Leo Hassan Beats to His Own Drum with the Pan-African Connection

3 March 2023

An African drumming class broke up the unorthodox weather on Thursday at the Meadows Museum of Arts in Dallas, TX.

Leo Hassan, better known as “Leo Baba”, taught an unexpectedly-large crowd how to play his four traditional African instruments. Before the event began, tornado sirens forced the audience members, Hassan, and the rest of the occupants in the Meadows building to hunker down in the basement and take cover. With a new setting and a new audience, Hassan swiftly made lemonade out of lemons and created a fun-filled environment with

“It was a very nice story of his childhood, and his grandparents, and his great grandparents coming from Africa to the Caribbean,” a couple from the audience said.

Hassan’s goal for his drumming demonstration is to encourage conversations between cultures and the sharing of cultural ideas. With this in mind, after the sirens were blaring, he introduced his friend who suffers from PTSD from hearing the sirens in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. She explained how the sirens were triggering her PTSD, but that support from community, especially a community joined together by her culture’s music, could help calm her.

He calms the entire audience by asking them to take a deep breath together. Then, he asks a boy to join him while playing. He assisted him play a traditional song.

This event had many goals from educating the audience on African culture to providing a calming experience for people to escape the stresses of everyday life. The Meadows Museum of Art sponsored the event for the Pan-African Connection to come and share their culture with the SMU community.

“I got to learn more about the origin of Africa and you know, I’m mixed race so half of me comes from there, and it’s really tough because I’ve never learned any of that in school. I guess, the first time I learned about African studies was when I was in college and I chose to take a class that focused on that,” Sicarra Devers said, an audience member who participated in the drumming demonstration.

The organizer of this event and the organizer of the Latino Arts Project exhibit in the Meadows Museum of Arts, Jorge Baldor, has a passion for this event and the Pan-African Connection. At the beginning of the event, he expressed his love for this event and the way it brings cultures closer together.

“He provides free lessons and you can play the drums yourself, and learn you have a talent you didn’t know before,” Jorge Baldor said.

Sicarra Devers provided an interesting perspective with a metaphor that speaks to the importance of learning the full truth about a new culture. She began describing a scenario in which a person was attempting to read a book with missing pages. She continued to say that they would not understand the full story because information is missing. She compared this hypothetical to the way African studies are taught to students in public schools. She said that Americans will never fully-understand African culture without attempting to fully-learn about the culture.

Hassan truly wants his drum circle to be a healing experience for the participants. Near the beginning of the session, he was concerned that the audience was too tense so he naked everyone in the audience to engage in a group-wide deep breath as a stress-relief.

“It is an honor to have this opportunity to come and share the Pan-African connection with all of these people. I call this my healing drum circle because folks come to play drums and this is an opportunity for them to release their anxieties and stress,” said Leo Hassan, the leader of the drumming session.

To learn more information about the Pan-African Connection or to learn how to play the African drums, join Leo Hassan in his drum circle at 3:00 p.m. on Sundays. Admission is free and completely open to the public.