Ethnographic notes on Kongo musical instruments

African Arts, Summer, 2002 by Wyatt MacGaffey

The basic text on Kongo musical instruments is Bertil Soderberg's thesis (1956), which is based on an exhaustive search of the literature of the day, a good deal of museum research, and his field experience as a missionary. Soderberg takes many details from K. E. Laman's Dictionnaire kikongo-francais (1936), which itself derives musical terms from KiKongo manuscripts ("cahiers") written in 1915 by four or five of Laman's Kongo collaborators from Manianga and eastern Mayombe in what was then Belgian Congo. Extracts from these texts relative to music and musical instruments were included in the draft of a book that Laman intended to publish in KiKongo. A greatly reduced version of this draft, written in Swedish and then translated into English, appeared, but only in 1968, as the fourth volume of Laman's The Kongo, in which chapter 13 deals with song and music.

Soderberg made some use of "Laman's manuscript," probably the Swedish version. The posthumously published English text does not fulfill Laman's original intention of letting the KiKongo authors speak for themselves, and instead synthesizes their reports into a generally homogeneous view of Kongo culture, which the editor calls Sundi. For example, on page 83 we read, "The Sundi believe that music and musical instruments arrived with the first people"; this belief is in fact an opinion by Lunungu Moise of Nganda, in Manianga. The book also omits many details of interest. A full discussion of the manuscripts in relation to Laman's published volumes can be found in my Kongo Political Culture (MacGaffey 2000).

The present essay complements these sources with notes drawn from the original KiKongo texts of 1915, not only those in which the authors describe musical instruments but also the much more numerous ones in which instruments are mentioned in connection with particular minkisi (sing. nkisi). An nkisi is a ritual complex, centered on a focal object which is the nkisi proper, that is carried out in order to resolve some problem of health, misfortune, or injustice I have used the present tense when following texts that use it, although many of the instruments in question are more likely to be found in museums than in modern life. In the last eighty years the Kongo musical repertoire has been greatly impoverished, along with the ritual and ceremonial life it used to enhance; minkisi are still much in use but no longer take spectacular public form (Van Hee 2000). Chiefship too is effectually dead, though there are attempts here and there to revive it. Even for entertainment purposes, people rely more and more on "world" instruments or, in rural areas, on the radio.

Kongo musical instruments have many functions and significances besides that of making music. Soderberg remarks that there is a close link between musical instruments and art, including painting, sculpture, and pyrography (Soderberg 1956:221); I will explore the nature of that association. Music itself was and is thought to enable communication with the dead, often inducing spirit possession, "causing the spirit to descend." The presence of the spirit is recognized when everybody is carried away, having a good time. Parties and ritual events, which are often much the same thing, are enlivened by music, dancing, alcohol, ululation, and explosions of gunpowder. The only instrument that, so far as I can tell, has no ritual connotation whatever is diti, the "thumb piano."

Some instruments are so closely associated with particular functions and occasions that they give their names to these events, or are themselves named after them. Some dances, no longer practiced, were called by the names of the drums appropriate to them. The large, vertical wooden "trumpets" called ludi, played at funerals, are surmounted by carvings that may take the form of a woman in mourning (Soderberg 1956: fig. 22). A slit-drum, called mondo or mbudikidi, was and is made from a small log, with a short, narrow slit in the middle and a wider, rectangular opening at either end of the slit. It is played with two sticks whose ends are wound with rubber, giving the instrument a distinctive sound. This drum is used in eastern Kongo in association with judicial hearings; those who attend such hearings say they are going "to the mondo" (field-notes, 1966). The dance drum, ngoma, gives its name in this way to a complex of rituals of healing and renewal all over eastern and southern Africa (Janzen 1992; Van Dijk et al. 2000). In Kongo, ngoma was used when there was dancing and when ancestors or chiefs were being addressed, but it does not have a ritual named after it. The dance drum is carved from a tree of the same name, ngoma-ngoma. On the other hand, the word ngoma can refer to any kind of drum, sometimes any musical instrument. The dance drum may be engraved all over to decorate it (nwata, which also means to make cuts in the skin). (1)

A large standing drum called ndembo, with a single membrane and a heavy base, was closely associated with executions. It was expensive to make: the carver ate meat every day while he was at work, and was paid a pig and a slave when he finished. If a man was to be executed in the morning, ndembo was beaten all night (Laman 1968:80).