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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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The First West African Lutes: Gourd-Bodied? by
The sheer variety of different types of plucked lutes found throughout West Africa indicates to me that the various West African peoples took the plucked lute concept, as initially introduced by the Moors and Kel Tamashek, and basically ran with it. They developed new forms of plucked lutes, constructed using preferred local materials-- in particular, gourd, the "plastic" of pre-colonial West Africa. It was and still is one of the most common materials used in the construction of musical instruments as well as household vessels and implements and other cultural items. This would account for the preponderance and wide-spread dissemination of gourd-bodied variants in the folk/artisan lute class.Speaking of the various gourd-bodied West African lutes, Eric Charry in his book, Mande Music (2000), offers the following thought: "Calabash resonator lutes might be older than the wooden trough variety in West Africa, perhaps predating iron implements that could help in carving out a wooden body." This could well be the case, though it's hardly likely that the introduction of the lute into West Africa predates the region's Iron Age. Rather, I think that the emergence of the gourd-bodied lute stems from the necessary adaptation of the instrument's design and construction to better reflect local cultural preferences, especially in terms of the types of materials traditionally used to make instruments.By way of example, let's take a look at the Soninke gambaré. In his article, Senegambian Archetypes for the American Folk Banjo ( Western Folklore, 43/2, 1984) Michael Theodore Coolen states: "The Soninke generally call their form of the plucked-lute the gambaré, apparently from the word gamba, which means a certain type of gourd. Although most musicians now use a wood resonator, the instrument traditionally had a gourd resonator."The first major West African empire, Ancient Ghana (c.300-1100 CE), was a Soninke kingdom, so it stands to reason that the Soninke would have been among the first West African peoples to adopt the plucked lute from their neighbors and trading partners, the Amazigh Moors and the Kel Tamashek. It also stands to reason that probably the first modification Soninke musicians and instrument-builders made as they "folk-processed" the new type of instrument into their musical culture was to replace the carved wood bodies of the Moorish tidinit and Kel Tamashek teharden with ones made of gourd.Interestingly enough, the Mauritanian Haratin --formerly rural serfs who are the descendents of enslaved black Africans and disenfranchised Amazigh Moors-- traditionally play the gambra, a single-string gourd-bodied lute. Clearly, there must be a connection between this instrument and the Soninke gambaré. For one thing, both gourd-bodied instruments have similar names that, in all likelihood, share a common root -- the word gamba. As Michael Coolen pointed out, in Soninke it's a reference to a type of gourd. It's also found in the languages of other neighboring peoples. According to Daniel Jatta, the word gamba is also used in the Wolof language to mean a gourd. The Wolof are thought to have originated in Mali and migrated southwards to Senegal, Gambia and Mauritania, sometime in the 11th century CE. Wolof is the lingua franca of coastal West Africa, much in the same way that Swahili is in East Africa. One point to consider is that the Soninke are thought to have descended from the Bafour, the original inhabitants of Mauritania who were driven southwards with the influx of the Amazigh. Those Bafour who remained in the north were subjected and made vassals by the Amazigh tribes. These were the abid, the enslaved ancestors of the Haratin. In the south, the Bafour tribes coalesced and reformed as the Soninke, eventually creating Wagadu, the Kingdom of Ghana, with the southern Mauritanian city of Koumbi Saleh as its capital. |
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