Stedman's Creole Bania

Views of the Creole Bania

2/28/2019

I spent February at the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis on a William Reese Company Fellowship, looking at the papers of Captain John Gabriel Stedman and investigating the banjo's early history in Suriname and the Caribbean.

This is a banjo, one of the earliest images of a banjo. This engraving is only one of four pre-1800s images of the banjo, taken from Stedman's memoir Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Suriname. The special collections at the Bell Library have Stedman's diaries from Suriname, notes and journals from after his time in Europe, the original 1790 manuscript, and many different versions of the published memoir. To the left is a hand-colored plate from the English first edition, while below are versions from the German, French, and Dutch editions.

German edition.

French edition.

Dutch edition.

The first edition included 81 plates, based on Stedman's own drawings and watercolors. He provided his watercolors and drawings to the engravers, who made plates that became prints in the book. Below is one of his watercolors of a forest scene, and the engraver's version

18th century watercolor of a man sleeping in a hammock in the jungle, attended by enslaved Black men with a fire.

18th Century engraving of a white man in a hammock, attended by enslaved Black men with a campfire. A similar image is done in watercolor.

Above: "Manner of Sleeping in the Forest," a hand-colored engraving from the first edition of Stedman's memoir, held at the James Ford Bell Library. Left: One of the remaining watercolors painted by Stedman, also from the James Ford Bell Library.

Unfortunately, Stedman's drawing or watercolor the engraver used to create the image of the Creole Bania is lost. One possibility, however, might be that the engraver used the actual instruments Stedman collected in Suriname to create the drawing. We know Stedman brought back the Bania, but we don't know how it ended up at in the collections of what is now the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, where it's now on permanent display as part of the Tropenmuseum's exhibit "Afterlives of Slavery."

The Creole Bania, the earliest banjo made of a calabash with three long strings and one short string.

The oldest known existing banjo, made by an enslaved person in Suriname and collected by Stedman in the 1770s. Held by the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen.

When Richard and Sally Price re-discovered the instrument in the 1970s, it was labeled "Creole Bania," but in the Asian department's storage. Even though it didn't look like the engraving in Stedman's book, they knew it was the instrument he collected.
So why do the instrument and the engraving look so different? The engravers may have been looking at a sketch or watercolor and not the actual instrument, and didn’t have enough detail to faithfully recreate the instrument. Or (what I think is more likely), they let their white supremacy get in the way. They thought, a handmade instrument by a Black person in Suriname had to be “crude,” “primitive,” or “simple.”
We don’t know who made the Creole Bania or how Stedman or the museum in the Netherlands got it. (I’ve got some theories but I’ll leave those for another day.) But it was very likely made by an enslaved man with a lot of woodworking experience. I haven’t seen the Creole Bania in person, but I did see the Panja, a second early banjo from Suriname. Banjo maker Pete Ross tells me that both have an incredible amount of intentionality. The Bania has an ornately carved headstock, beading around the edge that requires a specialized tool, and parts that have been smoothed with a hand plane. Whoever made it had access to these tools and knew how to use them well. Even the construction of the neck entering the calabash meant something. To say that gourd- or calabash-bodied early banjos are crude or primitive is a reflection of the white supremacy that lives on in our thoughts and words.

In the collections of the De Mey van Streefkerk Papers at the James Ford Bell Library, I found evidence of how much the planation owners literally valued woodworkers. The Dutch family owned plantations and people to work on those plantations. In an inventory of the enslaved, men named Champagne, Saul, Hector, and William are listed as carpenters. In Dutch, the word “Timmerneger” designated enslaved Black woodworkers and carpenters who lived on the plantation. These men were highly skilled and highly valued. Perhaps it was one such woodworker who created the Creole Bania.

2 Comments

Ed Christian

6/26/2023 11:02:55 am

I’ve read Stedman (John’s Hopkins, 1992 edition). Thanks for the closeups of the banjo etching. One thing that may be worth noting is that the headstock seems to be the beginning of the root of a sapling carved into the neck, not a fancy carving. That would help prevent splitting of the neck and perhaps improve the sound. That etching is beyond question banjo-like.

I think you should consider the possibility that the actual instrument photo from the museum is NOT a banjo but a bowed instrument. The strings are too far off the neck. It looks long in the photo, but is really only 32” long and has a scale of perhaps 17” to 19”: about like a viola. The bridge would have been close to the neck, not the tailpiece, or it could not be played. It could have been fingered like some other African bowed instruments, with the inside of the finger pressing down on the string but not touching the neck, rather than the finger tip pressing the string to the neck, as with a violin.

I’m also not even certain that this was made in Surinam or by creoles, as the headstock is too different. I suspect that it was made in India and brought to Surinam by a sailer on one of the many Dutch ships that arrived from the Dutch East Indies and had sailors from throughout that area, then sold or traded.

Banjo-like instruments seem to have reached Africa possibly before 1300, brought by traders along the east coast from Persia, India, and the Muslim Middle East. They may have also been carried North Africans who descended down across the Sahara to buy slaves carried north in caravans. It seems that ultimately, the Persians were the root inventors of the many stringed instruments with skin heads that spread to India and Africa and the stringed instruments that spread into Spain and then into Europe and were eventually made with wooden tops rather than skin as suitable wood became more available and became ouds, lutes, guitars, rebecs, and fiddles.

It seems to me unlikely that any Africans sold into slavery brought banjos with them. However, some Africans who played banjos in Africa brought the knowledge of how to make and play them in their way to the new world and eventually, when they had the opportunity, made them from memory.

Tony Thomas MFA

9/24/2023 08:43:45 pm

No one has shown there were banjos in Africa. Banjo researchers from Europe, North America, Africa, and the Caribbean thought they would find banjos in Africa that were not the result of the influence of banjos brought from the Americas or from Europe once banjo entertainers from England and other European countries began to bring banjos to Africa in the mid 19th century.

As banjo scholars, scholars of African music, African musicians have searched for decades seeking "Africans who played banjos in Africa" and came to the conclusion no such thing ever existed, either Ed Christian simply does not know what he is talking about, or has to bring forth the evidence for his statements that have evaded people on 4 continents who dedicated their lives to this question.

So Ed, tell us about "banjos in Africa" a whole world of people are waiting for your evidence on that issue?

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Views of the Creole Bania

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