Kora

Assembled from 21 blocks · 1 evidence · 19 related

1. Story
2. The twenty-one-string harp-lute of the Mande jali tradition, and the instrument that shows most clearly why "lute" and "harp" are inadequate categories for West African stringed instruments. Its body is a large calabash gourd cut in half and covered with a cowhide soundtable; a long hardwood neck passes through the gourd, and the strings run not to one side of the fingerboard but over a tall notched bridge standing upright on the skin, in two parallel ranks. The player holds the instrument facing them, grips two upright handposts, and plucks with the thumb and forefinger of each hand, one rank per hand. That bridge is the defining feature: it makes the kora a bridge-harp, a class barely represented outside West Africa. The instrument is associated with the Mande heartland and spread west into Senegambia with Mandinka movement during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It appears in this Journey not because it crossed the Atlantic — there is no evidence that it did — but because it demonstrates the depth and specialisation of the West African plucked-string world from which the instruments that did cross were drawn.
3. Knowledge
4. Kora
5. West Africa
6. Connections
7. Jaliya — the Mande hereditary musician tradition
8. West Africa
9. Kora
10. Ngoni
11. Akonting
12. The West African drum ensemble
13. The Middle Passage
14. The trans-Saharan routes
15. The trans-Saharan routes
16. The Kru seafarers
17. Highlife
18. The transatlantic trade in enslaved people operates
19. Jefferson names the banjar and its origin
20. Evidence
21. The kora is a twenty-one-string Mande harp-lute with a halved calabash resonator, cowhide soundtable, a neck passing through the gourd and a tall notched free-standing bridge carrying two parallel ranks of strings plucked with the thumbs and forefingers; it is played within the hereditary jali tradition and spread west into Senegambia with Mandinka movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary; the AMIS article was not opened and no instrument in a museum collection is cited by accession number.