“Long before Alexander Graham Bell ‘invented’ the telephone, West African drummers were sending complex messages across miles using tonal codes nearly identical to binary. So why does tech history ignore this?”
“Whites stole the idea of the telephone and computer from African drumming” pic.twitter.com/PSphRSZHPX
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) July 19, 2025
We’ve all been taught the same story: The telephone was born when Bell shouted into a wire, and computers sprang from the minds of Turing and von Neumann. But what if these “groundbreaking” inventions weren’t so original after all?
Buried in the archives of colonial history lies a startling parallel—African talking drums, which for centuries functioned as a wireless communication network, encoding language through rhythms just like modern digital systems. The resemblance is so uncanny, it begs the question: Did Western inventors steal the concept?
The Original “Wireless” Tech
In Yorùbá societies, the dùndún drum wasn’t just an instrument—it was a proto-telephone. Skilled drummers could replicate:
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Tonal languages (like Yorùbá) beat-for-beat
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Emotional nuance (sarcasm, urgency, even humor)
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Long-distance messaging (relaying news between villages in real-time)
This wasn’t just rhythm—it was data transmission, using a coded system eerily similar to how phones convert voice into electrical signals.
The Suspicious Timeline
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1854: Missionary John F. Carrington documents drum languages transmitting messages 25 miles in under 7 minutes—faster than European postal systems.
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1876: Bell patents the telephone, claiming it as wholly original.
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1940s: Computer scientists develop binary code—the same “on/off” logic used in drum languages for centuries.
Coincidence? Or uncredited inspiration?
The Bigger Problem: Erasure
This isn’t just about drums. It’s about how:
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African innovations were dismissed as “primitive” despite their sophistication.
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Colonial powers rebranded existing concepts as their own.
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Tech history still centers Whiteness as the default source of ingenuity.
So—Was It Stolen?
We may never find a smoking gun where Bell scribbled notes on Yorùbá drumming. But the pattern is clear: When Europe encountered advanced African systems, they were either:
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Plundered (like rubber cultivation or metallurgy)
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Mythologized as “magic” (like the “mystical” talking drums)
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Written out of history
The telephone and computer could have been collaborative triumphs. Instead, they became case studies in intellectual colonialism.
The Uncomfortable Question
Without concrete proof, we can’t claim Bell “stole” the telephone from drummers. But the structural parallels—and the colonial habit of appropriating Indigenous knowledge—demand scrutiny. As scholar Walter Rodney noted: “Underdevelopment isn’t natural; it’s engineered.” Perhaps the same applies to innovation myths.
Final Thought: Next time you send a text, remember—the concept of instant messaging wasn’t born in a lab. It was beaten out on a drumhead, somewhere in West Africa, centuries ago.