Bwiti Music and Ritual Instruments

Music is the part of Bwiti that has travelled furthest, and the part most confidently misdescribed in English.

The instruments, kept apart

The mongongo and ngombi conflation is close to universal in English-language writing, which routinely produces phrases like “the mongongo harp”. A Gabonese ethnomusicologist’s doctoral thesis on the subject is titled, plainly, the bow and the harp. They are two things.

A further ambiguity worth knowing: mongongo is also the common name of an unrelated Central African tree and its nut, which is a separate source of confusion.

What is known about the ngombi

A doctoral study of Mitsogo harpists gives the technical description, and it is more specific than anything in general circulation.

The ngombi has eight strings, tuned to a hexatonic hemitonic system, and the accompaniment figures are in strict ostinato.

And a detail almost entirely absent from Anglophone accounts: it 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.

The same study found something counterintuitive about commercialisation. When harpists move repertoire from sacred to commercial contexts, the formal musical structures do not change: scale, metre and melodic-rhythmic structure are identical. What changes is the setting, not the music.

The harp that was forgotten

This is the strongest finding on the page and it comes with material evidence.

Research on harps in the region records that historical sources from the German colonial period, including recordings, photographs and descriptions, show harps bearing a sculpture representing a man. The polychrome female sculpture familiar today belongs to the context of the syncretic Bwiti cult.

Deeper still, and the researcher credits the observation to a 1985 doctoral thesis on the harp in Gabon: although the Fang no longer remember it, a harp of slightly different morphology existed in their culture long before this instrument was reintroduced through the borrowing of the Bwiti cult.

An older Fang instrument, the ngueme or ngomo, also eight-stringed, documented in South Cameroon.

The recordings, and an unresolved question

French public institutions hold a substantial archive, and it is worth knowing it exists.

The Fonds Pierre Sallée at the sound archives of the CREM-CNRS, successor to the phonothèque of the Musée de l’Homme, runs to nearly 177 hours from Gabon between 1965 and 1978. Among its collections is one titled Cérémonie du Bwiti, Gabon, 1967: 170 items, over 16 hours, recorded at Libreville, Mandji and Koulamoutou, among the Bavuvi, Eshira, Fang, Massango, Nzebi and Tsogho, with the ngombi and tsambi among the instruments recorded.

Other holdings include a fonds from the 1940s to 1960 and recordings from 2000 onwards.

Every page in that archive carries the same access statement: usage of the archives in the respect of cultural heritage of the original communities. The 1967 ceremonial collection is marked with full access type and a restricted rights statement at the same time.

We are not going to resolve that tension. Ceremonial recordings made in 1967 are technically streamable while their rights are marked restricted, under a heritage-respect statement rather than a licence, and the people whose ceremony it was were not the ones who set those terms. It is worth naming rather than using.

What travelled, and what did not

Researchers who studied the transnationalisation of these musics found an asymmetry that explains a great deal.

Iboga and the rituals it sits at the centre of have exported themselves only very weakly beyond their borders. The music has travelled much further, including into Gabonese rap sampling ritual instruments from around 1989.

Their description of what Western centres take up is the phrase to keep: a very fragmentary appropriation of iboga and of the music, two shards of a religion.

And the circulation runs through musicians, initiates and the diaspora rather than through any heritage programme. Gabon’s only inscription on a UNESCO intangible heritage list is a different musical art entirely; Bwiti is not inscribed on any of them.