ZAMBIA LETTERS, 14

Warthog skull

”You describe how to animate masks. Before donning it, the mask bearer must be facing a mirror. He or she then looks at his or her own reflection. Draws a breath. Closes the eyes. The mask is then put over the face and secured. He or she opens the eyes. Seeing the mask now, for the first time, the breath being pulled is also the breath of the mask. With it, the mask comes to life. 

The Luvale people of northwestern Zambia uses not a visual impulse but an audiell impulse to animate their masks. Supposedly, there were no mirrors around when the tradition was invented. Their ritual for entering the mask goes as follows (this is according to Mr Chibweka, a Luvale man residing in Livingstone): 

First he puts on the legs, then the arms and after that the head. Lastly the throat or neck is sewn in place. When the voice changes, the mask comes alive. The voice leads. Masks are called ghost. The wearer can see through the maskings in the throat. If a wearer recognizes someone, than he can call the person by their name, with the voice of the mask. Every mask has their own voice, their own way of being. In our belief these masks are people who have died a long time ago, ancestors, Ndumba Chavatu, they seem like people but are ghosts.

He goes on to describe the drums used in these rituals. 

Tang is the largest one. Simpukur is the medium. The third, Perenge-perenge, is the smallest one. Everyone has different sounds and their own rhythms. There is also a form rattle.

As you can see, this sounds very much like the battería in Capoeira Angola, down to the Caxixi.  I would imagine that here, too, the instruments ventures into dialogue with one another in a very similar way (and also with the mask wearer, resulting in a conversation going back and forth between the performer and the musicians) but this remains to be seen when I get the chance to experience a ritual. 

On a footnote, I am not sure about the spelling of any of the terms I use above. I have written them down as they sounded to me when he explained them, I hope to get time later to come back and correct this.”

___

Luyando Muleya is young, meticulous, very careful and gives a warm impression. His name means heart. We meet him outside the Safari Company office. Their staff is going to take us to Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park, but let's first spend some more time with Luyando.

1 He is Tonga. The people were displaced by the authorities in connection with the establishment of the Kariba Dam and it was a traumatic experience in their history. Luyando has relatives who still live in a traditional manner.

2 He runs music projects and makes jewelry from copper.

3 He has a curating practice and wants to work with artists who explores their relationship with nature. He appreciates investigations which goes beyond narratives and motifs. Such investigations should involve the choice of materials and processes, as much as the expressions themselves.

4 He has benefited greatly from LuCAC in Lusaka and from a residency he recently completed at LoCA in Livingstone. Tomorrow he will show us their premises. LoCA is also arranging an exhibition with Zambian artists, which he will show us.

5 He has never been on Safari before and never come face to face with many of the animals we will meet during our trip. He has hiked, but never slept under open sky.

The other day, I was listening to a presentation at LuCAC with the artist Gloria Hankombo. She is self-taught and has only been active for two years. Her residency has just finished and in connection with that, she showed a selection of her works. She also spoke about her background and its importance for her. Gloria Hankombo is Tonga. She was teased for this by other kids as she grew up. Tongas are considered primitive by some other peoples. She explains that she is not very comfortable speaking, because she never learned any language properly and she feels that she always has to correct herself. Her first language is English, her second language is Chewa and she has only recently learned Tonga.

Her medium is painting and drawing. She is clearly methodical in her approach, studying other artists and exploring their methods until she has conquered them. Then she will takes their knowledge further in her own works. There is a determination in this that allows her to reach a point of artistic depth. She explains that art is her way of compensating for her difficulties with spoken language.

Many motifs are taken from traditional life in Tonga communities. The content is powerfully ambivalent. She expresses an attraction to traditional life, and at the same time she conveys something that is threatening about it. In some of the drawings she depicts her cousin, who hates cows, near cattle. In other works, she shows mothers braiding girls' hair, an old tradition that is an important part of the social bond between generations in Zambia. Here, the same duality is exhibited. On the one hand, the act of braiding constitutes a strong identity that has shaped Gloria Hankombo and it is obvious that she appreciates the practice. At the same time, braiding is also an expression of the forced gender roles that underlie traditional society.

Do we know more about the Tongas? The current ruling party consists mainly of Tongas. There are tensions between them and the previous government, which was made up of Chewas. We will have reason to return to this conflict later.

In the meanwhile, we continue our travel in the landrover. It goes through the bushes of the national park and takes us along sandy and bumpy roads. The first animal we see is a monitor lizard. We then see elephants, giraffes and Impalas. All the animals come very close to the car, sometimes only a few meters away. Our guide explains that although some of them can be very aggressive, they see the car as an object and that is why we are safe as long as we stay in it.

We continue on our way and meet a group of park rangers. They are armed with Kalashnikovs and dressed in military uniforms. They allow us to leave the car and instruct us to walk with them in a straight line. One of them goes first and one of them goes last. We follow them for about two hundred meters out into the bush.

Here we stop, in front of a herd of rhinos. They are very close, no more than 20 meters away. The herd consists of five animals. There are also many baboons. They run around wildly and fight with each other over scraps of food. We stand still in a line in front of the rhino herd and watch them while they feed. The animals ignore us completely. The park rangers tell us about their habits.

Suddenly, the tall bush growing behind the rhinos disperses and a herd of elephants appear. The two herds interact peacefully with each other and give each other space. The park rangers tell us that unlike the hippos, rhinos and elephants usually get along well.

There is nowhere to run if something happens but we trust the rangers.

After a while, we make our way back to the car. The journey continues. We see wildebeest (perhaps more dangerous than the other animals we saw), more impalas, more giraffes and a herd of warthogs.

A selection of lessons from the trip:

1. Giraffes have seven vertebrae in their long necks. They bend their knees when they give birth so that the baby doesn't have to drop that far to the ground. They can see lions from a very long distance out in the bush.

2. There are only white rhinos in the park. They are imported from Zimbabwe. The blacks that were there before were killed by poachers. The fact that they are called white and black has nothing to do with their color but is due to a language confusion that arose when the British first heard the local names of the animals. The white rhinoceros is larger and ii is characterized by moving and feeding in open terrain. 

3. Warthogs need to be able to roll in mud to cool down when it gets hot. In times of drought, they die from the heat. We saw a skull by the road.

4. You should never go near termite mounds. They attract poisonous snakes and other dangerous animals, not least because they are often in the shade of trees. Termites dig burrows up to three meters deep under their mounds.

At one point we stop at an abandoned cemetery. It features the remains of the first British colonizers. They had no in-depth knowledge of malaria and made the mistake of settling near the Zambezi River, where the mosquitoes breed. Many of them died during the first year and so they called in a doctor. Unfortunately, he soon suffered the same fate. After a couple of years, it was decided to abandon the colony and establish another settlement further away from the river. This developed into Livingstone.