Fan Drum and Handja
This image depicts Fang musicians wearing beads and metal jewelry. One is playing a vertical log drum and the other a balafon-type instrument. They likely would have likely been enslaved as royal musicians. Du Chaillu described the Handja as being made with " “a light reed frame, 3 feet long by 1 ½ broad, into which are set and securely fastened a set of hollow gourds covered by strips of a hard red wood found in the forests” (p. 87). The Fang people, also known as Fãn or Pahouin, are an ethnic group that straddle the southern Bight of Benin and northern Loango Coast regions. The speak a Southern Bantu language called Fang, Pahouin, Pamue or Pangwe. The Fang people likely arrived to this region to avoid violence emanating out of the formation of the Sokoto Caliphate after 1804. Paul Belloni Du Chaillu (c. 1831–1903) was a French-American traveler, zoologist, and anthropologist. He became famous in the 1860s as the first European to confirm the existence of gorillas and the Pygmy people of Africa's Central Interior region.
Image Title
Fan Drum and Handja
RegID
SI-OB-629
Date
1850s
Title
Fan Drum and Handja
Source
Paul B. Du Chaillu, Explorations & adventures in equatorial Africa (London, 1861), p. 81. (Copy in Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library)
Language
English
Item sets
Pre-Colonial Africa: Society, Polity, Culture
Spatial Coverage
Africa--West Central North
Reproduced In
Paul B. Du Chaillu, Explorations & adventures in equatorial Africa (London, 1861), p. 81.
Researchers
Jerome Handler; Michael Tuite; Henry B. Lovejoy Graduate Research Assistants: Tiffany Beebe; Travis May
Identifier
DuChaillu-81