poems painted on the walls by local artist Calunamba (CalunambaArt), featuring a new generation of Angolan poets who write about passages, their own and their country’s, looking deeply at the world as they find it, including young poets from Tombwa, Sabino Mbuta Calvia (Pensador Mbuta) and António Sebastião York Caunda (Poeta Lágrimas De Arrependimento), whose work combines a deep sonorous lyricism with bold rhythms.
Divination is one of the African practices that both colonization and extractive capitalist imperialism have ceaselessly sought to undermine and violently eradicated. It’s a tradition that foregrounds a receptive and responsive instead of exploitative attitude to the environment and thus one that develops its initiates intuitive capacity to read and interpret signs in one’s surroundings; to sense whether the forest, the sea, the desert, the mountains or the valleys are in equilibrium, whether the trees are flourishing, and the animals thrive.
Divination Basket
Visiting anthropologist Koenraad Stroeken in consultation (by phone) with his mentor Malamala of the Chwezi cult of spirit mediums from Tanzania, created a ‘sample’ of a divinaton oracle in one of the smaller rooms that engaged Augusto Zita’s association of the house with a nkizi, a religious object whose purpose is to communicate with the ancestors’ world, meeting the challenge of ecological transition wih indigenous cosmology.
Local communities, pushed to the brink of survival by ecological destruction mainly due to overfishing by large international industrial fishing companies, are recycling old concrete electric distribution poles, which run in a line across the desert from Namibe to Tombwa. While this isn’t overtly an ecological strategy for these communities it nonetheless speaks of both the effects of globalisation and late industrialism on communities, as well as their ingenuity. The recognition that we can recycle and reuse what we have, points one way forward. All of over 400 of these poles have by now completely toppled by desert scavenging. Their concrete remains lie as graves in the desert that testify to both a history and a possible future.
Zita interpreted the various man-made interventions in the area, such as excavations by heavy machinery, as human ‘inscriptions’ written in a foreign tongue by the colonial “utopian” dream to subjugate nature. He envisaged using satellite images, together with local forms of cartography that embrace walking as a method, to read these inscriptions alongside the deep history engraved into the sand, the rocks, the land that attend to the ancient and future memories tracing the pathways of animals, matter, people, and plants across ancestral and current systems of migration, seasonal displacement and transhumance in the region and resonating landscapes.
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