Ngoni

node · earth · The Sahel and the Mande world — Mali, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea

A West African plucked lute of the Mande world — cognate instruments carry the names xalam among the Wolof, hoddu among the Fulbe, and several others across the Sahel — and one of the two strongest candidate ancestors of the banjo. Its construction is the argument. The body is a hollowed wooden trough or a gourd; the soundtable is a stretched animal skin, not wood; a stick neck runs through or over the body; there are no frets; and the strings are attached to the neck by movable leather or fibre tuning rings rather than by pegs, which is an unmistakable diagnostic. Several members of the family carry a short string that does not run the full length of the neck and sounds a fixed high drone, played by the thumb. Skin table, stick neck, gourd or trough body, no frets, and a short thumb string are precisely the features of the earliest American gourd banjos, and they do not co-occur in any European instrument. The ngoni sits inside jaliya as a professional instrument with hereditary transmission, which is why its construction and technique are conservative enough for the comparison to carry weight.