Sitting quiet this
morning, we definitely have a broader range of birds sounding off. There are the
standard chickadee and magpies who’ve been here, all winter. But there are some new guys flying through, as well. I identified about three additional calls out
there. Mind you, none were as beautiful
as whatever it was that was singing away back there in San Diego. These are the ornithological equivalent of
barking. Short, staccato bursts that
sound more like someone defending a pile of seeds than it does someone calling
sweetly to their lover. But the rhythmic
variety, “triple tweet”, “shotgun blast tweet”, if not the melodic refinement
is appreciated. They’re here for a
reason.
L'orchestre Folklorique T.P. Konono Nº1 de Mingiedi, (a.k.a.
Konono Nº1 ) have a remarkably original sound.
I’ve had the album Congotronics from 2004, for some time now. A song of theirs "Lufuala Ndonga" came
on the mix today at the gym during sit-ups.
I’m glad it did. After a week on
the road flab waning, I needed help to push. As the
name suggests they are from the Congo, hailing from Kinshasa, but I’d have
struggled to say much beyond that. The
sound is, to my ears remarkable original.
It occurred to me that I wanted to write about them as soon
as I heard them, as once again, I knew of them, but knew nothing about
them. I fancied myself saying that these
oddly amplified acoustic bangings
sounded like they had culled instruments from whatever they found
around them, playing truck exhaust pipes and truck tires and waste products
into a remarkable salvage symphony.
Then, I paused. This is probably just my ignorance. These are likely traditional instruments that
have been played for centuries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konono_N%C2%BA1
Always good to check.
It appears that Konono Nº1, who have been around for years but only in
the last fifteen or so have they played abroad, have in fact culled their
instruments from waste products, including trucks. This from the Wiki page on em’:
“They combine three electric
likembé (a traditional instrument similar to the mbira) with voices, dancers,
and percussion instruments that are made out of items salvaged from a junkyard.
The group's amplification equipment is equally rudimentary, including a
microphone carved out of wood fitted with a magnet from an automobile
alternator and a gigantic horn-shaped amplifier.”
Apparently the “T.P.” in their name stands for tout
puissant, or "all powerful" and is an homage Franco and his band T.P. OK
Jazz. Franco, was effectively a saint in
the Congo when it was called Zaire. But
this music is so completely different from Franco’s melodic, jangly guitar melodies
as, well most U.S. popular music from the sixties music and the urban grooves
of today.
Almost straight-line east from Kinshasa on the Indian Ocean
is a small Tanzanian port city called Bagamoyo near Dar es Salaam. My cousin has long run The Baobab Home, an
orphanage and sustainable farming community to support local children as well
as anyone in the community who is HIV positive. http://www.tzkids.org/ I’ve long wished for the chance to be able to visit her there and especially to introduce my daughters to her and her work. And we’ve discussed, up until now, the growing presence of China in her adopted continent.
Well, last night I got a note suggesting the Chinese
presence had evolved from a theoretical fancy to an imminent concern. A Chinese company, it would seem, is now to
build an enormous tin can facility and port complex right there in Bagamoyo. http://www.spiegel..de/international/world/chinese-investment-in-africa-boosts-economies-but-worries-many-a-934826.html
The
Ming Dynasty eunuch Admiral Zheng He traveled with his treasure fleet to the
coast of Tanzania in the early fifteenth century, long before the Portuguese
made it around the Cape of Good Hope.
Apparently when they did, some 70 years later, the local people, who
were not particularly impressed with the Portuguese leather handled axes, held
up old silk scarves and said, effectively, “hey, you got any of these?”
And
now, six hundred years later, the Chinese have returned. There is a lot of ink spilled over the
question of whether China’s efforts in Africa will have a net positive
affect. Leaving aside the fact that the
West’s engagement with the continent was a frightening mix of predatory,
extractive behavior, noble aspirations and often-shambolic execution, China and
Africa will almost certainly have a hard time of it. People will invariably be frustrated by the
Chinese comparatively insular way of doing things, and their studied lack of
concern for local political conditions will create a gulf between moneyed
elites and everyone else. But I have no
doubt that the Chinese will get this and many more ports, done. They may be able to jumpstart Africa’s
industrial revolution, in a way that heretofore has only been theorized.
Is
this a good thing? I don’t know. I know my whole life is predicated around
taking advantage of what the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath have
wrought. I have witnessed the Industrial
Revolution at time-lapse photography speed here in China over the last twenty
years. It is not pretty. There are many attendant hazards. But look at any period of rapid industrial
development, it’s always ugly, always 翻天覆地[1] any time its ever taken place. And it is impossible to deny for a
people who are organized and determined to obtain the same standard of living I
always enjoyed.
Perhaps
the attention that China is attracting with its efforts on the continent will
drive a recalibration of strategy from Western firms and Western governments
who have long assumed they knew what was best and what was possible for
Africa. Perhaps it will stimulate some
supra-national cooperation on the part of regional African states that see
power in collective bargaining rather than being played off one another. (Take a lesson from how China negotiates with
S.E. Asian nations over the Spratlys!) And perhaps it will lead to an immediate
period of even more venal and horrid corruption of local elites, who go too
far, and who pull a reaction from newly empowered urban working force. Whatever happens, China’s engagement will
force a change to the status quo that seemed an interminable sentence on that
continent. And it will force China to
learn about international engagement in a way that may also force change, at
home.
I like to imagine bird calls in the morning down there in Bagamoyo. Maybe there is a way to engage in that dialogue.
[1] fāntiānfùdì: sky and the earth turning upside down
(idiom); fig. complete confusion / everything turned on its head
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