mbanza

The banjo's ancestors came from West Africa, where similar instruments—gourd bodies, skin heads, stick necks—had been played for centuries. In Kimbundu, an Angolan language, mbanza meant a stringed instrument. Similar words existed across the region: banza, banjar, banjil.

Enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and American South recreated these instruments from memory and available materials. The earliest banjos were handmade: gourds, animal skins, wooden necks, gut strings. They were called banjar, banza, bangie—the African words adapted to English ears.

The banjo became central to African American music. It was the instrument of plantation life, of minstrel shows (where white performers in blackface appropriated and mocked Black music), of early country and folk. The five-string banjo emerged in the 1830s, combining African design with European additions.

By the 20th century, the banjo was so associated with white Appalachian music that its African origins were forgotten. Only recently has the fuller history been recovered—the banjo as an African instrument, carried across the Atlantic in the minds and hands of the enslaved.