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The drum comes from the Akan people, a group which includes the Asante and Fante kingdoms, and was possibly used at court, probably as part of a drum orchestra – music and dance were fundamental ingredients of ceremonial and social life.

We assume the drum was taken on a slave ship – but not by a slave. Slaves took nothing. It may have been a gift to the captain, or taken by a chief’s son – we know they sometimes sailed with the slavers to America as part of their education. On board, the drum had little to do with the joy of communal music-making. Drums like this were used for what was grotesquely called ‘dancing the slaves’:

As soon as the Ship has its Complement [of slaves], it immediately makes off; the poor Wretches, while yet in sight of their Country, fall into Sickness and die … The only sure means to preserve ’em, is to have some Musical Instrument play to ’em, be it ever so mean.

Slaves were taken on to the decks and forced to dance to the rhythms of the drum to keep them healthy and to combat depression, which the slave captains knew could lead to suicide or mass revolt. Once on the plantations in America, the slaves were allowed to drum and make music for themselves, but it was not long before slave owners grew anxious that drumming, used once again for communal communication, would not prevent rebellion but incite it, and indeed in South Carolina in 1739 drums were used as a call to arms at the outbreak of a violent slave rebellion. It prompted the colony to prohibit drums by law and classify them as weapons.

Hans Sloane, who had the drum brought to London, was himself a slave owner in Jamaica and published one of the very first transcriptions of slave music. Sloane also described the slaves’ instruments and explained why the authorities in Jamaica ultimately banned them:

Slaves formerly on their Festivals were allowed the use of Trumpets after their fashion and Drums made of a piece of a hollow Tree … But making use of these in their Wars at home in Africa, it was thought too much inciting them to Rebellion, and so they were prohibited by the Customs of the Island.

This Akan drum, collected for Sloane in the early 1700s, might have been confiscated in one of the drum bans on the plantations. It is just over 40 centimetres (16 inches) high and carved into patterns around the wooden body, which sits on a narrow foot. Intriguingly, the material stretched over the drum is deerskin, almost certainly North American, which could well have been acquired in trade with a local Native American. The complicated relationships between African Americans and Native Americans in the eighteenth century are often overlooked, but there was a good deal of contact, including intermarriage. Some Native Americans had their own slaves – both Native American and African. This is a history that is not often mentioned, but it adds another resonance to the identification of the object itself in the eighteenth century as an ‘Indian drum’.

The story of the drum is a story of global displacement: enslaved Africans transported to the Americas; Native Americans forced westward by encroaching slave plantations; the drum itself taken from Africa to Virginia and, in the latest phase of its life, to London. And here the most extraordinary thing has happened – like the drum, the children of slaves have now also come to England. Many descendants of all those once involved in the slave trade – British, West African and Afro-Caribbean – now live together in the same cosmopolitan city. The Akan drum has become a typical twenty-first-century Londoner. Bonnie Greer, an African-American playwright and Trustee of the British Museum who now lives in London, explains:

The drum itself represents to me the idea of voyage, and crossing. I crossed the Atlantic to be here, and the drum did too. And so it represents for me that passage of my ancestors. And the ancestors of a good number of black British citizens as well.

As a person of African descent and also having Native