In the old kingdom of Burundi the drum was not an instrument but a regalia of the sacred order. The karyenda, the great drum of the mwami, embodied the kingship itself; it sounded only for the great moments of the realm, the enthronement of a king, the umuganuro sorghum festival that opened the agricultural year, and the funerals of rulers. Around it stood a whole hierarchy of named drums and hereditary drummer lineages, keepers of sanctuaries such as Gishora, founded after a nineteenth century victory, where the drums rested on sacred ground and were fed and honoured like living dependents of the court. When the monarchy fell in 1966 the karyenda lost its royal master but not its meaning. The drum had already been placed on the flag of the short lived kingdom, and the drummers of Burundi, the abatimbo, carried the tradition into national life, performing the leaping, thunderous ensemble drumming that has become the country's best known cultural export.
In 2014 UNESCO inscribed the ritual dance of the royal drum on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and the state now regulates who may drum and where, a modern echo of the old rule that the great drums never sounded for private occasions. What survives is the conviction that some sounds belong to the sacred and not to entertainment.