|
Excerpt
From Chapter 13 “…it
is from Java that this instrument came to the African continent
…” Xylophones
are found with scarcely a break across the sub-Saharan regions from
the Gambia to Lake Victoria; and in a dog-leg across the southern
Congo down to parts of South Africa and Moçambique. Though
most African xylophones are played either individually or in groups
of two, or three, there are notable exceptions: both the Ganda of
Uganda and the Chopi of Moçambique have – or had - xylophone
orchestras comparable to the magnificent gamelans of Indonesia.
Some
years later than Kunst, the staunchest advocate of the Indonesian-African
musical link was the Rev. Dr. A.M. Jones, a Welshman gifted with
‘perfect pitch’, who started his working life as a missionary in
Northern Rhodesia. With his musical background, and
his interest in African music, it came as no surprise when, after
twenty years in the bush, he left the church to become a full-time
ethnomusicologist at the School of Oriental and African Studies
in London. Father
Jones liked to tell the story of how one day, early in the 1950’s,
there was a knock on the door of his room, and in walked a man with
a bundle under his arm and introduced himself as Bana Kanuteh. Mr
Kanuteh was a Mandinka griot, a professional wandering minstrel
and storyteller, whose homeland was in Sierra Leone. Untying
his parcel, he produced a xylophone which he said he had made himself,
and proceeded to give an expert performance of his own West African
music. Father Jones listened in astonishment,
for in this Mandinka music he immediately recognised many of the
same unusual features that had been recorded in the xylophone music
of the Chopi four thousand miles away near the mouth of the Limpopo.
Being well aware of Kunst and
“In my room at the university” he wrote, “I placed a Cambodian xylophone (Indonesia) and one from the Mandinka tribe of Sierra Leone (West Africa). Bana Kanuteh … had, of course, never set eyes on an Indonesian xylophone before. He ran his playing sticks up and down its keys and immediately began to play his own African music on it. He told me it was the same as the Mandinka model and asked me if he might buy it! He then started playing, without stopping, first on one instrument and then on the other – and still more remarkable – with one hand playing on one xylophone and the other hand simultaneously playing on the other. Lastly he started singing Mandinka songs accompanying himself on the Cambodian xylophone.” Though there is no clear musicological imperative for it to have been so, the fact that the pitch and tuning of xylophones were identical - from Southeast Asia to Southeast Africa, and to the furthest Atlantic coast of West Africa - went beyond the realm of coincidence, and firmly suggested that at some time in history there must have been a direct link between them.
Five
hundred years ago the Chopi must have undergone changes as traumatic
as those in recent years, but happily with less dire consequences.
According to the late great expert on African
music, Hugh Tracey, their oral historians told how at the end of
the fifteenth century in a time of war and upheaval in Zimbabwe,
their people broke away from the Karanga – a prominent Shona clan
- and moved to their present location three hundred and fifty miles
away near the southern Moçambique coast. As the
Karanga were the traditional custodians of the ancient buildings
at the ‘Great Zimbabwe’ it is extraordinary to think that there
must have been a time, long ago, when the towering walls of the
Elliptical Temple regularly echoed to the thunderous sounds of some
of Africa’s most brilliant instrumentalists. The
significance of the Chopi relationship with the Karanga and the
Great Zimbabwe is of much more than passing interest. If
xylophones and xylophone music were introduced into Africa by Indonesians,
as is now generally accepted, it means that their direct descendants
must once have lived in the heart of one of Bantu Africa’s most
renowned ancient culture-zones. It supports contentions
already expressed that the Zanaj of Indonesia must have been closely
involved with the Zanj of Africa in the gold mining region of Ard
Sufala, at the centre of which lay the Great Zimbabwe. The
fact that the Chopi separated from the Karanga roughly 500 years
ago also brings to mind the story, well authenticated in Madagascar,
of how the Maroserana came from ‘Mijomby’ (Moçambique) to
present-day Tulear in Madagascar with a shipload of gold which ultimately
enabled them to gain supremacy over the local people and create
the huge Sakalava Empire. When the court
musicians moved to the coast – perhaps harassed by invading Bantu
warriors - were they hoping to escape to Madagascar with Andriamandisoarivo,
their new Maroserana king? Were they, for some
reason we shall never understand, abandoned and left behind in Africa?
Apart from a very primitive version played in a few parts of the island, the Malagasy have never been xylophone players, an odd omission that clearly supports the view that there was not just one single Indonesian imprint left on Africa, but many different ones from different points of origin, and arriving at different times throughout the thousand years of Zanj dominance on the coast. The contention expressed earlier that different Indonesian sukus made up the people of Zanj – the Bugi and the Bajoo, for example; or the Mandar, and the Makassar - suddenly makes greater sense. Each group of Indonesians brought a different facet of their culture; had their own specialisations; and settled in different regions – the Bajoo and the Mandar in the northern islands where they continued to live their traditional life, and became the builders of the mtepe; the Bugi and the Makassar who were prominent in the colonisation of Buki (Madagascar); others from Sumatra, the ‘Island of Gold’, to develop the minerals of the hinterland; and yet others whom we shall encounter who sailed on round the Cape of Storms to far away West Africa.
A scenario such as this helps to explain some anomalies in the world of xylophones and other musical instruments. Bana Kanuteh’s xylophone, for instance, had a box resonator similar to a Cambodian instrument. Large xylophones in the southern Congo, shaped not unlike half a huge truck-tyre, so that the player could reach all the notes without moving, were very similar in appearance to arrays of tuned metal gongs of Thailand called khong vong. Chopi xylophones, and the beautiful marimbas of their cousins the Ndau (from where our word ‘marimba’ comes) have individual resonators like Javanese instruments. It is very likely that certain instruments were introduced in some areas but not in others.
In
the music world the direct comparison of instruments is one thing;
but much the strongest evidence of Indonesian or Southeast Asian
origins lies not so much in the morphology of the instruments as
in the principles behind the music; the type of scales used, how
they are tuned, and so on. Suffice to say that on both
sides of the Indian Ocean musicians used heptatonic and pentatonic
scales with similar intervallic relationships. The same principles
do not just apply to xylophones, but to other instruments as well,
e.g. such instruments as the ‘finger piano’, or mbira, popular in
Central Africa, but which has no precise counterpart in Indonesia.
In our Western world nobody minds if music written, say, for strings, is transposed for the piano or some other instrument; and the same sentiments seem to have been shared in both Indonesia and Africa. Music composed for instruments of one type was often played on instruments of another type. A delightful, if extreme, example of this was on the island of Natuna Besar in eastern Riau, where women once had their wooden mortars ‘tuned’ to a perfect heptatonic scale so that they could make joyful music as they pounded their rice, thumping their pestles up and down in interlocking rhythms. History does not record what the music was; but one can be fairly sure that it was not written specially to be played on pestle and mortar! The fact that finger-pianos and xylophones share the same scales is therefore unremarkable. It is not the instrument that really matters; but the principles behind the music.
The last paper Father Jones wrote before his death was on African panpipes. That ‘bible’ of everything to do with music, Grove’s Dictionary, says – incorrectly - in the current edition (2004) that panpipes are only found in Central Europe or around the Pacific rim. Panpipes were also once an instrument of western Java; and they are a very important instrument in parts of South Central Africa where they are found in a large swathe of country roughly between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers stretching inland to the Upemba depression around the headwaters of the Congo. They are played by the Chopi of Moçambique, and in the mountains of Basutoland: they are also played by Bushmen and Hottentots, suggesting that panpipes may have been around in southern Africa for a long time – possibly since before the Bantu migrated into the area. Hugh Tracey’s musicologist son, Andrew, recorded his impressions when he heard panpipes played in a Nyungwe village near Tete on the Zambezi: “I will never forget the first time I heard (an ensemble). I was immediately surrounded by about 50 men and women singing and playing the panpipes, and a richly harmonic sound on all sides, something like being in an organ loft among the pipes.” Both Tracey and Jones agreed that the scales and pitch of the panpipes is the same as for mbira and xylophones: and Jones’ contention, once again, was that the scales, pitch and tuning of the African panpipes had their origins in Indonesian music. Had Father Jones lived longer he might have noticed two other factors that seem to confirm a direct relationship between African and Southeast Asian panpipes: the first - how the Nyungwe panpipes are bound together with strips of palm leaf in an attractive criss-cross plaited knot identical to the ‘plaited ligature’ of panpipes in Vanuatu. The second is how, in order to reduce the size of the opening at the top of large pipes to make them easier to blow, the Nyungwe push several sections of smaller pipe - in diminishing sizes - into the mouthpiece, fastening them with beeswax in exactly the same way as Solomon Islanders. Did they dream up all these things independently, or do they – as Father Jones wrote – “,… force us to admit that there must have been diffusion”? (The Music Trail Continues...) |
Excerpts continued:
