Akonting

node · earth · Casamance, Senegal, and the Gambia river region

A three-string gourd lute of the Jola people of the Casamance and the Gambia river region, and the West African instrument that most closely resembles the early American gourd banjo — in construction and, unusually, in playing technique. It has a gourd body with a skin head, a long unfretted stick neck passing through the gourd, and three strings of which the shortest is a thumb-plucked drone. It is played with a downward stroke of the index-finger nail across the strings followed by the thumb catching the short string, a technique the Jola call o'teck. That stroke is essentially the movement known in North America as stroke style, clawhammer or frailing, which is the oldest documented way of playing the banjo and is not a European technique. The correspondence was pressed on the scholarly world largely by the Gambian researcher Daniel Jatta, himself a Jola akonting player, and it changed the terms of the banjo-origins debate: earlier arguments compared bodies and necks, whereas the akonting case compares what the right hand does. Unlike the ngoni, the akonting is a folk instrument played by anyone rather than a professional one, which is itself relevant to who was on the ships.