African harp

The oldest depictions of harps without a forepillar can be seen adjacent to the Near East, in the wall paintings of ancient Egyptian tombs in the Nile Valley, which date from as early as 3000 BCE.

[1] These murals show an instrument that closely resembles the hunter's bow, without the pillar that we find in modern harps.

The Egyptian angular harp later made its way to West Africa, where it survived in the form of the Mauritanian ardin.

According to the different ways of attaching the truss rod to the body, Wachsmann differentiates between three main types of African bowed harps, which allow conclusions to be drawn about their distribution routes.

It has a resonating body made of calabash, with 10 to 16 strings and metal rings affixed to the top of the neck, and a skin belly.

The neck is attached to the inside of the box, exits through a small round opening on the membrane, and curves upward for about 60 to 70 cm.

Seven or eight strings are attached to a piece of wood inside the box, and extend through the skin to tuning pegs inserted along the neck.

The instrument has generally fallen from popularity, though in 1993 some older players were recorded on the album Central African Republic: music of the former Bandia courts.

[21] In the "spoon in a cup" type, the lower end of the curved neck (string carrier) lies loosely on the edge of the flat, bowl-shaped body and protrudes to about the middle of the bottom.

At the height of the integument, a rod serving as a suspension bar for the strings is inserted into the neck and attached with its other end to the opposite edge of the resonance bowl.

This type, which occurs exclusively in Uganda, includes the ennanga of the Baganda, the ekidongo of the Nyoro , the kimasa of the Basoga, the five-stringed opuk agoya[22] (or lotewrokuma ) of theAcholi and the tum of the Langi , also consisting of a turtle shell as a resonator .

The oral tradition can be summarized in the case of the ennangaas far back as Kabaka Nakibinge (ruled c. 1494–1524), to whom it was played on the Ssese Islands in Lake Victoria.

The distribution region extends along the Atlantic Ocean from Gabon to southern Cameroon and includes two isolated occurrences in Ghana and Ivory Coast.

The representation of a body made of several boards was probably modeled on an eight-string bowed harp observed among the Kele (Bakele, Kélé -speaker) on the coast of Gabon.

The "cork in the bottle" type, to which the adungu belongs, developed from instruments that first made their way west from Kush to Lake Chad .

Franz Födermayr (1969) found halfway along this route among the Bilia in the retreat area of the Ennedi mountains(in northeastern Chad) the five-string bowed harp krding.

With the progressive drying out of the savannah, there were population shifts to the south, and this type of harp reached its present distribution area, including northwestern Uganda.

[29] The Alur and Acholi also call adungu or adingili[30] a multi-stringed musical bow, which consists of a semicircular curved stick over which a cord is stretched in such a way that three Z-shaped strings with different pitches result.