Paper short abstract:

This paper concerns the contemporary production of knowledge and meaning upon the Cokwe songs recorded by Dundo Museum in the northeast of Angola during the 1950s.

Paper long abstract:

During the 1950 and 1960 decades, the Dundo Museum developed the 'Mission of Folk Music Collecting of Angola', and recorded more than fifteen hundred songs. This museum was created and held by Diamang, the former Diamonds Company of Angola, established in Lunda from 1917 until Angolan independence in 1975. During 2014 I did fieldwork in the Angolan northeast, and I took with me some of those songs and photographs from the Diamang digital archive (www.diamangdigital.net). My aim was to reactivate colonial memories to think about the colonial relations between sound collections, music and power. Although some of those songs continuing to be performed in ritual situations, they are today no longer performed in a spontaneous way. But Angolan people easily remember colonial past experiences and the political meanings of colonial times precisely through these songs. Thus, the local processes of re-appropriating of those colonial collections of 78 rpm recordings occur through different kind of meanings and memories from the colonial times, in diverse places, and by different agents: by local radio programs, by traditional music bands/groups from Lunda, by Angolan cultural elites together with the Regional Dundo Museum. I problematize those different uses of colonial music collections as contemporary tools of participation in a exercise of value attribution, one that reveals colonial knowledge and memories as diverse and heterogeneous, and which are a form of cultural and political empowerment in order to secure postcolonial futures.