Musical Instruments of the Indigenous People of South Africa. Percival Kirby

Limpopo; but there exist two eighteenth-century accounts of the mbila as seen at the Cape, which show that the instrument had been ‘imported’ into the Union even in those days. The first of these descriptions was written by La Caille,² who, under the date 1st January 1753, wrote:

      I have seen an instrument played which is used by the Caffres. It is composed of twelve rectangular boards, each eighteen to twenty inches long, whose breadth goes on diminishing from the first, which is about six inches, to the last, which is hardly two and a half. These boards are assembled side by side on two triangles of wood, to which they are attached by means of leather thongs, so that the whole instrument forms a kind of table four feet long and twenty inches broad: under each board there is a piece of calabash which is attached to it [sic] to increase the resonance. A man carries this instrument in front of him, almost in the same way that our women in Paris carry an inventaire (a flat basket suspended before the wearer). He plays by striking thereon with two mallets of wood, of which the shape and size approximate to those of a plumber’s soldering-iron. This instrument is tolerably sonorous, and with its twelve notes a great many tunes can be played upon it.