SHLOMO PESTCOE  שלמה פּסטקאָ

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³ Banjo Roots: From Africa to the New World ³

³ Banjo Ancestors: The Lutes of West Africa ³

³ The Akonting: A West African Ancestor of the Banjo ³

Please note: This is not a commercial site. I do not sell or appraise instruments.

Introduction

(Pete was right about plucked lutes being unique to West Africa. In the entirety of sub-Sahara Africa, traditions of plucked lutes pre-dating contact with the Europeans are only found in this region. And, yes, these instruments came into West Africa probably around the same time that Islam was introduced around the 9th century of the Common Era [CE]. However, it wasn't the Arabs who brought plucked lutes and Islam "to the African west coast." Rather, it was Amazigh [Berber] peoples of North African origin-- the Kel Tamashek [Tuareg] and the Moors-- who dominated the trans-Saharan trade routes. For my take on the question of the origin of West African lutes, please visit: The Origin of West African Lutes and From Ancient Egypt to West Africa: The Lute Connection)  

Pete included the above drawing of a gourd-bodied lute from Senegambia region of West Africa in the book's appendix. There was no source given for the illustration. The caption didn't provide a name for the lute or any other information about its provenance, save for a cryptic reference describing it as "an instrument played by present day minstrels in a village 100 miles east of Dakar, West Africa."

What struck me about this mysterious Senegambian lute was that it bore an amazing resemblance to the gourd-bodied instrument seen in another appendix illustration, the anonymous folk painting The Old Plantation, circa 1790, the oldest depiction of a banjo in North America. (see detail below)

I was intrigued. The Senegambian lute and the early gourd-bodied banjo of the slaves in the New World were obviously related. The question was: How?  What was the real story here?

The history of the banjo and its roots in West Africa became an obsession with me. I embarked on a personal "quest" to learn all I could about the unnamed West African lute I saw in Pete Seeger's book and its connection to the banjo. 

My "obsession" came to the fore in the early 1980s, when I began doing interpretative programs on American vernacular music and musical instruments of the 18th and 19th centuries at historic sites and museums in New Jersey and New York City. The two centerpieces of my historic period music presentations were the fiddle-- the most popular "pop" instrument back in the day, which was commonly played by African Americans and Native Americans as well as European Americans-- and the fretless banjo, reflecting the instrument's general form and style prior to 1880.

The objective of these presentations was to showcase the diversity of traditions that were the hallmark of America in its formative years. My hope was that if folks came away with anything from my performances, it would be an awareness that our country in its youth was actually a lot more ethnically and culturally diverse-- and a heck of a lot more interesting-- than the history textbooks and early Hollywood ever let on. The  image enshrined in our collective consciousness of Early America as a monolithic, monochromatic white Anglo Protestant bastion was certainly more myth than historical reality.

From the earliest colonial period on, folks from around the world have come to this country, bringing with them their unique traditions and arts. All these disparate ethnic groups had to develop new ways of expressing and perpetuating their distinctive cultural heritages in the context of building new lives and communities for themselves in a new land.

Early on a folk process emerged here based on the communication and exchange of ideas between the various different communities in a given region. The result was the creation of new distinctly American traditions and culture.

However, this folk process was hardly the mythical "melting pot" posited by advocates of assimilation and the eventual eradication of ethnic cultural diversity. Rather it was the creation of what the late great American folklorist/ ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax called "America's patchwork quilt:" a quilt that's ever-evolving and growing as each new community contributes its own distinctive piece to it. (The original North American peoples-- who were here when everyone else came, and are still here, despite centuries of attempts to make them "disappear"-- contributed yet another vital piece to the quilt which I can't properly do justice to in the limited scope of this piece.)

This is the real essence and beauty of American vernacular culture.  

A prominent piece of America's patchwork quilt was the musical culture created by African survivors of the horrific Middle Passage and their descendants. The modern banjo, the progeny of the humble slave banjar, is the embodiment and tangible manifestation of this fact. Like all other elements of African Diaspora culture in the New World, it's the product of the synthesis of African and European influences. It was born in the harsh crucible of slavery in the Caribbean and America, and evolved in that great "laboratory of ideas," the United States.

This is what makes the banjo, at once, uniquely African, Caribbean, American, and, by extension, universal.

In the early '80s, I began to search out any leads I could find on the banjo's West African ancestors. This was no easy task since, back then, there was no literature available on the many different types of plucked lutes found throughout West Africa. The simple truth is that, up until quite recently, there had been very little scholarship done specifically on West African lutes. They were viewed as "cultural implements," ancillary to the greater traditions they were used in in. As such, the only references to these lutes were in broader anthropological and ethnomusicological studies. Whatever information there was had to be culled from general accounts of African music and culture.

That said, the two things I did gather from everything that I read on the subject were that:

• Plucked lutes were primarily played by the professional musicians and praise-singers known as griots, and;


• The types of lutes that the griots played exclusively-- such as the Mande ngoni, the Wolof xalam, the Mandinka kontingo, the FulBe/Tukulóor hoddu, and so on-- were the forbearers of the banjo.

First Contact

Let me point out here that in all that time I had never actually seen a griot lute up close and personal. My only experience of these instruments were photos in books and recording liner notes.

My first opportunity to see an actual griot lute "in the flesh" came in 1998 when I was hired to be a principal consultant in the development of Music Mix, the Brooklyn Children's Museum's permanent exhibit on musical instruments from around the globe. One day I was looking through BCM's rather extensive collection of cultural artifacts from nearly corner of the world, searching for instruments to be displayed in the Music Mix gallery.

(I should point out that the Brooklyn Children's Museum, founded in 1899, was the world's first children's museum. Over the years, BCM has amassed quite a collection of cool instruments: East Indian vinas,  Chinese plucked and bowed lutes of every description such as the banjo-like sanxian and the erhu fiddle, Nepalese gaine sarangi fiddles... even a homemade banjo ukulele from Jamaica!) 

I then laid eyes on something quite unexpected-- a very old West African griot lute: a Bamana ngoni from Mali.

I nearly flipped with excitement. From everything I had ever read about the banjo's West African roots, I was looking at the forbearer of the banjo.

However, as I picked the instrument up to examine it closely, I was struck by the griot lute's physiology. It was nothing like that of the earliest forms of the banjo, as documented from the 17th century on. Its body was a long, narrow-oblong, hollowed-out piece of wood. The archetypical banjos had gourd bodies, mostly round, though a few were teardrop-shaped. Its fan-shaped bridge didn't rest on the top of the instrument's skin head like those of the early gourd banjars and their descendent, the 5-string banjo. Rather, it was inserted through a hole in the head to attach to the tail end of the lute's stick neck, which ran under the head.

I was more than a little perplexed. How could the banjo be descended from this instrument? 

Having no information to contrary, I simply shrugged my shoulders and dutifully described the griot lute as "the ancestor of the banjo" in the exhibit's caption text.

"I Saw The Light..."

Fast forward to the Fall of 2003. One day, I opened my mailbox and found the latest issue of The Old-Time Herald: A Magazine Devoted To Old-Time Music. The cover story was The Akonting and the Origins of the Banjo by Swedish banjo historian Ulf Jägfors. On the cover was a photo of a West African musician, Daniel Laemouahuma Jatta, playing a large 3-string gourd-bodied lute. Looking at this instrument, I was thunderstruck: the lute's top third string was a short chanterelle drone, akin to the 5-string banjo's short "thumb string."

Talk about epiphanies!

As I read through Ulf's excellent article and studied his photos of the Jola akonting and the related bunchundo lute of one of the Jola people's neighbors, the Manjak, the similarities between these instruments and the early gourd banjos became very evident.

Shortly thereafter, I jiffed off an email to Ulf to compliment him on his article and thus began a friendly ongoing cyber discussion on the West African heritage of the banjo that continues to this day. Ulf introduced me to other folks who were actively working to uncover the banjo's hidden roots, such as Ed Britt-- a designer by vocation, a banjologist/ banjo collector by avocation-- who had been in communication with Ulf since the mid-'90s, and Daniel Jatta. As a result, an informal cyber discussion group emerged in which we exchange ideas and information on this subject, as well as the history of plucked lutes in general. The group has included other members of the banjo community who research and study the instrument's history and heritage, such as: Sule Greg Wilson, a veteran performer/arts edu-tainer active in the emerging movement of African American musicians and scholars seeking to reintroduce the banjo back into their community's contemporary musical culture; English banjoist/banjo historian Nick Bamber; gourd musical instrument builder Paul Sedgwick; musician/historian Simon Spaulding; and Peter Szego, an expert on the 19th century minstrel banjo.   

³ The Akonting: A West African Ancestor of the Banjo ³

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Last modified: 01/28/08