The Line of Thought
In his notebooks Augusto Zita N’Gonguenho reveals how the road from Namibe to Tombwa, represents what he termed “the Abraxa channel”, in reference to More’s Utopia, an island separated from the mainland by a man- made channel, a border dividing the colonised, and hence “civilised” territory with what “the Utopians” saw as the “uncivilised” wilderness that lay beyond it.
In contrast to this border, Zita proposed a “linha do pensamento”, an unstable fluid threshold of endless possibilities, and the moment when two opposite paradigms intersect and clash causing a foundational change. Countering colonisation’s enlightenment project (represented by the electricity poles), Zita’s line is a thought-movement creatively evolving and producing new forms of understanding rather than territorialising into the recognisable grooves of Western philosophical thought and knowledge.
Zita used this “line” to illuminate not just the colonial ruins (of the Cantoneiros houses and electricity poles), but also the“ espaço negro (black space)” within and beyond them, the unknown and erased histories and indigenous epistemologies that colonialism tried to silence. Zita saw these black spaces as generative realms of infinite knowledge.
In order to illuminate this concept we staged a series of popup light installations in the houses at night. As the houses are close to the road, travellers and passers by became an unwitting audience, while also participating in the work as their car lights illuminated the straight line of the road and danced across the walls of the houses. We documented the light installation using photography, focusing not only on the lights but also the dark interiors of the houses and the starry night sky.
Songs of the Disappeared
On 12 July 1979, a shadowy and deadly apartheid military unit called Delta 40, stationed in Northern Namibia collected two dead guerrillas and dropped them deep in the Atlantic Ocean. This was the first in hundreds of “death flights” carried out by the ultra-secret South African Special Forces unit, whose tactics were an integral part of apartheid South Africa’s undercover war in Namibia, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Zambia. Drawing on strategies devised by French colonial forces in Madagascar and Algeria, and perfected by United States of America’s “blackops” programmes and fascist regimes in South America, Delta 40 soon expanded its operations to include torture, extrajudicial killings, and the deployment of pseudo-gangs – the practice of turning the enemy into one’s own deadly instrument.
In addition to collaborating with local informants and counter- revolutionary movements, D40 worked closely with South Africa’s top secret chemical and nuclear weapons programme, and frequently used illegal chemicals to kill targets before disposing of their bodies. In Angola, they joined with the infamous “counterinsurgency” unit Koevoet, to conduct secret operations from a headquarters at Oshakati, close to the Angolan border. “Death flights” guaranteed impunity for the multiple human rights violations and war crimes apartheid South Africa committed throughout the region. It was the regime’s way of erasing knowledge of the victims’ existence and, by extension, the very ideas they stood for.
With prisoners dropped from planes into the ocean, simply vanishing beneath the waves, or dumped deep in the desert to be eaten by sand, they could cover their secret illegal operations. The likelihood of the victims’ bodies ever being recovered for evidence is practically zero. The wounds of detainees who were mutilated by torture were never seen.
There is no proper gravesite for the dead, preventing their comrades from creating places of commemoration. The identities of their victims – which included civilians – still remain largely unknown, buried in destroyed apartheid security dockets and the memories of South African operatives who refuse to testify.
Their graves are mounds of desert sand, rocky cliffs and the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. Their ghosts are bound to the sand, the sea, the sky.
Augusto Zita N’Gonguenho still walks the desert and inhabits the ruins of its Cantoneiros houses. Our past is with us in the present, and we will carry it forward, either as living memory or repetition.
