Building a Kora — The West African Harp-Lute

The kora is a 21-string harp-lute of the West African griots. A huge gourd faced with skin is the body; a long neck holds the strings, which run in two parallel rows and are plucked with the thumbs and forefingers.

Take a large calabash gourd and cut a wide flat opening across one side — the biggest gourd you can find, for a deep, full sound.

Stretch cow-skin rawhide drum-tight over the flat opening and lash it down. This skin is the soundboard that radiates the strings.

Drive a long, straight hardwood neck right through the gourd, sticking out both ends. Two hand-posts either side of the neck give the player something to hold.

Stand a tall wooden bridge upright on the skin with a row of notches down EACH edge — the strings will split into two rows, left and right, one for each thumb.

Run twenty-one strings from the base up over the notched bridge and to the neck, eleven in the left row and ten in the right, each held by a sliding leather tuning ring or a peg.

Tune the two rows so they interleave into a scale, then pluck with the thumbs and forefingers of both hands, the left and right rows answering each other.

The kora is a 'harp-lute', and its clever bridge is why. On a true harp, each string runs at its own angle straight from a soundboard to a neck, one string per note; on a lute, a few strings run parallel over a bridge and along a neck. The kora does both at once: its strings run parallel like a lute, but they pass over a TALL bridge notched down both edges, so they leave the bridge in two flat planes, one on the left and one on the right — effectively two little harps sharing one body, one for each thumb. Each string is a single fixed note (the kora, like a harp, is not stopped or fretted — you simply pluck the string you want), and the two interleaved rows let the player weave fast, rippling patterns with just thumbs and forefingers. The sound is radiated by a stretched skin over a giant calabash gourd, exactly the drum-like resonator idea of the ektara and the banjo, scaled up. Strings obey the same rule as the musical bow — tension, length and mass set the pitch — and the kora belongs with the lyre of Ur and every soundbox-and-strings instrument, the branch of the family that keeps one string per note. It is the instrument of the Mande griots (jeliw), the hereditary musician-historians of West Africa.