A gourd-resonated frame Xylophone of the Manding peoples of West Africa, found in the Gambia, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Mali and northern Côte d’Ivoire. Possibly the earliest reference to the instrument is that of Ibn Battūta, who visited the court of Mali in 1352 and saw an instrument ‘made from reeds, and provided with gourds below them’. In 1620, the British gold-prospector Richard Jobson described the ballards, the principal instrument of the Gambia, as having 17 keys with gourds suspended beneath them from iron rods. The player used a beater in each hand, the end of which was covered with ‘soft stuff’, and the instrument was played to accompany dancing. In the 1790s, Mungo Park described the Mandingo balafou as having 20 hardwood keys with ‘shells of gourds hung underneath to increase the sound’.
The contemporary instrument has 17 to 19 keys strung together on a frame with a gourd resonator beneath each. The keys are from 27·5 to 40 cm long, 2·5 to 4 cm wide and less than 2·5 cm deep; the undersides and ends are thinned for tuning. The instrument is tuned to an apparent equitonal heptatonic scale and has an approximate range of 2·5 octaves. It is played exclusively by professional male musicians and is used to accompany praisesongs; its repertory is almost identical to that of the kora, which has largely replaced the balo in Senegal and the Gambia (see Kora). Players use a rubber-tipped beater in each hand and sometimes have bells strapped to their wrists.
The balo may be played on its own or in pairs, in which case one instrument provides the basic melody (kumbengo) while the other incorporates melodic variation and ornamentation (birimintingo). This is especially common in the Guinea tradition. In Mali the balo is considered one of the most prestigious instruments of the professional musician and often accompanies the recitation of epic songs such as Sunjata. In the Gambia, the balo is played today by only a few families since it was overshadowed by the kora early in the 20th century. Nevertheless, much of the kora and konting repertory, as well as several playing techniques such as damping of notes, derive from the balo.
The term bala is used by the Kpelle people of Liberia for a free-key log xylophone with four to seven wooden keys resting on banana stems. The instrument is played with beaters of soft wood or raffia midriff and, like the cognate Mano balau and Gio blande, is used by boys on rice-farms for bird-scaring or signalling. Among the neighbouring Gbunde people it is known as kipelevelegu and among the Sapa as gbwilebo. The term balafon, used for the frame xylophone, was probably introduced by European travellers (from the Greek root ‘phono’), since its use is mainly confined to early European literature.
M. Park: Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (London, 1799)
H.G. Farmer: ‘Early References to Music in the Western Sudan’,Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1939), 569–79
G. Schwab: Tribes of the Liberian Hinterland (Cambridge, MA, 1947/R)
A.M. Jones: Africa and Indonesia (Leiden, 1971)
J.H.K. Nketia: The Music of Africa (New York, 1974)
K.A. GOURLAY, LUCY DURÁN