Apinti

A carved Afro-Surinamese drum that calls the winti and once carried messages.

The apinti is an Afro-Surinamese drum with a carved wooden body and a skin tightened with pegs or wedges. It is played with the hands, often seated, with the drum held between the knees. The instrument has its roots in West Africa and came to Suriname with enslaved people.

The apinti is known as a talking drum. In the time of slavery messages were passed on with it, in rhythms and pitches that outsiders could not understand. That drum language has kept its place in religious use: the apinti is linked with the winti of the sky, such as the kromanti, and with the ancestors.

At a wintiprei the drums are indispensable. Together with song they form the poku, the music of the ceremony. Many winti have their own rhythms and songs, and it is the music that calls, greets and accompanies a winti. The drummers therefore have a responsible role: they must know the right rhythms and play them at the right moment. The apinti plays together with other drums, each with its own voice.

In dreams the sound of drums is often taken in a Surinamese reading as a call: something or someone asks for your attention. Whoever dreams of hearing an apinti can ask where the sound came from, who was playing and how it felt. Drums in the distance are sometimes read as an invitation or a reminder of the family; playing yourself as taking up your own voice. Someone who starts dancing in the dream or feels drawn along sometimes reads that in Winti as contact with a winti, but that too remains a possibility, not a certainty. Dreamkin prescribes no ceremony or action after such a dream; that belongs with the family and experienced practitioners.