Within the context of this project, Artificial Intelligence, has been (re)coded as Ancestral Intelligence using the frameworks of Radical Zambezian Reimaginings. A methodology which accepts and prioritises fictive realities as being a necessary component in the healing of critical gaps in history, especially those of marginalised and silenced people and communities. Ancestral Intelligence (AI) is the tool used in the development of Reindigenising Future Food, which uses digital technology to reflect on the present, project a future, and map a past of possibilities around Food Security challenges in the face of climate change in Zambia.
The short film uses the technology to time travel, showing fictive histories and fictive futures from 1955 to 2055.
Ancestral Paths to Future Seeds
AI SOUND BOARDING FILM (3mins)
Ancestral Paths to Future Seeds (2024) is an AI sound boarding film by Banji Chona. The experimental film set between 1955 and 2055 highlights the possibilities of a future in which the functionalisation of baTonga indigenous knowledge systems, in various forms, provides adequate solutions to the current climate crises through locally generated mitigation strategies. Its objective is Radical Reimagination. It has been referred to as a sound boarding film as from this immersive visual project an array of outputs emerge, such a poetry, short character stories, critical essays, social policies and collages.
Basket weavers, the protagonists of the film, use their studios as the place in which a community think-tank emerges. The weavers and their community solve their unique climate related challenges by implementing unique response systems such as the reindigenisation of seed systems within foreign agricultural practices. They replace maize with drought resistance indigenous grains like gankata, sorghum and millet. Later on, they reclaim indigenous land on the Zambezi, which in a post-colonial condition belongs to a majority of non-Zambian landowners. The community use their access to the river to revive the pratice of alluvial gardening (cilili) and to continue the ancestral practices of foraging and wild food culture. These actions all lead to furthering food security and climate justice in their community.
SUBMISSION
The relationship between baTonga and the land has been fractured and altered by the many violences of colonial and even post-colonial imposition. The forced removal of people from areas along the river to accommodate for infrastructural development or tourism investments is a common and long standing practice within and across the country. The most common example is that of the forced removal of an estimated fifty seven thousand baTonga in the Gwembe Valley for the construction of the Kariba Hydroelectric dam. baTonga were moved from where Kariba now stands as a colossal scar on the land, to higher grounds, away from the Zambezi and fertile soils which held centuries of knowledge and technique. The Valley Tonga are also known as ba Silwizi, the river people. A majority of their systems and world views were defined or influenced by the river. Ons such system of importance was Alluvial Gardening (Cilili) this system in its respective techniques can be said to be environmentally (with regards to soil and water) efficient systems. These garden systems were mapped and designed based on the deep knowledge of the channels, currents and soils of the Zambezi and also of indigenous seeds and plants.
The film is a response to the current climate crisis ripping through Southern Zambia and the country as a whole. As of the 29th of February 2024, Haakainde Hichilema, the President of Zambia declared national disaster after countrywide drought. “The destruction caused by the prolonged drought spell is immense,” he said. The dry spell has already affected 84 of the country’s 116 districts. “In view of these challenges … we hereby declare a prolonged drought as a national disaster,” the president said. The measure allows for more resources to address the crisis, with the drought expected to last well into March. Due to influence of El Nino on the 2023-2024 rainy season, Zambia has lost one million hectares (2.5 million acres) from 2.2 million planted crops. Almost half of the nation’s “planted area” has been “destroyed”, Hichilema said. He said humanitarian aid would be made available to ensure people do not go hungry, and he urged cooperating partners to provide relief beyond grain. (Al Jazeera, 2024)
The film is set across various junctures of time. Frames span from 1955 to 2055. The opening scene is set in the present, 2024. A seemingly endless field of maize is captured swaying in the hot and fast el Niño winds, silently singing their songs of rot at the root. A majority of the Southern province of Zambia, an agricultural strip which used to be known as the “Green Belt” for its fertile soils is now tinged a morbid brown from sun scorches and periods of dry spells. From the sky or the eye of nziba, the red eyed dove, one can see patches of bright green squares signalling a reserve of water sprayed from the sky in spiralling motions by pirouetting machines. The animals in the parks feel the air and the ground losing its moisture, they labour through the Miombo and Mopane Woodlands which are beginning to resemble their Kalahari cousin.
The desperate brown scenes of the present are reinvigorated by the swirling verdant motion of leaves in a retrospective scene which pulls back into 1995, a year when droughts swept across Zambia. Food relief programmes initiated by the state and international NGOs introduced bags of yellow maize as a way to curb the food security crisis in mostly rural areas. Although this may have been, stories still resting in communities tell of how the Zambezian, Miombo and Mopane Woodlands and the fruit and foragable food they bore, like Musikili, Lusala, Inji gave way to banquets and rituals of thanksgiving.
A striking close up of a larvae rendered to resemble Bana ba Popolofwa, Imbrassia Belina, a specie of Emperor moth found in the Gwembe Valley, serves the purpose of alluding to the ways in which these magnificent creatures were an important part of the baTonga ecosystems in that they were both a forageable food and an inspiration in basketry design.
The film then jumps forward to 2032, thirty seven years from the last drought and eight years from the current drought, to a scene of women in a field of nzembwe (millet) an indigenous grain which has been farmed using modern or rather foreign agricultural techniques which can be traced to the 1920s when mixed farming techniques introduced by white settlers became one of the oppressive imperial and colonial languages of land. A close up scene shows the stalk of a head of sorghum swaying gently in the hands of a woman. It cuts to a scene of houses mu munzi (in the village) which are modelled after the homesteads of baIla who used to mount the horns of cows and buffalo atop their homes as spiritual and decorative objects. In this case the decorative object is the frond of an ilala palm, a plant which signals rivers close by.
The years end is marked by a scene showing a group of Banyama (the basket makers) sitting in front of their weaving studios turned climate mitigation think tanks discussing possible solutions of further regeneration of their environment and thus that of their future.
Six years later, the opening scene mirrors that of 1995, women emerge from within carved ancestral paths in the Miombo forest, carrying baskets of wild fruit which has been harvested for the festival of thanksgiving to the soil (Lwiindi lwa Bulongo). In their foraging practices the women introduced seed planting initiatives which led to the slow regeneration of the woodlands around them. Fast forward 11 years, the woodlands have been replenished, there is a 61% increase in regenerated woodlands in the area achieved through community initiatives of Banyama. By 2055, 89% of the woodland areas have been regenerated, the Zambezi River is healthy and accessible to the indigenous people, its people. Alluvial gardens with gourds such as pumpkins are thriving on the banks of the river. The indigenous technology of cilili has been further developed and the risk of silting up the river with this technique has been alleviated.
The film cuts back into a black and white scene of an alluvial garden in 1955, two women dressed in black look at each other with worry and uncertainty glinting between their gazes. A Sikatongo, earth priestess, looks longingly across Kaliba, a point between two hills, meaning trap. Two years later, in 1957, large yellow machines are in front of the mkaings of Dam wall. They are digging and drilling, excavating and piling up rubble amongst felled trees. Bodies of ancestors.
A year later in 1958, baskets are floating atop a gushing body of water, having been washed away by a violent flood, a colonially imposed curse on the land. Although miles from their homes and their makers, the baskets gather and stay together as they continue to journey and float along a lake which ceaselessly tries to remap its journey as a river. Floodings of the river as its ability to excercise the act of remembering. The next scene shows the homes of the baskets, submerged under water, those in stilts only managing to hold against the flow of rage.
Almost a century later in 2055, two women stand in an alluvial garden, mirroring the 1955 image of the women in black. In this mirror the women wear brown and hold in their hands a new plant as a result of new seeds and new soils. The hands of a woman alchemise a pumpkin, almost sprouting from the bright orange colour on the woman’s nails. Their homes are surrounded by acres of regenerative soils and plants that feed and grow strong resilient communities. Their insides are inspired by architecture and design principles of their foremothers. A woman jolts through her hallway, which is donned in earthy tones and telluric materials like carpets and frames. In the next scene a group of women from the community walk in the Miombo Forest, towards their shared alluvial gardens. The women work in pairs to plant and harvest. The very same pumpkins that grew in the centuries before began to grow again.
The film then pans across to lands and timeframes in which violations have rendered plants unable to grow and feed the people of those nations. It is almost impossible to speak of a food security crisis in the context of Zambia without addressing and acknowledging the positions of women and children in nations like Palestine and Congo.
human narration
Poetic Overview
NOTE: In using digtal technologies, like AI, the vast asymmetries which exist within these new spheres of creation and possibility are not lost on me. As products of a world in which programmers are not baTonga people who understand the intricacies of our own stories, the pronunciation of words in our own tongues… current digital technologies used without employing a critical lens risk the danger of perpetuating violent essentialisms and stereotypes.
artificial intelligence narration
Character stories
Character Stories is driven by the visceral need to attribute and reconstitute the instrinsic, non-exploitable value of baTonga women. It also exists as a direct challenge to the normative visual conceptions and projections of baTonga women found in the mainstream archive. baTonga women, in contemporary and historic visual culture, are often presesented as products, subjects or objects which exist as part of largely asymmetrical visual corpus mostly cemented by the western schools of Anthropology/Ethnography. Schools of thought whose foundational theories (and legitimacy in many ways) relied on the camera’s ability to capture curated scenes which corroborated the pre-conceived and often violent hypotheses of their carriers.
A number of photographs or videos of baTonga women which exist in the archive, mostly in public museums or private galleries in the occident, are often subtitled with the text “photograph of an unknown woman” and are devoid of any further data which alludes to the very core or centre of the photograph. This approach, renders baTonga women appedages of oppressive histories and narratives as opposed to autonomous agents of free will.
Character Stories challenges this gap in the documentation of dignified existences of baTonga people by virtue of Banyama, the main characters of the film, being written as people with recognizable and traceable names, extensive stories, timelines, families, hobbies etc.
Namatete
is a Banyama (basket weaver) and a Sikatongo (earth priestess) who was born on a warm October afternoon in Nampeyo in a year not a single soul can confirm. Nampeyo is a village which lies on the edge of the Zambezi Escarpments, where the plateau has just begun to break into the escarpment (E. Colson, 1958) Located to the northwest of the village is Nazyaando Hill which gives way to Chisoboyo Hill on the east and Jalata River to the north. (M.C Chona)
Her name, given to her by her great-aunt, means Mother of the Reeds. A sign she was to become Banyama.
As a Sikatongo, she has the ability to understand the syntax of the land and the trees, the ways of the water and the animals. Namatete’s companion is Nakakolyo, the Goliath Heron, which visits her in her mystical abode. Her element is that of wind, which she harnesses through iguwo a basketry pattern she learnt in the village of Munyumbwe in the Gwembe Valley, during a trip she made with her sister Namaliketi to trade animal skins for the cotton grown by the Valley Tonga.
iguwo basket pattern
The 2032-2055 society Namatete lives in is non-hierarchical as a further reindigenisation of systems. Although this may be, she is a well respected and valued member of the community as the first think-tank session took place in her basketry studio.
Part of Character Stories has been inspired by ‘Masters of Ceremony’ a presentation shared by Rob Marriott (Author, DJ & Filmmaker) at The Center for Black Visual Culture (NYU) on the 27th of March 2024.
In the presentation Mariott who is speaking on Hip-Hop’s Impact on Black Visual Culture describes the genre, in the context of the Bronx, as being “a body of psychological technology which creates a resurrection of liberation and intent…one which is rooted in the tradition of what black people have done all throughout these 400 years of oppression. This is to story tell, to live in story and to create characters that convey the information to negotiate that oppression”
He brings into context the charcater of Br’er Rabbit (or Peter Rabbit), a popular storytale figure rooted in African American oral traditions, which can be traced to the myriads of Bantu speaking people who were enslaved en masse and loaded onto ships bound for a land in which cultural violences and silences were abundant. As a means of maintaining their integrity, their humanness, the connection to their homes and their ritual expressions, they carried with them, across the seas their stories, songs and teachings of Sulwe (ciTonga), the rabbit.
In the parallels of baTonga and African American storytelling, Br’er rabbit/Sulwe uses his vivid imagination to constantly rebel against a hegemonic (and often oppressive) system which tirelessly and ceaselessly tries to box him in. By the end of the tale, which often has twists, turns and cascading dips and peaks, Sulwe/Br’er Rabbit always escapes by the skin of his teeth, but with exactly what it is he was after.
“..with his wit and intelligence, he creates word magic which is really the root of Hip-Hop. He’s the original glitch in the scarcity matrix”
TITLE
Maanu a Sulwe
AUTHOR
Bruno Mwiinga
FILE
LANGUAGE
Tonga
PUBLISHER
National Education Company of Zambia Ltd.
YEAR
1974
SOURCE
illustrations from Maanu a Sulwe
translation
WE WERE IN TIMES OF WAR
Years had gone by, the animals were still in times of discussion, they wanted to form a community and live together. In their midst, was Sulwe who looked like he had a sense of intelligence that could outwit them all.