Historicity of African musical instrument technology

The primary objective of our project is to research and document in the field the unique and ingenious techniques of manufacture of African musical instruments in their timbre complexity and tunings, as carried out by experts in their communities. The documentation will be audio-visual to create a permanent record before any of these begin to disappear. Our project aims to cover the large families of African language communities as conceptualized by Joseph Greenberg and embraces in particular the countries Ghana, Togo, Senegal, Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, Tanzania, Uganda, Madagascar to be covered by our team members. Historicity means that our team members will put their fieldwork into the larger context of reconstructing the history of musical instrument making in all the major African language families, and will use historical methodology, working with written, pictorial, sound and artefact sources. For example, the techniques of making iron bells (single and double bells of various kinds) can be traced back to around 400 BC in the Nok culture of north-central Niger, from where the techniques seem to have spread, as is suggested by archaeological sources and surviving artefacts across Togo, Nigeria, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe. Musical instruments, their makings and instrumental styles adopted by performers are time-prone and subject to technological changes, sometimes across centuries of their existence. On the basis of available sources, and information collected in the field, it is now often possible to reconstruct the points of invention, technological changes and usage of a variety of musical instruments in African history, at least back to the 17th and 18th century, sometimes on a much longer time scale as was demonstrated by Klaus P. Wachsmann in the 1960s in his typology of African harps. In our project, we recognize that invention and innovation always occur as an initiative of individuals, although their names have rarely been transmitted for many generations in African oral traditions. Neglect of the individual as originator of what later may become a tradition is still one of the colonial leftovers, denying African individuals any agency in cultural change. During our fieldwork, we have dismantled these misconceptions and disproved the concept of ethnicity, recognizing the individual composer and inventor of techniques in African music history.