The heart of Africa, Vol. 1 (of 2) — Key Ideas to Explore

The Ethnographer's Ear

Schweinfurth’s descriptions of Bongo music oscillate between technical precision and expressive metaphor. He carefully details the construction of the manyinyee—a wooden tube four to five feet long, closed at one end, carved with a human head and horns, played by blowing into an upper orifice. He notes the alternative bottle-shaped form, played between the knees like a violoncello. Yet when he describes the sound, his language becomes deliberately unflattering: “unwearied thumping,” “bellowings,” “shrill blasts,” and an overall “unearthly hubbub.” The singing is characterized as a “babbling recitative” that “at one time suggests the yelping of a dog and at another the lowing of a cow.” This dual register—objective reportage paired with subjective, often negative, aesthetic judgment—reveals the author’s struggle to reconcile his scientific training with his cultural expectations. He does not simply record; he evaluates, and his evaluations are shaped by European musical norms.

Instruments as Cultural Artifacts

The excerpts devote considerable space to the physical properties of Bongo instruments, treating them as objects of material culture worthy of systematic study. Schweinfurth notes the tamarind tree as the preferred source for drum wood, the process of hollowing a cylinder, and the use of goat-skin stripped of hair, strained and laced with thongs. He observes that a fire is kept burning during nightly performances to dry the skin and counteract relaxation from dew. The signal-horns, made from antelope horns, are described as having three holes like small flutes, and he compares them to fifes. The mburrah, a long narrow pipe with a widened air-chamber near the mouthpiece, is likened to ivory signal-horns seen elsewhere in negro countries. This comparative approach—linking Bongo instruments to those of other African peoples—demonstrates Schweinfurth’s effort to place his observations within a broader ethnographic framework, even as his terminology occasionally betrays a colonial hierarchy.

The Dynamics of Performance

Schweinfurth’s account of Bongo festival music emphasizes dramatic shifts in volume and tempo. He describes a typical performance beginning with a lively air, then escalating into “yelling, screeching, and bellowing with all their strength.” Gradually the sound subsides into a “wailing, melancholy strain,” a dirge-like phase, before suddenly erupting again into “the whole fury of the negro throats.” He likens the contrast to “sunshine in the midst of rain.” This attention to dynamic structure suggests an analytical ear, yet the language remains pejorative: the music is “cat’s music run wild.” The women and children contribute by filling gourd-flasks with stones and rattling them “as if they were churning butter,” or striking sticks together. Schweinfurth’s persistent use of simile—comparing unfamiliar sounds to familiar, often domestic or animal noises—reveals his effort to translate the experience for European readers while simultaneously distancing himself from it.

Voice and Translation

The narrative voice is mediated by translator Ellen E. Frewer, whose choices in diction shape the reader’s perception. The original German text is rendered into English with a formal, slightly archaic register that suits the 1873 publication date. Phrases like “the burden of the unearthly hubbub” and “the surging of the voices” carry a literary quality. Frewer preserves Schweinfurth’s tendency toward vivid, sometimes jarring comparisons—the singing “sinks into a very dirge, such as might be chanted at the grave.” The translator also retains the author’s occasional first-person reflections, as when he admits, “Often as I was present at these festivities I never could prevent my ideas from associating Bongo music with the instinct of imitation.” This personal aside, embedded within a scientific report, underscores the subjective lens through which all observations are filtered. The reader is thus reminded that this is not a neutral record but a constructed account shaped by both author and translator.

Readers approaching The Heart of Africa should attend to the interplay between Schweinfurth’s scientific ambitions and his cultural assumptions. The excerpts offer a concentrated example of how nineteenth-century travel writing balanced empirical detail with personal judgment. By noting the specific instruments, performance practices, and the author’s own reactions, one can trace the contours of a mind striving to comprehend the unfamiliar while remaining anchored in its own aesthetic standards. This tension, rather than diminishing the account, makes it a revealing document of cross-cultural encounter.

I remember how Schweinfurth lingered over the Bongo drums, the sound of a people held in his careful words. Years later, a similar patience appeared in another traveller’s account, tracing rivers through frozen lands. Both men listened to the world quietly. That old kinship sits upon my shelf, side by side: Down the Mackenzie and up the Yukon in 1906 — Edition Insights, a gentle echo of the first.