TWO EARLY WEST AFRICAN HARPS IN GLASGOW

Abstract

Two musical instruments, about which little is known, have been in the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow since the nineteenth century. This article relates them to a number of similar instruments in museum collections in Europe and the United States, and identifies the West African coast around Sierra Leone as the most likely place of origin. It also suggests as the likely donor of the instruments Dr Thomas Winterbottom, an eighteenth-century Glasgow graduate and physician to the Colony of Sierra Leone 1792–6. If this suggestion is correct, the two instruments would be rare eighteenth-century African artefacts and of much greater historical importance than has hitherto been recognized.