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These are the words of the black American historian J. A. Rogers, writing in the 1920s about the nature of jazz – a music of freedom and rebellion that can trace its roots back to the terrible days of the slave trade between Africa and America in the eighteenth century, when drums were brought over from Africa to America along with the slaves, and music gave the enslaved and displaced a voice, connected their communities, and provided a language that would ultimately cross continents. Drums like this one stand at the head of that whole African-American musical tradition which dominated the twentieth century. Blues and jazz are just two of the great musical genres which begin here – music of poignant regret, or exuberance and rebellion – the music of liberty.

This is the earliest African-American object in the British Museum. From this drum – made in Africa, taken to America, sent on to England – and others like it, we can recover some of the story of one of the biggest forced migrations in history. These utterly dispossessed people were allowed to bring nothing with them – but they brought the music in their heads, and one or two instruments were carried on the ships. With them came the very beginnings of African-American music. Kwame Anthony Appiah, who teaches at Princeton University, comments:

These drums are important to life, and if you could take one with you to the New World, it would have been a kind of source of memory that you could take with you, and that’s one of the things that people taken into slavery tried to hold on to.

When the British Museum opened its doors for the first time, in 1753, Europe’s engagement with the rest of the world – the Enlightenment enterprise of gathering together all the world’s knowledge – was in full swing. The founding collection was mostly the legacy of Sir Hans Sloane, an Irish physician with wide-ranging interests, and consisted of scientific instruments, plants and materials, stuffed animals and wildly various and intriguing human-made objects from around the globe. Part of the collection was this drum, acquired in Virginia around 1730 and in the eighteenth century thought to be an American Indian drum. It retained that identification until 1906, when a curator in the Museum guessed that it could not be any such thing: it looked more like drums from West Africa. Much later, his hunch was confirmed through scientific examination by colleagues at Kew Gardens and at the Museum. We now know that the main body of the drum is made of wood from the tree Cordia africana, which is prevalent in West Africa, and other parts of the drum – pegs and cords – derive from wood and plants from the same region. This is unquestionably a West African drum, which by 1730 had travelled from West Africa to Virginia.

The first African slaves arrived in British North America in 1619, brought to the American colonies on European-owned ships to provide labour for the ever-expanding plantations. At first they were put to work cultivating sugar and rice, later tobacco, and then, finally and most famously, cotton. By the early 1700s the trade in enslaved people had become the most lucrative business between the European maritime powers and West African rulers. Overall, around 12 million Africans were transported to America from Africa, and both sides – European and African – were profitably involved. Kwame Anthony Appiah has heritage from both sides.

I always like to tell people I have slave traders on both sides of my family: some of both my English ancestors and my Ghanaian ancestors were involved in the slave trade. You have to understand that it was a trading relationship – as the trade developed, by the eighteenth century in a place like Asante where I grew up, and where the drum comes from, they had become very dependent on the slave trade. They were going out in warfare, capturing large numbers of people, and sending them down to the coast, exchanging them for the goods they were getting from Europe, which would have included guns