Bear with me, I'll just get 'My Family and Them Damn Bones' off my chest, then I'll feel freed-up to get on with looking at enslaved African's bones. My father was 'a bone-man' (speciality: growth of the skull). Here's some of his rabbit skull stuff.
I've still got loads of his skulls in my attic. I tell visitors I've got 'my father's bones' in my attic. I don't know why they look at me strangely. Then it sort of skipped a generation and re-surfaced with my younger son, Simon, and his fascination with really ancient hominins whilst working as a research student at Cape Town University in South Africa
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Popular name: Toumaï
Species: Sahelanthropus tchadensis
Age: ~ 7 million years old (the oldest hominin found so far)
Found: Djurab desert, northern Chad
(ps: don't worry, it's a cast, not the original!)
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Maybe I should be slightly hardened to writing about horrendous things - after all, I'm simultaneously working with Prof. Steve Poole of the University of the West of England (UWE) on a project called 'Romancing the Gibbet' (at the moment HEIF-funded: awaiting the Arts Council response to roll-out the live-art tour) to make a geo-located app for the smartphone (I do a lot of that) at actual early 19th/late 18th century crime-scene execution sites in Somerset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and Bristol.
Here's one part of the pilot (part of the Being Human Festival of the Humanities 2014)
The Ballad of Johny Walford fromRalph Hoyte on Vimeo.
And here's what the public thought of the accompanying live-art performance
Romancing The Gibbet (Walfords Gibbet/Over Stowey) from Ralph Hoyte on Vimeo.
In Merry Old England rogues, criminals, murderers and those who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or said the wrong thing to the wrong person were, it seems, randomly and slowly choked to death in front of crowds of thousands; then, occasionally, their bodies were coated in tar, put in a 'gibbet' (an iron cage: see 'Pirates of the Caribbean'), hung up a 30ft tall pole, and left to rot away. There used to be two, one either side of the River Avon coming in from the Bristol Channel, a nice sight for the ladies coming up-river to take the waters at Hotwells, no doubt. So let's not get simplistic about what humans have done, are doing, and will do to other humans.
So - a vehicle to carry all this? It's going to have be a pretty robust one. I went to a concert with Seckou Keita supported by Gwyneth Glyn at St George's Bristol recently. Here he is with Katrin Finch:
A shared musical journey between two world class virtuosos. From Wales, the "Queen of Harps" (Classic FM Magazine) and from West Africa, "an inspired exponent of the kora" (The Guardian). The harp occupies a vital place in the rich cultures of both Senegal and Wales.and both nations share a centuries-old bardic tradition of intricate oral history, expressed through music, song and verse.
Amazing to see the harp (usually glimpsed at the back of, eg, the Royal Albert Hall with a few notes thrown in as a by-the-by or a few glissandos every three hours or so ...) reinstated at centre stage; and the deep, resonant, booming of the kora. If there was ever an instrument to call up the ancestors, it's surely the kora. But what strikes me is "the harp occupies a vital place in the rich cultures of both Senegal and Wales. and both nations share a centuries-old bardic tradition of intricate oral history, expressed through music, song and verse". Or, if you prefer that in Welsh, that would be: "Yn rhyfeddol, mae'r ddwy wlad yn rhannau traddodiad barddonol hynafol o hanesion llafar cywrain, wedi eu mynegi trwy gerddoriaeth, cân a phennill."
Perhaps there's something here. I write epic poetry, I use the epic voice that is mine. Both Wales (20 minutes over the Severn Estuary from where I live) and Senegal "share a centuries-old bardic (epic) tradition of intricate oral history"; maybe I can mine the Senegalese bardic tradition for this project.
Or maybe it's necessary to create an entirely different language. Hmm. Mix the two - an entirely new language based on a centuries-old Senegalese bardic tradition!
I'm getting in too deep (already!): Ralph, just go see some bones, talk to the archaeologists, write something. Easy-peasy. Well...
Ralph Hoyte