The Ethnology of African Sound-Instruments

Extract

Ankermann has confined his investigations to the distribution of instruments within Africa, and the only idiophones of which he takes account are slit-drums, bells, the xylophone, and the sansa. Sachs arrives at his strata I-II by considering the length of the eastern dispersal-radius (from Asia by way of Oceania to America), without including the African occurrences; though, conversely, he arranges some later strata according to the African distribution. In accordance with the methodological principle that distribution over the whole world must be decisive for any system of grouping adopted, I have attempted in what follows to arrange the African sound-producing instruments according to their distribution both within that continent and outside it. It is not meant that all instruments now united in the same group necessarily belong to one and the same culture, but only that, in all probability, they are nearer to each other in time and more closely related in origin than they are to the members of any other group. A closer examination, especially if undertaken with a view to including consideration of all other cultural phenomena, will in many cases lead to subdivision into smaller groups, perhaps also to different arrangements, or even to a change in the entire scheme. The designations of the several groups are not meant to suggest a prejudice of any kind; they were added post factum, principally because it is convenient to have a name for everything. Those borrowed from the nomenclature of Frobenius and Struck should not be taken to mean that their notions of African ‘cultures’ necessarily coincide with our groups; they are only intended to suggest the directions in which contacts can be sought. The names of the instruments have been taken over from Sachs; the numbers appended to them refer to his strata.