Marvels of music: There’s an instrument that sounds like tanpura and piano!  

Starting from guitar and synthesizer to tabla, harmonium and piano, you must have come across many musical instruments. If you are a music enthusiast, you may be playing one or a few of them too. Is piano in your favourite instruments? If you answer yes to this, then we will introduce you to a close cousin of piano that is native to Africa. Known as kalimba, it is played only with thumbs and the sound it produces, is a combination of piano and tanpura. 

Wondering how it looks? Imagine a small sound box, the size of a book, which is fitted with a row of tuned tabs. It belongs to a unique family of musical instruments called mbira that is native to Africa. 

Mbira family of instruments 
Have you ever heard of the Shona people? Well, they are tribes who are part of the African ethnic group Bantu and are native to Southern Africa, primarily living in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Now, these people enjoy playing mbira, a group of musical instruments that come with a wooden board (often installed with a resonator) with metal tiles attached. They hold them with one hand and use the thumb from the other hand to pluck the tiles. Occasionally, forefingers are also used for extra support. Though the natives call them mbira, musicologists identify them as percussion idiophones or lamellophones that originated more than 3000 years ago. There are quite few instruments that fall in the umbrella of mbira. Some of the examples are Dandaro mbira, pasichigare and kalimba. While the first one is a modern version, the second one is a traditional instrument with 17 keys. However, kalimba is the most popular one and comes with 15 keys usually. Kalimba was invented an English ethnomusicologist named Hugh Travers Tracey in the 1950s. His goal was simple: Popularising the culture of Zimbabwe natives and introducing this thumb piano to the world.  

The naming of kalimba 
Not many Shona people might even know that present-day kalimba, although designed and developed by Tracey, is named after an ancient mbira professional, Kalimba. In fact, it was him who had pioneered the type of mbira on which kalimba is based. It is called nyunga nyunga (translated into ‘something little that causes both fun and trouble’) and has 15 metallic keys, 7 each in two rows and one extra key at the wooden base. Another theory states that kalimba means ‘little wooden xylophone’ since the instrument bears close resemblance to xylophone. 

Famous kalimba artists 
As you can probably imagine, only a single person’s effort is not enough to take a traditional African instrument to the global map. For that, many others need to contribute. Native American singer Maurice White, who is the founding member and leader of the jazz, folk and Afro pop band Earth, Wind & Fire became passionate about his mother’s Zimbabwean origin and thus chanced upon kalimba. Needless to say, he was thoroughly impressed by its potential and ever since the 1970s played it all around the globe during his tours and performances. Similarly, Thomas T. Mapfumo, nicknamed Tthe Lion of Zimbabwe, is a Shona musician who used kalimba to not only exercise his political voice, but also create a brand-new musical genre called Chimurenga (means “liberation” in Shona language) that turned folklores into songs in the 1980s. Other notable kalimba practitioners include Dumisani Maraire who first introduced the thumb piano and the Shona people to North Americans. Today, because of its melody and portable size, kalimba has become quite popular worldwide.