a the a : t r -mediation j redinha paredes p l media theory and history, bridging the pre-colonial,...

Critical Interventions 9/10, Spring 2012

Alguém varreu o fogo a minha infância e na fogueira arderam todos os ancestres.

(Some fire swept through my childhood and the fire burned all of the ancestors.)1

—“Terra Autobiográfica” by Francisco Fernando da Costa

Andrade

Júlio Vilhena, scholar and son of the then Delegate Administrator for the Companhia de Diamantes de Angola (Diamang), wrote an article for the Journal of the International Folk Music Council in 1955, in which he presented a folklore project of the Dundo Museum in Lunda North, Angola. He comments on the logistics of recording folk songs and oral culture among the ethnic Chokwe residents in the region, stating,

In the future a tape recorder will be used for this work, which will give greater mobility, as it will avoid the transport of the voluminous and fragile stock of virgin discs in the conditions of travel prevailing in the tropics.2

The excursions Vilhena describes included tents, trucks, and generators that were all subject to heat, bad roads, and humidity. However, for Vilhena, this process of etching Chokwe voices into

“virgin discs” was saving the Chokwe culture from demise at the hands of the Chokwe themselves, who, according to him, were discarding their heritage in favor of “newer” musical forms. They were denying the traditions of their ancestors, an ironic characterization of the upheavals that took place in the Lunda region during the rise of the mining industry and colonial conflict—after all, 80 percent of Diamang’s workforce was Chokwe, a large portion of whom were conscripted by the colonial government.3 Vilhena explains that the Dundo Museum was the first line of defense in saving tangible and intangible Chokwe culture. The company’s last resort, he says, was the use of phonographic discs and other media objects to record analogical information that could pass through and out of these tropical conditions and into the ether—the non-place safety zone of storage media.

Diamang built the Dundo Museum in 1940s and it became the ultimate apparatus to store information about what they called “life” in the Lunda provinces, and then to transmit that information to the Chokwe and around the world in the form of “education.” Under the directorship of José Redinha, from the 1940s through the 1960s, the museum collected and exhibited thousands of objects, choreographed cultural events, exhibited photographs of chiefs and political leaders, and hosted scholars from around the world, who published an impressive corpus of scholarship on the Chokwe and other native Angolan populations.4 Most of the research was published in Diamang’s Cultural Publications

accEssinG thE ancEstors: thE rE-mEdiation oF José rEdinha’s ParEdEs Pintadas da lunda

delinda Collier, School of the Art institute of Chicago

123ACCESSinG thE AnCEStOrS

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series, of which there are 89 volumes.5 This essay will focus on one of those publications and its subsequent adaptations: José Redinha’s Paredes Pintadas da Lunda (Painted Walls of Lunda) (1953). Paredes is a compilation of Chokwe hut murals that Redinha collected between the years 1939 and 1943. Using photography and watercolor, he copied the images from huts primarily around the Chitato district of the Lunda Sul province of northeastern Angola, 10 km from the city of Dundo. Bertrand Brothers, Inc. of Lisbon, specialists in typography, printed Paredes with its 102 color plates. Redinha replicated the murals as closely possible, even using the same pigments and binders as the Chokwe artists. As he did with the maps and sketches he included in publications and company reports, Redinha signed each watercolor as if it were an original work of art. This case study attempts to unravel the march of mediation and its painful digestions using three moments of Paredes: Redinha’s initial intervention into the artistic practices of the Chokwe, the book’s publication and circulation, and its re-mediation by two recent online heritage projects. Within this essay, Parades acts as an object of media theory and history, bridging the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial periods in Angola.

Paredes is a colonialist object par excellence. Its publication by Diamang occurred within a bounded situation, as Diamang was a hermetic and hierarchical company, a geographically isolated organization, and a total project of control. Often called a “state within a state,” Diamang maintained health services, agriculture, a radio station, museum, and a hydroelectric dam, and by the 1950s it was returning enormous profits to a cadre of international investors, as well as the Portuguese and colonial Angolan governments. In its many activities, Diamang measured and controlled every aspect of life

in the Lunda provinces—what they termed Scientific Colonialism—producing knowledge that encompassed studies of botany, biology, zoology, and medicine, and stressing the re-education of the native population.6 In the decades following its publication, a generation of anti-colonial artists began to look at Paredes with the intent of re-mediating its images, mostly in paintings, to serve the growing independence movement and to repatriate Angola’s indigenous visual heritage. In some cases, Redinha himself mentored these artists.

The idea that native art operated by a disinterested autonomy was attractive to anti-colonial Angolan writers and artists before and after Angola’s independence in 1975. The most famous poem by Angola’s first president, Agostinho Neto,

“Havemos de Voltar (We Shall Return),” uses the trope of “return” to the land, the ancestors, the minerals, and the culture as the ultimate act of activism.7 Scholar and visual artist Manuel Vitor Teixeira, or Viteix, researched Chokwe art as a similar nationalist return to primordial Angola. He was an activist-artist before independence and a cultural administrator for the Marxist-Leninist Movimento Popular da Libertação de Angola (MPLA) government after independence. For him, accessing and nationalizing the writings of Portuguese anthropologists was a revolutionary act, a return to the ancestors ghosted by the Portuguese. In particular, Paredes was an important resource for artists who wanted to learn about and use Chokwe images in their easel paintings. By resuscitating native methods of mediation, as Viteix’s reasoning went, contemporary artists freed the colonial stranglehold on African communalist art and society, concurrent with a Marxist restructuring of the state. In other words, re-mediation is remediation: an improvement of a technological medium, as well as a societal correction.8

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It is important, then, to be specific about how Redinha disallowed for innovation within Chokwe art, and particularly his position concerning the recursive logic of many Chokwe art practices, their self-referentiality, and interactivity. For it was his appraisal of Chokwe art as static and obsolescent—which was demonstrably politically motivated—that Angolan artists desired to negate. In this essay, I will repeatedly, sometimes allegorically, refer to a Chokwe practice that most clearly performs the tension between system and agency: sona. Sona is a drawing performance that has a very clear and open logic, which is articulated by its practitioners, but is incrementally complex and closed to non-practitioners. As such, it contains within it a theory and method of pictorial representation and, in the larger scheme, it mediates assertions of power and conceptualizes societal progression. For instance, sona instructs boys as they are initiated into the mukanda rite at puberty, where they are instructed for a period of time on rituals, history, and the production of objects, such as masks and figures, which mediate communication with the ancestral spirits.9 Sona is a scalar, self-perpetuating system, like cybernetics, and like cybernetics, the reception-transmission process is where meaning and its translation into material authority is negotiated. This autonomous structure of sona, as well as its manipulation and potential for usurpation, will be an important link to the discussion of the two recent digital projects and the “recursive” logic of the Internet.10

Two online heritage projects digitized material from Paredes: the Lunda Tchokwe project of the contemporary art exhibition, Trienal de Luanda (2006), and the Cultura Lunda Tchokwe project, launched in 2003 by International Trading and Mining, Ltd. (ITM). Angolan artist and Trienal de Luanda director, Fernando Alvim, authored both projects. Each project digitized and exhibited sections from Paredes for related purposes:

aesthetic and archival. Redinha’s signature was digitally removed from the images in order to

“repair an injustice” done to the Chokwe artists, in that they were unnamed by Redinha. For both projects, visibility and participation were the guiding principles. The latter part of this essay will argue that the democratic gesture of removing Redinha’s signature operates on the interface of a complex geopolitical system of media objects, flows of information and capital, and power plays that are obfuscated with each act of digital mediation.

These projects give us pause to consider the colonialist structure of media themselves, particularly the myth that “native” media and their logics are unconsciously self-organizing, analogical, and “real,” as opposed to colonialist media, which are artificial projects of rationalistic control and surveillance (digital).11 Rather, that which passed through the signifier and into a technological medium with colonization was not any primordial real presence of the Chokwe ancestors, but Chokwe media that likewise negotiated conceptions of the ancestors and their protocols of access. It is clear that sona went from a land-based medium to a more mechanized medium that privileged information and opticality, its materials and logics much more dispersed. However, even within Chokwe media practices, materials and logics are used to obsolesce previous media of transmission and to colonize access itself.

Therefore, mediation is the constant destruction and construction of ancestors, with ancestors being “real” or primary mediation, such as the speech act. In these various interventions, the latest digital project included, the discourse reveals a unanimous sentiment that older media are closer to the real than new media—a desire for a more pure connection with things like the ground, the spiritual realm, and the body—the


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analog. For mid-century Structuralists, like Victor Turner, symbolism in Africa indicated a direct relationship with the ancestors. When symbols acted as consciously manipulated (changing) media, they were seen as either an aberration or proof that colonialism had permeated to the extent that ancestor worship, indeed, collectivism itself, had died. Reading mediation against the grain of a lost tradition and a disconnection from real ancestors, I instead utilize the ancestors as a way to conceptualize mediation as a tool that both invests and divests communities of power. All of the media within this essay seize control of the protocols of transmission as a strategic method of securing resources and the authority to enunciate a particular history.

Media theory often describes “ghosting” in terms of its ability to mythologize and render previous media obsolete. Harold Innis and Walter Ong approach a civilizational genealogy of media from what Ong calls “primary orality” to print cultures, and how empires are formed by superior modes of communication.12 They describe a progression of media linked with “the order of things,” as technology builds on itself. More recently, Matthew Fuller has described a more internal, ecological process of media, as it “eats” itself: “[e]ach body stretched around another marks the mastery of a domain.”13 Media theory’s description of ghosting (in Fuller, a result of the violent act of mediation) links technological obsolescence to both its death and

Figure 1. Screen shot of one of the Trienal de Luanda Lunda Tchokwe pages showing a version of Estampa 13 from Paredes Pintadas da Lunda (2006).

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immortality: as one media envelops another, the dead are kept in the present. Within European colonization, one must add to this spectrality: the self-imposed charge to save the primordial human family, of which the father figure was the colonial occupier.14 Reading these together, Redinha’s book intentionally placed Chokwe knowledge transmission in the realm of the dead—it calcified the protocols, participation, and power negotiation in those societies it purported to save. Though media theory rarely specifically addresses the history of European colonialism, writers such as Friedrich Kittler emphasize the meta aspects of media: “All the orders and judgments, announcements and prescriptions (military and legal, religious and medical) that produced mountains of corpses were communicated along the very same channel that monopolized the descriptions of those mountains of corpses.”15 Kittler’s “channel” emphasizes the specificity of the mode of transmission and the type of information suited to it. Colonialist media forced the Chokwe out of the loop of history transmission and detached them from the land, which, mediated by bodies and stories, was the location of the ancestors.

SonA

As Redinha recorded the murals in his 1940s fieldwork, he encountered lusona (plural of sona), as they appeared in mural compositions, not in performance, which compelled him to write about them as finished symbols (Figure 1). He does not include very much about their logical structure in Paredes; rather, he uses sona to illustrate his processual theory of Chokwe drawing. During this time period, ethnomathematical analyses of lusona were basically nonexistent. Redinha often references Eduardo dos Santos’s mid-century literature on sona, which discusses the lusona as designs.16 Dos Santos analyzed lusona as

“pictographs and ideograms,” according to their symbolic use value in everyday life. For Redinha, as for Dos Santos, the finished lusona are at most illustrative, but not logical. They are primitively abstract, but not geometrically advanced. Redinha also references Hermann Baumann’s work on the diagrams, which claims that they have a predominantly religious function.17

Sona’s multi-media performance should be briefly described here, as it will introduce how its underlying logic comes to signify primitive collectivity, after being enveloped by “foreign” and mechanized media.18 The process by which lusona are drawn in the sand is formulaic, as the format of the resulting images appears. The akwa kuta sona, the elder maker of the sona drawing, who is usually in his 50s or 60s, finds a patch of ground and smoothes it to make a clear drawing surface. He begins the drawing by impressing dots with the tips of his fingers. The dots are carefully plotted equidistant from one another, measured by the distance between the fingers. After the practitioner has plotted the grid specific to the sona he will draw, he begins to draw an unbroken line around the dots: in Western mathematics, a Eulerian path. He circumnavigates each of the dots quickly and precisely, never lifting his finger, to create a lattice pattern. In some instances, the conventional method of drawing entails starting at one edge of the dot grid and drawing a diagonal line down the middle until the edge is reached, making a 90 degree turn and returning in a diagonal line, until all of the dots are outlined and the line returns to its starting point (Figure 2). Accordingly, most of the sona patterns are symmetrical.19

The drawing of the line is the challenge—the riddle—and demonstrates the akwa kuta sona’s memory and skill. The line, or the mufunda, is the key element in the communicative process. It demonstrates both the figurative elements


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of the drawing and its anima: its play and performance. It also determines the success of mastering the algorithms and memorizing the corpus of representations and stories. Thereafter, practitioners can scale them up or down, add figurative elements to the finished figure, and challenge others to drawing competitions. Given their performative nature, there is great pressure on the akwa kuta sona to execute the drawings perfectly. Mistakes are often marked by laughter or a quiet sarcasm. Sona is a pastime for Chokwe men and a favorite activity of men passing through each other’s towns. It is a social event; a conventional communication medium.

At times, the akwa kuta sona narrates the corresponding myth as he is drawing the figure. Other times he is silent as he concentrates on the process and the finished results are explained. Because the drawings are finished with the interweaving of one unbroken line, it is not only the finished image that must be retained in the memory of the akwa kuta sona, but also the process of its revealing. Paulus Gerdes refers to the drawings as mnemonic devices that aid both the elders and their students in rehearsing social mores and political configurations.20 Similarly, Gerhard Kubik calls sona the Chokwe “library” and he notes how they “convey to the male

Figure 2. “Habitação com Pinturas.” Photographic record 18634957. Courtesy of Universidade de Coimbra archive of the Companhia de Diamantes de Angola.

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community’s ideas about existing institutions, to stimulate fantasy, abstract logical thinking and even meditation.”21 As such, sona can also be understood as a liturgical practice, according to Mário Fontinha. He explains, “The sand drawings are part of a liturgy of songs and ancient rites, a type of mnemonic language perpetuated by oral tradition.”22

Like computer science, the flexibility of the system lies in the simplicity of its binary structure: the line and dot. The space in between the two is activated during the performance of delimitation and circumscription, and the subsequent projection of meaning onto the code. In one sona, Kalumba, the dots are body structures and the lines are the contours of the body, and the space in between in body structures.23 In another, Kambilinginja kaNthumba, the dots are villages, the lines are the path of travelers and rivers, and the space is the terrain through which they travel. Meaning occurs in the dynamic interplay between opposing graphemes and as actors project meaning onto the drawing process and the finished figures. This flexibility has resulted in a large number and variety of lusona, from those that approach verisimilitude to those that are predominantly conceptual.

In sona, mathematical operations and content production are neither separate, nor by rule can meaning be fixed. Instead, as Gerhard Kubik writes, “[o]ne of the criteria of a good kasona is to show a convincing logical relation between the drawing and its explanation, from the viewpoint of the cognitive system of the culture which has produced it.” He continues, “It is characteristic of the tusona tradition that the logic of a thought may be transformed and remoulded into the geometrical logic of relations between dots and lines.”24 Kubik’s interviewees understand the algorithmic operations to be a priori to meaning. They described to Kubik their process of “finding”

patterns within resulting shapes. Innovation in sona, as Kubik concludes, happens within strict parameters, where knowledge of the code is so thorough that spur of the moment invention can go by undetected by less sophisticated practitioners. As in cybernetic theory, sona receives feedback in order to mutate the system itself; to give it new rules of operation. Gerdes gives an example of such mutation, where a bilinear lusona transforms into a monolinear lusona, which then produces this rule of transformation: “when one ‘cuts’ two closed lines at their point of intersection and links each of the obtained extremities of the first curve with those of the second curve, then one transforms the two initial lines into a single closed curve.”25

Sona is a self-organizing scalar system of drawing, as well as a gathering of bodies to learn, to riff, to joke, and to scale up social status. It is at once an open and closed code. Mary D. Leaky recounts a visit she took to the Dundo Museum to study Chokwe string games, similar to the puzzle-like game of sona, but a game that José Redinha did not know about.26 She recalls that Redinha found it inconceivable that he would not be privy to see a practice of “his people,” amongst whom he had been living for years. He was disturbed to find that his own house workers practiced the game and had kept it secret from him. As so many ethnographers have described in their research of societal codes, Redinha had been denied access.27

PAredeS PintAdAS dA LundA

Partially due to the author’s exclusion from Chokwe practices, Paredes reveals both an anxiety over and a performance of the death of Chokwe culture, as does Redinha’s work with Diamang’s Dundo Museum in Lunda North. Redinha was a natural choice to head the Dundo project for Diamang, being familiar with the Lunda area. He


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served as an administrative assistant in the colonial post of Chitato and became deeply interested in art during his tenure. After his move to Angola, he began to amass a collection of local art and, by the time he was hired in 1942, he had collected around 315 objects. His collection initiated the collection of the Dundo Museum, to which he added thousands of objects throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Redinha immersed himself in the art of the area and learned several of the local languages. The information he presented in his monthly and yearly reports to the company headquarters in Lisbon formed the basis of monographs published in the Cultural Publications series.

Diamang was at the height of its activities when Redinha was hired, but tenuously held its territory in Lunda North. The Portuguese government of Prime Minister António Oliveira Salazar and his Estado Novo (New State) (1933–1974) were under fire from the international community for their increasingly violent colonial rule and support of companies like Diamang. In response, his government intensified its rhetoric of Portugal’s “natural” ability to integrate and civilize the natives in its colonies.28 Upon his receipt of Redinha’s Paredes Pintadas da Lunda in 1953, Ernesto de Vilhena, father of the Júlio de Vilhena, quoted earlier, marveled: “I do not know of any other publication superior or equal—about Angola—presented so well. Honor to the Company, honor to Angola, honor to Portugal!”29 Vilhena established partnerships with other institutions and individual scholars of African art around the world, the most notable being Chokwe scholar Marie-Louise Bastin.

Diamang also established “partnerships” with chiefs in the area, in some cases installing men who were only provisionally accepted by their subjects. Nuno Porto’s examination of how Diamang orchestrated the photographic object in reformulating Chokwe history points to the

collapsing of time in the display of current chiefs with deceased ancestors. He writes that Redinha knew well the effects of displaying “important members of their race after they have died.”30 Importantly, the Gallery of the Native Chiefs was in the museum’s History Room, which amounted to a full-scale usurpation of Chokwe ancestors, coterminous with Diamang’s resource grabs. The Gallery of the Native Chiefs mediated and proclaimed Diamang’s restructuring of Chokwe authority and the supposed complicity of the natives to its authority. Porto argues that Diamang officials intentionally divested native chiefs of their power and the portraits “were thus intended to inculcate the native population with colonial views of order.”31

Redinha also attempted the obverse: to reach the “everyday” members of the Chokwe population. The opening lines of Paredes describe the interest Redinha had in the quotidian aspects of Chokwe wall murals:

The paintings executed on the walls of the houses are a manifestation of one of the most spontaneous arts of the indigenous of Lunda. Made by adults and children, sometimes by women, they are, that is to say, a popular art. This no doubt confers to them a great value for understanding the soul of the people. Unlike other artistic activities, as for example sculpture, there is no professionalism in wall painting: it is an amateur art.32

From the outset, Redinha identifies his study as being unconcerned with “official” symbols of authority, but instead with the popular use of the Chokwe image corpus, the almost compulsive repetition of cultural symbols. As the murals

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Figure 3. Three-stage photographic record of Livingi Matemba drawing the tortoise lusona. Reproduced from Gerhard Kubik, Tusona—Luchazi Ideographs: A graphic tradition practiced by a people of West-Central Africa. Wien: Föhrenau, 1987, 49.


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washed off in every rainy season, Redinha presents this as an urgent, but unique opportunity for researchers to understand the more subjective aspects of Chokwe art.

Following Redinha’s short eight-page introduction, Paredes consists of 102 color plates of murals of disparate types, composed of pictograms, ideograms, and geometrical

“decorative” forms. Each print is rectangular with a solid background that appears on the right page (Figure 3). On the left page is printed the plate number, geographical location of the edifice, and the name of its owner. Below that is printed Redinha’s description of the mural composition. For many of the plates, Redinha adds a “note,” which is usually an interpretation of the symbols and folktales to which the picture alludes, based on his own knowledge of Chokwe oral and visual culture.

Like most of his colleagues in Dundo and abroad, Redinha argued that the scientific study and recording of Chokwe material culture helped to stabilize the migratory Chokwe population and to integrate them psychologically into the Portuguese civilization. Thus, in addition to the museum’s mission to act as guardian of “pure” Chokwe culture, its most potent role was to provide a behavioral and conceptual constant; a tool of re-education. Echoing Júlio Vilhena’s sentiments regarding folktales and music, Redinha laments the appearance in the village of a Brazilian dance that had been taken up by Chokwe youth, writing, “[i]t is as important to introduce good customs as it is to exterminate bad ones in order to guarantee the existential equilibrium of the indigenous population.”33 The space in between convention and change was the very space that, if controlled, would be the most intimate and potent act of the civilizing mission.

In his 1942 annual company report and book proposal, Redinha explains that, although

the museum has thousands of examples of the paintings archived in photos, they need a comprehensive archive to understand the practice and history of the murals—to construct a proper

“symbology.”34 Though Redinha never explicitly defines “symbology,” it is his attempt to organize a wide range of performative practices into a strict lexicon of pictograms, ideograms, symbols, and icons—including lusona. Symbology is, to use terminology that will relate to the discussion below, the attempt to make digital (discreet and orderly) certain analog (physical) processes that were subject to death and erasure. Perhaps even more than their washing off every season, it is the quickly changing semantics of the symbols, Redinha argues, that makes this research urgent. In one example, the symbol for sun becomes a clock, wheel, or Portuguese coin, in what Redinha calls the “decay of symbology.” Redinha considers it a serious impediment to the “existential equilibrium” of the Chokwe. However, Redinha is hard pressed to find any kind of formula that unites the symbols in the wall paintings, either in their semantics or their syntax. Likewise, he explains, the murals do not have any conventional subject matter. Images can refer to quotidian life, aspects of history, descriptions of folklore, nature and human beings, animals, plants, ritual personages, masqueraders, idols, ghosts, imaginary monsters, lands, stars, celestial spheres, and so on. The paintings have themes of the everyday, but are also concerned with religion and folklore, and have roots in the past.

As he analyzes wall painting like a collective endeavor with certain conventions—though able to be transgressed—Redinha’s analysis negotiates structure and agency. In one particular example, Redinha discusses an image in which the artist used white paint to both create luminosity and to suggest a third dimension. He admits that in the absence of the interpretation by the artist

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of this particular image—the absence of a code—he is left to make interpretations of his own. Noting that his interpretation might be inadequate, Redinha concedes, “Chokwe art is, really, profoundly subjective,” one of the rare moments in which he alludes to the suppleness of the Chokwe representational logic.35

Herein lies the fundamental problem of Redinha’s analysis, where his dual methods of art history and anthropology reach an impasse between structure and agency. Given the multi-perspectival compositions, especially in landscape scenes, he concludes that Chokwe artists, as a whole, attempt an intellectual and not a visual realism. For instance, because of their artistic immaturity, they constantly shuttle between the bird’s eye view and vertical orientation. Because both perspectives exist in the murals, Redinha surmises that the mural paintings are an intermediate mode between the rock and sand drawing of pre-sedentary life and “correct” landscape painting (European).

Redinha’s interpretation becomes even more strained when he discusses sona, as perspectival crossovers are endemic to sona and a part of the dynamism of its formal logic. He begins the section on sona by stating that there are “perfectly distinct” types of drawing within the murals: schematic figurative drawings and geometric

“tracing around points” drawings. He is presented with the problem that the more sophisticated of the two types, sona, is also that which was practiced on the ground and should logically be considered an earlier mode of drawing. Redinha explains:

It was on the ground, no doubt, that the Chokwe tribe, still nomadic, entertained in the leisurely camps, drawing many of the outlines of what would much later, when they became sedentary, be

raised onto the walls of the houses they inhabited.36

Redinha’s two-page discussion of sona places it in the development of the Chokwe lifecycle, not only that of Chokwe society as a whole, but also in the individual intellectual development of a Chokwe child. Before puberty, Redinha explains, the child draws human figures with “a head, trunk, and members. The second […] besides the head, trunk, and members, they are marked with a sex, hands, and feet, and the attitudes are more developed.”37 Eventually, the young boy learns the sona drawing code: the complex ritualistic corpus taught by the elders. Redinha indicates that sona is a specialized practice in Chokwe society, tied to ritual initiation, but then he only briefly mentions the requisite “large amount of practice of such exercises.”38

Finally, Redinha betrays his inability to access sona with this statement: “The relation between form and idea that [sona] border on is so abstract that it would be difficult to recognize them by what they represent.”39 That is, Redinha cannot surmise their meaning from their finished forms, what the Chokwe informant tells us, through Kubik, is directly related to the process of their creation. From the ground to the book, the privileging of visual units of information required a suppression of the more complex performances of Chokwe media, what are really their functional aspects in mediating the ancestors: the moment when the insensible becomes sensible. Paredes sent the Chokwe “analog” performances through the

“bottleneck of the signifier” in Redinha’s typology of the murals.40 The intermediate mode that Redinha describes in the landscape compositions spells the eventual obsolescence of a participatory medium.


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re-mediaTion

Viteix, one of the major figures of postcolonial Angolan art, discusses sona in the games section of his 1983 Theory and Practice of Angolan Plastic Art, a doctoral thesis that compiled Angolan art from the hinterlands and urban centers. In one of the strongest sections of his book to address the logic of Angolan art, he concludes that sona and other games “[confirm] the relevance of the notion of unity in the Angolan territory. […] it seems significant that this game represents, without elitism, the desire for unanimity in Angola.”41 There was, he argues, no power play in these types of activities; no winner. Fascistic Portuguese colonialism changed Angolans’ mass consciousness and intentionally divested them of democratic participation. As a dedicated Marxist, Viteix and other writers of his generation demanded that the state be a disinterested medium of various cultural expressions; he extrapolated a political ideology from Chokwe art.42 As did his comrades, Viteix used native symbols as formal tools within his medium of canvas painting.

We may briefly relate Viteix’s work to another anti-colonial revolutionary, Franz Fanon, who wrote of the aspects of media beyond just their use to disseminate messages. In his essay “This Is the Voice of Algeria,” Fanon describes a fundamental shift in anti-colonial consciousness, as the native Algerians embraced the medium of radio as a technique of war.43 Until 1954, he explains, Algerians understood the radio as a tool of the oppressor, having no use for their daily lives. It was only after they discovered nationalist broadcasts in Arabic from Egypt and Syria that Algerians began to buy radios and marshal the medium in the anti-colonial war. Contra Adorno’s declaration of the radio as a one-way form of communication, Fanon argues that the active listening of Algerians to the meta aspects of French communication channels, particularly their

jamming of revolutionary broadcasts, revealed the lie behind the colonial message. Built into Viteix’s and Fanon’s activist stance is the Marxist principle that systems have no inherent biases, but, as with the machines of finance and industry, they must be intimately known and acted upon to signify for the people.

Post-independence Angolan administrators have operated in the tenuous space of the nation-state as radically open or dangerously conservative and nepotistic, their power enacted in large part by the deployment of symbols. The desire for the former can be read into Viteix’s characterization of sona as a naturally egalitarian activity—not a static symbol—that demonstrates the unifying logic of Angolan art. The same ethos of democratic participation characterized the online projects by ITM and the Trienal de Luanda. One of the Trienal de Luanda’s first exhibitions was a solo exhibition of anti-colonial “ancestors,” such as Viteix; they also mounted billboards around the city of Luanda that featured the poetry of anti-colonial writers. Their progressive fantasizing of the Angolan nation indicated a sincere desire for a self-perpetuating cultural production and the establishment of “habits of culture.”44 The Trienal de Luanda’s aims were nationalistic. Its director and conceiver, Fernando Alvim, spoke about the exhibition as a way to heal from the devastating violence of both the civil war and the colonial period. In the many promotional interviews and speeches he delivered about the Trienal, Alvim spoke about the emergence of Angola onto the world scene, claiming Luanda as a place where possibilities are endless and life is vibrant. Lunda Tchokwe was the one project of the Trienal that best characterized its aims, according to Claúdia Veiga, an artist and Trienal de Luanda organizer.45 It represented Angolans’ reassertion of the nation after colonialism and a debilitating 30-year civil war. Both projects made explicit the structural

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connections between indigenous communalist art and the participatory opportunities afforded by the Internet.

The introductory essay for ITM’s Cultura Lunda Tchokwe asks, “Why [Lunda Tchokwe culture] dissemination on a website, and not in a book?” Its answer: “Angola is a country constituted mostly of youth. As a result of current trends in the modern world, youth in general read little, and are more attracted to the visual, whether video or computers, internet, etc.”46 ITM later explains that the platform will include a discussion forum and, given the feedback they receive, they will change the text of any of the sections “if, as a result of the contributions of scholars and the general public, we conclude that there is new data and facts that the information from the bibliography that we used is truncated or distorted.”47 They take care to bracket the entire discussion with the avowal that the project is not a vehicle of self-promotion. In its web medium and its interactivity, that is, Cultura Lunda Tchokwe declares ITM’s respect for Chokwe history and culture. Both online projects profess an ethos facilitated by—but more importantly symbolized by—digital culture.

This is an important point: the online projects address interactivity on the level of the interface, not any deep connection on the level of code or the material circulation of media objects and network access. The Trienal de Luanda’s Lunda Tchokwe essay, “Rescue, Absorption, Visibility,” argued that the visibility of Chokwe art on the web and their digital removal of Redinha’s signature would allow it to be aesthetically judged by the public.48 By removing colonial ownership, the project would “finally repair an injustice related to the omission of the original names of the creators.” The web exhibition consisted of all 102 images from Paredes, each image occupying its own webpage, without meta-textual information.

Some images were cropped and some rotated; all were suspended within the clean minimalist interface of the Trienal website—as close to a virtual “white cube” as could be achieved, which was a cue that the images were to be read formally.

Cultura Lunda Tchokwe and Lunda Tchokwe were both sponsored by the diamond industry, which earned the Trienal de Luanda heavy criticism, given the industry’s history in Angola.49 The Trienal de Luanda came under particular scrutiny after it partnered with a foundation run by Sindika Dokolo.50 Dokolo is a Congolese businessman married to Isabella dos Santos, daughter of Angola’s president, Eduardo dos Santos, and together they control major shares of the country’s diamond, oil, and media sectors. In fact, both digital projects are more structurally aligned with the 1953 publication than they or any critic acknowledged, as both of their sponsors are among the corporate progeny of Diamang. Diamang was nationalized in 1977 and in 1979 Angola passed a law giving the state exclusive rights to mining enterprises. Endiama was formed in 1981, taking control over the 77 percent of Diamang owned by the government.51 ITM is one of the many companies that must now partner with Endiama, a company largely controlled by the family of Eduardo dos Santos. A careful analysis of these industries and their web of ownership opens up their complexity: a dense mesh of actors and intentionalities.52 Similarly, the colonization of open systems, territories, and materials has characterized the trajectory of art and communication media. The totalizing effects of the digital medium obscure even the starkly uneven accessibility of the information economy.53

At the conclusion of the Lunda Tchokwe essay, the Trienal de Luanda organizers explain the potential irony of its sponsorship, writing, “in light of the social and cultural politics of CATOCA,


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and being a company that operates essentially in the Lunda region, it is to enhance the fundamental conscience and participation that this project is funded exclusively by CATOCA.”54 Thus, the remediation that Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin write about is here attempted on a grand scale, and with the aid of an aestheticized interface. But, behind the glowing monitor—the interface of the Chokwe images and content—pulsed a matrix of funding, telecommunications materials, and a whole network of international finance, which, like the book object, had to remain invisible to transmit its post-historical democratic message.

Thus, interface of both web projects was the space in which to consume both the images and the significance of their re-mediation. The

Trienal de Luanda staff altered and exhibited each image from Paredes and put them onto the website in the same order in which they appear in the book. Some images only removed Redinha’s signature, while some images were cropped and others cropped and rotated. The cropping and rotation results in the images acting as modernist formal compositions, which are able to be rotated to any degree and still remain compositionally stable. Thusly cropped, they created part-images dependent on the paratextual elements of the interface, such as the hyperlink buttons and page header. The removal of Redinha’s signature not only removed the Chokwe image from the book, but it was also visually materialized within the interface of the online project. The images’

Figure 4. Finished mukanda sona. Reproduced from Mario Fontinha, Desenhos na Areia dos Quiocos do Nordeste de Angola (Lisboa: Instituto de Investigação Cientifica Tropical, 1983), 68.

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incompleteness within the webpage was part of a digital spatio-temporal logic in which the operation is never finished; the “surfing” never completes itself. In this digital iteration of the part-images, this operational logic both veiled and depended upon the complex relationships at work behind it.

The ITM’s Cultura Lunda Tchokwe project presents a page from Paredes of Redinha’s sketches of finished lusona he found in the wall murals. An analysis of this page is helpful in understanding how sona, as a practice, becomes significant in this web mediation. Under the subheading “drawings,” ITM includes a pop-out window of the page from

Paredes with various finished lusona (Figure 4). Two other hyperlinks include his sketches of various other pictographic drawings, 64 in all. Under these links, ITM includes a portion of Gerdes’ text “On Ethnomathematical Research and Symmetry,” which concerns the mnemonic skills required for the performance and algorithmic complexity of lusona. When the pop-up window is activated, the scanned image of the figures page from Paredes floats above the text page and, thus, a picture of Redinha’s sketches can be dragged around over the HTML text transcription. As in Paredes, what we web users interact with on the interface of the ITM website is the particular reality effects

Figure 5. Two-page spread from Mario Fontinha’s Desenhos na Areia dos Quiocos do Nordeste de Angola showing range of representational and non-representational lusona.


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given to us by the coding of this particular digital platform. That is, what we interact with is already a translation from code to picture and HTML: the endpoint of the signification process. With the paratextual elements of the interface, the ITM and Trienal de Luanda’s Lunda Tchokwe sites keep us embedded within the interface that refers to itself as a system, but a system of already translated operations. If we look at that moment when the akwa kuta sona makes his own logical connection from mathematical operation to its visual translation, or his process of “finding” the image in the resulting pattern, here we must find the system through an iconic translated

interface. Alexander Galloway calls the “ludic capitalism” of digital culture, where play after late twentieth-century cybernetics fuses the expressive and iterative, the poetic and protocological.55 Given that there are different levels and types of interactivity that happen on the web and in computer science generally, we might ask how

“play,” in these two particular projects, involves interacting with obsolesced media (here Paredes and sona).

The ITM website is more of a content management system, as it has transcriptions of studies by Redinha, Marie-Louise Bastin, and João Vicente Martins. Unlike a book, it is a web of

Figure 6. Estamp 9A from Paredes Pintadas da Lunda. Lisboa: Companhia de Diamantes de Angola, 1953.

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previously researched and published information, which is de-historicized. Redinha’s 55-year-old research is presented as if it were describing the contemporary condition in Lunda North, left to float on the website without an explanation of the context under which it was produced. There is no

“original” research here and no physical containers of scientific knowledge; only ephemeral links and transcriptions activated with mouse clicks. As with the Lunda Tchokwe project, each of the images from Paredes appears on Cultura Lunda Tchokwe. The colonial project is neatly repackaged as a contemporary cultural initiative by ITM, a company declaring its humanitarian goals, as did Diamang in the 1950s.

Lunda Tchokwe addressed an important aspect of control within digital mediation: the legacy of the nation-state’s control over the political process of signification. As part of the gesture of the project, Lunda Tchokwe adhered to the post-independence era copyright laws that were carefully written for transparency and the protection of national heritage, referring to a mythic time during the independence period, when the state and the people held the same interests. Two Angolan intellectual property laws applied to the duplication and alteration of Paredes. First was a type of fair use exception. In Angola, this law, written after independence, allows for duplication in cases where the work is figured as a national “treasure” and transmitted within Angola or to its citizens abroad.56 A second and more philosophical argument that could be applied to Lunda Tchokwe comes from article 18, a moral copyright law that punishes those who alter or appropriate works. Under this law, the Trienal could, and did, argue that Redinha altered and appropriated the Chokwe artists’ work without due credit and thus had no copyright on the visual material. In addition to the Ministry of Culture’s intellectual property rights, there was a layer of

copyright that took the place of José Redinha’s signature. Fernando Alvim copyrighted the Trienal de Luanda, including the Lunda Tchokwe artistic gesture. Alvim’s interest in copyright made claims on access itself. The artistic gesture was the ethical claim to the transmission of the images and not necessarily any inherent meaning or message within them. Indeed, copyright does not protect content as such, but the transmission or delimitation of ideas and superficial content.

On the fantasy egalitarian architecture of the Internet, Galloway explains that, despite the open logic of the binary system, the various uses of it in computer coding are notoriously diverse and non-standardized; open-source code constantly runs up against proprietary ownership.57 In fact, the historical challenge in computer programming is to make separately authored packets of code compatible with each other and the information age has been largely defined by the pursuit of technological standards. In Lunda Tchokwe, the removal of Redinha’s signature did not erase authorship, neither Redinha’s nor its own, but profoundly dispersed it. As Redinha’s book displayed the optical effects of Chokwe art, effectively veiling the protocols of sona production, as well as its own, so does the monitor operate by a ludic capitalism that spectrifies the code, bodies, and materials on the other side of the glowing interface. Kubik’s description of a successful kasona, “a convincing logical relation between the drawing and its explanation, from the viewpoint of the cognitive system of the culture which has produced it,” in this case would require acknowledging the irony of the enclave economies and often violent politics that underpin the democratic ethos of digital culture, including the extraction of minerals and the distribution of hardware and electricity—all increasingly tenuous within what is facilely referred to as the digital divide. Thus, the haunting that Kittler


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describes is the machinations of ideology and the impossibility of a non-place ether of storage and transmission media.

Notes

1 Reprinted in Antologias de poesia da Casa dos Estudantes do Império 1. Angola, São Tomée Príncipe (Lisboa: Edição ACEI, 1994). All translations from Portuguese and French sources are the author’s.

2 Júlio de Vilhena, “A Note on the Dundo Museum of the Companhia de Diamantes de Angola,” Journal of the International Folk Music Council 7 (1955): 41–43.

3 For a thorough discussion of Diamang’s labor policies and its history in the Lunda North province, see Todd Cleveland, Rock Solid: African Laborers on the Diamond Mines of the Companhia de Diamantes de Angola (Diamang), 1917–1975. (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2008).

4 I use the spelling of Chokwe that is common in English-language publications. Other spellings include Tchokwe, Cokwe, Qiocos, Jokwe, Badjok, etc.

5 Some of the most important research and publishing that Chokwe art expert Marie-Louise Bastin completed was facilitated by the Dundo Museum, which she first visited in 1956.

6 For an excellent discussion of the Dundo Museum and Diamang policies, see Nuno Porto, “The Spectre of Art,” Etnográfica 6:1 (2002): 113-125; and Porto, “The Arts of the Portuguese Empire: The Emergence of Cokwe Art in the Province of Angola,” in Collectors: Expressions of Self and Other, ed. A. Shelton (London: The Horniman Museum and Gardens, 2001), 225-247.

7 For a more extensive examination of the trope of “return” in postcolonial literature, see Vera Mihailovich-Dickman, Return in Post-Colonial Writing: A Cultural Labyrinth (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994).

8 See Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). They describe remediation as having three aspects: the mediation of mediation, the inseparability of mediation and reality, and remediation as reform.

9 For a classic structural-functional analysis of a neighboring mukanda practice, see Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967). Turner notes that the structurally intended space of liminality is created to facilitate change and transition.

10 My interest in using sona as a way to think through systems, agency, and meaning production in mediation, beyond the normal art-historical discussions of appropriation and postcolonial discussions of identity, has been influenced by Ron Eglash, African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design (London: Rutgers University Press, 1999); and Ron Eglash, “African Influences in Cybernetics,” in The Cyborg Handbook, ed. Chris Hables Gray (London: Routledge, 1995), 17-27.

11 The history of scholars’ treatment of Africa as “natural,” “real,” and as being closer to the elements is voluminous, as are its critiques. For a general discussion of these figurations of Africa throughout Western history, see V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). For an application of these ideas to the specific terminology of cybernetics and digital culture, see Eglash, African Fractals.

12 Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Techologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982); and Harold A. Innis, Empire and Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972).

13 Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 57.

14 For a fascinating discussion of the interface of media history and colonialism, see Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993).

15 Freidrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter

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(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 4–5.16 Eduardo dos Santos, “Contribuções para o estudo

das pictografias e ideogrammas dos Quiocos,” in Estudos sobre a etnologia do ultramar Português 2 (1961):17–131.

17 Redinha also makes passing mention of Baumann’s theory that sona and the very similar Kolam drawings of south India evidence an ancient relation between the two cultures. Redinha does not seem to buy the idea. See Hermann Baumann, Lunda. Bei Bauern und aegern Inner-Angola (Berlin: Wuerfel Verlag, 1934), 223.

18 Here I must briefly define the term “Chokwe,” as it existed in the 1950s. As Joseph Miller explains,

“[o]nly with reservations can one speak of a single homogenous Cokwe people in the middle of the twentieth century. However true this may be today, a century and more ago the Cokwe people lived in a compact nucleus, something more than a hundred miles in diameter, astride the watershed of the Kasai, Kwango, Zambezi, and Kwanza rivers in east-central Angola;” from Joseph Calder Miller, Cokwe Expansion: 1850–1900 (Madison: African Studies Program, The University of Wisconsin, 1969). From about 1850 until the 1920s, the Chokwe had more or less maintained control over the region; first, in their role in the slave trade, which included a system of pawnship, and, after the slave trade was abolished in 1835, in the wax and ivory trade. With their economic success, the Chokwe amassed firepower and conquered various groups, which aided their expansion that lasted until the beginning of the twentieth century. For this history, see Edouard Bustin, Lunda Under Belgian Rule: the Politics of Ethnicity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). Before Chokwe prominence in the nineteenth century, the Lunda state was the most powerful political entity in the region. However, the colonization of the Chokwe by the Lunda around 1600 was primarily political and, ironically, Chokwe cultural practices were adopted by the Lunda. The Lunda political network distinguished

“land chiefs” from “political chiefs,” which made it possible for the Lunda government to operate,

while still preserving Chokwe descent systems. This system allowed the Chokwe to preserve their local traditions and values. Not only did the Chokwe cultural practices exist under the Lunda empire, but the Lunda and other communities adopted the language and cultural customs of their Chokwe subjects. This cultural integration helped the Chokwe to later gain dominance in the region and spread exponentially in the mid nineteenth century. They determined how they were to make their own contacts with the Portuguese and did so to the extent that it benefited them. Chokwe political dominance was in large part due to their practical adaptability in trade and territorial expansion.

19 For a discussion of the types and classes of algorithms in lusona, in Chokwe and neighboring practices, see Paulus Gerdes, Sona Geometry: reflections on the tradition of sand drawings in Africa South of the Equator (Maputo, Mozambique: Instituto Superior Pedagógico Moçambique, 1994). My description of the sona process is culled from various descriptions by Gerdes, Kubik, and Mario Fontinha.

20 Gerdes, Sona Geometry.21 Gerhard Kubik, “African Space/Time Concepts

and the Tusona Ideographs in Luchazi Culture with a Discussion of Possible Cross-Parallels in Music,” in African Music 6:4 (1987): 58.

22 Mario Fontinha, Desenhos na Areia dos Quiocos do Noreste de Angola (Lisboa: Instituto de Investigação Cientifica Tropical, 1983), 77.

23 As recorded by Gerhard Kubik, Tusona—Luchazi Ideographs: A graphic tradition practised by a people of West-Central Africa (Wien: Föhrenau, 1987), 181–182.

24 Ibid., 31.25 Gerdes, Sona Geometry, 24.26 Mary D. Leaky, Some String Figures from North East

Angola (Pasadena: Munger Africana Library, 1981), 10.

27 For an oral history and discussion of Chokwe resistance to Diamang policies and cultural colonialism generally, see Cleveland, Rock Solid.

28 Brazilian scholar Gilberto Freyre visited the


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Dundo Museum during a grand tour in 1951, sponsored by Salazar as a publicity stunt to drum up support for the continued control of the Angolan colony. He narrates his trip in Aventura e Rotina (Rio de Janeiro: J. Olympio, 1952). Despite the Company’s (and government officials’) wishes for his approval, he writes that he is quite ambivalent about the Diamang operation and especially the Dundo Museum. He notes the feeling of being policed at Dundo, that despite the “festive” environment of a civilized city in the tropics, the need for security makes everyone suspect no matter their race or position. Freyre in essence describes an environment highly artificial and engineered in its racial segregation. He calls Diamang’s operation “anti-lusitanian” and states that sociologically it is not a Portuguese society. He blames authoritarian Belgian-designed methods for the harsh and overtly racist environment there. Company officials were furious at Freyre’s report and released a series of propagandistic publications to counter his claims. See especially, Museu do Dundo, Flagrantes da Vida da Lunda (Lisboa: Companhia de Diamantes de Angola, 1958).

29 Ernesto de Vilhena, Letter of Receipt of Paredes and Pinturas, October 7, 1953. Diamang Dundo Museum Archive, University of Coimbra, Portugal.

30 Redinha quoted in Nuno Porto, “Under the Gaze of the Ancestors,” in Photographs, Objects, Histories: On the Materiality of Images, eds Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (London: Routledge, 2004), 119.

31 Ibid., 121.32 José Redinha, Paredes Pintadas da Lunda (Lisboa:

Companhia de Diamantes de Angola, 1953), 9.33 Departmento de Antropologia da Universidade

de Coimbra, Museu do Dundo Monthly Report number (April 4, 1947): 2.

34 Departmento de Antropologia da Universidade de Coimbra, Museu do Dundo Annual Report, (1942): 8.

35 Redinha, Paredes Pintadas, 40.36 Ibid., 14.37 Ibid.

38 Ibid., 15.39 Ibid.40 Kittler, Gramophone, 4.41 Vitor Manuel Teixeira, Pratique et Theorie des Arts

Plastiques Angolais (Doctoral thesis, Saint Denis, Université de Paris VIII, 1983), 55.

42 In proposals for a new museum system found in official documents, the MPLA names the inhabitants of the hinterlands as “the People.” The MPLA publications attempt to circumscribe them through educational programs and a pledge of respect for their “cultures.” The publications explain that in order for this to succeed, officials in Luanda must work in concert with the various local chiefs and power structures. The MPLA’s attempt to culturally integrate rural Angolans coincided with the historical struggle to gain control over all of the sectors of Angolan society, including agriculture, mining, industry, and so on. The urgent need to unify Angola in the face of serious fracture caused the MPLA to shift from the revolutionary side of Marxism-Leninism to the implementation of “scientific socialism” in the hopes of having a state system that could transcend divisions of race, ethnicity, tribe, ideology, etc. See Departmento Nacional de Museus e Monumentos, Manual de Museologia (Luanda: Instituto Angolano do Livro, 1979), n.p.

43 Frantz Fanon, “This Is the Voice of Algeria,” in A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 69–97.

44 Fernando Alvim and Albano Cardoso, interview with the author, March 12, 2006.

45 Claúdia Veiga, interview with the author, October 5, 2008.

46 ITM Cultura Lunda Tchokwe, “Apresentação,” http://www.culturalunda-tchokwe.com, accessed July 18, 2012.

47 Ibid.48 The website domain name, www.trienal-de-luanda.

net, expired in 2008 and the entire project went offline. Thus, I will speak of the website in the past tense.

49 See Jakkie Cilliers, “Resource wars—a new type of insurgency,” in Angola’s War Economy, eds Jakkie

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Cilliers and Christian Deitrich (Pretoria, South Africa: Institute for Security Studies, 2000).

50 For criticism of the Trienal de Luanda, its sponsorship, and curatorial process, see Adriano Mixinge, “Reflexão: As críticas e as razões do desconforto,” Jornal de Angola (October 12, 2005), http://www.jornaldeangola.com, accessed March 13, 2007. He states, “A Trienal de Luanda yes, but not just in any manner! A Trienal de Luanda yes, but with more enlarged dialogue and with participation enriched with more diverse sensibilities!” Mixinge also criticized the Dokolo collection, which was exhibited in the 2007 Venice Biennale, for many of the same reasons. See Adriano Mixinge, “Os Mercadores de Veneza,” in Made in Angola: Arte Contemporânea, Artistas, e Debates (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009). Chika Okeke also addresses the politics of the “African” pavilion in Venice in “Venice and Contemporary African Art,” African Arts 40:3 (2007): 1-5. For a more nuanced discussion of these issues, see Ronald Suresh Roberts, “The Colour of Money,” Mail and Guardian online (November 13, 2007), http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/ronaldsureshroberts/2007/11/13/the-colour-of-money, accessed July 18, 2012. He argues that,

“Dokolo’s business activities certainly deserve rigorous scrutiny and criticism and ought to receive a lot more of both. But when I hear talk of diamonds and forced labour, when I hear of the kinds of objections raised by the activist NGO Global Witness in the Angola case, I also immediately think of South Africa’s De Beers, which is a philanthropic benefactor of Michaelis, of the University of Cape Town more broadly, and of all sorts of African studies work across the cultural and academic landscapes of South Africa and the world.”

51 Nancy Clark, “Diamonds,” in Angola country study (Washington D.C., Library of Congress Federal Research Division: February 1989), available online at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy:@field%28DOCID+ao0105%29.

52 For example, movies like Edward Zwick’s 2006 Blood Diamond helped to raise awareness about

the problem of diamonds in Africa, but border on aestheticizing the ethical disaster of the trade, recapitulating stereotypes of Africa as the Dark Continent. Todd Cleveland believes that essentializing either his own or Lunda North residents’ opinions about ITM is difficult, as they aided him greatly in his research and they are marginally better in their interactions with the locals than some other companies, but still have documented human rights abuses and use the same thuggish private security companies that other companies in the region use. See Rafael Marques and Rui Falcão de Campos, Lundas—The Stones of Death: Human Rights Abuses in the Lunda Provinces (Washington, D.C.: Wilson Center, 2005), available online at www.wilsoncenter.org/events/docs/ADDMarq.pdf.

53 Such a structure, James Ferguson explains, is not “global,” as in universal, but skips over “non-usable” areas of the world and creates enclave areas of connectivity. See James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

54 Trienal de Luanda, “O Resgate, a Absorção e a Visibilidade,” http://www.trienal-de-luanda.net/?page_id=101, accessed March 8, 2007. Page no longer available.

55 Alexander Galloway, “The Unworkable Interface,” New Literary History 39 (2009): 934.

56 Article 30, “Licensing Arrangements.” Angola Law on Author’s Rights (No. 4/90 of March 10, 1990).

57 Alexander Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

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