The white man came up Out of the waters.
His grave is in the waters.
According to a 400-year-old tradition of the Ovimbundu of Angola, this song, called We Ko Yava, was sung when the first European ships arrived on the coast; it survived into the twentieth century as a boys’ marching song.1Few African
traditional songs are so long-lived – though some of the royal songs (ncyeem ingesh) of the wives of the Kuba king (nyimi) in Congo-Kinshasa, handed down from generation to generation in the closed world of the harem, may have survived since that kingdom was established in the middle of the sixteenth century.2 But basic aspects of musical organisation, performance and style, throughout the whole Kongo-Angola culture area, have shown remarkable powers of persistence since they were first reported by European travellers from the fifteenth century onwards. And yet, at the same time, the everyday music of Angola – and in particular the music of the Kongo-Luanda area – has been greatly influenced by instruments and styles brought from Europe, and in the first place from Portugal.
What exactly is meant by the Kongo-Angola culture area? According to Robert Farris Thompson, traditional Kongo civilisation encompasses modern Congo-Kinshasa and neighbouring territories in modern Cabinda, Congo- Brazzaville, Gabon and northern Angola:
The Punu people of Gabon, the Teke of Congo-Brazzaville, the Suku and the Yaka of the Kwango river east of Kongo in Zaïre, and some of the ethnic groups of northern Angola share key cultural and religious concepts with the Bakongo and also suffered, with them, the ordeals of the transatlantic slave trade.3
The ancient African kingdom of Kongo was ‘bounded on the north by the river Zaire (or Congo), on the south by the river Dande, on the west by the sea, and by the river Kwango on the east’; Angola ‘may be taken as the area between
the Dande and Longa rivers, with a hinterland stretching several hundred miles into the interior’.4
The uniformity of major cultural concepts across such an immense area led to a striking uniformity in the approach to music-making. Gerhard Kubik points out that Angola is one of the few states in southern Africa where detailed written data on music are available, in Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, English and other languages, covering the whole period of European contact. As was seen in Chapter 7, these accounts start with Ruy de Pina (1440–1521), who reported that ivory trumpets were played at the Kongo king’s reception of a Portuguese delegation in 1491. João de Barros (1496–1570) and Duarte Lopes (fl. 1578) added to the growing store of information. In 1648 the Italian missionary Giovanni Francesco da Roma described the Angolan xylophone; in 1654 the Capuchin monk and missionary Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi (d. 1692?) described and illustrated the xylophone and the nsambi pluriarc, or compound bow-lute; and in 1692 Girolamo Merolla da Sorrento, another Capuchin monk and missionary, illustrated the five-string nsambi and other local instruments.5
Portuguese cultural influence, according to Kubik, was especially strong in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the middle of the seventeenth century, Kongo musicians were playing with great skill the military drums brought over by the Portuguese. Nor was that the extent of such acculturation. Under Portuguese influence the side-blown ivory horns used at the Kongo court were transformed into end-blown trumpets with wooden mouthpieces, and these instruments were played in church in the king’s presence. Kubik also refers to early Portuguese influence in the shape of
bowed violins with three srings along the Luanda coast. The Portuguese term is
viola, and in Angola they are played in two- and three-part harmony by celebrated
musicians who often sing with a head voice. In the Lunda region the viola is often accompanied by a long vertical scraper of the type known in Portugal as the reque-reque.6
After some 200 years of such acculturation, Herman Soyaux, who had spent three years in Angola, could write in 1879:
the concertina [Harmonika], flute and tin penny-whistle have become naturalised in the colony thanks to merchants and sailors. The military bands made up of Negroes and mulattoes, and usually led by a white, play the pieces popular in Europe, and many a Negro has become a virtuoso on his instrument. As proof of the Negro’s excellent musical ear and memory, it must be said that everywhere in Angola, even in the interior, men, women and children can immediately and correctly whistle and sing the melodies played by the military bands.7
If there seems to be a contradiction between the essential musical conser- vatism of the Kongo-Angola area and its ready acceptance of military drums, military bands, concertinas, flutes, tin whistles and other European contribu- THE MUSIC OF THE KONGO-ANGOLA CULTURE AREA 159
tions, it is a contradiction that from a very early date underpinned and speeded up the acculturation process in Brazil. As time went on, fewer and fewer of the millions of Africans transported to Brazil from Kongo or Angola would have remained untouched by the musical innovations in their homelands. Kongo- Angola musicians held fast to certain basic organising principles in their music (they sought above all a texture of contrasting timbres arranged polyrhythmi- cally); but whatever aspects of the music lay outside those basic principles were open to innovation, borrowing, experiment and change. And this dialectic of continuity and change largely determined the shape that Brazilian popular music would take, up to and including the modern samba.