Ramkie

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Oldest known figure of a ramkie . Watercolor by Charles Davidson Bell, 1834. A Khoikhoi woman plays a long-necked three-stringed lute with a calabash body.

Ramkie was a plucked long neck lute with three or four, occasionally six strings and a calabash half-shell as the body, which was played in South Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries . The string instrument originally used by Khoikhoi and taken over by Bantu in the course of the 19th century was popular in a younger version with a tin can resonator until the 1930s. Later the ramkie was almost entirely replaced by the European guitar . The ramkie does not come from the South African musical tradition, but probably goes back to small Portuguese guitars that were brought to South Africa by Malay slaves from Indonesia.

Self-made guitars made from tin canisters were preserved as a relic in southern Africa, mainly in the music of young people; in the 1950s, replicas of American banjos with a circular body and skin surface spread with the kwela music . For mainly nostalgic reasons, industrial tin can guitars are also sold today.

Origin and design

The ramkie was the first multi-stringed neck lute to be played in all of South Africa; in an area in which previously predominantly single-stringed musical bows reinforced with a calabash such as the uhadi of the Xhosa and mouth bows such as the umrhubhe were known. There were also two-stringed rod zithers , including flat rod zithers of the zeze type . A multi-string instrument from pre-colonial times in southern Africa is a Pluriarc , which the Swedish explorer Karl Johan Andersson described in 1875 as "a kind of guitar". The Africa explorer Bernhard Ankermann (1901) describes the seven-string pluriac of the Ovambo together with seven other plucked instruments of this type in sub-Saharan Africa. The Damara in Namibia call the Ovambo-Pluriarc, whose body consists of a rectangular wooden trough with a wooden ceiling, ǃgoukhas . Percival Kirby (1934) mentions this pluriac as the only multi-string instrument that he saw south of Limpopo apart from the ramkie .

It is unclear when the ramkie was introduced in South Africa. Kirby believes it is one of two instruments that can be traced back to an early European influence. The other is a simple imitation of the violin that the Swedish naturalist Anders Sparrman found among the South African Khoikhoi under the name t'guthe from 1772 to 1776 . Three to four strings were stretched over a board in the t'guthe and were bowed with a bow. Sparrman also mentions the mouth-blown Khoikhoi musical bow gora . From the beginning of the 19th century, somewhat more elaborate fiddles were described in European travel reports.

As the oldest source for the ramkie , Kirby quotes the Prussian traveler Otto Friedrich Mentzel, who stayed in South Africa from 1733 to 1741. Mentzel is certain that the ramkie , whose name he gives as ravekinge or xguthe , cannot be an invention of the Khoikhoi (" Hottentots "), but is an imitation of an instrument that came with slaves from the Indian Malabar coast . It was one of the musical instruments that slaves played for themselves and not for the entertainment of their masters. Presumably it was used for chordal accompaniment rather than melody formation. What Mentzel says about the playing style also suggests that the ramkie has no African origin. If the neck lute originated in India, it was brought with Portuguese merchant ships . The Portuguese began to take possession of colonial areas in India in the early 16th century .

Drum ghoema and ramkie play to dance in front of a kapstylhuis , the grass roof of which extends to the ground and which is typical for the Western Cape province . Watercolor by Charles Davidson Bell, 1830s.

In favor of the Indian origin, Kirby draws a parallel to a sound called kinanda , which was known in the Swahili culture of the East African coast and on Zanzibar and which he associates with the Indian long-necked lute kinnari vina , although he does not refer to the vina that is common today Types, but refers to a lute with a body from an ostrich egg. According to Ralph Skene (1917), the kinanda was a seven-string, guitar-like instrument that was used together with the small double-headed cylinder drum marwasi (from Arabic mirwas , Pl. Marāwīs ) to accompany the "kinanda dance". Later the word kinanda was transferred to different musical instruments (in today's Taarab string instruments in general and Indian harmonium ). Some of the instruments used in the Taarab style of music have Middle Eastern or Indian origins.

The historical spelling variants ramki, raamakie, ramakie, ramakienjo, ramgyib, ramkietjie, rabeltin, rabouquin and others have been handed down for the word ramkie . The rave Kinge Mentzel is from the French explorer François Levaillant (1790) rabouquin , the Swedish naturalist Carl Peter Thunberg 1796 rabékin and (1861) by Peter Borchardus Borcherds ramakienjo called. All word formations of the plucked instrument are traced back to Portuguese rabequinha and further to rabeca pequena , as a small Portuguese fiddle was called, which was related to the medieval and early modern rebec . Rebec is finally derived from the Arabic rabāb , from which the name for the string instrument rebab became in Indonesia . The rabequinha , like the little guitar cavaquinho, reached Brazil. A similar plucked instrument with four strings on the island of Madeira is the braguinha , older name machete , the forerunner of the ukulele . In Indonesia, the Portuguese cavaquinho developed into the small five-string plucked kroncong , which was played with a frame drum to accompany the dance. In Indonesia, Kroncong is also the name of the entire ensemble with other European instruments and Portuguese melodies. In addition to the European-Arabic lute types, further cultural influences could have reached South Africa via the detour Indonesia. In contrast to the thesis of Indian origin put forward by Mentzel and subsequently by Kirby, Daniël G. Geldenhuys (1998) believes that the Khoikhoi have taken over an instrument of the Cape Malay , who had been brought from Indonesia by the Dutch East India Company as work slaves. The second name given by Mentzel, xguthe, has a linguistic connection with t'guthe , the string instrument mentioned by Sparrmann.

According to historical descriptions, there must have been different forms of this plucking instrument. In Thunberg (1796) the rabékin of the Khoikhoi consists of a calabash half-shell with a flat top and three or four strings that are stretched with pegs. Borcherds, who lived in Stellenbosch from 1786 to 1801 and heard the ramakienjo in the evening as it was played by his father's slaves, gives the same description . The English explorer John Barrow , who stayed in South Africa from 1797 to 1804, mentions two stringed instruments, including a gabowie called plucked instrument with three strings, a hollowed out wooden body and a long neck. The other instrument was apparently a single-stringed musical bow, gora , which notably had a tuning peg and whose name it reproduced as gowra .

The name gabowie also passed down the British Captain Robert Percival (1765-1826), who was involved in the attack against the Dutch in South Africa in 1795/96. He saw a young woman who, with a four- or five-string instrument, accompanied the round dance of a dozen Khoikhoi men. The brass strings were stretched over a long rectangular board and held at a distance at both ends by bridges. On the board was a mirror that the woman kept looking into during the game. She tore the strings with a pick while another musician played gora . Percival leaves open whether the wood was hollowed out or flat, as in the instrument mentioned by Barrow. With the stated size (around 90 × 30 centimeters), this instrument does not seem to have been a lute, but a board zither. Apart from these two sources, the name does not appear anywhere, but Hinrich Lichtenstein (1812), who worked as a doctor in South Africa between 1803 and 1805, mentions a “type of zither that is very simply drawn from four pumpkin skins that are half hollowed out Strings and an attached raw fingerboard. ”It was played when Lichtenstein visited some sick Khoikhoi. He heard the same tone sequences as with the gora .

Cape Malay imitate European dances and music. The music group plays drum, horn and ramkie . In the 19th century, slaves would gather outside the cities on Sundays to dance and sing satirical songs ( moppies ). Watercolor by Charles Davidson Bell, around 1840.

Ramkie and Gora produced the Scottish officer John Wedderburn Dunbar Moodie (1797–1869), according to "wild and melancholy tones", which he heard in the evenings while sitting on the verandah in front of his brother's house. Moodie, who lived there between 1819 and 1829, describes the ramkie as a type of guitar with six strings stretched across a narrow fingerboard. The sound box consisted of half a calabash, over which an animal skin was stretched as a blanket. Moodie's description is of particular importance because he mentions that the musician produced the octave above the open string tone by lightly touching the middle of the strings with her chin. This is a technique typical of the Khoikhoi and has nothing to do with the European way of playing the guitar. It is used, among others, by Nama women in Namibia when playing the musical bow khas ( Nama language , "bow").

George Thompson, who traveled to South Africa from 1818, complains in his travelogue published in 1827 that one evening a Khoikhoi woman played a raamakie with a calabash and violin-like strings and only produced a dull, monotonous pluck with no audible melody. The instrument was one meter long and around twelve centimeters wide. The two terms ravekinge and xguthe given by Mentzel in the first half of the 18th century appear again similarly in a report by the zoologist Leonhard Schultze from 1907. Although Schultze did not see a string instrument at all among the Khoikhoi, he heard them tell of a type of guitar: “They call it ramgyib or ! Gutsib (from ! Gut = to cover, in this case: to cover the resonance vessel with a skin).” The string instrument ramgyib also appears in a fable collected by Schultze, in which a leopard lies in wait for a jackal who has previously slaughtered a cow.

According to Kirby, the earliest surviving drawing of a ramkie comes from Charles Davidson Bell (1813–1882), the chief surveyor of the Cape Colony and in 1834 a participant in the Andrew Smith scientific expedition into the interior of South Africa. A three-stringed long-necked lute with a wide fingerboard and a round calabash resonator, which is covered with animal skin, can be recognized. You can also see three front vertebrae on a floral, curved head plate and a bridge set up in the front third on the skin cover. The musician, crouching on the floor, holds the instrument at an angle in front of her upper body like a guitar, plucks the strings with the fingers of her right hand and shortens them with her left hand. She bends her head over the center of the fingerboard and appears - as observed by Moodie in the 1820s - to be touching the strings with her chin. Another drawing by Charles Bell from around 1840 shows a lively group of Cape Malay and African dancers and musicians apparently trying to imitate European behavior. For this, the drummer has put his hand drum ( ghoema ) on the floor and beats it like a European kettle drum with two sticks. One musician blows a semicircularly curved “ horn ” made from the stalk of a seaweed species ( Ecklonia buccinalis ), and the third sits on the ground with a ramkie, of which no details can be seen.

One of the few existing photographs showing the original shape of a ramkie with a calabash body was made around 1900. The four-stringed instrument shown here with a long neck slightly bulged in the middle and an oval headstock was played with a capo , which is just below of the saddle was attached. This instrument largely corresponds to the description by Mentzel a good 150 years earlier. The oldest surviving specimen, which is kept in the McGregor Museum in Kimberley , has a small, almost square tin box, which is covered with sheep skin and a spade-shaped neck narrow at the top, as a resonator instead of the calabash. The three strings run from an extension of the neck, which protrudes from the underside of the sheet metal resonator, over a wide bridge to front vertebrae on the headstock. Until it came into the possession of the museum in 1912, the instrument belonged to a Koranna boy from the Northern Cape Province .

distribution

Large version of the Malagasy kabosy , played by the group Ny Malagasy Orkestra at the world music festival Horizonte in Koblenz, 2013

The old form of the ramkie had practically disappeared by 1900. According to Percival Kirby's observations, there were still some “degenerate forms” in the 1930s, which he understood to mean types with resonators made from tin canisters. Otherwise, cheap European guitars had replaced the ramkie . Gerhard Kubik (1989) takes up Kirby's “degenerate” assessment and instead differentiates between two types of long-necked lutes that originated in southern Africa and are made by the musicians themselves and known as the banjo : The first type is the ramkie with a single body rectangular tin canister with a sound hole cut in the center of the top. As with the guitar, the strings run over a bridge set up below the sound hole to a headstock with pegs at the back.

The second type is more like a banjo. It has a circular body, which was cut out of an old tin cooking pot or a similar household item and which is covered on the top with a skin cover. The top is tied to the body ring with wire hooks, presumably as an imitation of the clamps on a banjo. If no suitable wire is available, membranes are pulled up on both sides like a double-skin frame drum and braced against each other in a V-shape using skin strips. When both skins are dry, a large hole can be cut in the lower one. The model of this type, the American banjo, became popular in the 1920s and 1930s with American dance and music styles such as foxtrot , shimmy and dixieland .

Both types have the same neck; In terms of developmental history, however, the different corpus shapes do not suggest any descent from one another, but rather their own origins. The common name banjo (in northwestern Zambia mbanjo ) has to do with an imagined cultural togetherness of the two variants, but only the type with a round body can be understood as a self-made replica of the industrially produced American model.

On the other hand, according to Kubik, the lute called banjo with a metal canister body goes back to the old ramkie tradition. Kirby gives the tuning G, C and E for a ramkie with three strings played in the area of Gaborone in the south of Botswana . This corresponds to the usual mood of the self-made banjos throughout southern Africa. In 1971, Gerhard Kubik made sound recordings in Zambia of a boy who played a four-string ramkie- type tin can guitar . The string tuning B – G – D – C from top to bottom corresponds to the typical banjo tuning in Zambia and Malawi . One such instrument, called igqonqwe , can be seen in a 1964 photograph of a Zulu boy from South Africa making music . It is not known when the tin can guitar made its way north from South Africa. It is possible that the spread to Zambia and Namibia was carried out by migrant workers. This self-made type of lute ( banjo ) was also observed less frequently in Malawi. In Zambia, the three or four-string mbanjo has been popular with 10 to 15 year old boys since the 1950s. It spread from the South African townships to the Northwest Province , along with the kwela, which was fashionable at the time, and was adopted into local musical styles. Young people in this age group make their own musical instruments with simple means and later - if they continue to make music - switch to better instruments.

The kabosy in Madagascar is probably a comparable adaptation of European box- necked lutes , with a rectangular body made of wooden boards in different sizes. The kabosy is also known under the names gitara, mandoliny and mandolina . Plucked sounds with a guitar-like, waisted body are also called kabosy . An archaic-looking variant of the gabusi (from qanbus ) on the Comoros with a narrow body and a relatively wide neck is reminiscent of the original type of ramkie .

Replica of a ramkie with a body from an oil can: Afri-can guitar .

Today in South Africa - following a nostalgic trend - under the label Afri-can guitar six-string guitars, the body of which consists of a brightly painted oil canister, are manufactured by hand or with industrial production processes. Its neck has frets like a real guitar, but the sound cannot be compared to that of a real guitar. Corresponding, self-made guitars with four or six strings are known throughout South Africa as blik kitaar , regionally the names katara in Lesotho and Botswana , igogogo in Zululand and generally ramkie are still used .

Other stringed instruments in southern Africa with tin canister resonators are the single-stringed trog zither segankuru with a tuning peg and the simpler isankuni , the string of which is stretched directly between the end of the support rod and one edge of the canister. In 1980, in the Kweneng District in Botswana, for example, the following traditional stringed instruments existed: the mouth bow lengope, the string of which is struck with a stick, the calabash musical bow segwane and the segankuru ( serankure ). A single observation was a boy, a three-stringed to sing along ramkie with a body from a floor wax tugged -Blechkanister.

literature

  • Percival R. Kirby : The Musical Instruments of the Native Races of South Africa. (1934) 2nd edition: Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg 1965
  • Gerhard Kubik : The Southern African Periphery: Banjo Traditions in Zambia and Malaŵi. In: The World of Music , Volume 31, No. 1 (South Africa) 1989, pp. 3-30
  • David K. Rycroft, Angela Impey: Ramkie. In: Grove Music Online (David Rycroft: Ramkie. In: Stanley Sadie (Ed.): The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Macmillan London 1981)

Web links

Commons : Ramkie  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Karl Johan Andersson : Notes of Travel in South Africa. Hurst and Blackett, London 1875, p. 233, Text Archive - Internet Archive
  2. ^ Bernhard Ankermann : The African musical instruments . (Inaugural dissertation to obtain a doctorate from the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Leipzig) Haack, Berlin 1901, p. 21 ( archive.org )
  3. ^ Percival J. Kirby, 1965, p. 244
  4. ↑ Anders Sparrman : A voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, towards the Antarctic polar circle and round the world: but chiefly into the country of the Hottentots and Caffres, from the year 1772, to 1776. Volume 1. GGJ and J. Robinson , London 1786, p. 229, Text Archive - Internet Archive
  5. ↑ Otto Friedrich Mentzel: Complete and reliable geographical and topographical description of the famous and in all consideration remarkable African promontory of Good Hope ... Volume 2. Günther, Glogau 1787, p. 518f
  6. ↑ Percival R. Kirby, 1965, p. 250; Maximilian Hendler: Banjo. II. Prehistory and early history. In: MGG Online , November 2016 ( Music in the past and present , 1994)
  7. ↑ Percival R. Kirby, 1965, pp. 255f
  8. ↑ Ralph Skene: Arab and Swahili Dances and Ceremonies. In: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Volume 47, July – December 1917, pp. 413–434, here pp. 414f
  9. ↑ Maximilian Hendler : Prehistory of Jazz: From the departure of the Portuguese to Jelly Roll Morton. (= Contributions to Jazz Research / Studies in Jazz Research ) Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, Graz 2008, p. 39
  10. ^ François Levaillant : Voyage de M. Le Vaillant dans l'Intérieur de l'Afrique par Le Cap de Bonne Espérance, dans Les années 1783, 84 & 85. Leroy, Paris 1790
  11. ↑ Carl Peter Thunberg : Voyages De CP Thunberg, Au Japon, Par le Cap de Bonne-Espérance, Les îles de la Sonde & c. Traduits, rédigés… Par L. Langles, ... Et revus, quant à la partie d'Histoire Naturelle, par JB Lamarck ... Paris 1796
  12. ↑ Petrus Borchardus Borcherds: An autobiographical memoir. Being a plain narrative of occurrences from early life to advanced age, chiefly intended for his children and descendants, countrymen and friends. AS Robertson, Cape Town 1861, p. 178, Textarchiv - Internet Archive
  13. ↑ See Ulrich Wegner: African string instruments. Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin 1984 (= Publications of the Museum für Völkerkunde Berlin , New Series 41, Department of Ethnic Music, V), p. 154, ISBN 3-88609-117-1
  14. ↑ Machete . In: Sibyl Marcuse : Musical Instruments: A Comprehensive Dictionary. A complete, authoritative encyclopedia of instruments throughout the world. Country Life Limited, London 1966, p. 324
  15. ↑ Denis-Constant Martin: Sounding the Cape. Music, Identity and Politics in South Africa. (PDF) African Minds, Somerset West 2013, p. 73
  16. ^ Daniël G. Geldenhuys: South Africa (Republic). II. Traditional music. 2. Khoi-Khoi. In: MGG Online , November 2016 ( Music in the past and present, 1994)
  17. ↑ See Percival R. Kirby, 1965, p. 178
  18. ^ John Barrow : Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa, in the Years 1797 and 1798 ... Volume 1, second edition. London 1806, p. 98, Text Archive - Internet Archive
  19. ^ Robert Percival: An Account of the Cape of Good Hope . C. and R. Baldwin, London 1804, p. 91, Textarchiv - Internet Archive
  20. ↑ Hinrich Lichtenstein : Travels in southern Africa in the years 1803, 1804, 1805 and 1806. 1. Volume. C. Salfeld, Berlin 1811, p. 150
  21. ^ John Wedderburn Dunbar Moodie: Ten years in South Africa: including a particular description of the wild sports of that country. Volume 1. Richard Bentley, London 1835, pp. 224-226, Text Archive - Internet Archive
  22. ↑ Percival R. Kirby, 1965, pp. 212, 252
  23. ^ George Thompson: Travels and Adventures in Southern Africa. Volume 1. Henry Colburn, London 1827, p. 391, Text Archive - Internet Archive
  24. ^ Leonhard Schultze : From Namaland and Kalahari. Report to the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin on a research trip to western and central South Africa in the years 1903–1905 . Gustav Fischer, Jena 1907, p. 374, Textarchiv - Internet Archive .
  25. ^ Leonhard Schultze, 1907, p. 487 f., Textarchiv - Internet Archive .
  26. ↑ Percival R. Kirby, 1965, pp. 83, 253f
  27. ↑ Percival R. Kirby, 1965, pp. 249-254
  28. ^ Gerhard Kubik: Muxima Ngola - Changes and currents in the musical cultures of Angola in the 20th century. In: Veit Erlmann (Hrsg.): Popular music in Africa. Museum of Ethnology, Berlin 1991, p. 250
  29. ↑ Gerhard Kubik, 1989, pp. 7–9
  30. ↑ Gerhard Kubik, 1989, p. 12f
  31. ^ Gerhard Kubik: Musical Activities of Children Within the Eastern Angolan Culture Area . In: The World of Music , Volume 29, No. 3 ( Children's Music and Musical Instruments ) 1987, pp. 5–27, here p. 19
  32. ↑ Denis-Constant Martin, 2013, p. 97 fn. 33
  33. ↑ Peggy Seehafer: The Ramkie on their way to the AfriCan-Guitar. ( Memento from February 29, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) guitarfoundation.de
  34. ↑ Africa . Atlas of Plucked Instruments
  35. ↑ Elizabeth Nelbach Wood: Observing and Recording Village Music of the Kweneng . In: Botswana Notes and Records , Volume 12, 1980, pp. 101–117, here p. 114