Home-made tin guitars and tin-fiddles are made by young boys in most parts of formerly colonised Africa. In the early 1960s our maternal cousins taught my older brother to make, tune and play six-string tin guitars. Tin guitars normally were incorporated into informal mission school ensembles comprising metal flageolets (pennywhistles) and wooden tea-box single-string bass. Nightlong mission school dances sustained by this type of ensemble were the highlight of modern rural popular entertainment as well as black Christian wedding dances. The popular kwela style of the 1950s urban black South African music owes its roots to the widespread practice of tin-guitar making and playing. My odler brother (who turned fifty in 2007) continues to make tin guitars, which I have used them to teach and perform with children and record documentary film music.