by Samba Yonga for Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage
Invisible Archives - Seeing, decoding and locating silences in a colonial archive.
The idea is that the colonial archive tells you stories… the reality is, it also creates silences. The question to consider is what stories the silences of colonial archives tell and what the archive does to biographies of objects they hold.My practice is largely on how to communicate cultures and in my contact with colonial archives I have discovered the gaps and silences that archives reveal about my own cultures.
The colonial experience was a period of acquisition of artefacts looted and “gifted” during the colonial expeditions, I speak particularly from Africa but the experience as similar in other territories. It coincided with a time when religion was also introduced as a tool to coerce, silence and control populations in these territories. This extraction of cultural heritage and the suppression of intangible heritage rendered the creation of colonial archives that have entangled histories and narratives that continue to be reproduced with violence, erasure and oppression that the objects carried with them.
The interruption, dislocation and decontextualisation that was caused by the separation of knowledge, objects and histories from their place of origin has created epistemicides in their communities of origin which the archive is blind to. This introduces the question of sovereignty, position and the power of a colonial archive. How it imposes power, takes away power and renders the “archives” it claims to hold powerless.
The reality is many of the items that have experienced epistemic violence were themselves archives and this entanglement and contact with colonial archives has made them lifeless. The objects dies and is deactivated when it sits on the shelf of a colonial archive and in coming into contact with the objects we have found we are not only grappling with the idea of how to restitute the object but also start decoding the life and knowledge of an indigenous archive embedded in the colonial archive and considering how the dislocation changes the indigenous coding and the prospect of codifying this unwritten language without any Western knowledge system mediation.
This is an example of this indigenous archive – The Makishi Mask and the Book of Chokwe Ancestral Knowledge
The images are of the Makishi masks and tablets with ancient ancestral symbolic language called “Tusona” that journeyed from their place of origin to a dealer, then a collector who rendered meaning to them by writing a book and then gave them back to the National museum in Lusaka as a “donation”. In the national Lusaka Museum, where these pictures were taken, they are stored on a shelf in a store room, gathering dust. The curators and conservators do not even know the names of these objects, they are not clear of the provenance of the object and essentially have repeated the silencing and erasure of the colonial archive that they had been “rescued” from. The entanglement, erasure and silencing continues even here.
Another part of this story is that we have done previous studies with the Makishi masks that are located in the archives of the National Museum of World Cultures in Sweden, we are working with the museum and have created digital surrogates of the masks. In the museum the Makishi is attributed to the wrong ethnic group. It is described as a mask used in a ceremony and the narrative ends there. It is mostly considered in its aesthetic nature and yet none of the features of the masks or tablets are intended for aesthetics. If I had to attempt to present these masks and tablets in its actual function it would be something in the order of the tablets used by the indigenous people as archives of knowledge of the Luvale people which perform knowledge transmission functionality when activated through ritual performance and are embedded with symbols and language that carry significant meaning.
These masks and Tusona are part of the Mukanda initiation ceremony for boys that is performed by the Luvale, Chokwe, Luchazi and Mbunda people during the Likumbi Lya MIze ceremony. The significance of this ceremony is that a ritual is performed where ancestors are reanimated through these masks through dance, rhythm, music and oral transmission and in this way pass on the ancient knowledge of the ancestors to the initiates. Symbols and markings on those tablets represent an archive of knowledge and information that is embedded into our bodies, and in that sense our bodies also become archives. I am describing an archive and how this community comes into contact with the archive, accesses the archive and interacts with it. And the practice today, as I describe it, is largely interrupted and no longer practiced as a result of this separation.
In my very rudimentary description you can already see and hear how different these same objects are presented to the world and for me it is particularly frustrating that in our own museum we perpetuate this silence… essentially still reproducing a colonised archive in a post-colonial and independent space of learning for indigenous people.
This makes us (at the museum) also consider how colonial archives change the biography of an object– for the mask and tablets, the story dies in the book, in the library, in the museum storage or on the shelf of an archive and it begs the question of how to deal with silences and ways of seeing or not seeing that the colonial archive manifests and questioning its ability to perform as an archive for these specific modified objects.
We are in deep contemplation thinking around the question of - What does contact with colonial archives do to other forms of archives? – The violence of colonial archives. The colonial archive keeps the dead material and the community is also robbed of the archive
The power the colonial archive has to decide the fate of an indigenous archive is a power that is largely excludes indigenous communities and gives meaning mostly through the lens of the colonial archive.
On our end we then start to think and consider the question of - What do indigenous archives and libraries look like? What are the politics of seeing this archive with a varied lens? How to make visible invisible spots in archives.
I will end with the story shared by Teju Cole to illustrate the absurdity of some items in a colonial archive, he says when you want to listen to Bach or Beethoven you would not go straight to the score and contemplate it and think “Oh great piece of music” you have to actually listen to the song or composition to fully appreciate its beauty and value and that makes complete sense, people go into an archive or museum and they will look at an object, and this case a mask, and only read the score and not have the experience of what it transmits when activated… and that stayed with me in understanding the interaction and impact of colonial archives and what we need to do to influence and change that.