A West African lute. Its body is a hollowed-out, canoe-shaped piece of wood with dried animal (often goat) skin stretched over it like a drum. The neck is a fretless length of dowel that inserts into the body but does not emerge from the base of the instrument (unlike the kora where the neck goes totally through the calabash resonator). For this reason musicologists classify the ngoni as a 'internal spike lute'. The strings (which are made of thin fishing line like the kora) are lashed to the neck with movable strips of leather, and then fed over a fan-shaped bridge at the far end of the body. The string closest to the player actually produces the highest pitch, and the player plucks it with his thumb, just like a 5-string banjo. This feature, coupled with the fact that the n'goni's body is a drum rather than a box, provides strong evidence that the n'goni is the African ancestor of the banjo.

Instruments of this general construction can be found from Morocco to Nigeria, and everywhere in between. Some are very large, such as the gimbri played by the mystic Gnawa brotherhood of Morocco. Others are tiny, such as the one-stringed gurkel of northern Mali. In Senegal the Wolof call it xalam, while in the Gambia the Mandinka have a 5-string version they call kontingo. It is also closely related to the akonting. The version played by the Manding griots of the Gambia, Mali and Guinea is called a djeli n'goni (shown here) and is typically about two-feet long and has either 4 or 7 strings.