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In 1957, shortly before the flooding, he was invited to the Zambezi Valley by the Livingstone Museum in
Zambia and commissioned by them to record on analogue tape examples
of what were believed would become the last remaining vestiges
of local culture before it vanished forever. |
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The Livingstone Museum believed that Tonga culture would be utterly destroyed because of the forced removal of everyone from the valley to make way for the building of Kariba dam. Fortunately they were proved wrong. In fact, strangely enough, the enforced move provided the Tonga with a small jewel. Shortly before the flooding, the ethnomusicologist, Hugh Tracey, was invited to the valley by the Livingstone Museum to record on tape examples of what were believed would become the last remaining vestiges of Tonga culture before it vanished for ever.
He recorded over eighty examples of Tonga music. Previously these
recordings were unavailable to the culture that produced them
because very few of the Tonga had access to gramaphones, tape
recorders, CD players or radios. Now, through the International
Library of African Music (ILAM) website in South Africa and the
newly established internet connection in Binga, this historical
legacy, which was transferred from analogue tape to vinyl record
and recently digitalised, has the potential to be reclaimed by
the people of the Zambezi Valley.
Keith Goddard, Tonga.Online