The fetish folk of West Africa

by Robert H. Milligan

In the latest of Mr. H. E. Krehbiel’s learned and interesting books, The Pianoforte and Its Music, the writer holds that the first of all stringed instruments was the bow. Every boy knows the musical twang of the bowstring at the moment that the arrow flies. In the Iliad, Apollo, the god of music, is also the god of archery, and is called the “bearer of the silver bow.” Mr. Krehbiel also recalls the passage in the Odyssey in which Ulysses tries his bow, after the suitors of Penelope, one by one, had tried and failed; and when Ulysses drew the arrow to its head and let it go, the string rang shrill and sweet as the note of a swallow. This theory of the origin of musical instruments is strikingly supported by the instruments in present use among the savage and primitive tribes of West Africa.

A Kombe cook, at Gaboon, each day after dinner, lay down for a nap and played himself to sleep upon an instrument which was nothing but a bow with a single string. The string was made of a certain runner, the fibre of which is very tough and gives a resonant note. The cook found that by plucking the string with a metal, rather than with his fingers, he produced a better note; so for this purpose he regularly used the bread-knife and took it to bed with him. When I first heard this unclassical music I thought he was playing on a Jew’s-harp.

The native improves this instrument when he attaches to one end of it a gourd or calabash, in the shape of a bowl, to augment the sound—the first sound-box. When he plays he places the flat side of the gourd against his chest. He improves the instrument immensely when he adds three strings, making four in all, successively shorter. The four strings pass over a central bridge, which is notched at different heights for the different strings. This makes eight strings and produces eight different notes. The gourd, or sound-box, is placed in the middle of the bow, opposite the bridge. This instrument is usually made from the midrib of a palm-leaf. The bent midrib itself forms the bow; while the strings are the loosened fibres of its own tough skin. These are made taut by the vertical bridge, and their vibrating length is regulated by strong bands passing around the ends of the strings and the bow.

Another native instrument is a harp, both in shape and in principle. The upper end is a bow, or half-bow; the lower end is an oblong sound-box covered with a perforated skin—monkey-skin or goatskin. The upper ends of the strings are attached to pegs inserted in the bow, by which the strings may be tuned. There is also a five-stringed lyre, with a sound-box somewhat like the harp, but instead of a single bow at the end, there are five bent fingers, each with its string. There is a very rudimentary dulcimer, and a xylophone, and various modifications of the instruments which I have described.

The favourite of all these instruments, and the one of largest musical capacity, is the harp. The native uses it most frequently to accompany his singing. There are professional singers among them, whose position is somewhat analogous to that of minstrels several centuries ago in Europe. The songs of these professional singers are usually lengthy ballads—traditional tales in lyric form. The monotony of the solo, which is a dramatic recitative, is broken by a somewhat regular and frequent choral response. The singer half closes his eyes and sways his body as he sings. He seems oblivious of time and place. I have sometimes thought that there was an element of hypnotism in his influence upon his audience. Upon the instrument he plays a running and unvaried accompaniment to his song. But it would be a great mistake to judge the song, or the African capacity for melody, by the miserably inadequate instrument. The singer’s voice far exceeds the instrument, both in range and in the division of intervals.

The fact is, however, that the only one of his musical instruments which the African regards with profound respect is his dearly-beloved tom-tom—the drum to which he dances. From this some have inferred that, to the African savage, rhythm without melody is music, which of course is a mistake. It is even doubtful whether his sense of melody be not altogether as keen as his sense of rhythm, though not equally appealed to. The drum is very easy to construct; but not so the harp or viol; and the Negro is so lacking in mechanical genius that he cannot invent an instrument capable of reproducing his melodies. Therefore the melodies are always vocal. They do not dance to the drum, by itself; for they invariably sing when they dance. Dancing without singing is almost impossible; at least I have never seen it during seven years in Africa. They are passionately fond of singing and have good voices. The voices of the men are much better than those of the women and have sometimes the resonant sonority of a deep organ-tone, or an exquisite melancholy, which it is to be hoped they may never lose through future conditions of civilization.

The native songs are elementary but fascinating. Few white men, however, can sing them; for the scales, or tone-systems, upon which most of them are based, are entirely different from our major and minor modes. Their scales have not a distinct tonic, that is, a basal tone from which the others in the system are derived, as, for instance, the first tone, do, of our major scale. It follows that the cadences of their music are not clearly defined; or, as a friend of mine would say, “They don’t taper off to an end like ours.”

Although their music is so difficult for the white man, the natives learn our music with astonishing ease, even their oldest men and women, and sing it well—if they have half a chance. But is it surprising that—since our scales are new to them—they at first need a little careful training, or at least the lead of a clear-toned organ reasonably well played? Otherwise they are not unlikely to substitute the tones of their own scales. The result is indescribable. Imagine a large congregation singing the doxology with all their might, and about half of them singing it in G minor instead of G major! But the comparison is inadequate. The singing in some mission congregations is enough to cause a panic. The first Sunday that I spent in Africa was at Batanga, where the people had learned the hymns before any white missionaries went to live among them. I was near the church when the large congregation started the first hymn. It was a translation of “God is the Refuge of His saints, When storms of sharp distress invade.” The tune of this storm of sharp distress was good old Ward, but, alas, in such a state of decomposition that I did not recognize it until they had sung it through twice. And so it was with many of the tunes. Their own music has no extended range of high and low notes; and so, in these hymns, whenever they came to a high passage, or even a single high note, they sang it an octave lower, and the low notes they sang an octave higher. It was a vocal feat, and no audience of white people could have done it without training; but it did not sound much like music, still less like worship.

So great a musician as Dvorak, when he came to America, was profoundly moved by the original melodies of the American Negro, and became their enthusiastic champion. Indeed, they inspired the most beautiful of all his symphonies, the one entitled, “Aus der Neuen Welt.” I do not refer, of course, to the so-called Negro melodies composed by white men. Some of these are beautiful; but they are not Negro melodies. They do not express the Negro’s emotional life and he does not care much for them. Those wonderful songs of the Fisk Jubilee Singers are the real thing. Some of those very melodies may have originated in Africa. Others are more developed than any that I heard in Africa; but they are very similar, and they use the same strange scales, which makes them unfamiliar to our ears and difficult to acquire. Among them, I really believe, are occasional motives as capable of development as those of Hungary.

For a long time the music of Africa defied every attempt on my part to reduce it to musical notation. Very few persons have made the attempt; for it is easier to reduce their language to writing than their music. At first it seemed as inarticulate and spontaneous as the sound of the distant surf with which it blended, or the music of the night-wind in the bamboo.