Description
This paper revisits Olga Boone's 1936 Les Xylophones du Congo Belge, a foundational yet flawed study of the manza xylophones from the Azande people in the northern region of Belgian Congo (1908-1960), which is the present day Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This paper aligns with the conference theme on postcolonial music history through illustrating how the critical reassessment using modern music technology clarifies the misleading data created during the colonial period, and reveals the tensions between Western scientific reasoning and the complexities of the traditional African music practices. This paper exposes the importance of revisiting colonial archives and ethnographical data to serve the decolonization of a museum musical collection.
Contains of ten wooden keys and mounted on a fixed frame separated by small bridge boards, the manza xylophones are part of the musical instrument collection in the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium (RMCA). By recording the collection instruments and using a frequency software, i.e., Sonic Visualizer and Tarsos, the research identifies significant discrepancies between Boone’s pitch frequency graphs and the actual pitch arrangement of the twenty-three manza xylophones of RMCA. Boone’s reinterpretations of the manza xylophone tuning—altering pitch orders and transposing the octave pairs to fit a standardized zig-zag model—reflect an imposition of Western epistemology on the incommensurable music systems of the indigenous culture. The recent measurement reevaluates the etic, universalizing approach in Boone’s frequency graphs and classification system. Grounded on an idiocultural approach (Kubik 1996:6) and a universal analytical framework, Boone’s analysis was driven by her primary research scope of classifying and mapping ethnic entities through the musical instrument collection (Sciot 2018), but failed to incorporate an insider/emic understanding of the manza culture and practices.
Reference
Kubik, G. (1996). ‘Emics and Etics Re-Examined, Part 1: Emics and Etics: Theoretical Considerations.’ In African Music 7(3): 3–10. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30250055.
Sciot, E. (2018). ‘Performing Science Amongst the Filing Cabinets. Women, Anthropology and Museums in Belgium (1930–1970).’ In History and Anthropology 29(5): 620- 644. DOI: 10.1080/02757206.2018.1538046.
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