How I really started instrument making

The info I put on the 'about me' section is a bit boring so here's the real story. It's mostly about building a drum under the tutelage of a man who lived in a tree back in '98 but actually the first instrument I made when I was 17, a little violin. I was in Cape Town at the time for bass lessons. Travelling 3 days there and 3 days back on the train between Harare and Cape Town for bass lessons is another story. But since I really didn't have the stamina at that stage to practise for 7 hours a day, I needed something else to do to pass the time and that's when I found a model of a little build-it-yourself violin in a hobby shop. So I followed the instructions and managed to put it together, fun, fun ,fun. When I look at it now it's pretty crude. I had no idea about cutting a bridge blank so the strings are way too high, I didn't even know to shape the button at the back. But the funny thing is that now after years of training in real violinmaking and in a workshop full of sophistocated, properly made instruments, it's often this very clumsy first attempt that really catches people's attention and gets them talking. Not sure what to make of that, really.

Anyway, back to the drum. I learnt to make my djembe from a guy called Anthony, who had a large rambling property on the outskirts of Harare. It had a wild permaculture garden, rampant with banana groves and paw-paw trees. The main house was rented out to a family and he lived up a tree at the top of the garden.  Actually that's not quite true. He had a maid who lived up a tree. He lived in a self-built house on a large granite rock that was designed in such a way that a large tree growing out from the side of the rock was an integral part of the house. It was really beautiful and technically speaking still a tree house. Now in a country like Sweden where everyone does everything for themselves I feel a bit self-conscious talking about how many people we employ in Zimbabwe to do all sorts of things. But that's just the way things work there. Even a guy who abandoned his house to live in a tree employed 2 people. Tich helped with the drum building and well, lets call her Patience as I can't remember her real name - very nice, quite game and long suffering - lived up a tree. I was secretly a bit envious of Patience as she had a very nice tree house to live in. She would sweep the ground and make us boiled eggs on toast made over the fire and cups of hot sweet milky tea.

Mmm, morning tea - thick slabs of fresh Lobels bread all black and smokey from the fire and the special taste of african tea made properly over the fire by boiling up the milk and water and sugar and loose tea leaves and then drunk out of an enamel mug. Making a drum outside in the fresh air does give you an appetite. We also ate bowlfuls of bananas from the garden with my grandmother's homemade yoghurt (she was also a permaculture fan and therefore approved of this little adventure of mine and kept us well supplied). Supper usually consisted of sadza and vegetables in some form, eaten under the stars, after which I'd collapse into my tent.

Also part of the set up there were about 3 dogs which lounged contentedly around in the shade, snapping at the odd fly, and 2 cats called Jane and Roger which Anthony had inherited from two different people. The funny thing about the cats was that Jane, elegant if burr-ridden, with long white fur was really a boy cat and the tough short-haired Roger was really a girl.

So, how do you make a drum? Take a large straight section of trunk, at least 40 cm in diameter and 63cm high in my case from a Jacaranda tree, and bore a hole down the middle with a special kind of large hand drill called an awl. This means you have to screw in the awl a short way and then take it out, and turn the log upside down to get the shavings out, again and again and again. No small task considering that the log weighed about as much me. Then you hollow out the middle wth a chisel and shape the outside with an axe and a spoke shave and then skin a goat. Actually, I didn't have to skin a goat, just soaked and shaved a dried and salted goatskin. Then you fix the skin to the drum with a special method using metal hoops and rope. There you have a drum and a lot of nice new muscles that you didn't know existed. Actually truth be told, I did get Tich to help me out with some of the worst work. When it was all finished we had a big jam session with drums, digeridoo and double bass.

Around that time a friend of mine gave me an application for a scholarship that the Norwegian aid organisation was offering to Zimbabwean students to learn instrument making in Norway. Sounded like fun, so just for a lark I sent it in. Some time later we were called to do a test at the Harare Polytechnic. We watched a video, had to plane 2 sides of a block of wood to perpendicular to each other and wrote a maths test. Sometimes you wonder how people think, the way they'd set this maths test with numbers that didn't compute. Do they really expect people in Africa to go around with scientific calculators in their pockets? Of course no one had a calculater and they didn't provide us with logorhythmic tables either, not that I can remember how to use them, so we ended up handing in pages and pages of complicated long division and long multiplication scribbles. Just hope they had lots of fun marking it, that's all.

Anyway many months later, to my surprise as I'd forgotten all about it, they told me that I had got one of the scholarships. And that is the real story of how a white girl from Zimbabwe ended up learning violinmaking in the chilly climes of northern Europe. And now I have my own business and a lovely workshop in Sweden, customers knocking at the door, but always, always, lurking somewhere at the back of my mind is this secret yearning to abandon everything here in this strange modern land where everything works and go back to Africa, to live up a tree and make drums.