Bwiti Instruments: the Ngombi, the Mongongo and the Rest

The ngombi

A doctoral study of Mitsogo harpists gives the technical description more precisely than anything in general circulation. The ngombi has eight strings, a hexatonic hemitonic tuning, and accompaniment figures played in strict ostinato.

The same study carries a fact that almost never reaches English-language accounts. The harp is a symbol of traditional religion in Gabon because it holds a fundamental role in the initiatory ceremonies of both the male societies of bwete and the female societies of ombudi. Writing that presents the ngombi as an exclusively male instrument has left out half of where it is played.

Bwiti music and ritual instruments covers what happened to the Fang harp before Bwiti reached them, which is a stranger story again.

The mongongo

A musical bow is a stave held under tension by a single string. The player holds one end at the mouth and uses the mouth cavity as the resonator, changing its shape to bring out one harmonic or another over a fundamental that barely changes. There is no soundbox and there is no fingerboard.

That technique is why the instrument is so often described as speaking. An ethnographer of Bwete Misoko titled his study of it the voice of the mongongo, or how to make a musical bow speak. The mouth that shapes the harmonics is the same mouth that would form the words.

Why the conflation is not a simple error

This site has said elsewhere, flatly, that the mongongo and the ngombi are two things and that mongongo harp is wrong. That is still true of the phrase. It is too simple as an account of why the grouping happens.

An ethnomusicologist working on Central African instruments has set the problem out directly: cultures routinely group together instruments that organologists classify as different. Her argument draws on a set comprising the ground harp, the monochord harp and the resonator bow, with examples from eight cultures of different languages and ways of life.

Across all of them, three things stay constant: who plays, what it is for, and how it is played. On that basis she treats these organologically distinct types as a single class of equivalence, and concludes that the cultural coherence is stronger than the classificatory hesitation, which becomes secondary in the face of use.

So there are two different errors available, and English-language writing usually commits the first.

Fusing the names into mongongo harp destroys a distinction the players themselves make, and leaves a reader unable to tell which object is meant.

Insisting only on the split imports a European classification system and treats it as the last word, when the people who use the instruments have their own grouping and their own reasons for it.

The honest position keeps the names apart and does not pretend that the organologist’s categories are the only real ones.

What is struck

The ceremony is not one instrument with accompaniment. It is layered, and the struck layer is the one English-language writing skips.

The mokengue, a double bell

This one is Tsogho, which places it with the people whose language gives Bwiti its name. It is forged rather than carved, and it belongs to the ironworking tradition rather than the woodworking one, which is a different set of makers and a different body of knowledge.

The standing drum

Note what the museum record says about the surface: the drum is not a plain sound-producing cylinder but a carved object, decorated with figures. Where an instrument carries figuration, the instrument is doing more than making noise.

The quadruple bell

Set beside the forged Tsogho bell above, this one is instructive: same family of instrument, entirely different material and different maker. One came from a smithy and the other from a carver’s bench.

The obaka

Struck sticks or beams. This is the layer that holds the pulse under the harp, and it is also where the published material runs thinnest.

We can tell you it is named, that it appears in the branch listings and archive records, and that it is percussive. We are not going to invent a paragraph about its construction or its history to make this section look even with the two above. The imbalance is in the literature that reached us, not in the practice.

The ngombo

And a lamellophone

The sanza is not specific to Bwiti and is played across Central Africa. It is here because it is Gabonese, nineteenth century, and because its record carries a detail worth noticing: it sits in a Bordeaux museum on deposit from the quai Branly, so its custody has already moved twice within France.

The mvet, which is three things at once

The mvet appears in every list of Gabonese instruments and it needs its own treatment, for two reasons.

It is not a Bwiti instrument. It belongs to the epic tradition of the Bulu-Beti-Fang, across Cameroon, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. Lists that put it beside the ngombi without saying so leave a reader thinking it is played in the same ceremonies.

And the word does not name only an instrument. A study of the epic sets out that the term mvet designates three interdependent elements.

The instrument, a harp-zither called mvǝ́t-óyǝ̀ŋ, Mvet-raphia. A raphia stem carries a bridge fixed at its upper middle, supporting four strings. Three calabashes are fixed to the lower part as resonators, one at each end of the stem and the third in the middle, symmetrical to the bridge.

The epic, narratives called ǹláŋ-mvǝ́t, declaimed before an audience. They run to an average of seven hours, and they are interdependent: a narrative told by one teller in one place carries information that helps make sense of another told elsewhere by someone else.

The performer, the m̀bòm-mvǝ́t, at once orator, storyteller, musician and poet, who declaims the epic while playing. The practice demands both a specific oratorical speed, named èlàt-mvǝ́t, and command of the whole epic from which each telling is composed.

What they are made of

Read the column rather than the rows and something appears. This is not one craft. It is woodcarving, ironworking, skinwork and cordage, plant-fibre work and calabash, and the smith who forges a double bell is not the carver who hollows a drum.

An ensemble assembled from five trades is a piece of social organisation before it is a sound. Somebody had to be a blacksmith for that bell to exist.

And at the other end of the table sits the mongongo, which needs almost nothing: a bent stave, a string, and a human mouth. The instrument with the least material in it is the one described as speaking.

The calling horn, and what a catalogue cannot hold

One instrument on this page comes to us from practice rather than from literature, and we mark it as such rather than dressing it up.

A buffalo horn is sounded to open the vigil. It is a calling horn: it does not accompany, it announces. The night begins when it is blown.

We have not found that stated in a source we can cite, and we are not going to manufacture a citation for it. It is given here as what practitioners describe, and this page is reviewed from inside the tradition rather than only from outside.

Now set that beside what the museums hold. The Metropolitan catalogues two Gabonese side-blown horns, both nineteenth century, both about thirty-six centimetres, one attributed to the Fang. Both are ivory. Neither is released under an open licence.

Ivory and buffalo horn are not the same material, and a prestige object is not necessarily a working one, so we are not claiming those two horns are this instrument. They may be something else entirely.

The full list, as far as the record supports it

Where the photographs are

Count where the objects on this page are kept.

Seven instruments, four cities, three countries, and not one of them in Gabon. An eighth, the musical bow, is in New York, in storage, photographed once and released to nobody.

That is not a claim that any of them was taken wrongly, and we have no provenance for most of them. It is a statement about which instruments a person can see a photograph of, which turns out to be the ones that left.

Gabonese reliquary art in Western museums follows the same observation about objects rather than instruments, and the Gabonese mask that sold for 4.2 million euros follows the money.

The Metropolitan’s caution is worth repeating: its own record gives the maker as Fang people? and the culture as possibly Fang people. A museum hedging its own attribution is being careful, and the hedge is more informative than a confident label would be.