Kora

node · earth · Senegambia and the Mande heartland — The Gambia, Senegal, Mali, Guinea

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.