In this four-part book on fiddling in West Africa the author shares thirty years of learning and scholarship with her readers, leading them through a “voyage of discovery.” The bowed lute or fiddle is a musical instrument found in the geographic region known as the Sudan, which spans from Senegal to Ethiopia. Known variously as anz(h)ad (Tuareg), nyanyeru (Fulbe), goge (Hausa), and goondze (Dagomba), the horizontally-played long-necked West African fiddle has a hemispherical gourd resonator covered with animal skins, especially of goat and reptile, and the fiddle bow is generally made of wood. The strings of both fiddle and fiddle bow are made from a horse’s tail. A fiddle ensemble also has a shaken gourd rattle or calabash drum accompaniment.
Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje observes that the West African fiddle has multiple identities, identities that shift due to geographical differences and ideologies. These differences are shaped by what emotional attachment the patrons have with the musical genre itself, and the cultural history the musical instrument encodes or brings into a particular culture. Whether it is in the Fulbe tradition where the fiddle is used to affirm identity, the Hausa bori spirit possession tradition where the Islamic religion sees it as a profane practice, or among the Dagbamba where the gondze is the most valued instrument in the King’s court, fiddle music is as entertaining as it is empowering.
According to the author, fiddling encompasses the instrument, player, performance context, and the intertextual references and meanings that surround and link performance events with audiences, thus providing a window for a better understanding of ethnicity, religion, and social status in Sudanic West Africa, a region she describes as best known, musically, yet the least understood culture area on the African continent. Training takes a long time and until recently fiddling was a musical tradition that was the sole preserve of an endogamous group (except in Hausa land) where children learned from kinsmen.
DjeDje draws her source material from multiple sites in order to give holistic descriptions as well as comparative analyses so that her conclusions will not be slanted. This multi-sited approach to ethnography enables her to view fiddling “not as a discrete unit in several West African locations, but as a whole with interconnected parts” (8). The work not only gives useful historical and linguistic background on the peoples of the area, but also gives prominence to music analysis in order to show how identity and culture relate to sound. The author uses this approach to see if West African fiddle music meets the same yardsticks used to characterize African music. She echoes the performers’ goal of making fiddle music an iconic symbol, an art that shows cultural identity and calls on both locals and researchers to pay more attention to this tradition, which is as old as the better-known drumming tradition of West Africa.
The author gives vivid descriptions of how the artists approach and perform their art, plus, there are useful photographs and diagrams to help readers get a better understanding of her narrative. Her conclusions that West African fiddle music satisfies the feature requirements of African music, that is, it is structured with an opening, middle, and a closing and also employs the ingredients of call-and-response, repetition and variation, is a starting point for further scholarship into this musical genre.
There was just one little flaw in translation of the Dagbamba title wulana on page 170. “Wulana” is not a “spear bearer.” He is an intermediary/spokesman or advisor. Kpanalana is the Spear bearer. This minor point, however, cannot take away from the fact that Fiddling in West Africa is a good resource not only for a Westerner who knows next to nothing about fiddling in some “obscure” corner of Africa, but also for the African student and scholar trying to understand the musical practices of their folk. This interesting piece is as informative as it educative, and should be at the head of reading-lists for students of ethnomusicology and cultural studies, and on the desk of the avid reader.
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[Review length: 669 words • Review posted on October 15, 2008]