies to music and dance in Africa. The body adornment and movement style are reminiscent of dance styles still found in many African societies, according to Britannica.com.
