The African Christian Democratic Party has been told religious drumming in South Africa will not benefit from arts and culture department funding. ”I did not commit myself to use funds of my department to finance the reintroduction of religious drumming in South Africa,” Arts and Culture Minister Dr Ben Ngubane said in written reply to a question by the ACDP’s Cheryllyn Dudley in the National Assembly. ”The reason being that my department is not responsible for religious issues per se. We can only deal with issues of religious drumming in so far as the drumming is an artistic expression, and not religion or an act of worship. ”In addition to that, even where the drumming is an art, it is not the government’s prerogative to reintroduce it,” Ngubane said. He also assured Dudley he had not said, during comments made after a recent festival of sacred music in Cape Town, that ”religious drumming in Africa started as a way to call up the spirits”. ”What I said is that religious drumming in southern Africa (not Africa as a whole), was confined mainly to the music of diviners (sangomas). ”In addition to that, I said that this type of music was sacred to the spiritual connection between the individual diviner and their ancestral spirits,” Ngubane said. – Sapa