Chaka, age 29, says that being the son of a king made it taboo for him to drum when he was home in Africa. New York has opened up a whole new world for him, where he takes center stage.

We started the Drum Circle, me and Claude and Omar. We're all from Senegal. We used to play soccer in the park, and when we got tired, they started playing the drums and I started dancing. Then Boo joined in; Boo is a lady, she always around drumming for many years, but she always play at the dancing school, but she came around and joined, and then other people joined. It was just people having a good time: playing soccer and playing drums; it just started like that.

Back home in Senegal, I was always around drumming. What happened in our village, every day, we just drummed. Every night, we get together with all the people from different neighborhoods in the village, and do the wrestling around the drumming. What happens, they put a big fire in the center, so it was like, for instance, let's say Brooklyn wrestled against Manhattan. So all the young guys around the village come out in the night time, and wrestled and drummed around the fire.

But myself, I could not drum, because I'm from the king's family; the king's family cannot drum: people just drum for you. That is tradition. But I drum now, and my family never knew about it. When they found out, it was like, "What is this about the music we hear about you doing in America there?" So it's something really new in my family.

But unfortunately, back in '98, Guiliani and the Parks Department started trying to close down the drumming circle. The cops started to arrest us all the time. They took our drums to the precinct — they gave them back, but some of us had to go to the court to get them back. Until 2000, it was a really big fight. But they could not arrest me! I come down here, and start drumming, and one or two of the cops talk like they're gonna arrest me, "Oh, that's the boy, we gotta get him, we gotta get him, that's the boy! Let's get him to the precinct!" But the cops' feet get stuck to the ground, they couldn't move, and they didn't know what was going on! It was kind of funny, they could not get me, we all get stuck like something holding us down, just on the ground, like that: boom! And they could not move, and I could not move, so they give up. I do believe that's some kind of spiritual stuff.