STEVE ELKINS: I found out about your work when David Harrington of Kronos Quartet told me you collect musical instruments children made out of tank parts and bullet shell casings during the civil war in Angola.  I later learned that you discovered these children in the midst of a longer journey to unearth the music that was being produced in Angola during the war. What are the roots of this journey you undertook?
 
VICTOR GAMA: I started my journey (which became known as the Tsikaya Project) in 1997, during the conflict. Angola was one of the worst cases of African struggles for independence. We were in the peak of the Cold War. The apartheid regime in South Africa was already designing strategies to survive all the African independences that started in the ‘50s and ’60s. And they’d already acquired nuclear weapons. So the geopolitics was very tense. We had Cuba sending troops to Angola to defend against a South African invasion. The Soviet Union sent an armada, including submarines. Meanwhile, the CIA, the United States, and western countries were supporting attempts at creating buffer zones for the South African apartheid regime to survive, because they saw it as a western country. I was there during those years, and I lived through that. Growing up before and after independence was an opportunity to witness colonialism firsthand, as well as an attempt to recover from it. But the entire infrastructure of Angola was destroyed, and there was an immense loss of life for thirty years.

The idea for Tsikaya came about because I was in this very small village, Cuito-Cuanavale, which was a battlefield during the 1980s. It was a front line joining the Angolan and Cuban armies against the invasive forces of South Africa, involving thousands of soldiers, tanks, helicopters, and sophisticated artillery. A lot of people lived like these villagers, cut off from the rest of the country and the rest of the world, because there were lots of mine fields, or war zones or battle fronts. And so they wouldn’t dare go out of their immediate areas or villages. They barely survived on what they could grow. When I visited, it was about ten years after that particular battle ended, and the whole place was still completely littered with debris from those battles. A lot of tanks are still in the same place and they’re going to be there for a long time because it’s very hard to remove them after a war. But now they’re totally dismantled, because people needed source materials for construction, and weren’t able to safely leave their village.

From these military scraps they could get copper wire, rubber, sheets of metal, you know, anything. At that time, there were a lot of kids who would grab them and transform them into toys and musical instruments. For me, it was a tremendous message: they take these objects which represent destruction, aggression, violence, a whole world of technology and creativity that’s geared toward destroying peoples lives, and these kids can convert it and send it back as if it were a message in a bottle, saying: hey you dropped all this here, but I can send you something nice. With your stuff. So when I began collaborating with Kronos Quartet, I tried to find more of these. I worked with children in Cunene, where I was able to find kids that still played on those types of instruments. One of them is an ammunition box with three strings on it.

Musical Instruments Made From Military Parts By Children (Angola)

[Note: Some of these instruments are now at the Museum of Musical Instruments in Phoenix, Arizona, which is hosting a parallel exhibition of instruments children in Paraguay made out of recycled trash from the landfill their slum is built on. A short video about their formation of the Landfill Harmonic Orchestra can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/52129103]

Musical Instruments Made By Children Out Of Recycled Trash From The Landfill Their Slum Is Built On (Paraguay)

GAMA (cntd): But aside from this, there were two very special moments that led me to search for musicians throughout Angola. When I went to Cuito-Cuanavale in 1997, I had a four-track cassette recorder and some microphones. As soon as the villagers saw me, they immediately came out and wanted to speak out. Those people had lived for more than a decade completely isolated. They especially wanted me to play me their music and record it. What’s interesting is that many of the songs they recorded were like messages. The singer was telling about the situation he and his family were in, that there was a battle and all of this destruction. Recording was a way of sending a message beyond the village, to reach out and ask for help, because they knew they were totally isolated from the world. So that really struck a chord in me.

The next year, the war started again and I could no longer record in Angola. So I went to Namibia and South Africa to try to find Angolan refugees in case there were any musicians among them. But Namibians don’t like Angolans. They say it is a country without law. So at first the refugees were hard to find because they were scared to speak Portuguese, our shared language; it would give them away as being Angolan. Not really sure what to do, I got on an eight hour bus ride to another region to look for them. When the other people on the bus realized I was speaking Portuguese, one by one they all started speaking Portuguese. In other words, I got on the bus not having any idea how I would find Angolan refugees and suddenly found myself surrounded by them in the bus. And many of them were musicians. So I started recording them, right then and there. It was incredible.

Musicians Of Interior Angola

Homemade Instruments Of Interior Angola

ELKINS: Is there any consistency in the kinds of musical forms that came out of this research that you could describe distinctly as “Angolan” music? Or is that something that’s so diverse that it’s not easily categorizable?

GAMA: You can definitely categorize it as Angolan music, but the music is incredibly distinct in each village, so we’ll probably have to continue going back to the same provinces before we start going to the others. I have a website, http://www.tsikaya.org, where you can find the musicians I’ve located on a map of the country and see what I’ve documented of them. A Brazilian musicologist contacted me recently saying that he discovered an instrument on the website that the wider community of musicologists thought had disappeared from that part of Africa. Now people can know the instrument still exists. That’s more or less the purpose of the site, since so much of the musical heritage of Angola has already been lost or buried through the war. The first album of music we produced from our journeys into Angola can now be heard on itunes: https://itunes.apple.com/album/tsikaya-musicos-do-interior/id329923505. The last project I did was in a province called Huambo. An album assembled from their music actually went into production today: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/id675712149. Ultimately what we’d like to see happen is that the musicians somehow benefit from the project. Even financially. But that has proven to be difficult.

Victor Gama's "Pangeia Instrumentos"

The Acrux

GAMA (cntd): For example, the Acrux is an instrument I made that’s associated with the Southern Cross constellation that you see from the southern hemisphere. The shape of the instrument reflects that and its system of keys are related to the four stars of that constellation and the orbits of imaginary planets. It was also inspired by the migration of birds, specifically the arctic stern that migrates from the south pole to the north pole. It goes zigzagging between the African continent and North America. Scientists recently discovered that this zigzagging migration path is aligned with the Earth’s tectonic plates, and changes based on the movement of the plates. All that was built into the instrument.

Weaver Bird Nests (Cunene, Angola)

GAMA (cntd): Another instrument I made, the Toha, is based on the collective nests of the sociable weaver birds you find from the Cunene region in the south of Angola to the Kalahari desert in South Africa. Dillon Marsh took a photo of one (pictured above); you can see the telephone wires going through at the top, but the birds build the nest around it. Those telephone wires became the strings of the Toha (pictured below), but I brought them vertically to the base of the instrument. I saw several of those nests empty because of the conflict in the 80s. So the idea was to somehow evoke the spirit of the bird in the instrument as a way of asking them to come back. But you’ll notice in this photo that a fence was put up in front of the nest. So the Toha responds to our romanticized and blurred idea of humans connecting with nature as well, and to one of the Golian Modes which is responsible for animals and flying. Richard D. James (Aphex Twin) released an album of recordings I made with these instruments on his Rephlex label. I’ve developed many other instruments through the Golian Modes which can be seen online: http://www.pangeiainstrumentos.org/

ELKINS: And you’ve also started a program that researches the resistance processes Angolans developed to protect their culture amidst war and colonization?

GAMA: The writing of our language in our societies is at the core of our civilizations and culture. It’s one of the main central pillars. In Angola, there’s a writing system called Bodimbo that is constituted by pictograms containing a tremendous amount of cultural information. A little like Chinese characters, but in this case it’s more figurative and complex. They were encapsulated into religious practice, and the Europeans associated this with the devil. So when the Angolans were brought to the Caribbean islands as slaves, to Haiti, Brazil, and Cuba (where these writing systems are preserved most intact), they used the white man’s fear of the devil to keep them away from this graphic writing system and protect the culture that held them together. Bodimbo became a container that transmitted their culture to the next generations.

Kongo-Angolan Bodimbo (Graphic Writing) As Seen In Angola and Cuba

Vèvè, Voudoun Graphic Writing (Haiti)

GAMA (cntd): My Odantalan project, in Luanda, was an exchange program that brought together musicians, anthropologists, religious leaders, art historians researching these kinds of resistance processes from all possible angles and coming out with some new music we recorded on a CD and thoughts and ideas we've published through a book both titled Odantalan 02.

It’s still important to look at those processes of resistance, because they generated cultural expressions like Capoeira, Berimbao and Afro-Brazilian music, and other manifestations you find today in South America and the Caribbean. These forms of music are incredibly marked by the actual life of survival that went on in the hostile environments they emerged from. For example, Capoeira is combat performance, which involves keeping the body close to the ground because it was a way of not being spotted when people left their barracks to practice it in the fields. The Afro-Americans were really coming from a dark place in terms of the hostility they were subjected to daily, yet their ability to redevelop their culture and come up with such fantastic music, really says a lot about these minds. That’s why the religious practice on the other side of the ocean became so, so important, because it was a capsule of all the cultural elements of their lives. And the only way they thought they could bring this back to Angola was through their spirits after they died, so that’s why I’ve made the program an exchange between Angola and these countries, like Brazil, Cuba, and Colombia.

Capoeira

GAMA (cntd): The slave trade was really the first historical system of globalization, which largely managed to silence their knowledge systems. So understanding how Africans used culture to resist is not just a rarified interest in the past or history. Today, we are all in this situation, as most culture around the world is being colonized by industry. It is critical to our survival that we create capsules which preserve everything that is totally different from what we’re bombarded with everyday when we go to the supermarket, or the cinema, or turn on TV. Our work is to shed light on the darkness we live in, through books, through music.

ELKINS: Have you seen music become part of the healing process in Angola?

GAMA: The process of healing in Angola has involved dealing with what happens when a civil war reaches the core of the family. Within each family there were people fighting on opposing sides. It was mainly driven by external factors connected with big money, such as the big business of arms sales. But once the war ended and those people had to return to their families, a healing process was critical for that society to continue. People began to share in community ceremonies and rituals which were guided by music. In that sense, music was like oxygen for the healing process. And many of the musicians I recorded were conscious that they were making music that was significant to their community.

Behind The Land Mines: Victor Recording Musicians In Angola

ELKINS: You once said that your work is partially about examining what drives people into a creative constructive cycle as opposed to a creative destructive cycle. What did you mean by this?

GAMA: Well, I started thinking in those terms because I was called for the army in two countries, Angola and Portugal, and I refused. The only country where I was allowed to apply as a conscientious objector was Portugal, because Angola was in a war and they wouldn’t even think that kind of concept existed. You’d be sent straight to the front line. So I escaped before they could send me. I really believed in non-violence. And then I started working in digital signal processing. One day I found out that the project I was working on was a military project. As a conscious objector, you can’t work for the military. So I quit my job. It made me think that when you’re in a creative position, like electrical engineering, my creativity was, without me knowing, already going down a path that could lead to some kind of destructive outcome. In that case, it was a modem that would transmit through electronic noise caused by interference, so there was no destructive outcome directly from my work, but I could have been working on a missile or a land mine that you trigger when you pass by and it jumps one meter so that it explodes when it’s close to your head. You see lots of civilians and children maimed and killed by that kind of creativity. There’s a direct relationship between someone working in an office creatively, and that kind of impact that’s going to create waves for a long time in this world.

Creativity enables militaries to invade countries and keep them underdeveloped. So many countries had advanced societies at the time they were colonized that could have developed into contemporary societies. We have no way of knowing now. But they had all the tools for that: great cultures and great minds and great systems of knowledge. Thinking about this has led me to try to deal with it on some level through music. My recent piece Vela, commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, is one example.

Namibe Desert

GAMA (cntd): Vela developed out of my attempt to close the gap in our knowledge of the forces steering the Angola conflict, through investigating the mysterious disappearance of a young Angolan anthropologist, Augusto Zita N’Gonguenho, who was conducting research in the Namibe desert, which shares part of its territory with Angola. He was developing methods to analyze the infrastructure foreigners had built on his country, in the same way a Western anthropologist might study the cultural traditions of a foreign tribe, to reveal something about their way of understanding the world and relating to it. And in doing so, he was one of the first African anthropologists to reverse the direction of anthropological inquiry. He looked at the cultural values and symbols embodied in the types of constructions the Portuguese had built, and the particular ways roads and buildings were imprinted on the landscape to organize the territory.

ELKINS: Was there something in the form or shape of them that he was looking for?

GAMA: There’s definitely a kind of graphical information that he was looking at in their systems of development. He was using scientific and anthropological methods, but because science can’t provide us access to all kinds of information, he was also gathering information with knowledge systems that his people used, like divination systems, which were not accepted in science. His people believed that matter was imbued with spirit, so he was also analyzing the leaves of particular plants there and collecting recordings of the sound of a stick being dragged along the ground. All of that gathers a lot of information, and when you have lots of information, you can maybe run some kind of algorithm and find out what that brings you. But we don’t know what algorithms he was using because we don’t understand them in the West.

Victor Gama In Antarctica

GAMA (cntd): I went to Antarctica with her diary and chartered a boat to retrace her route to the secret test site. I was trying to document what she might have been going through, filming and photographing what I perceived could have been the most important moments for her up to the nuclear explosion she witnessed. The music of Vela is totally composed from what she saw on that route and how it transformed her internally, according to her diary. For instance, she describes a big storm they go through in the beginning of the mission, where she almost died. It led to an awakening of consciousness in her as she starts looking at nature in a different way, because she felt nature had talked to her about what she was sent there to do. As a result, she developed a big conflict with the mission she was on.

I am also attempting to reconstruct some of the research of the disappeared anthropologist, Augusto Zita N'Gonguenho. In 2006, I initiated "tectonik:TOMBWA," a long-term project to reconstruct and interpret his archive and lost research. He had written extensive notes about his search for “dark space,” and no one knows what he was referring to. When I went to Antarctica, you see these incredible huge icebergs and realize that two thirds of them are floating underneath. I felt that his search for “dark space” was probably connected to information that’s hidden either by people or by the nature of the universe. So my new pieces involve doing field work to shine a light where otherwise there would only be concealed information.

ELKINS: Kind of an echo of when you went out to find the musicians in Angola.

GAMA: Yes, it became clear that this would be the ideal process of composing for me from now on. I've completed a multimedia opera based on my field work in the rain forests on the Pacific coast of Colombia to see very up close what the climate conflict is for the people who live in the forest, not what it is for the governments and business contractors who control what information about this is provided to us. Titled "3 thousand Rivers: Voices in the Forest," it is music that expresses the personal narratives of people who actually live there but are concealed from our view. It is also a step toward transforming the purpose of opera by engaging with the natural world and the people living its dramas. What if the ancient vocal techniques of calling out birds or singing and performing to the spirit entities of the forest could be integrated into the heart and practice of contemporary opera? Are we ready to listen to the forest, its rivers and its peoples?

Victor Gama's "3 thousand Rivers: Voices in the Forest" (Colombia & Brazil)

POSTSCRIPT: A white-knuckle account of Victor Gama's detainment by U.S. authorities over his research into the disappearance of Augusto Zita can be read here: https://chimurengachronic.co.za/searching-for-augusto-zita/?fbclid=IwAR12IJXNSBmgkrhC6s8NPAdBmTnYs-LN9-F3sKqUSjpvfe2bQBsboPXeGHU