The Kankobela of the Batonga Vol 1

Once fishermen and farmers on the rich alluvial banks of the Zambezi, the Batonga were driven at gun¬point from their ancestral lands by the Rhodesian colonial authorities in 1958 and dumped on the arid, infertile hinterland to the north and south – divided by the rising waters of Lake Kariba and by the border that now separates Zambia from Zimbabwe.

They were left with little but their culture. These 2008 field recordings showcase the music of the Batonga kankobela: a thumb-piano with a tin or calabash resonator and the membrane of a spider’s egg sack stretched beneath the keys, to give a buzzing sound. As an instrument it might look like the Shona mbira but the Tonga harmony, based on intervals of fourths, recalls church bells as much as it recalls the music of Stella Chiweshe. Even these 15 tracks are quite unlike each other – from Eduard Mun’gombe’s pure, mournful, cyclical ‘Kondipa Ambe Ndimuntu Nyokwe,’ to the mad buzzing, frantic tempo and chanted vocals of Nyeleti Mukkuli’s ‘Nchembele Musimbi Wangu’, which recalls Konono No 1. It is a tragic fact that the all-conquering guitar has driven the kankobela to the brink of extinction; the youngest of these musicians is 50 years old.

The good news is simply that this album exists. It may be the soundtrack to a disappearing world, but it may just provide the impulse that this uniquely beautiful, funny, furious music needs to survive.