REVIEW
What does Africa sound like, asks William Kentridge and his team
This Wednesday, as part of the UK’s massive art programme commemorating the centenary of World War I, 14-18 NOW, a 70m-long stage inside the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London, will showcase William Kentridge’s latest work, The Head & the Load — a hugely ambitious artistic response to a commission to tell the story of the African porters and carriers who served in the war. Kentridge worked with composer Philip Miller and music director Thuthuka Sibisi, choreographer and dancer Gregory Maqoma and a huge cast to create a piece of hybrid performance art that takes the form of “an interrupted musical procession” combining music, dance, film projections, mechanised sculptures and shadow play. The run at the Tate Modern is completely sold out; it’s a hotly anticipated event in the four-and-a-half-year programme of centenary commissions that have commemorated the war.
“Since 2014, we’ve commissioned around about 100 projects across all art forms,” says Jenny Waldman, director of 14-18 NOW, who commissioned the work. “We set ourselves a massive target in the beginning of reaching 10 million people in the UK with our programme, and we so far have reached 30 million people.”
This, the final season in 2018, she says, will focus on the “global impact of the war”.
She speaks about how, although the war is studied at schools in the UK through history and literature, “we always look at it from a Western point of view”.
“We simply don’t learn about that fact that war took place in Africa,” she says, when, in fact, the first shot of the war was fired by a black soldier in Africa — in present-day Togo — before the Western Front was even formed.
There’s an entire history of the millions of African porters and carriers who served British, French and German forces during World War 1 that she says will come as a revelation to British audiences. There are also projects she’s commissioned that deal with Indian and Caribbean soldiers.
Speaking last week, Miller and Sibisi were quick to point out that the difficulty of exploring history of this sort, of course, is that little of it was properly recorded. In fact, much of it was deliberately obscured or erased. There’s a gap in the archive, and excavating the past can only get you so far in re-imagining it.
So, telling a story like The Head & the Load is less a matter of digging through history to discover the truth as it is trying to find a way to respond imaginatively to lost stories. As Sibisi points out, that also involves thinking about how the fragments and gaps, and the way in which we deal with the past, affect how we understand ourselves now.
As composers, it was their job to evoke the aural landscape of the war — and they found that the silences of history were mirrored by the silences in the universe of sound. The structure of the performance is deliberately fragmented — they compare it to a collage — so that it can reveal the gaps and the joints in its telling, and start to acknowledge the provisional nature of our relationship with the past, rather than trying to fill in all the details.
“What we started to think about when we worked with William,” says
Miller, “[was] how little we actually know about this”, referring to African wartime music. He points out that if you google music in the First World War, you get a bit of jazz, perhaps the beginnings of blues, some “jingoistic war songs and patriotic stuff” like Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag.
As classically trained musicians, both composers were well versed in the history of European classical music. “The composers in Europe at the time were rejecting melodic, Romantic music and looking for something that [had] more cacophony and dissonance,” says Miller. The era spawned movements like Dadaism, which in part reacted to the war by starting “to look towards Africa for another kind of world and sound”. This would have pivotal significance in their musical response to the subject matter of The Head & the Load.
But the silence at the centre of all this was the question of what the war sounded like to Africans, and what
African sounds the war had.
“What we thought about is what the world sounded like for a soldier coming from Senegal, or a soldier coming from Malawi,” says Miller.
Part of Sibisi and Miller’s aim in the creation of their sonic response was the impulse to flip the whole dynamic of Dadaism on its head — “trying to imagine that sound world talking back to Europe”, says Miller. What they found most fascinating was that, while the European artistic avant garde was looking towards Africa as a world outside its experience, “in fact, those kinds of experiences were also taking place in Africa”. He points out that “actually Dadaism is happening in the way that colonialism unfolded” in Africa. So their compositions hoped to find a way, as Sibisi puts it, to “not just to turn our back towards Europe, but also to grab Europe by the horns and look back at it through sound”.
Their research and sonic excavations uncovered surprising prompts and discoveries. For example, they found that a philanthropic organisation called the English Committee for the Welfare of Africans sent hymn books, harmonicas, gramophones and banjos to the African battalions so that they could entertain themselves. “Just that list of things being sent to soldiers in African makes it a really interesting start for sound-imagining processes,” says Miller.
Other discoveries include a Swahili phrasebook published for colonial commanders. “If you read these phrasebooks and the list of words, they become absurdist,” says Miller. He compared them to the Dadaist nonsense poetry of Kurt Schwitters.
“The silence then becomes a place we start filling up with these found sounds that come from North Africa, West Africa and also Southern Africa,” says Sibisi.
Miller points out the importance of the fact that they are “taking these existing archives and rethinking them, and reinterpreting them from here rather than from Europe”.
Sibisi is quick to note that composing music under these conditions of silence, partial knowledge and guesswork becomes a “subjective imagination of what this world could potentially have sounded like. It becomes an introspective project as well,” he explains, “not only looking at Africa as a place that cannot be activated because we don’t know enough, but rather: what do we know about ourselves in terms of this history itself?”
The point, as Miller explains, is “not to make some faithful recreation” of what African music might have been made, which in any case would be impossible, but taking the fragments that they could find into their own sonic universe and harnessing them to say something else.
“I think we would both be comfortable in describing the sound process and music making [as a] form of collage,” he says. The soundscape — like the narrative structure of the larger performance — harnesses the
‘The silence at the centre of all this was the question of what the war sounded like to Africans, and what African sounds the war had’
‘The silence then becomes a place we start filling up with these found sounds that come from North Africa, West Africa and also Southern Africa’
fragmentation, “colliding and cutting” to evoke the physical and cultural collisions taking place while maintaining a space for the silence at its heart. It’s not about straightforward musical quotation, but, rather, through the ways in which “the quote itself is transformed”. This adds another layer of meaning, as Miller explains, by creating a sense that the songs, too, have undergone a kind of journey.
“Once we start thinking about the make-up of history as a nonlinear passage, that it is these constructs that are pasted together, we can start to make sense of them,” says Sibisi. “We start bringing the archive into the contemporary, bringing the contemporary into a weird place behind us, and then we start looking at [traditional African] chants and war cries as something futuristic. For me, something interesting happens in the way that time goes into this mishmash, and our reflection of this history, this thing we look at as what makes us who we are today, really starts to feel imbalanced, and it feels unstable.” Later he adds: “The instability of it all becomes our point of departure in how we reflect on this history.”