West Africa has produced a great diversity of harps, which are consistently uniform in certain respects. From the three- or four-stringed bolon that incites warriors to battle and to the six-stringed donso ngoni or seven-stringed simbi which provide music to protect and impassion hunters, to the twenty-one-stringed kora that symbolizes the royal synthesis of indigenous and Islamic cultures, all calabash spike harps are a major feature of traditional and even modern music in West Africa. The pentatonic sound of the donso ngoni is reminiscent of African American blues tonality, and its use in modern electric ensembles in Mali makes for some of the most fascinating popular music in Africa. Wooden-box-resonator spike harps of the forest regions farther south do not enjoy the widespread distribution nor the documentation of their northern relatives and may be in a state of decline.

The peculiarity of West African harp construction has until quite recently prevented scholars from realizing that these instruments are harps and not a hybrid kind of harp lute. By articulating the distribution of these harps, as well as their morphological features, I hope to have laid the groundwork for future comparative studies which might investigate with increasing sophistication the diffusion of musical instruments.