enough to acquire over three hundred specimens of South African native musical instruments, a number of which are rarely seen by European visitors; many others I have observed in use in the field. As a further check I have examined practically all the musical instruments in public collections in this country, as well as many in Europe.
The ultimate result of my investigations, which I cannot hope to be exhaustive, in spite of the generous assistance of many willing helpers, will, I trust, show that, although the musical instruments of the native peoples of South Africa may, at first sight, appear simple and their players unsophisticated, in reality they display not only constructive ingenuity on the part of their makers but also a real understanding of certain of the basic phenomena of sound.
To the African, music, one might say, is life, rather than a part of life; and although this study deals only with a part of that music, I trust that it will serve to show in some measure how full and varied the musical life of the African is.
The names of the various instruments I have checked as well as I could; but, since there are so many different dialects, I must confess at once that I may have omitted many variants; yet I venture to hope that the work is neither very inaccurate nor very incomplete in this respect.
With regard to the spelling of native words, I have tried to be as consistent as is possible in these days of orthographic argument; in most cases I have used the more commonly accepted forms. Again, when quoting from any writer I have always preserved his spelling of native words. It would have been a simple matter to call in the aid of our phonetic experts and use phonetic script for all these words; nevertheless, with the exception of certain Bushman and Hottentot words I have not done so, since this book is not primarily a linguistic study.
In the same way I have decided to present the musical illustrations in European notation. Occasionally I have used a plus or minus sign to show that a note is higher or lower by less than a semitone than the notation indicates. But I think that it will be clear that, with few exceptions, such fine shades of intonation do not exist for the South African native. True, his musical system is radically different from that of present-day Europe, but, like that of many Europeans, his pitch-sense is frequently at fault, and the almost universal lack of permanent absolute pitch standards gives him little opportunity of improving it. Pitch, to the South African native, is, however, chiefly relative, not absolute. But in the harmonic series he has a definite standard by which he may measure intervals; and it is one of my objects to demonstrate to what a great extent it has controlled his musical art.
The map shows the general distribution of the various native peoples; no map which shows the exact distribution exists as yet, although steps are being taken to prepare one. The difficulty will be realized when it is pointed out that, although in a province like the Transvaal there are, as indicated on my map, certain areas where particular tribes are to be found, yet in those very areas large numbers of other tribesmen have settled. Again, although strictly speaking the Pedi are actually Transvaal Sotho, I have only used the former name for them when referring to the particular people who inhabit the area shown on the map. Further, I would point out that the older writers, when using the name Damara, were usually referring to the race now known as Herero.
The index of musical instruments has been deliberately made very full in the hope that it may assist students who may wish to identify specimens whether in the field, in museums, or described in books.
I have made no mention of the musical instruments played by the Indians of Natal or by the Chinese on the Rand, because I have found that such instruments have had no influence upon those of the native races of South Africa.
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
WHILE writing this book, the original edition of which was published in 1934, I found it necessary to make several very important decisions regarding it.
In the first place I had to decide whether to arrange my material tribally, or to deal with each type of musical instrument separately from the technological and historical points of view, allowing the tribal aspects to emerge incidentally. I chose the second of these alternatives, my chief reason for doing so being that I wished the work to be, as far as was possible, a complete and comparative study of one particular aspect of the life of our aborigines.
In the second place I had to determine what was the most suitable manner of classifying the various musical instruments. I was, of course, well aware that no universally accepted ‘taxonomy’ of musical instruments existed, though two excellent systems had been evolved in recent years.
But these systems, respectively devised by Gevaert and Mahillon of Brussels (1877) and by Hornbostel and Sachs of Berlin (1914), although eminently scientific, ‘seemed to belong’, as my friend the late Canon Francis W. Galpin put it, ‘rather to natural science than to human artifacts’. For this reason I preferred to retain the age-old simple classification of musical instruments into the three main groups of percussion, wind, and string.1
But for the use of those who may wish to relate the instruments described in the present volume to the more scientific system of classification, I quote here the five main ‘Divisions’ as set out by Canon Galpin in the simplest possible terms. They are:
1. Autophonic, or self-vibrating instruments (rattles, xylophones, etc.).
2. Membranophonic, or skin-vibrating instruments (drums, etc.).
3. Chordophonic, or string-vibrating instruments (musical bows, etc.).
4. Aerophonic, or wind-vibrating instruments (whistles, flutes, etc.).
5. Electrophonic, or electrically vibrating instruments (‘Hammond’ organ, etc.).
It will be seen at once that no musical instrument belonging to Division 5 has ever been made or used by aborigines of South Africa. On the other hand those described in Chapters I and III of this book belong to Division 1, those in Chapter II to Division 2, those in Chapters IV, V, VI, and VII to Division 4, and those in Chapters VIII, IX, and X, to Division 3. With this as a guide, any museum director or musicologist will be able to place the musical instruments that I have described in their appropriate divisions.2
As I have been asked by the University of the Witwatersrand Publications Committee to add a few pages to this work to ‘bring it up to date’, I have done my best to do so. But when I began to reflect on the subject I soon realized that it might not only be a matter of addition but in some cases of subtraction.
For during the past thirty years the rapidly increasing urbanization of the non-European inhabitants of our country has resulted, as might have been expected, in a dying out of many old tribal institutions and the disappearance of many objects of material culture, including musical instruments. The case of the mbila, the great resonated xylophone of the Venda, is typical, for the old craftsmen who used to make it and the skilled musicians who used to play it have all died, and as they were apparently unable to train successors, the instrument is no longer being made and is now virtually extinct.
The historical importance of the resonated xylophone, however, is so great that I have devoted several paragraphs to further consideration of it in my additional appendix.
Since 1934 I have published twenty-one papers on African musical practices, a dozen of which are concerned with instrumental music. One of these was the report on the music of certain Bushmen which I studied during the Witwatersrand University Kalahari Expedition of 1936, of which I was a member. Descriptions of the musical instruments observed on this and
