Abebe Bikila Abebe Bikila Abebe Bikila (; August 7, 1932 – October 25, 1973) was an Ethiopian marathon runner. A double Olympic marathon champion, he won the first at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome while running barefoot, setting a world record. He is Africa's first world record breaking athlete in any sport and the first sub-Saharan African Olympic gold medallist. At the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Abebe became the first athlete to successfully defend an Olympic marathon title, breaking his own world record in the process. He was a member of the Ethiopian Imperial Guard, an elite infantry division that
Rhythm in Sub-Saharan Africa Africa is the seven-stroke figure known in ethnomusicology as the "standard pattern". The standard pattern, composed of two cross-rhythmic fragments, is found both in simple (4/4 or 2/2) and compound (12/8 or 6/8) metrical structures. Until the 1980s, this key pattern, common in Yoruba music, Ewe music and many other musics, was widely interpreted as composed of additive groupings. However the standard pattern represents not a series of durational values, but a series of attack points that divide the fundamental beat with a cross-rhythmnic structure. The most basic duple-pulse figure found in sub-Saharan African music is a figure the Cubans