Description
Mr. Terry recalls the sounds of native drums and how they were used by the natives to relay the message that the UN Secretary General had died in a plane crash in September 1961.
Bob Terry
Bob Terry was born on May 30, 1936 in London, England. He remembers walking in London and seeing a sign saying “come to Canada” and that is when he decided to join. After basic training in Trenton he was posted to the Congo. Later Mr. Terry went to Cyprus where he served with the Royal Signals maintaining radio masts for the British. After leaving the military he worked as a salesman and a commissioner.
Transcript
Our best communication at one time was the drums. You’ve seen Tarzan movies where you hear the drums going in the background where Tarzan stands and looks off into the distance. That’s real. I was there when Dag Hammarskjöld’s plane went down. I was over in Bukavu and we got a teletype message from the headquarters in Leo, Leopoldville, Kinshasa as it is now, saying, do you have any news on Dag Hammarskjöld’s aircraft? He was heading over your direction and he hasn’t arrived and the drums are going and one of our house boys, his name was Emmanuel, a very smart guy, smartest man I’ve ever met, he said, “Your boss is dead!” And I said, “Who do you mean, do you mean the lieutenant? ” He said, “No, the drums can’t say his name.” So we sent the teletype down to the headquarters and they said, “It’s an unreliable source of information.” But they knew about it, a couple of hours before we did by these drums going that went from one clearing to the next through language after language and dialect after dialect.