Ingungu

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Ingungu ( isiZulu ) is a stick drum of the Zulu in South Africa , which consists of a clay pot covered with goat skin and is used by girls during puberty rites ( ukuthomba ) on the occasion of their first menstruation to accompany songs that are often sung in seclusion at night. With wet hands, the player strokes a stick loosely attached to the membrane, producing a humming noise.

Origin and Distribution

Battle shield of the Zulu warrior Utimuni, a nephew of King Shaka, covered with animal skin . Hand-colored lithograph by George French Angas , 1849.

The most original form of a drum, which was still struck by the Xhosa women at the beginning of the 20th century to accompany ceremonial dances ( abakweta ) in the circumcision schools of boys, is the ingqongqo . For this purpose, the skin of a ritually slaughtered ox or buffalo was dried in the sun and then stretched slightly sagging between sticks at a height of about one meter above the ground or held with one hand by the women standing in a circle. With sticks in the other hand, the women hit the skin, which they set aside after the dance for later ceremonial use. The first known description of this ritual drum is from Cowper Rose (1829), a British officer who describes his four-year stay at the Cape.

An equally archaic ritual instrument was a shield that was once used as a weapon of war, the membrane covering of which was beaten with sticks. The Xhosa battle shield was called ikawu . The next and most important step in the development of membranophones is the introduction of a hollow resonance body. A temporarily manufactured drum was the Swazi intambula , the name of which is probably derived from the Portuguese tambor (cf. tabor ). If necessary, an uncircumcised wet goat skin was stretched over a clay beer vessel ( imbiza ). The musician hit the membrane with a stick in his right hand, which an assistant crouching to one side was holding taut with both of his hands. If the musician played the drum alone, he would pull the animal skin over the vessel so that two of its feet were on the floor and pointed in his direction. He then squeezed his knees while holding the other side of the skin taut with his left hand and striking it with a stick in his right hand. The intambula was used for the initiation of a traditional healer, wedding dances and some other dances.

Beating drums made from clay pots are part of the instruments used by the Khoikhoi (formerly " Hottentots ") who have lived in southern Africa since the turn of the century . Since ancient times they have been using kettle drums that are closed at the bottom and made of vessels covered with a membrane, which the formerly semi-sedentary cattle breeders used to store milk. The traditional drum of the Khoikhoi was a repurposed milk vessel made from a section of bamboo, a hollowed-out piece of wood or a clay pot. The oldest description of such a Khoikhoi drum comes from the Dutch doctor and writer Olfert Dapper (1668), who himself never was in South Africa and refers to an eyewitness whose name is not known. Dapper was the first to refer to this hand-struck drum as "rommel-potten", thus equating its design with the Dutch rommelpot , which, however, belongs to the completely differently played grating drums. Similar drums are mentioned in European travelogues from the 18th century. The Africa researcher Peter Kolben (1719) gives a detailed description of the shape and way of playing the beating drum, but adds that the Khoikhoi use the drum on festive occasions as well as in some European regions: “... right in Braband, also in Thuringia and Saxony are played on the Rommel pots; how they serve them in their fun and dances instead of a drum, or have to take the place of an army drum ... “Peter Kolben differentiates between beating drums and friction drums, if he sees the latter as a substitute for quasi real drums, he still uses it apparently from Dapper the name "Rommel-Topff" for the Khoikhoi beating drums. This linguistic confusion, which was taken over in later travel reports, has entered the official language Afrikaans . In 1932 Percival Kirby found a Koranna woman in Bloemhof with a drum made according to old tradition from a softwood vessel used to store milk. In this / khais a wet goat skin, which after drying could be beaten, was stretched over the opening. The shape of the / khais corresponds to the type of drum known in the Netherlands as a rommelpot .

Wooden vessels ( iThunga , plural amaThunga ) with handles that were used by the Zulu for milking. Covered with a membrane, the drum becomes moropa .

Further from the South African tradition derived vascular drums are conical with a handle in the form of an oversized beer mug made of a log murumbu the Venda . The shape corresponds almost exactly to the wooden khamelo milk vessel , which has a handle because it is held at an angle between the legs when the cow is being milked . The player also holds the drum between her legs and hits it with both hands. Among the Pedi this type of drum is called moropa . In the 19th century, the name moropa was used by the Basotho of Basutoland for a round kettle drum made of clay, which girls beat with their hands at the beginning of their initiation ceremony. To this day, the Venda still play the large "magic" kettle drum ngoma , the wooden body of which is carved from a log in landscape format. The membrane of the ngoma is attached to pegs, while the side handles appear as the creative takeover of a string tension. The ngoma , beaten in sacred rituals, is said to have an influence on the cohesion of the community. The tube drum ghoema , which was produced in the 17th / 18th centuries, has a completely different origin and meaning than the vessel drums . It was introduced from Asia by Cape Malay in the 19th century .

Most of the traditional percussion drums in South Africa were played by women at ceremonies. The Pedi moshupiane is a moropa grater drum with a cauldron- shaped wooden body, which is played by an older woman at initiation ceremonies for girls. The instrument, which became rare in the 1930s, is made by the women in secret and may not be seen by the girls even when they are playing. The wooden body is covered with goat skin, which is attached to the edge with a winding of strips of skin. In an even rarer type, which Percival Kirby mentions without having seen it, the body consists of a barrel-shaped construction of wooden rods that is completely covered with cowhide except for the membrane top. The elderly woman holds the moshupiane under her left arm and strokes the membrane counterclockwise with a dried bundle of millet that has been moistened for use , creating an eerie, screaming noise. With this, the girls who have completed a certain stage of initiation are accompanied at night on their way to their settlement ( kraal ). The girls should recognize a nature spirit in the form of an owl guarding them in the sound . After the group has reached their home, the drum is burned. As a friction drum, the moshupiane is closest to the ingungu .

According to Henry Balfour (1907), the oldest functional description of a grating drum in Africa comes from Emil Holub , who traveled in southern Africa in the 1870s. He found the drum morupa in Barotseland in what is now Zambia :

“The eardrum is pierced and a stick is inserted through the opening, through which a cross stick runs at the top. A sound not dissimilar to the creaking of new boots is elicited from this drum and is produced by quickly rubbing the stick inside the 1½ foot tubular drum with a hand wrapped with a moistened baobab bast. The drum is only used when the inhabitants of a village go to meet someone who has returned home from a lion or leopard hunt in order to receive them with song and dance. "

In another work, he describes the morupa as a 50 centimeter long tube with a 20 centimeter diameter that tapers slightly at one end. Joachim John Monteiro (1875) found a similar, "very loud" grater drum in Angola . According to his description, the wooden tube was covered with skin on one side. A rod stuck through a hole in the middle was prevented from falling through by means of a knot. The player ran a wet hand along the stick from the open bottom of the tube.

A rubbing drum known from the Subia (Subiya, own name Ikwahani), a Bantu-speaking group in Namibia, consists of a vessel with a diameter of about 50 centimeters, open at the bottom. The player reaches into the opening of the drum lying on the floor with one hand and rubs the membrane with a wet fiber bundle tied to his hand on ritual occasions.

Design and style of play

A Khoikhoi woman beats the kettle drum / khais , which is similar to the ingungu . Black and white reproduction of a watercolor by Charles Davidson Bell, 1834.

The ingungu grating drum is mentioned as a Zulu tradition that still exists today. Percival Kirby rarely found the ingungu in the 1930s because the ceremonies associated with it were rarely performed. The ingungu does not appear in travel reports from the 19th century , it is only described in a few dictionaries, although there is no consensus on its form. The German missionary Jacob Ludwig Döhne (1857) mentions under the entry in-gungu a kind of drum made of a large basket that is covered with a thin skin, like a drum being struck and a noise like “ngu! ngu! ”. Ukwenza ingungu therefore means “to make a sound like ngu”, “to drum”. Correspondingly, the word ingungu is onomatopoeically traced back to the snorting of a wildebeest .

William Jafferd Davis (1872) explains the in-Gungu as a type of drum in which an animal skin is pulled completely over a hollow body, such as a calabash, and “which is played like a drum; So it's a drum. ”The missionary Alfred Thomas Bryant (1905) also describes the i-Ngungu as a beating drum as a beer vessel ( imbiza ) or large clay pot with a membrane drawn over the opening and which is hit by hand and used to accompany the song becomes. He adds that the ingungu was struck "earlier" when a girl had her first menstruation and mentions the Zulu proverb: ingungu yaleo ntombi kayakali, "this girl's menstrual drum doesn't play well," which means: the girl has herself already let in with quite a few young men. However, since the Zulu War (of 1879) the drum has largely disappeared and is hardly known to young girls.

In ingungu , goat skin, which has been freed from its hair and cleaned, is cut roughly in a circle and stretched over the opening of a beer clay pot ( imbiza ) or, alternatively, an iron saucepan or a vessel made of another material. An approximate diameter of the clay pot is 30 centimeters. The instrument, which came into the collection of Percival Kirby in the 1930s, consists of a black, almost circular clay vessel, the opening of which is about half the diameter of the vessel. The membrane, which is pulled on when wet, is braced with V-shaped skin strips against a circular cut-out skin ring or a round piece of skin on the underside. For this purpose, the wet stretching strips rolled up by hand are alternately pulled through cuts on the edge of the membrane and around the lower skin ring or through cuts on the edge of the lower piece of skin until the entire drum is evenly tensioned. When it dries, the membrane tightens and the strips of skin lie flat against the body.

The rubbing stick is a twig or section of reed 45 to 60 centimeters long and one to two centimeters thick that is carefully smoothed at the knots. The player crouches in front of the drum, which is placed on the floor with the membrane horizontally, and holds the stick with both hands vertically on the center of the membrane. With the wet fingers of both hands, she alternately strokes down the stick, as if milking a cow. The rod starts to vibrate strongly, which it transmits to the membrane. This creates a roaring humming sound of considerable volume. According to Alfred Thomas Bryant (1905), the ngu in the name of the drum means "to make a dull booming sound like a drum".

Either the player regularly wets his hands in an adjacent water container or an assistant pours water over the stick from time to time. Because the membrane gets wet as a result, it has to be dried in the sun after playing.

Ritual use

According to the sparse information in dictionaries from the end of the 19th century, the ingungu was played by girls during their first menstruation. Percival Kirby (1934) describes a ceremony called omula (corresponds to ukuthomba ), which Bryant (1905) mentions, in which a girl was initiated into the status of candidate for marriage by her father. For this purpose, a goat was slaughtered and the girl was sprayed with the contents of the gallbladder . The girl then carried the air-filled gall bladder on her head. The next day another animal was slaughtered and its skin was used to make an ingungu . After the ceremony was over, the skin was removed from the clay pot and the two kept separately without destroying them. According to a study from 1985, the goat sacrifice to the ancestors has been forgotten.

The puberty rites of the Zulu are still separated according to sex and performed with different musical forms. Two ceremonies follow every few years. The inungu is used by girls in the first puberty ceremony ukuthomba (outdated udewa ). Her game symbolizes the girl's fertility. The ukuthomba ceremony at the beginning of the first menstruation includes songs sung privately by several girls at night and accompanied by the inungu .

Within the girls' puberty songs, there are two categories : ingcekeza and ukubhina . The ingcekeza songs are sung on two days during public celebrations at the height of the ceremonies. The inungu is used in the second song category, ukubhina . These songs are characterized by obscene language with sexual innuendos and are sung by the girls at night in a secluded area during initiation. According to David Rycroft (1975), pubescent girls gather for this purpose with somewhat older girls who have already had sexual experience in a hut that boys are not allowed to enter.

According to Rosemary Joseph (1983), the statements of the informants differ as to whether the girls should receive a kind of sex education and marriage preparation or whether it is simply a habit. The ukubhina songs accompany the girls with clapping hands ( ukunqukuza ) and the ingungu, which is occasionally replaced by the double-headed frame drum isigubhu . Clap with the palms of the hands arched, creating a thud. The use of the ingungu is of great symbolic importance for the ceremony, rubbing the stick with the hands is associated with sexual intercourse and the clay pot is associated with the woman's body. The tree species Schefflera umbellifera ( isiZulu umsenge ), which was previously used for a wooden body, was also associated with rain and fertility. The ukubhina -Lieder include loud Rosemary Joseph (1983) one of the few genres of choral singing in the region listed wholly or mainly without dances. In contrast, M. Janice Forbes (1985) observed girls dancing at the ukuthomba ceremony, who moved with similar dragging steps to the rhythm of the song and to the friction drums. You kept your upper body straight and bent forward in between. With their arms stretched out, they symmetrically formed a large figure eight in the air.

More important is the second, public ceremony of girls, umemulo or ukwemula , which takes place several years after the onset of puberty. As an initiation, it is of greater importance because it leads to the stage of marriageable age, that is, to the age of majority. Through the ceremony, the father formally recognizes his daughter's marriageability and issues the marriage permit. According to Eileen Jensen Krige (1936), the girl had to stay in a separate area in her mother's hut for up to three months during initiation. Today the girl is expected to stay at least a week in a house where they should not see her mother or father.

At the umemulo ceremony, the girls perform songs and dances during the week-long seclusion. At 4 a.m. they go to the river to wash. They can then be seen by their relatives and other people. This is followed by dances and festivities that are performed on a large scale outdoors without the accompaniment of drums. The girls in the center of the ceremony point with a spear ( umkhonto ) at individual guests and they attach bills to their torsos and hair. They also receive money from relatives, conveying the blessings of the community for their future life.

literature

  • Percival R. Kirby : The Musical Instruments of the Native Races of South Africa. (1934) 2nd edition. Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg 1965.
  • David R. Rycroft: Ingungu. In: Laurence Libin (Ed.): The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Volume 3, Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York 2014, p. 17.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Percival R. Kirby, 1934, pp. 20-22, plate 7
  2. ^ Cowper Rose: Four Years in Southern Africa . Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, London 1829, p. 146.
  3. ↑ Percival R. Kirby, 1935, pp. 23-26.
  4. ↑ Olfert Dapper: Naukeurige Beschrijvingen der Afrikaenschegewesten. Jacob van Meurs, Amsterdam 1668, p. 653b
  5. ↑ M. Peter Kolben : Caput bonae spei hodiernum. That is: Complete description of the African prelude to the Good Hope ... Peter Conrad Monath, Nuremberg 1719, p. 528.
  6. ^ Percival R. Kirby, 1934, p. 16.
  7. ^ Percival R. Kirby, 1965, p. 18.
  8. ↑ Laurie Levine: The Drum Cafe's Traditional Music of South Africa. Jacana Media, Johannesburg 2005, p. 229.
  9. ↑ Moropa. University of Cape Town Libraries Digital Collection (picture of a wooden drum moropa with handle from Botswana)
  10. ^ Percival R. Kirby, 1934, pp. 30, 32.
  11. ↑ Percival R. Kirby, 1934, pp. 33f.
  12. ^ Henry Balfour: The Friction-Drum. In: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Volume 37, January – June 1907, pp. 67–92, here p. 73.
  13. ^ Emil Holub : Seven years in South Africa. Experiences, experiences, research and hunts on my travels from the diamond fields to the Zambesi (1872–1879). Volume 2. Alfred Hölder, Vienna 1881, p. 148f.
  14. ↑ Emil Holub: A Culturskizze of Marutse Mambunda empire in South Central Africa. (Communications from the Geographical Society in Vienna) Gerold, Vienna 1879, p. 158.
  15. ↑ Friction drum with fixed stick. University of Cape Town Libraries Digital Collection (image of a corresponding grating drum with a rod from Zambia fixed inside)
  16. ^ Joachim John Monteiro: Angola and the River Congo . Volume 2. Macmillan & Co, London 1875, p. 140.
  17. ↑ Matt Dean: The Drum: A History. Scarecrow Press, Lanham 2012, p. 52.
  18. ↑ Zulu . Kruger National Park
  19. ^ Jacob Ludwig Döhne: Zulu-Kafir Dictionary. Cape Town 1857, p. 111.
  20. ^ Marlene Burger: Indexing traditional African musical instruments. In: The Indexer. Volume 21 No. 4, October 1999, pp. 169-172, here p. 170.
  21. ^ William J. Davis: A Dictionary of the Kaffir Language. Part 1. London 1872, p. 67.
  22. ^ Alfred Thomas Bryant : A Zulu-English Dictionary with Notes on Pronunciation: A Revised Orthography and Derivations and Cognate Words from Many Languages; Including Also a Vocabulary of Hlonipa Words, Tribal-names, etc., a Synopsis of Zulu Grammar and a Concise History of the Zulu People from the Most Ancient Times. P. Davis & Sons, Maritzburg 1905, p. 429.
  23. ^ David R. Rycroft (2014), p. 17.
  24. ^ Percival R. Kirby, 1934, plates 9 A and B
  25. ↑ Percival R. Kirby, 1934, pp. 27f.
  26. ^ Percival R. Kirby, 1934, p. 28.
  27. ^ M. Janice Forbes: The documentation and analysis of selected socio-ethnic Zulu dances for implementation in physical education programs. (Master thesis) University of Durban-Westville, October 1985, p. 119.
  28. ^ David K. Rycroft, 1975, p. 353.
  29. ^ Rosemary Joseph: Zulu Women's Music . In: African Music. Volume 6, No. 3, 1983, pp. 53-89, here p. 67.
  30. ↑ M. Janice Forbes, October 1985, p. 120.
  31. ↑ Eileen Jensen Krige: The Social System of the Zulus. (1936) Reprint: Longmans, Cape Town 1962, pp. 100-102; quoted from: David K. Rycroft: A Royal Account of Music in Zulu Life with Translation, Annotation, and Musical Transcription. In: Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. University of London, Vol. 38, No. 2, 1975, pp. 351-402, here p. 385, footnote 37
  32. ↑ Mbusiseni Celimpilo Dube: The Tourism Potential of Zululand North of the Tugela River with Special Reference to Zulu Culture and History. ( Memento from February 3, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) (Master's thesis) University of Zululand, 2011, pp. 11–13.