2023 / multi-sensory installation; printed posters, archives, paper, 6x channel sound, photography, text, stencils
Obeah: Tribunals & Voyage Au Bout De La Pagode
Light, the one we sense Light, the one that holds us These sensing particles of gushing energy crossing our bodies, making it move. Light, one that needs only seconds to reach us Light, traveling space millennia before it touches us Light, this hot balancing air Light, this power carrying the atmosphere Light, as high as warmth weighing gravity Light, the one we sense Light, the one that holds us This light we sense, carrying the history of a body, that it touched, before it touched us. Light is energy Heavy we feel, with Light taken Heavy we feel, with warmth shaken Heavy we are A world of warmth, a world of light, becomes lighter, Becomes Light Light Is By Arlette-Louise Ndakoze 2021
A corridor room, the living space of King Rudolf Manga Bell inside his Palace ‘La Pagode’ in Douala, Cameroon. He writes about Obeah, a curse and spell his father NDUMBE Auguste Manga Bell cast; he writes about his own execution in 1914 (a betrayal by King Ndjoya of Bamun Kingdom) and about the murders of two of his great grandchildren; one in the 20th Century José Hernandez Manga Bell (1947) and one in the 21st Century. The flickering of wall lamps traces the heartbeat before the Prince’s death. His death was not natural, rather Bell was a sacrifice to someone’s weakness; revenge and greed for power. A death made by a magician that fooled everyone.
The two children of the deceased remain in the Pagode corridor dozing to sleep between reality and the imagined world, where Prince Bell is trapped. For the children have learned to time-travel back to their palace (built in 1905 by German prisoners) home in Bonanjo, Douala. A little castle, made by the same architect of Frieda von Bülow’s home in Germany. After the execution of King Rudolf Manga Bell in 1914, the writer, a once anti-colonialiste and anarchiste turned Nazi, Louis-Ferdinand Céline was sent by a French colonial company to overlook plantations in Cameroon and he lived in the Palace as a guest to write his novel Voyage Au Bout De La Nuit. Alcide is a servant of the house, other times his commerce is in trafficking people in the park square of Bonanjo. Alcide imagines to find solace with Céline, a former doctor, that could help appease the pain of his daughter’s polio disease who was sent to France for electro-treatment and would never come back. Céline being an active member of the Nazi party in WWII, will send little gifts to Alcide and the Bell family; little lamps both as a memorial to the memory of Alcide’s daughter and a gift of thanks to Bell’s hospitality and enduring friendship. The lamps were privately purchased in Buchenwald through his former supporter Isle Koch. Manufacturally hand-made by prisoners of the camp in Buchenwald, these were adorned inside the Pagode corridor. Its skins with traces of visual marks tells Alcide that the lamps have other stories to tell. The gifts were fitted by the King Alexandre Manga Bell at the time of his son José Emanuel Manga Bell’s visit to Cameroon in 1947. Alcide remembers the lights flickered as if to talk to him about things to come. They flickered at him when his wife died of cancer, they flickered at him when his sister was hit by a horse carrier, they flickered at him when the son José Manga Bell was shot dead in the park by the Palace, with 2 bullets; one in his head, one in his heart. King Alexandre shot his son to death, but it could not derive in history that a King-to-be would shoot his son. Despite the pleas of the mother Andrea Manga Bell, his crime was claimed to be an accident. And the world went on as if bullets could whisper, the world went on to forget. But then the lamps wouldn’t flicker anymore, its light would run dead for decades. A gardener of the Palace, would notice the flickering of the lights decades later into the 21st century, at the death of another Bell boy.
The skins, the string, tassels, and lights. The lamps so quietly pace down the corridor of this abandoned Pagode in Douala, still but not still. The lamps so quietly pace down the corridor of Frieda’s home, still but not still. The lamps and other objects made inside the camps by prisoners were sold privately to writers, soldiers, teachers, scientists, doctors, musicians as items of memorabilia, just like the ones King Leopold II and Carl Peters made with the skins and bones of emprisoned African peoples to sell and collect back in Europe. Many who manufactured these items from the camps were sent to juridicial court trials for committing human crimes against prisoners of war. Many were the descendants of Schultztruppe generals in Namibia who enforced years of genocides and the making of Shark Island’s German concentration camp, the first in the 20th century. Some of the bones from Herero and Namas were crushed to dust to be used in the thread manufacturing company Amann & Böhringer. Some of their human skins were used for table tops and ornaments. One of these items rests inside the Berlin Charité hospital and in the possession of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, a broken table lamp ornamented with the hair and human skin of Nama women.
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This inspired the descendants to continue these traditions inside the concentration camps in Germany since these crimes would not be monitored at the time of production. In one of the trial courts inside Spandau prison near the Zitadelle, a young Jewish man who was enslaved in Havensbrook as a maid, details how the lamps trailed in the rooms of his Master, Mrs Koch, who made an unconceivable fortune of the production and sale of the items. She created a horse hall made entirely out of mirrors. Inside the trial papers, we can hear this young boy’s fright of Koch’s adoration of the items that gave her much satisfaction, human skins. She threatened the boy that she would skin him deep one day so he could lay right by her bedside. Lamps in the house would flicker whenever it snowed outside of ashes and when new lamps came into the house, the boy knew someone more died and would lay by her bedside. Not all perpetrators were taken to justice.
The lamps so quietly open the upside down world for the children, still but not still. In the corridor we hear the children of Bell sleep-talking to their father, brushing against the world of trapped souls, the imaginary. Their father’s death was not a natural one, his murder, slow but with haste, was decided by someone’s greed for power. The perpetrators of the murdered family members in the family have never been put to trial. Their deaths have never been natural. The spirit of Obeah calls for a trial against the perpetrators who committed these crimes. The sonic landscape of this corridor is a ritual to dismantle the curse that was set upon the children’s father, a ritual for peace, a ritual for revenge, a ritual for transformation. Bell’s children whisper in their sleep inside the upside down world. Nevertheless, the skins of the lamp stimulate an energetic vortex of transmission of trapped souls. The corridor shares archival material from tribunals in Douala of the murder of José Manga Bell and those from trials from the Spandau prison. Literary ruins and faded photographs come with a sonic multi-channel work of ghostly voices, ecological ruinations and stories from the skins of the lamps. The lamps activate when we walk through the corridor and are conductors to lives we were never meant to remember.
A story entangled in colonial tragedy, racial injustice and voodoo, Obeah is a means for creating rituals between the living and the dead. It is a way for a Black family to call for peace and release and break an unbearable curse that has fallen on their family and those close. Obeah is a wrath of revenge, a wrath of joy, a wrath for justice. Obeah is a story on ways in which two black children mourn the loss of their father a young heir Prince of Douala that so strikingly links traditions to white supremacy, racial injustice and colonial practices to human tragedy inside the camps in Namibia and Germany, inside the home and that of the Palace in Douala. The element that allows the children to time-travel and communicate with their father are lamps from inside the Palace made out of skins from a former WWII prison camp in Germany and carried as gifts to the King Manga Bell.
Ancestors
José Manuel Lico Jiménez Berroa, was a Cuban pianist and composer (1851-1917). Jiménez found his music was less accepted in Cuba. He toured the island and worked for a while as a music teacher in Cienfuegos and Trinidad de Cuba, but in 1890 returned to Germany and settled in Hamburg, where he became active at the Weimar court. He was befriended by Franz Liszt, and became a director of the Hamburg Conservatory of Music. He was he father of Andrea Manga Bell and married to Emma Filter from Hamburg. Photo: José Manuel Lico Jiménez Berroa, José Julián & Nicasio Jiménez Andrea Manga Bell (1902-1985), daughter of José Manuel Jiménez and Emma Filter. Was an actress and graphic designer at Gebrauchsgraphik between 1928-1949. She co-wrote and edited Josef Roth’s novel ‘Job’ (1930) and was married to King Rudolf Manga Bell’s son, Alexandre Manga Bell when she was 17. She had the official title of Queen of Duala but never travelled to Cameroon. She has 2 children with Alexandre José Emmanuel Manga Bell (1920) and Andrea Tüke Ekedi Manga Bell (1921). She took King Alexandre Manga Bell to court in Paris for the murder of his son in 1947 in from of the King’s Palace in Douala. Alexandre Manga Bell (1897-1966), son of King Rudolf Manga Bell, was schooled in Germany and part of the French government as an MP in Paris during WWII. He married Andrea Berroa Manga Bell in 1912 after a visit to Hamburg in her uncles’ thread and chocolate factories. Alexandre had committed 5 public counts of homicides in Germany but was never sentenced. In returning to Cameroon in 1922, he had to fight for his position in Cameroon as well as for his family property, around which he led an 18-year-long lawsuit. Alexandre Douala-Bell was elected to the Constituent Assembly of the Fourth Republic in 1945 as one of the representatives of Cameroon. He shot his son in 1947 in front of the Palace grounds in Douala and was sent to court for murder by Andrea Manga Bell but was never sentenced for his crime. According to Andrea, she claimed that Alexandre had a mental disorder with a high level of domestic violence against women. Alexandre never granted Andrea’s wish for divorce unless he would ‘purchase’ her children from her. Photo: Andrea Manga Bell, her mother Emma Filter, her siblings Manuela and Adolfo and her father José Manuel Jiménez Berroa. Rudolf Manga Bell (1873-1914) was a Duala king and resistance leader in the German colony of Cameroon. After being educated in both Kamerun and Europe, he succeeded his father Manga Ndumbe Bell in 1908. In 1910 the German Reichstag developed a plan to relocate the Duala people living along the river, to be moved inland to allow for wholly European riverside settlements. Manga Bell became the leader of pan-Duala resistance to the policy. He and the other chiefs at first pressured the administration through letters, petitions, and legal arguments, but these were ignored or rebutted. Manga Bell turned to other European governments for aid, and he sent representatives to the leaders of other Cameroonian peoples to suggest the overthrow of the German regime. Sultan Ibrahim Njoya of the Bamum people reported his actions to the authorities, and the Duala leader was arrested. After a summary trial, Manga Bell was hanged for high treason on 8 August 1914. José Emmanuel Manga Bell (1920-1947) was the son of Andrea and Alexandre Manga Bell. He was a renowned actor from his youth club and made famous adaptations of the play Emil & Detektive. He and his sister lived with their grandmother in Hamburg Emma Mina Filter who severely abused them during their childhood. His prospects diminished due to the constraints of the war and suffered from chronic illnesses. Their father was not present in their upbringing and José moved through Europe serving shortly as a soldier. During his first visit to Douala, his father shot him in front of the Palace grounds. His burial site is unknown and unmarked. Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a controversial French doctor and author. Once an anti-colonialist WWI, he became an active member on the Nazi party in WWII with highly anti-semitic views. He wrote the book Voyage Au Bout De la Nuit during his stay in Doula at the Manga Bell Place in 1910’s and published in 1932. |
Soundwork
- Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf; by Eric Zeisl from the opera “Hiob" | Book by Joseph Roth originally co-written and edited by Andrea Manga Bell
- Emile und die Detektive 1928 | previous original version played by José Emmanuel Manga Bell
- Reise in dem Kamerun mit Louis Ferdinand Céline 2019
- Music composition by Jose Manuel Lico Jimenez played by Jose Ruiz Elcoro at Ramsey Hall Atlanta
- Voyage Au Bout De La Nuit by Louis Ferdinand Céline | stage readings by Fabrice Luchini 1988
- John Eichler: Die Entmenschlichung der Juliette Martens in Klaus Manns Roman «Mephisto»
- Discours sur le Cancer de la Trahison | speech by Amilcar Cabral
- Plenilunio sung by Antoin Herrera-Lopez Kessel | music by José Manuel Lico Jimenez | poem by Fabio Fiallo
- La Tribune de L’histoire de Ananie Rabier Bindji
- Cylinder recording 1930, Bamun soldier inside Wünsdorf colonial camp | produced by Wilhelm Doegen
- Manga Bell - Eine deutsch-afrikanische Familiengeschichte | Peter Heller und Sylvie Banuls 1997
- Audio vibrations, ruinations, chants and rhythms from Douala Cameroon by Anguezomo Mba Bikoro
Images
- Andrea Manga Bell 1929
- “Weißer Mann immer schlecht”; Der Spiegel 34/1950 | 23rd August 1950 | with Andrea Manga Bell
**content warning, the article contains racial slurs and misogynistic content based on strong biases from the author of Der Spiegel**
- x6 graphic posters designed by Andrea Manga Bell for Gebrauchsgraphik 1928-1949
- Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf; by Eric Zeisl from the opera “Hiob" | Book by Joseph Roth originally co-written and edited by Andrea Manga Bell
- Emile und die Detektive 1928 | previous original version played by José Emmanuel Manga Bell
- Reise in dem Kamerun mit Louis Ferdinand Céline 2019
- Music composition by Jose Manuel Lico Jimenez played by Jose Ruiz Elcoro at Ramsey Hall Atlanta
- Voyage Au Bout De La Nuit by Louis Ferdinand Céline | stage readings by Fabrice Luchini 1988
- John Eichler: Die Entmenschlichung der Juliette Martens in Klaus Manns Roman «Mephisto»
- Discours sur le Cancer de la Trahison | speech by Amilcar Cabral
- Plenilunio sung by Antoin Herrera-Lopez Kessel | music by José Manuel Lico Jimenez | poem by Fabio Fiallo
- La Tribune de L’histoire de Ananie Rabier Bindji
- Cylinder recording 1930, Bamun soldier inside Wünsdorf colonial camp | produced by Wilhelm Doegen
- Manga Bell - Eine deutsch-afrikanische Familiengeschichte | Peter Heller und Sylvie Banuls 1997
- Audio vibrations, ruinations, chants and rhythms from Douala Cameroon by Anguezomo Mba Bikoro
Images
- Andrea Manga Bell 1929
- “Weißer Mann immer schlecht”; Der Spiegel 34/1950 | 23rd August 1950 | with Andrea Manga Bell
**content warning, the article contains racial slurs and misogynistic content based on strong biases from the author of Der Spiegel**
- x6 graphic posters designed by Andrea Manga Bell for Gebrauchsgraphik 1928-1949