Mbira

Mbira ( ; Shona pronunciation:), also known as kalimba and zanza (or variant spellings), are a family of musical instruments, traditional to the Shona people of Zimbabwe.

The instruments consist of a wooden board (often fitted with a resonator) with attached staggered metal tines, played by holding the instrument in the hands and plucking the tines with the thumbs and/or fingers. Musicologists classify it as a lamellaphone, part of the plucked idiophone family of musical instruments.

In Eastern and Southern Africa, there are many kinds of mbira, often accompanied by the hosho, a percussion instrument. It is often an important instrument played at religious ceremonies, weddings, and other social gatherings. The "Art of crafting and playing Mbira/Sansi, the finger-plucking traditional musical instrument in Malawi and Zimbabwe" was added to the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2020.

The kalimba was commercially produced and exported by the ethnomusicologistHugh Tracey in the late 1950s, popularizing similar instruments outside of Africa. Tracey's design was modelled after the mbira nyunga nyunga and named kalimba after an ancient predecessor of the mbira family of instruments. It was popularized in the 1960s and early 1970s largely by such musicians as Maurice White of the band Earth, Wind and Fire and Thomas Mapfumo. These musicians included mbira on stage accompanying modern rock instruments such as electric guitar and bass, drum kit, and horns. Their arrangements included numerous songs directly drawn from traditional mbira repertoire. Other notable influencers bringing mbira music out of Africa are Dumisani Maraire, who brought marimba and karimba music to the American Pacific Northwest; Ephat Mujuru, who was one of the pioneer teachers of mbira dzavadzimu in the United States; and the writings and recordings of Zimbabwean musicians made by Paul Berliner. It is common for the instruments to be called kalimbas in western countries.

Joseph H. Howard and Babatunde Olatunji have both suggested the mbira (and other metal lamellaphones) are thoroughly African, being found only in areas populated by Africans or their descendants. Similar instruments are reported to have been used in Okpuje, a village in Nsukka, in southeastern Nigeria, in the early 1900s.