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From Africa to the New World ♦ The New World Banjo ♦ African Ancestors ♦ Lute Family ♦ Related Topics ♦ Please note: This site is currently under construction. For the latest in modern banjo roots research, please visit: http://www.myspace.com/banjoroots
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Analyzing the Evidence: The Name Game by The historical record of the early New World banjo is replete with many different names for the instrument: banza (Martinique, 1678; the preferred term in French and Spanish colonies); strum-strum (Jamaica, 1689); bangil (Barbados, 1708; Jamaica, 1739); bangar (New York City, 1737); banjo (Pennsylvania, 1749; Maryland and Virginia, 1774; North Carolina, 1787); banshaw (St. Kitts, 1763); Creole Bania (Suriname, c.1770s); banjar (Virginia, 1781; Antigua, 1788); and so on. This perplexing diversity of terms offers us an intriguing puzzle as well as tantalizing clues in the ongoing search of the banjo roots. African Cognate Terms To date, none of the various designations for the early banjo mentioned above have been found in African tradition. There are, however, a few leads which bear further exploration:
Bania Let's now take a look at the term bania. Our only reference to this name in the early banjo's historical record is its mention by Captain John Gabriel Stedman in his book, Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, in Guiana, on the Wild Coast of South America, from 1772 to 1777 (1796). In the book's section on the musical instruments and dances of the enslaved Africans he observed, Stedman wrote, "The Creole-Bania [Figure 1]... is like a mandoline or guitar, being made of a half gourd covered with a sheep-skin, to which is fixed a very long neck or handle. This instrument has but four strings, three long and one short, which is thick, and serves for a bass; it is played by the fingers, and has a very agreeable sound, but more so when accompanied by a song."
Curiously enough, Stedman also reports the term bania as being used by Surinam's blacks to describe two other unrelated instruments. One was the Ansokko-Bania (Figure 2), an unusual xylophone-like instrument comprised of "a hard board, supported on both sides like a low seat, on which are placed small blocks of different sizes... struck with two small sticks like a dulcimer." The other was the Loango-Bania (Figure 1, upper left hand corner), a thumb piano made of "a dry board, on which are laced, and kept down by a transverse bar, different sized elastic splinters of the palm tree." (The bowl pictured directly below the Loango-Bania "is a large empty callebash [sic] to promote the sound [of the Loango-Bania]; the extremities of the splinters are snapt [sic] by the fingers, something in the manner of a piano-forte, when the music has a soft and very pleasing effect.") Apparently, bania was also the name of a West African gourd-bodied plucked lute that was once found in the area of present-day Senegal and Gambia. George C. Dobson (1842-90)-- a prominent American concert banjoist and banjo teacher who was the third of the five famous Dobson brothers, all leading figures of the emerging concert banjo scene in the 1870s and 1880s-- was well aware of the instrument. In his Complete Instructor for the Banjo with an Authentic History of the Instrument (1880), Dobson refers to it as the last item on his list of traditional African string instruments known at the time: "And in Senegambia, the bania, which it is sometimes claimed was imported to the United States by the negro slaves, and became the banjo." European and American scholars and writers continued to make reference to the bania well into the late 20th century. The eminent German ethnomusicologist/organologist Curt Sachs (1881-1959) described it as a 3-string lute with a "piriform" [pear-shaped] gourd body from Senegal in Reallexikon der Musikinstrumente (Berlin, 1913). Yet, American ethnomusicologist Michael Coolen's investigations in Senegambia in the 1970s yielded not a single trace of the bania nor anyone who had even heard of it. Curiously enough, Coolen was more successful in his inquiries on the early West Indian term banshaw. He did find one informant who was acquainted with the word: "Abdulai Ndiaye of Dakar, Senegal, is a master builder of xalams, and he stated that the term 'banshaw' is an old term used by the Wolof to refer to non-Wolof guitar-like instruments. Insisting that the term is a non-Wolof word, Ndiaye stated that it is a European word which has essentially disappeared from common use, replaced by the term 'guitar'." Banza: A Central African Connection? Banza has also excited a great deal of speculation over the years. The prevalent theory contends that the word banza is derived from m'banza, a term for "string instrument" in the language of the Kimbundu-- also known as the North Mbundu-- the second largest ethnic group in Angola. After a great deal of research, I have not found a single reference to bear this out... aside from a host of articles repeating this conjecture with no further elaboration or evidence to back up this claim. However, what I did find was that m'banza is an old term for a village that served as a regional political/economic centre amongst the various peoples of Angola and Congo. By way of example, Mbanza Kongo in northern Angola was the capitol of the Bakongo Kingdom of Kongo, which was founded in the 14th century. The Kongo Kingdom lasted until 1665, when King Manikongo Garcia II, who had allied himself with the Dutch twenty four years earlier, was defeated by the Portuguese. The Kimbundu people were subjects of the Kingdom of Ndongo, due south of Kongo, which was in northern Angola. It's important to remember that the Portuguese began to colonize Angola in 1483 and established the country's present-day capitol Luanda 92 years later for two main reasons: a) to create a base for its slave trade operations in Central Africa, and b) to serve as a primary source of slaves, especially during the last days of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. As for the term banza itself, I have found no sources indicating its connection to a West African or Central African musical instrument. All I was able to dig up was the fact that banza, like m'banza, is a reference to "village." In his book Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo (1875), the celebrated British explorer/linguist Sir Richard F. Burton (1821-1890) pointed out that the word banza is used by the various Bantu peoples of the Congo to refer to a "big village." There are no known traditions of plucked lutes in present-day Central Africa. Yes, there are string instrument traditions: mainly, that of bowed lutes -- the many different kinds of fiddles one finds throughout the region, like the Lari nsambi (Democratic Republic of Congo)-- as well as small harps, musical bows, zithers and pluriarcs. (Also known as bow lute, a pluriarc is a comprised of several musical bows mounted in a single resonating body.) That said, could it be that an Angolan and/or Congolese plucked lute, called a banza, may have existed in the 17th century, if not earlier, but subsequently fell into obsolescence and eventually became extinct? Again, banza is a common Bantu term for "big village." Could it be that the lute I'm suggesting was dubbed with this term to reflect the fact that it developed and was played in larger villages that had more contact with the Portuguese and their lute family string instruments, such as the cavaco, cavaquinho ["little cavaco," also machete] and rabequinha ["little fiddle"], the most probable sources of inspiration for the hypothetical banza? I have to stress that there's absolutely no evidence in either the historical record or in the documentation of the various ethnic musical cultures of the region to indicate that an indigenous Central African plucked lute ever existed, let alone one called a banza. This is all pure conjecture on my part. That said, I do feel that greater research must be done into the question of a Central African "missing link" as so many slaves in the Americas and Caribbean came from this region-- 3,927,801 out of a total of the 9,529,260 sub-Saharan Africans estimated to have been transported to the New World from 1662 to 1867 (Source: The Altantic Slave Trade by Herbert S. Klein, Cambridge University Press, 1999). This is especially true of those that ended up in the French and Spanish colonies where banza was the most common term for the New World banjo.
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