Christoph H. Müller (Gotan Project) & Rodolfo Muñoz present RADIOKIJADA "Nuevos Sonoidos Afro Peruanos" (New Sounds from Black Peru)

How, when and where instruments come into being is an eternal mystery. Nature has its own orchestras and ensembles, producing sounds and music unheard by most of us, but many inanimate objects reveal their hidden melodies - and some became conduits for gods, and therefore sacred objects. Nowhere in the world was imagination and ingenuity at work than in the African diaspora, and amongst the slave populations, desperate to maintain their musical heritages in the alien and fearsome New World. In the early 17th century, the Spanish conquistador mine owners drove their slaves up from the coast where they arrived, into the high Andean mountains to dig for gold and minerals. But the harsh climate and oxygen-depleted atmosphere cost so many lives that they switched them with indigenous Indians and herded the Africans down to the cost to work the sugar plantations and ports.

After the human beasts of burden came the mules - burros - responsible for carrying harvested sugar cane from field to processing mill and port. Theanimal which carried Christ's mother to his birthing place and her son to his crucifixion was, during those colonial times, the slave owners' most crucial possession, valued above the slaves. But the mule would also become a valuable asset for the Africans in a way never imagined by their masters.

After realizing the subversive and revolutionary potential of drums for
communicating between slave populations (which vastly outnumbered the whites and were only controlled through brutality and fear), they banned them. So the 'bush telegraphs' - as instantaneously as efficient as mobile phones today -had to be replaced. Not just for communicating but also for enabling musicians to perform the music vital in religious ceremonies, for marking rites of passage, for accompanying griot singers who carry their history and mythology, for fun and escapism, and crucially, for maintaining a sense of identity.

The ingenuity of cornered, desperate people is unbounded. In this story, the slaves and subsequently, freed men working under the same conditions, diverted fruit crates (in Lima, Peru) and fish boxes (in Havana, Cuba) for use as box-drums - cajons. Equally ingenious were the cajitas, made from church collection boxes whose wooden lids were banged opened and slammed shut to produce a sharp, slapping beat. Centuries later, the cajon is central to Afro-Peruvian music.

The third, and most exotic and mysterious of these improvised percussion
instruments is the quijada, made from the lower jaw bone of a young mule
(burro), donkey or horse, and like those bone-flutes, also possessing a magic which separates them from the wooden instruments, by involving parts of a once-living animal.
The opening song to RADIOKIJADA introduces the magic and also the incredible range of this deceptively simple percussion instrument. Insects chirping, woodpeckers drilling, seeds rattling in pods as a hurricane passes through - images come and go as the quijada player displays his skills like a bird flashing its feathers.

In 1969, the now celebrated musician Ronaldo Campos founded a folk music group called Peru Negro, which collected and performed songs heard from family members and in archives, and using those instruments including the quijada which they share with their slave ancestors. Two decades later, the singer Susana Baca dedicated herself (like Toto La Momposina in Colombia at the same (time) to researching, preserving and recording songs from old men with guitars and women with harsh voices who remembered songs their grandmothers taught them traceable back to slavery and beyond.

Today the Afro-Peruvian repertoire, and it’s songs are being reinterpreted and reinvented by musicians from all quarters, acoustic to salsa to electronic, and now included in the 21st century Afro-Peruvian adventure in music being conducted by RADIOKIJADA which perpetuates ancestral traditions and carries the primal voice of the quijada into the digital era. Suena la quijada.

Sue Steward.
Winter, 2008.