Repainting the Walls of Lunda

Information Colonialism and Angolan

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REPAINTING THE WALLS OF LUNDA
This page intentionally left blank
REPAINTING THE
WALLS OF LUNDA
Information Colonialism and Angolan Art

DELINDA COLLIER

UNIVERSIT Y OF MINNESOTA PRESS

Minneapolis ∙ London
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges financial assistance for
the publication of this book from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

“Construção Civil” by António Cardoso was originally published in 21 Poemas da

Cadeia (Luanda: União dos Escritores Angolanos, 1979).

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce previously

copyrighted material in this book. If any proper acknowledgment has not been
made, we encourage copyright holders to contact the publisher.

Copyright 2016 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Collier, Delinda, author.

Repainting the walls of Lunda : information colonialism and Angolan art /
Delinda Collier.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-9444-0 (hc)
ISBN 978-0-8166-9448-8 (pb)
1. Mural painting and decoration—Angola—Lunda Norte. 2. Art, Angolan—20th
century. 3. Art, Chokwe—Influence. 4. Redinha, José—Influence. I. Title.
ND2867.6.A52L863 2015
751.7'309673—dc23 2015008719

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 CONTENTS

Introduction 1

1. Diamang as Apparatus: The Production of

Painted Walls of Lunda in 1953 29

2. The Myth of Analog Africa: The Transition

to Information Colonialism 73

3. Rebouco: Postindependence Art and Angolan Socialism 117

4. “Rescue and Visibility”: The Digitization of Painted

Walls of Lunda and Postwar Angolan Art 177

Conclusion 217

Acknowledgments 223

Notes 225

Index 249
This page intentionally left blank
 INTRODUCTION
Telegram and telephone destroy the cosmos. Mythi-
cal and symbolic thinking strive to form spiritual
bonds between humanity and the surrounding
world, shaping distance into the space required for
devotion and reflection: the distance undone by
the instantaneous electric connection.
—Aby Warburg, “Images from the Region of the
Pueblo Indians of North America”

In a black-and-white photograph, a group of seven teenage boys gather

with their paintbrushes to a wall where a mural is materializing. Three are
standing, four are crouching; all seem to be applying the finishing touches
to a composition made up almost entirely of chevron lines, triangles, and
squares. To their left, another group of five boys stands on a bench hanging a
circular plaque with a sunburst of spears radiating from the top. The murals
cover the bottom half of the wall, and a finished circular composition is
positioned on the wall above the group. These unnamed, undifferentiated
boys labor under a sign that reads “Aos Povos da Lunda e à Sua História”
(The Peoples of Lunda and Their History).
The young men in the archival photograph from 1949 were part of a
labor force paid hourly wages to help construct and decorate the walls of
the Dundo Museum in the Lunda North Province of northeastern Angola,
what was then a Portuguese colony. The museum rose up in the middle of
the company compound of the Diamond Company of Angola (Diamang), a
provincial city called Dundo. The boys were hired by the museum’s director,
José Redinha, to put the finishing touches on a museum that he and company
administrators considered the jewel in the crown of the company’s fief in

1
2 INTRODUCTION

figure 1. Diamang’s unpublished photograph of the installation of wall

murals inside the Dundo Museum in 1949. Exact copy of Plate 9A from
Paredes Pintadas da Lunda on the upper wall. Photograph reproduced in
DMAR 1953.

Angola. The group almost definitely copied the wall murals from another
source, black-and-white photographs that Redinha had taken in the field
around that same time. The composition in the circular frame at the top
of the museum wall is a close adaptation of an image later published in
Redinha’s book Paredes Pintadas da Lunda (Painted walls of Lunda, 1953).1
What follows is a history of Paredes Pintadas da Lunda that opens
to a larger analysis of how particular media objects transact colonialism:
what I term “remediation.”2 Published in 1953 by Portuguese anthropolo-
gist José Redinha, the book is a compilation of more than one hundred
INTRODUCTION 3

images and their descriptions that Redinha copied from Chokwe adobe and
thatch huts in Chitato District, ten kilometers from the city of Dundo. The
widely disseminated book compiles three years of Redinha’s research on
the murals that he completed between 1939 and 1943; the murals were just
one subject of his extensive research among the Chokwe, one of the largest
ethnic groups in Angola, in his long tenure at Diamang. Redinha copied
the wall murals in the Chitato district of the Lunda Province in watercolor
and then signed each of his prints, providing a description and interpreta-
tion of each mural’s visual components and their composition. While the
young Diamang artists copied the designs onto the walls of the museum,
Redinha dispatched his version of the images to Lisbon to be printed and
bound into a book. Paredes Pintadas da Lunda was distributed to museums
and academic institutions worldwide, flowing out with the many Chokwe
masks and sculptures that have now become important components of the
most prestigious African art collections.
I first encountered Paredes Pintadas da Lunda sitting at my desk in
Atlanta, Georgia, in 2006, as I clicked around on the website of the first
Trienal de Luanda (2006–7), a contemporary art exhibition that took
place in the capital city. One of the triennial’s many projects was an online
exhibition called Lunda Tchokwe, in which the rotating team of Angolan
artists led by Fernando Alvim digitized the plates from Redinha’s book and
manipulated them to remove his signature. In addition to appearing on the
website, the images were printed for a gallery exhibition and displayed on
billboards around the city. The triennial also donated a set of these prints to
the Ministry of Culture as part of its petition for permission to reproduce
the images under Angola’s intellectual property laws. The act of digitizing
and reappropriating the images was, they stated, an anticolonial gesture that
would wrest “Angolan” creativity from fascist Portuguese control, which
officially ended when Angola became independent in 1975. The triennial
was conceived as part of postwar reconstruction, organized only four years
4 INTRODUCTION

after the official 2002 ceasefire of almost forty years of war, first anticolonial
and then civil (and proxy). The Lunda Tchokwe essay read, in part, “The
Luanda Triennial will thus propose a cultural correction, to try and account
for José Redinha’s work, and other errors in relation to his compilation, and
will finally repair an injustice related to the omission of the original names
of the Chokwe creators.”3 That is, Redinha’s signature indicated the theft
of Chokwe genius, which expanded in the essay to be a theft of Angolan
indigenous creativity that accompanied Portugal’s devastating social poli-
cies. All of these content-based gestures were overlaid onto the process of
digitizing the book—to dematerialize an object and to deliver it, in different
form, to a larger public. The digitized version of Paredes Pintadas da Lunda
also appeared on the website of a diamond company, ITM, as part of its
online “Cultura Lunda Tchokwe” project.
There are three reasons Paredes Pintadas da Lunda merits close analy-
sis. Even though it was published in the 1950s, well into the twilight of
European colonialism and positivist anthropology, it demonstrates one
of the most desperate attempts in the history of ethnographic research to
put the unprintable into print. I will explain what I mean by this shortly.
Second, the book became key source material for anti- and postcolonial
artists during the 1960s to 1980s. They took Redinha’s book and others
like it and incorporated the Chokwe symbols into their paintings as they
explored what Angolan nationalist art should look like and do. Finally, the
recent re-mediation of the book in the 2006–7 Lunda Tchokwe project not
only secures the book’s importance in the practice and history of Angolan
nationalism today but also emphasizes the specificity of the various media
its images have emerged within. The case study of Paredes Pintadas da
Lunda demonstrates the ethos of colonialism within media processes and
narratives of technological progress.
One of the overall arguments my book makes is that Paredes Pintadas da
Lunda in its many forms occurs within a tremendous shift from territorial
INTRODUCTION 5

colonialism to informational colonialism in southern Africa, in which the

diamond industry played a key role. What scholars normally call the In-
dependence Decade in Africa, I argue, can also be understood as a waning
geographical colonialism that was incrementally replaced by energy and
finance capitalism and by information colonialism.4 The displacement of
the human sensorium, or the displacing effect that media have on the hu-
man nervous system with the re-mediation of Paredes Pintadas da Lunda, is
linked to the “action at a distance” of late capitalism; for example, Diamang
needed new ways of creating a sensuous connection between those whose
hands held this book and the remotest part of the Portuguese “overseas
provinces.” There are three ways that this overall situation obtains with art
theory. First, media (art and communication) and colonialism are mutually
sustaining programs that depend on digestion and morphological change,
and artists have found an “internal differentiation” in the objects with
which to challenge their recalcitrance.5 Second, there is a strong element
of primitivism in art and media theory that was and still is formulated
according to “real” conditions on the ground in Africa. Third, conceptual
art in the late twentieth century, particularly its rhetoric of “dematerializa-
tion,” was a set of material and informational global interrelationships that
included its all-out rejection by a cadre of artists who embraced allegory
and layered symbolism in their chosen medium and the process by which
content is generated.
In the first place, Paredes Pintadas da Lunda should be understood
within the history of both photography and anthropology.6 That is, in addi-
tion to being a text about images, it operates by the program of the camera,
which I read as a history of linearity that was in many ways commensurate
with the state form in Angola. Along with explaining the Chokwe images
in a linear form, the book seeks out the Other of the camera, the nontech-
nological pure image. Perhaps because of this, its author Redinha misun-
derstood the extent to which the Chokwe cultural practices were already
6 INTRODUCTION

an abstracted medium (read text) before his encounters with it—how they
functioned as a code of the Chokwe apparatus of power. Indeed, the mate-
rial covered in Paredes Pintadas da Lunda troubles what we might mean
by unmediated “traditional images.” Vilém Flusser describes the process of
mediation of images between “man and the world” and the moment when
historical consciousness committed itself to a “struggle against magical
consciousness.”7 He writes of these fundamental transitions in media his-
tory in modern times experienced in an increasing removal from images to
text, where our ability to “abstract lines from surfaces” is a further removal
of the link between image and world. Similarly, Friedrich Kittler describes
an “evolutionary process” of two main phases: the history of writing and
technical media (telegraphy, analog media, and the digital computer). For
media theorists, this evolution is not strictly chronological or universal and
may reverse back on itself, but it depends nonetheless on the principle of
global technological and conceptual development. The impulse in media
theory to locate ruptures and mark eras is also a modernist mourning, a
gazing backward that is built on a general desire for a more pure connec-
tion with things like a terra firma, the spiritual realm, the speech act, and,
perhaps above all, community. Indeed, Achille Mbembe helps us under-
stand the culturally inflected notion of development: “For what Africa as
a concept calls fundamentally into question is the manner in which social
theory has hitherto reflected on the problem (observable also elsewhere) of
the collapse of worlds, their fluctuations and tremblings, their about-turns
and disguises, their silences and murmurings.”8 That is, “Africa” disturbs
the teleology of media theory. It disturbs modernism.
This media primitivism is analogous to mid-century structuralism such
as that of Victor Turner, whose influential book The Forest of Symbols
(1967) discussed Ndembu rituals in Central Africa. In this and other texts,
he argues that symbols in Africa were directly related to the ancestors and
the “real” via ritual use; they had no textual, or conceptually detached,
INTRODUCTION 7

element. When he saw instances of symbols used by native Africans as a

medium for meaning as profane as colonial politics, he decried it as an aber-
ration and proof that colonialism had permeated to the extent that ancestor
worship, and, indeed, collectivism, was vanishing and in need of rescue.
He writes that change, in this case, comes from technological innovation,
which threatens the “biological and meteorological rhythms” of traditional
Africa.9 The rescue Turner and others proposed, paradoxically, came in the
form of technological storage media such as the book, the phonograph, and
the photograph. We can read Turner’s anxiety against the grain as a crisis
of medium and image formats, what Flusser calls the “significant surface”:
Turner did not necessarily misread the symbolism in ritual behavior but
rather the apparatus through which symbols become significant. This mis-
reading came to be repeated by nationalist artists interested in the symbol
as Angola, Africa, and a “return.”
In overtly nationalist art, the artist often engineers the media object,
usually a canvas, to disappear and make way for the symbol as a type of
return to purity. In anti- and postcolonial African art, the symbol as such
becomes a site of collective contestation and reclamation of the ancestors.
Subsequently, most of the scholarship on nationalist art in Africa has rein-
forced this obfuscation of the apparatus by focusing on the optical elements
of the artwork and prioritizing content. But focusing on various media
objects regards the moments in which images become sensible via both
their materiality and their “magic”—at the moment the media apparatus
consumes itself.10 Book consumes dwelling wall, painting consumes book,
computer consumes book and painting. In some cases, the Chokwe images
remained visually intact through a mechanical reproduction that preserved
the colors, composition, and forms, as in the 2006 Lunda Tchokwe project
and Redinha’s watercolors of the 1950s. In others, the reproduction went the
opposite direction of mechanical, as in the canvases of postindependence art-
ists in the 1970s and 1980s who manually adapted the images in resistance
8 INTRODUCTION

to the technical image, which they saw as an allegory of colonialism and

imperialism.11 Artists of this era brushed the Chokwe forms carefully onto
surfaces to emphasize the plasticity of painting—not as a statement on
medium-specific automatism but to place mediation within its indigenous,
logical specificity. They showed a willingness to retreat from a subjectivity
captured by a stark and static technical image.12 Within the projects, artists
use the Chokwe image corpus to indicate communalism itself, an ancestor
ghosted within, but also accessed through, mediation that is defined by
fluidity and contradiction. In one of Viteix’s paintings, Construção Civil
(1985), the significant surface is directly addressed by the painting’s refer-
ence to a poem that uses the term rebouco, the plaster or gesso covering of a
wall that will receive paint. In the poem by António Cardoso, that rebouco
also covers the walls of his prison. It is, in his prose, bathed in the blood
of anticolonial activists. The industrial scene, with workers integrated into
a rationalist grid, is an ambivalent mix of codes concerning technological
progress and genocide.
The more recent and useful theories of “media ecologies” decenter hu-
man actors along with medium specificity, which is a useful way to diminish
an undue emphasis in postcolonial theory on human agency and ethics.
Repainting the Walls of Lunda follows three artists and periods in their
fraught relationship with their apparatuses: José Redinha during colonial
rule, Manuel Vitor “Viteix” Teixeira in the immediate postindependence
period, and Fernando Alvim in the recent post–civil war period. Each was
well placed to act as an interlocutor, holding official cultural positions in
Angola. Each was an artist and interested in the formal qualities of the
Chokwe images, and each theorized the Chokwe art’s value for Angolan
identity and subjectivity. And to varying extents, each was an outsider to
Chokwe society who came to the images with the intention to instrumen-
talize them for Angola. Their desire to secure native art accompanied a
conflicted position within a country that was experiencing rapid and violent
INTRODUCTION 9

societal change. Each (mis)reading of Chokwe art occurs within a mode of

media that shaped the interpretation of Chokwe art and, to a less measur-
able extent, their subjective responses to the material. The media objects
had certain affordances that they both pressured and worked within.13
Redinha’s response to Chokwe art in Paredes Pintadas da Lunda re-
ceives the most attention in my account, as I unpack how (more) indigenous
media practices were tied to Diamang’s initiatives to curtail autonomous
sociality and Chokwe politics.14 In the process, Redinha fashioned a set
of unchanging Chokwe traditions, which amounted to a limited defini-
tion of medium to that of objects and performances deemed primordial,
superstitious, obsolescent, and originary.15 In just one example, reflecting
Redinha’s sentiments, company official Julio de Vilhena claimed that the
Chokwe had a tendency to adopt music “other than the traditional, and
withhold from the traditional the value and importance attributed to it by
his ancestors.”16 He goes on to argue that Diamang must “[show] him the
value of his folklore, by inducing him to cultivate it regularly,” by providing
them with positive encouragement. Vilhena suggests that the whites clap for
the natives after performances at the Dundo Museum, that is, a Diamang-
controlled feedback, a foundational aspect of mediation. Chokwe art as
contained in a book and manufactured performances becomes artifactual
data in Diamang’s production and transmission of knowledge. The use of
what Vilhena calls “fragile stock[s] of virgin discs . . . in the tropics” goes
beyond just ghosting certain sense perceptions through transformations
in media. Media practices could both condition readings by scholars and
become part of the planned obsolescence of the entire Chokwe political,
economic, and social apparatus.
In no moment is this process revealed more clearly than in José Redinha’s
interpretation of Chokwe images. The most complex of these images come
from sona, a sand-drawing practice that Chokwe men perform with sto-
rytelling among other practitioners.17 Sona has a very clear and openly
10 INTRODUCTION

discussed logic but is incrementally complex and closed to amateurs. It is

a picture theory that both disseminates proper social norms and establishes
itself as an autonomous code. On a systematic level, the drawing process
mediates assertions of power and accompanies societal progression, enacted
through a mnemonic embodied performance of storytelling.18 For example,
sona is used to instruct boys as they are initiated into the mukanda rite at
puberty. The boys enter into the mukanda camp and are instructed for a pe-
riod of time on rituals, history, and the production of objects, such as masks
and figures, that mediate communication with the ancestors, or mahamba.
Sona is a scalar, self-perpetuating system, but acting as a code, not only
does sona represent something; it does something. Before their capitulation
to the Portuguese, in fact, the Chokwe practiced their own colonization, an
important aspect of which was cultural. Fuller’s picture of the digestions of
media is here evident in the similarities between Paredes Pintadas da Lunda
and sona; the most open and seemingly egalitarian logic systems perform
power in the moment they are deployed as a medium. In other words, there
was no originary, “pure” transmission of knowledge that Redinha desired.
Instead, sona and its recent adaptations allow for a mapping of connections
from sand and dwelling wall to the book, photography, painting, and “the
digital”—not because they are the same but because they are self-reflexive
and recursive systems of mediation.
In addition to the book Paredes Pintadas da Lunda, we have the pri-
mary documents from its publication to read how Redinha struggled with
definitions and functions of medium, not only in the function of art within
Chokwe society but also as an expressive medium for any one Chokwe art-
ist. He writes of the various formats the symbols took but always discusses
the discrete symbols over the format through which they were arranged
or composed. When he does address the material and technical support
for the murals or sona, he writes in terms of their being “raised onto the
walls” of semipermanent dwellings as a natural societal progression of
INTRODUCTION 11

nomadic to sedentary. They were current manifestations of a societal past.

Scholars such as Marshall McLuhan in the 1950s and 1960s also looked
at native practices to express their media primitivism, a desire for primary
orality and collective living. Few scholars considered the possibility of
alternative literacies that thrived as media apparatuses alongside the tech-
nologies of “modern” communication. Most scholars of media theory and
history attempted to make sense of the quickly expanding, mechanized,
and disembodied methods of communication as they spread across the
globe with increasing speed and penetration after the Second World War. In
that moment, few considered the coexistence and mixture of these various
formats as anything except an inevitable technological progression that
signaled the death of the “real.” As ethnomathemetician Ron Eglash has
recently argued, however, there is a different way to think about the digital
and analog dichotomy that figured Africa as analog, the space of techno-
logical obsolescence. He explains that analog systems are computational
systems alongside digital systems. They operate by a physical relationship
to that which is being represented—and indeed they were thought to be
more “real” and ethical because of this direct connection. He then writes
of the commensurability of analog and digital representation, writing, “By
viewing physical systems as forms of computation, rather than merely inert
structures, researchers became open to the possibility of having infinite
variation in deterministic physical dynamics.”19 In this line of reasoning, the
analog–digital divide becomes moot in terms of functionality and more a
matter of the politics of cyberneticians and media theorists and the historico-
racial schema generally. Even Turner’s work can be seen as a desire for the
analog epitomized by “African” ritual and symbols.
Part of anticolonial art was to regenerate precisely this heterogene-
ity of format and to reveal the malevolence, racism, and, ultimately, the
contingency of modernization. Working against Diamang’s intervention
and definition of Chokwe “art,” postcolonial Angolan artist Vitor “Viteix”
12 INTRODUCTION

Teixeira worked in the 1970s and 1980s to define what art should do under
a Marxist-inspired Angolan state, arguing that it is inextricably tied to the
material conditions of the nation. His theory and artistic practice rejected
photographic realism, what he considered the primary weakness of Western
representation as compared to native practices like Chokwe painting. Like
his Africanist compatriots, he committed his scholarly and artistic work
to the realities of the “everyday Angolan.” But his work occupied a unique
space between Marxist realism and African modernism, where the native
was also the peasant. Viteix’s interpretation of realism used the canvas
as its significant surface, with the express purpose of using the Chokwe
two-dimensional visual repertoire to reorder the visual field. In the most
effective of Viteix’s paintings, the symbol as such is registered within the
canvas but reflects on the physical and conceptual condition of the canvas
with his use of delineated, deductive borders that contain components of
two-dimensional Chokwe art. In terms of primitivism, the “African” com-
ponent of Viteix’s canvas was, at least in part, his symbol of right ethics in
postcolonial Angola.
In 2006, the Trienal de Luanda attempted to define its use of Chokwe
art under the same terms as Viteix, who by then had become an ancestor
along with the Chokwe artists. In the Trienal de Luanda’s Lunda Tchokwe,
the Chowke images emerged within a format of informatics—including
digitization and copyright compliance—governed by a geopolitical labyrinth
of protocols, materials, and electrical flows. One of the challenges of the
digital medium is to identify its significant surface, where its symbols and
codes are negotiated and then made intelligible to the majority of users.
Media historian Friedrich Kittler argues that in the decades of the 1990s
and 2000s, the computer screen became a powerful and ubiquitous signifi-
cant surface when the radar screen–like green monitor was replaced with
a screen that imitated the television—a more legible and friendly image.
The Chokwe symbol was an anticolonial gesture that relied on the myth
INTRODUCTION 13

of Internet democracy, which in this case was commensurate with biennial

exhibitions’ heavy use of media connectivity since Documenta began in
1955. Lunda Tchokwe’s website operated within what digital media theorist
Alexander Galloway calls the “ludic capitalism” of digital culture, where
play after late-twentieth-century cybernetics fuses the expressive and itera-
tive, the poetic and protocological.20 In Lunda Tchokwe, the very real issue
of authorial agency embedded within the wires, hardware, sponsorship, and
overall transmission capabilities ultimately weighed down on the project’s
postcolonial ethical claims.
Each of these postcolonial gestures made with the Chokwe image was
part of a global reordering of information that depended on readability and
common code, in a moment “when objects have explicitly become infor-
mational as much as physical but without losing any of their fundamental
materiality.”21 The Chokwe projects emerged from within Africa, a continent
consistently sourced for the physical components of informatics, such as
coltan, uranium, and labor. Paredes Pintadas da Lunda and its remediations
were part of a growing network of information that clustered according to
enclaves, excluding areas deemed communist or “developing” during and
after the Cold War.22 This reordering of the world reconfigured mineral-rich
regions, which has resulted in Central Africa’s volatile resource wars. Using
the idea of media ecology helps to understand this situation beyond just
the context of these artworks and projects. I write about Flusser’s “abstract
sort of witchcraft” of the technical image together with things like David
Harvey’s “action at a distance” of late capitalism. For Angolan artists, the
fractured state translated into real, physical suffering in the streets and
hinterlands. It made any format, any significant surface of art, fraught.
Each of the projects, from Paredes Pintadas da Lunda to Lunda Tchok-
we, operates from a certainty that the practice of art is part of social reha-
bilitation: remediation. By remediation, I mean two primary things. The
first is the re-mediating of a previous mediation, such as the scanning of
14 INTRODUCTION

a book into a digital file. The second meaning closely follows the first. It
is the tying of this newer, better media apparatus to a social good, such as
was the rhetoric of colonialism, anticolonial nationalism, and utopian glo-
balism. The force of the rhetoric in all three projects is inversely related to
the weakness of the nation-state, whether Portuguese or Angolan. In these
“states of emergency,” per Walter Benjamin, Redinha, Viteix, and Alvim
work for the emergence of a nationalist art, but for the express purpose of
creating order where it was scarce.23 For example, the removal of Redinha’s
signature in the Trienal de Luanda’s Lunda Tchokwe project was, on the
surface, an anticolonial gesture with a message of reconnecting to the an-
cestors of Chokwe artists. Chokwe artistic agency referred to the ideal of
political self-determination, an abstract notion of nationalism that would
emanate from “habits of culture.” The Lunda Tchokwe project’s anticolo-
nial gesture has been repeated around the world in postcolonial biennial
exhibitions, heritage projects, and social practice. Such remediations are
part of a constant, if not frustrated, desire to connect to the ancestors and
to engineer autonomous community. Such attempts are variously described
as primitivism, self-primitivism, primordialism, nationalism, autochthony,
and return. In Angola, the claim has often been expressed as filhos da
terra, or “sons of the land,” and has special urgency during the Cold War,
a time of increasing forced migration and proxy resource wars. The Lunda
Tchokwe project appeared in a fragile postwar moment when the Popular
Movement of the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) party attempted to gain
control over the hinterlands, something the party never achieved after
independence, which failure was in many ways epitomized by its dealings
with the Chokwe population.
Repainting the Walls of Lunda proceeds in roughly chronological or-
der, pausing in the second chapter to consider the deeper implications of
remediation and its ties to geopolitical technological development. The first
chapter considers Diamang’s Cultural Publications series, which included
INTRODUCTION 15

Paredes Pintadas da Lunda. Key among the eighty plus volumes is a pro-
pagandistic picture book called Flagrantes da Vida da Lunda (Snapshots of
life in Lunda, 1958). The book contains elaborately rendered photographs
of the landscape and native bodies of Lunda. The Chokwe workers are
shown in idyllic scenes of “clean” labor, health care, sport, choir services,
marriage, and cultural festivals. The pictures celebrate the mediation of the
region through images of agriculture, microscopes that examine plant types,
taxidermic displays, and Diamang’s hydroelectric dam. Martin Heidegger’s
analysis of the hydroelectric dam on the Rhine has direct bearing on the
“remote” Africa presented in Flagrantes da Vida da Lunda: the river is a
store of energy to be commanded and ultimately extracted from Africa.24 On
one page is a heavily retouched photo, the soft edges of natives submerged
in the flowing river; on the next is a crisp image of the dam and its mas-
sive turbines. Tied to both extraction and transmission of energy, these are
the images of the dematerialization of Angola and its rematerialization as
energy, capital, and information that flow out of Angola along with those
million-year-old compressed rocks from the deep earth of Central Africa.
These types of publications had precedents in the mining belt in southern
Africa. Alfred Duggan-Cronin, employed by South African diamond giant
DeBeers, helped to invent ethnographic types by exploiting the “eternity”
of the photographic image in the face of the disruptions of migrant labor.
Diamang was formed by a group of Portuguese investors in 1917 to
exploit the rich beds of alluvial diamonds that were discovered in the Lundas
in 1912. Soon after, Diamang became the largest revenue generator for the
Angolan colony until Angola’s independence in 1975. The Angolan colonial
government allocated large swaths of territory in northeastern and eastern
Angola to the company and conscripted labor in exchange for 40 percent
of Diamang’s profits. Diamang was a hermetic and hierarchical company,
a geographically isolated organization and a total project of control. Of-
ten called a “state within a state,” Diamang maintained health services,
16 INTRODUCTION

agriculture, a radio station, a museum, and schools, and, by the 1950s, it

was returning enormous profits to a cadre of international investors and
the Portuguese and colonial Angolan governments. In its many activities,
Diamang measured and controlled every aspect of life in the Lundas, what
they termed “scientific colonialism,” producing knowledge that encompassed
studies of botany, biology, zoology, and medicine and stressing the reeduca-
tion of the native population.
In the 1950s, Portugal’s colonies in Africa were the major point of con-
tention in its deteriorating relations with the United Nations. To answer
widespread criticism of the anachronistic and uniquely violent Portuguese
colonialism, Lisbon propagandized Diamang’s “humanitarian” project. Por-
tugal insisted that it was exceptional in the colonial project, putting forward
similar arguments made by Brazilian writer Gilberto Freyre in his theory
of Lusotropicalism. Freyre, and subsequently the right-wing Portuguese
president António de Oliveira Salazar, argued that the Portuguese more
successfully integrated native populations through miscegenation. In their
writings and speeches, they attempted to apply the myth of a racially har-
monious Brazilian culture to the African colonies. However, as Freyre noted
when he visited Dundo, Diamang practiced anything but miscegenation and
instead enforced a strict separation between the native and white workers.
Overall, the first two chapters examine the Diamang’s interventions in
Lunda, both the inner workings of the Diamang apparatus and its contem-
poraneity with mid-century structuralist scholarship and its accompany-
ing geopolitics. Chapter 1 situates Paredes Pintadas da Lunda within the
technocracy of Diamang, a book apparatus within a colonialist corporate
apparatus. Paredes Pintadas da Lunda emphasizes stylistic analysis, as did
many of Diamang’s Cultural Publications, which was a common type of
information conditioned by the book form in anthropology. These publica-
tions served the dual purpose of creating a “symbology” (Redinha’s term) of
Chokwe art and injecting a soul into the machine of the capitalistic Diamang.
INTRODUCTION 17

Chapter 2 examines the global implications of mid-century anthropol-

ogy in its confrontation with native knowledge production, using sona as
an example of autonomous systems and their privileged position in media
theory. This chapter challenges the commonly held notion that native prac-
tices were primordial and unconscious and instead describes sona drawing
as a recursive autonomous logic system that was consciously controlled by
Chokwe elders to secure their prestige and power. This aspect of sona was
ignored until relatively recently. But revealing this “prehistory” of power
relationships in supposedly collective societies more fully demonstrates how
the colonial-era discipline of anthropology performed its power. It rendered
sona static, in the process passing active flows of information through what
Friedrich Kittler calls the “bottleneck of the signifier.”25 Though we can
point to a type of analog to digital change, this chapter should demonstrate
that the analog–digital divide is fictional, or at least oversimplified. Those
distinctions are always already built into mediation, a process of codifying
the flow of knowledge and communication that operates even in so-called
oral cultures.
Chapter 2 connects up with global movements of cybernetics and control
that rose up during the 1950s and 1960s. Stereotypes of analog Africa were
reinforced as the information gleaned from these frontline anthropological
encounters trickled into the debates over analog versus digital information
systems in computer science. The stereotype of analog Africa was, of course,
nothing new. In 1885, the New York Times reported the “fear” that African
kings felt at the mysterious apparatus of the phonograph and its “magic”
voice; Nanook of the North, the first ethnographic film, showed an Eskimo
biting a phonograph plate, a “strange” object; mining officials in South
Africa in 1913 described native workers as being stunned by the “magic”
of electricity. The trope was reiterated by Marshall McLuhan, who based
his theory of media’s effects on humans on the argument that Africans were
unable to understand Western-mediated images and sound. He is one of the
18 INTRODUCTION

many writers of his generation to profess his desire to return to the African
“tribal” method of communication, based on the belief, again, that Africans
were unconscious of medium and practiced “primary orality.”
Chapter 2 is methodologically provocative and in many ways ties the
entire book together. It maps a connection between cybernetic and media
theory in the West and sand drawing and performance in rural Angola.
There are several reasons for this bridging of time and space. The first is
chronological: Paredes Pintadas da Lunda and cybernetics both emerged
in a time of global restructuring of industry, economy, and politics, which
resulted in a qualitatively different definition of labor and raw materials—a
major sea change in methods of imperialism and control. Indeed, the Cold
War and large-scale decolonization were well under way by 1953, and
the eve of geographical colonialism ushered in the dawn of informational
colonialism: structural anthropology concerned with predicting change
and finance capitalism. Though Redinha was not on the front line of these
developments, his work figured into Diamang’s attempts to secure financial
profit to a multinational assortment of investors, which required a new type
of information production.
Second, there are striking similarities in the structure of cybernetic
systems and native practices such as sona, which can be historicized along
with global forces that attempt to control outcomes. Contemporary critic
Alexander Galloway terms this “protocol” in computer science: the constant
usurpation of autonomous, mythically free information and recursive logic.26
The myth of recursivity in mediation is a crucial connection to what I later
describe in the Lunda Tchokwe online projects; a pattern emerges where
communal knowledge is both transformational and coded for political and
economic control. In some cases, Paredes Pintadas da Lunda is both a type
of process of analog to digital mediation—sand drawing and dwelling walls
to book—but is more accurately described as a re-mediation of Chokwe
media, which was itself periodically instrumentalized by the Chokwe in their
INTRODUCTION 19

process of colonization. It is “digitized,” recoded, in the process of anthro-

pologists creating a discrete data set and using it in the implementation of
policies and technologies that control access to the “ancestors” of history
and resource possession. There exist the obvious violence of colonialism
and the small assertions of power in acts of mediation.
It is not my contention that cybernetics as such had any direct influ-
ence on Paredes Pintadas da Lunda, although there are certainly episodes
of contact between cyberneticians and Africanists, and Eglash has docu-
mented the many cyberneticians who studied vernacular African practices
while developing decentralized computation.27 The relationship I describe
is more that between the shared structural interests of cybernetics and
Africanist anthropology at a time when those disciplines were converging,
roughly following the Second World War. Eglash’s book African Fractals
broadly demonstrates the recursive, fractallike logic of pan-African design
and performance practices and proposes that it is the prehistory of modern
information theory.28 Eglash’s most challenging argument is that the prehis-
tory of fractal knowledge exists both independently of and simultaneously
to Western cybernetics. Eglash’s argument is vulnerable to the criticism
that it is compensatory, which he heads off in writings about the politics of
African fractals. Ultimately, he argues that racism underlies the distinction
made between “natural” fractal patterns and those engineered and designed
by Western scientists.
What chapter 2 highlights is a further separation of labor—physical
and intellectual—in the late twentieth century. These postcolonial labor
practices circumscribed much of Africa within the realm of raw materials
and production in a detachment from finished commodities (diamonds,
computers, gold, financial products, etc.) that was more pronounced than
in early colonialism. That is, by the time Paredes Pintadas da Lunda was
published, labor in Lunda was directed according to the flow of finance and
markets, the logic of which can be detected in several of Diamang’s Cultural
20 INTRODUCTION

Publications.29 In many former colonies, the issue of balancing local labor

and international markets pressed on local activists and artists. It required
innovation in technologies that were counter to but still operated within
global networks. In Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of Its Global
Reproducibility, postcolonial India scholar Arindam Dutta goes so far as
to describe Gandhi as a cyborg to make this methodological connection:
Gandhi’s daily spinning or weaving and bodily training were, for Dutta,
totally integrated into the larger forces of labor, industry, and politics in
decolonializing India.30 His persona, a “native” laborer, was his counterat-
tack on attempts to industrialize India on a level equal to the West. On the
level of scholarship, Arindam Dutta’s methodological conceit of describing
Gandhi as a cyborg is a purposeful crossing of disciplinary boundaries to
show a global system made up of mutual dependence between “underde-
veloped” nations and the “West” in the post- or neocolonial period.
Media technology introduced a whole new order of occupation that
was “global” in its scope and penetrating because of its portability, which
created enclave economies defined by their economic disparities. Given its
publication in 1953 and Diamang’s status as a multinational corporation (at
the time under fire from the international community for labor conditions),
the Cultural Publications series conflated the media-driven displacement of
the human sensorium that McLuhan and, later, Michael Taussig describe
and a new type of geographical displacement at the dawn of late capitalism
and decolonization. That is, the effects on the nervous system with increased
global technological mediation were part of a growing internationalism that
reconfigured Africa as energy potential (labor) and the site of raw material
rendered financial products such as the diamond.
Thus chapters 2 and 3 discuss the postcolonial epoch in Angola accord-
ing to this move to finance capitalism and the fiction of the “dematerializa-
tion of art” that underpins theories of postmodernism. As the story goes,
the disappearance of a “real” referent corresponds with the expanded field
INTRODUCTION 21

of medium as theorized by prominent American conceptual artists and

theorists of the 1970s. However, this moment of the expanded medium
occurs in the postcolonial era, which is also the Cold War era. Recent
scholarship on artists in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile who responded to
movements in New York reveals the geopolitical and mass medial aspects
of dematerialization, what was described by Latin American theorists as the
battleground of message and code.31 Dematerialized art coincides with the
fictional term Cold War, which denotes an absence of—or at the very least
a disconnection from—a “real” war. In 1984 Jacques Derrida described this
as a literary condition that obtains from deterrence policy, the unreality of
the atomic bomb.32 Art history and theory’s focus in the 1970s and 1980s
on the literary as the privileged site of art dismissed concurrent global
practice to make sense of this expanded field of art, largely because it was
trapped within a close discussion of medium specificity. In its worst cases,
Global North scholarship repeats the fiction of the Cold War as cold—not
an active, devastatingly violent war that was materially and conceptually
connected to such far-flung places as New York, Moscow, and Tokyo. The
“real” sites of war—Vietnam, Afghanistan, Cuito Canavale, Sofiatown, or
even the streets of Chicago—were part of an entire apparatus that pulsed
with the energy of globally networked artists with divergent practices.
Much of the art that scholars of postcolonial African art have struggled
to define as modern is, I argue, a constellation of micro counterstatements
against the fiction of a violence-free, self-reflexive conceptual art in the age
of advanced capitalism.
Along these lines, chapter 3 narrates the efforts to re-mediate Paredes
Pintadas da Lunda as part of the ethos of Angolan nationalism, particularly
after Angola’s 1975 independence from Portugal. Remediation in Angolan
art began in earnest in the postindependence period by painters who were
active in the new Marxist–Leninist governing party. These artists studied
Paredes Pintadas da Lunda, in some cases tutored by Redinha himself after
22 INTRODUCTION

his move to Luanda, and incorporated both the Chokwe visual lexicon and
figural representations of Chokwe masks into their paintings. Chapter 3
analyzes the reiteration of the trope of a primordial Angolan art practice,
now deployed in the cultural policies of the newly independent government.
This remediation was embedded in the ethos of the global discourse of “O
Homem Novo” (the New Man), an early-twentieth-century modernist idea
deployed in Angola. Though the MPLA adopted Marxist–Leninist ideas of
the cultural worker, administrators were hesitant to prescribe an art prac-
tice that could be as artistically dogmatic as socialist realism. Instead, they
attempted to structure postindependence museums and art production as
open systems in which the various ethnic groups of Angola could stage their
own exhibitions. Chokwe art, with both its ethnic “style” and its formal
plasticity, became the most commonly cited body of work in Angolan na-
tionalist art. The MPLA interpreted revolutionary art broadly as a contract
with the future through recuperating the past, a sentiment similar to third
world cinema’s idea of prolepsis and Nigerian artists’ Natural Synthesis.
Viteix was a key figure in the implementation of a visual arts program
for the newly independent Angola. His dissertation, “Theory and Practice
of Angolan Visual Art” (1983), is a heroic attempt to circumscribe and re-
claim “Angolan” art from what he termed fascist Portuguese colonial rule;
it is both a description of and a prescription for art production—what he
calls an ideosociological study.33 Throughout his dissertation, he describes
certain logical affinities among the various ethnic groups of Angola. He
concludes, via his largely secular analysis of Angolan art, that its unifying
logic is populism. That is, the ancestors he mediates in his art and scholarship
are onetime Angolan art practices reached only through the obsolescence
of colonialist anthropology. In his rereading of Chokwe art and various an-
thropological texts on native Angolan art generally, he argues that Angolan
art is a self-generating system integrated into a society without hierarchies.
Having studied Chokwe art in texts and on research trips to Lunda
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