Interview with Christian Carver

Director of African Musical Instruments,
Makers of the Hugh Tracey Kalimba

• Christian Carver's Bio
• On African Hardwoods
• On the Value of African Culture
• Black Empowerment and South African Politics
• Empowering AMI's Workers

A Short Biography of Christian Carver

Christian Carver was born in Rhodesia in 1959 and moved to South Africa as a youth. After a year working as an assistant in a research chemistry lab, he enrolled briefly in Rhodes University, Grahamstown, S.A, where he met his future wife Mandy and Andrew Tracey, former director of the International Library of African Music (ILAM), as well as the leader of popular steel pan bands over the decades. Christian and Mandy joined Andrew's band and later married. Christian dropped out of Rhodes University and enrolled in a four year auto mechanics apprentice program, but after disputes with his mechanics mentor over ethics and race matters, he passed the certification exam in only two years. After working alongside black South African mechanics with thirty years experience who made only a fraction of his starting income, he realized in a very immediate way the inequity of the apartheid system.

During the turbulent 1980s when apartheid was in its last years, the white minority South African government mandated military service for all white males regardless of nationality and, rather than pick up a gun to defend a system he knew was morally bankrupt, Christian and Mandy left the country. After seven years of living and working in England, they didn't feel they fit in there—they were Africans. They moved to Uganda where Christian worked as a technician and repairman for a hospital where he maintained medical vehicles, renovated a hydro-electric power scheme, developed medical equipment, and maintained a spring-fed water system that provided safe drinking water to people over a region of more than 100 square miles. While in Uganda, Mandy home-schooled their three children.

Shortly after Nelson Mandela was elected as the first black president of South Africa, Christian and Mandy returned to Grahamstown, South Africa. Mandy went to work teaching music at St. Andrews school, where she eventually became the director of the music program, while Christian was hired by director Heather Tracey (Andrew Tracey's wife) at African Musical Instruments (AMI) in 1998 as the workshop foreman. When Heather Tracey suffered a debilitating accident, Christian stepped in as acting director of AMI in 1999. Heather did recover, but never returned to the director's job at AMI, and Christian started the process of purchasing AMI from the Traceys. A few years later, AMI bought the company Power Marimbas, the oldest marimba making company in South Africa, and brought them into the AMI family. As this more than doubled the AMI staff, Christian also moved AMI into a larger workshop on Cloncore Street, where they are located today. Christian re-engineered the marimba design and is now working on streamlining the kalimba production. AMI continues to expand its catalog, offering more African instruments, CDs, and instructional books to the world.

On African Hardwoods

Christian is a tinkerer, a fixer, an environmentalist, a cultural preservationist, a tool maker, and a visionary—exactly the right sort of person to be at the head of Africa's premier kalimba manufacturer.

KM (Mark): So, AMI uses the African hardwood kiaat for the kalimbas, and you make marimba bars out of both kiaat and sneezewood, another African hardwood. How does the sneezewood compare to kiaat?

CC: It is that much more responsive. You don't have to work as hard to get it out. It is like a top quality steen pan! You hardly have to touch it to make it really sing. You can move very quickly and still produce a lot of sound. It gives back a lot. It is quite bright, but it has still got a woody warmth. And the great thing about it is that it doesn't get affected by moisture.

KM (Mark): So you don't have to retune?

CC: No, I've had sneezewood instruments go around the world on the ocean on yachts and come back perfectly in tune.

KM (Mark): How long have people been making marimba bars out of sneezewood?

CC: Well, it's probably the earliest Western-documented instrument, and one of the earliest documented instruments in Africa. When the Portuguese explorers came down the coast here, they described the timbala. You're talking about the 1300-1400s. So, then it was much before that.

The other interesting thing is, when Andrew went to Bali and saw the gamelan, the format of a lot of those metallophones is identical to the Choppi instruments. The shape of the bars is the same. Their layout, where you have two bars and a spreader, two bars and a spreader, is exactly the same. But, even the little carvings on the end of the spreaders are the same. The cultural exchange took place way before any Westerners got here.

KM (Mark): I've read in various places that people don't know whether it went from Indonesia to Africa, or Africa to Indonesia.

CC: I like to think it went from Africa to Indonesia, because the technology really is that much more developed here.

KM (Deb): There is a connection with Madagascar there, as well—the culture—that's very, very interesting.

CC: Sure. But Andrew said when he saw the gamelan and he thought, no, this is too persuasive—there has got to be a very close connection. And, obviously, it is metallophone, but the technology is the same. To tune metal bars, or wood, is the same. And, the sort of blackness (brightness?) of the sneezewood is almost metallic anyway; they just couldn't get sneezewood there.

KM (Mark): So, how does sneezewood compare with rosewood, which I think most marimbas in the U.S. are made of?

CC: The disadvantage of sneezewood is that it's quite brittle. Rosewood is that much more robust when it comes to whacking it around a bit. You know, when I hear that really kind of xylophony kind of clonky sound that sometimes is used as effect in orchestral music and that kind of thing, I'm saddened, because I know that the bars are getting mashed. To me that's not the way you should play a marimba, but some people use it for effect. And the sneezewood will just crack. It is very brittle. Once you've baked it, it's very brittle. So, you use a much softer mallet on it, and you can use a softer mallet higher up the instrument without it disappearing. So, the rosewood can probably take a bit more of a beating, but it does splinter and break. I've got one client in Jo'burg who runs a music academy, and he had very nice rosewood instruments that just over time got hammered. I tried to replace them with sneezewood, and the kids broke the sneezewood, and we tried different kinds of wood—we put padauk in there—in fact, I made him a whole new set of padauk notes. You can't get the Honduras rosewood anymore. The big marimba companies have bought every last useful piece of Honduras rosewood there is.

But, yeah, I like sneezewood better, just because it's local and it's African.

KM (Deb): How long has it taken you to get that understanding and appreciation?

CC: I think it is probably like an artist. Once you've got the interest and the focus, you absorb stuff like this quite a lot, and being around Andrew. And also I've developed my own ideas about the striation in the wood. If I find a wood with the striation, then I'm always certain it is going to be good sounding wood. I think I can spot a good tone wood now.

KM (Deb): How do you see the striation in the wood?

CC: Well, I am very short-sighted. Padauk, you can see it quite well, it's quite large. It runs at right angles to the grain, and it is very, very even. It's like looking at the side of the twin towers, that's what it looks like—you've got that, and you've got that—it's like cells divided up, and it is very, very even, very homogenous. And you will see it on Kiaat. Especially if you plane it with a hand plane, you see it straight away.

A marimba bar made of sneezewood.

A closeup reveals striations in the sneezewood - look for the striping across the grain.

KM (Deb): It is just so reassuring, knowing that this is one of the things that is important to you in building instruments, when you are making the kalimbas and marimbas, that you are looking for things like that, that have a value in the playing of the instrument.

CC: You know, as I keep saying to Mark, there are no coincidences in the way African instruments have been made. The reason why a tine is a certain shape, there is a very good reason for it. The reason why the body is a certain shape, there is a very good reason for it. And the reason why they use these woods, there is a very good reason for it. It has been evolved over a long time.

I like to sort of put the idea out there that the West thought they invented Africa, because that is when history started. It's like they came along and they told everybody how to live their lives, and it was only at that point that Africa actually existed. But you have got to get beyond that. We don't think about it as sort of inherently there, but Africa only existed in Western consciousness for the last four or five hundred years. Before that? ...I'm saying there's such a depth of culture and such a depth of technology and knowledge and everything that goes into it...

KM (Deb): Well, the metalworking that was happening on this continent was centuries before it was developed in Europe.

CC: Well, so many people say, Where did they get the metal from? We used to live up in Uganda, where you could go to the metalworking sites, but we were told the local history. The local old men would tell you, what happened was the British came along and they said we weren't allowed to make metal anymore. We weren't allowed to produce our own axes, our own hoes. You will buy the stuff that comes from Birmingham.

KM (Deb): That sounds like salt in India.

CC: Same thing. And cloth.

KM (Deb): yeah, homespun.

CC: Same thing, that's what happened.

KM (Mark): Well, in some parts of Africa, metalworking goes back two or three thousand years.

CC: yeah, and it was sophisticated. It wasn't just iron or bronze, or something like that. There was knowledge of steel, there was knowledge of blacksmithing, obviously, for the keys, intimate knowledge of blacksmithing.

I've got a traditional African axe, which consists of usually a burl on a stick. So, you would get a branch with a burl on the end that is tight grained it is very strong. And then they have a socket in it, which the blade slides into. And the blades are very thin. Those axes are far better suited to these conditions. You use a European or American axe, which are soft wood axes, on African hardwoods, it doesn't work. But that's what was given to Africans.

KM (Mark): I've got three questions going backwards. One is, how plentiful is sneezewood? It's a slow growing hardwood tree here.

CC: Sneezewood, you cannot cut new trees now. There is no wood being logged now. We were investigated by the Department of Water and Forestry about three years ago when we tried to export some sneezewood to the UK. There was a guy out there— you know what a cajone is?

KM (Mark): Oh, the drum?

CC: Well, it's a box that you sit on and you play with your hands. The baby cajon is called a cajita, and it's a small box with a lid, and it works in the same way. You open the lid to get the whoop; you change the resonance of the wood. This guy was obsessed with making a cajita using sneezewood as the head material. And I said he should just make it with something local, because this is going to be difficult, and he wouldn't take no for an answer. So we eventually cut him enough for it to get out there. And then we tried to export it, and they came down on us like ton of bricks. As soon as it appeared on the export inventory, they were here about two days later. They came and looked around. Where's your sneezewood? Where did you get your sneezewood from? We showed them all the fenceposts. Ok, that's fine. And then, from that point on, we had to document where we got our sneezewood from and make sure that we had that if they came and inspected us in the future. So, it's a very highly protected wood. New trees are going to take awhile to grow. I try to replant as often as possible. There is quite a move... We've got one outside the house—I don't know if you noticed as you walked in the front door—that little tree standing there is sneezewood.

KM (Deb): Tree farming—is that something that's reasonable to consider? The shortages of wood are frightening when you have this business.

CC: It would be very nice to have the massive resource needed to go and become involved in projects in the county, say, where Kiaat comes from, in the areas where Kiaat comes from. That may still be in the pipeline. It is something I really have a heart for, is to get out to those places and begin the reforestation process. It's just a product. I had a massive argument with a guy once because he was saying things like, 'Wow, these people, they don't realize that they are just destroying the environment, and that's going to cost them down the road', and to actually bring it home to him that when you have to put the next meal on the table, you don't care. If it means that someone is going to get enough money to survive this week, then cutting down another Kiaat tree because it is the last one is not...

[Mark's note: a few days later, when we travelled to Pietermaritzburg to meet John Roff and his family, I sat down in their library to read the kids a story, and they picked out Dr. Seuss' book The Lorax, about the tragedy of a business built on making clothing out of trufula trees, and then cutting down the very last trufula tree. If you don't know the story, it is a good read, regardless of your age.]

KM (Deb): It is very hard to reverse that.

CC: And that's the problem with Kiaat, is that it's being logged out of desperation. Mozambique went through massive war. While Mozambique was at war, every last blackwood tree in Mozambique was logged out. I'll bet you it was Boosey and Hawkes and Yamaha and the big woodwind companies. While the world's attention is away. And of course you can get some maverick to go in there and cut it out for you. I've seen pictures of these hills with big stands of blackwood, and few years later, clearcut. That's the issue with Kiaat, I think, is that it brings in foreign money, and that is often the only way these countries survive. With inflation of a thousand percent in Zimbabwe, you know, it's something that holds value.

KM (Deb): So, is it feasible to tree farm? Is it feasible to start now, knowing that that won't generate an income for...

CC: Not Kiaat, not in this area. Sneezewood, certainly. Sneezewood, I try to get as many people to buy into as possible. There are a couple of places over the hill here where there are stands which seed very often, and we go and gather seed and get people to plant it. Some of the nurseries here have started growing saplings, and you can go and buy sneezewood saplings.

We had an instance with Venancio Mbande who runs this academy for Timbila, for the Chopi marimba orchestra. He did a documentary and, in thanks, the producer of that film asked us if we would supply him with sneezewood, because it has all been cut out in Mozambique. So we did. We cut it all up and planked it and crated it, and it got to some official at the airport there, who thought he was the Demigod, and nobody knows what happened to it. Venancio wouldn't pay the bribe, and the wood disappeared. It was basically flown out in a chartered plane. It was horrendous. It is a very difficult thing, because it is a very volatile region, and the Kiaat is a big worry. As I say, fortunately there are quite big stocks left in northern South Africa, up in Mpumalanga, up near the Zimbabwe border. There are some quite large stands of Kiaat.

KM (Mark): Of mature Kiaat trees?

CC: Yes. And they are holding onto them. And so, there is a genetic repository that we could use to reintroduce, but it is just sort of waiting for enough peace and stability and prosperity for people. I can remember growing up on the farm... I first started working here at AMI in 1998, and as soon as I smelled Kiaat being cut, I was back on the farm as a kid. The people on the farm used to cut it and burn it, or make utensils. The smell of Kiaat is tied up intimately with my childhood.

KM (Mark): So Kiaat was used for mbiras. How far back does that go?

CC: Who knows, but it's a tone wood. It works for the keys, it works with mbiras, and who knows how far that goes. It goes probably as far as mbiras (1000 years).

On the Value of African Culture

KM (Mark): So, you feel that African Musical Instruments is intimately connected with the traditions developed over thousands of years in Africa in building musical instruments?

CC: I think... tied up with cultural affirmation. Having been completely subjugated to Western ideas, Western ideals, Western education, for such a long time, I really think it's important for Africans to remember who they are, to look back and see the huge richness and value that they came from. And that's linked to my feeling that African music—the Africanness of popular music—is what makes it popular. It is a wellspring of creativity. It's huge creativity that is recognized worldwide, but that Africans have been blocked from creativeness through having cultural imperialism, I suppose. Being told that how they dress, what they do, their ideas, their music, everything—is rubbish and inferior. And so, yeah, making a kalimba out of used materials, found materials—great, yeah, and that's certainly something I need to think more about, in terms of where we go with this thing in South Africa, and in Africa, because of shortages that are going to occur over time. But, I also think there is something that has got to be honored as well.

You know the fact, like I keep saying, the fact that the more I learn about African music, the more I realize there are no coincidences. Nothing is superfluous. There is a really good reason why things are done the way they have been done, and their refinement is incredible. When I discovered, like you, that partials (overtones) could be tuned on tines, and then realized how many of these instruments had tuned partials... And then you try and do it yourself, and realize how difficult it is.

I feel the need to try and engender some appreciation of the depth of that culture. And to apply it now, to say there's a relevance now. You know, come on guys, what's missing? We can teach Africans math, we can teach science, we can teach history, but what are you going to do with it? There's a huge pressure for jobs in S. Africa, but there have got to be people who generate those jobs.

KM (Mark): So you're suggesting that, instead of looking to the European model, Africans look to their own roots?

CC: Yeah, and to sort of try and figure out what the mechanism is and where the gap is between... And I think a lot of it is a sort of belief gap. A lot of it is a sort of self-confidence, self-assurance gap.

KM (Deb): I was just thinking the word esteem, self-esteem, and value.

CC: Esteem, yeah, in believing that our stuff is important. Going back to the example of these cultural groups that perform at these game viewing facilities. There is so much pandering to a Hollywood Africa. I always talk about Hollywood Africa, the preconceptions that people have about it. But, at the same time, there is also a growing interest in the genuine from visitors, a personal and real, authentic connection in whatever it is in life, in ceremony.

KM (Deb): I think that's crucial. Part of that, I think, also deals with whether or not people do things with spirit, with spirituality, goodness, because the idea of people coming here seeking to absorb and collect and use all of this, and yet putting back an image or fostering an image that there is something negative there, that it's not worthy. That the people aren't worthy, but everything that they made is? It's a real conflict.

CC: Yeah, where is the gap? I see so many of these performers falling into that, pandering to the Hollywood Africa, at the expense of not learning much about their own culture. But, the demand is there, the interest is there.

KM (Deb): Well, that's entertainment.

CC: When's that gap going to be filled? When are Africans going to believe they can...

KM (Deb): Be themselves?

CC: Yes, and express themselves.

KM (Mark): It seems like you're committed to the joy of music. You're committed to the history of African music and music making. You're committed to an environment that enables a future for human beings on earth.

KM (Deb): Right, there is a sustainability implicit when we talk about these shortages of materials, and that's a concern, and it not just because of AMI or this business, it's broader than that.

CC: Yeah, but you know, I also feel that that's part of the fun! We have a shortage, well let's see what else we can do. What's the next big thing?

Some of the ideas that I have formulated and some of the things that Andrew and Hugh and Geoffrey push about the value of learning African music, the pressure to play came from the staff, mostly Stan, actually, mostly Stanley. When we inherited the making of the marimbas, Vuyani and Michael came across, and Vuyani was already playing quite a lot, but he didn't put much pressure on actually getting up a group going, but Stan was absolutely adamant. Why are we making these things and not playing them? And that hadn't happened under Heather's leadership, because she wasn't a musician, and Andrew was never that closely involved in the administration of the company.

It corresponded with a time when I'd come back from Uganda, with very strong impressions of what Western education had done in that country, how education was basically just a passport. We grow up in a paradigm which says you become better and better educated and qualified to get to a point where you will make a major contribution. It's at the point that you leave your learning that you begin to make the contribution in society. The impression that many Africans seem to have, and it's resultant from what they've seen, but there's this massive misconception that that's an entitlement.

So, for instance, in Uganda, once you'd qualified you got the job that allowed you to become the gatekeeper to illicit bribes. We had the situation in the hospital where there was a nurse who became pregnant by a local policeman, and her family went to him and demanded back the entire cost of her education up to that point. So, what are we talking about here—we're talking about their investment that has now been nullified. The fact that what she'd learned had relevance to what she would do after she finished learning was beside the point. She would not get a piece of paper, she would not be able to get the position which would allow her to survive. And that was very stark to me. I thought, Well, how do we change this? How do we get to the position where Africans leave education believing that they have this potential, this ability to contribute?

KM (Deb): And why does that nullify contribution before?

CC: They contribute all the time through music, that's what music is in Africa—it's everybody contributing.

How do we make that connection, where who you are becomes expressed in the contribution you make to society?

So those kind of things kind of melted together when I started working here, learning more about what Hugh [Tracey] was doing, learning about what Andrew [Tracey] was doing, learning more about the music, and my experience of making the music. Because that's what it's about, it's about making the music, it's about actually doing, it's not an academic study at all. It's physical intelligence. It's realizing that you can reach different places than you can reach any other way through making the music. It's the social aspect of it, it's the brain development aspect of it, it's just a whole gamut of stuff that could make a major contribution to try and bridge that gap.

KM (Mark): That's beautiful.

KM (Deb): It is, and it is just so inspirational, because it's not just about making a business. It's not just about us coming here because Mark's making a business that dovetails with what you're doing. It's so much deeper, and I guess that's kind of what I was talking about, too, the people coming here that are coming here without soul. It shows. I mean, you are coming here doing something else. Your being here is a spiritual path. It's just exhilarating to me to have that awareness. And what you're talking about, music and that hope.

CC: Yeah, I think definitely spiritual in possibly being part of the repair process of the broken spirit of Africa, for sure.

KM (Deb): Another thing that you said about your time away from Africa, you said something like, when you were gone you were in England and you just kind of felt like a foreigner, and that if you're born in Africa you're an African.

CC: Anybody who's lived here attests to that. I think anybody from anywhere can attest to that, but it's the smells, it's the sights, it's the sounds. You sort of look up when hardidas [a beloved South African bird] flew across here— that's who we are. I think in terms of community here, in terms of society here, one thing we really were amazed with in England... we traveled quite a lot, we traveled a fair amount towards the end of the white regime in S. Africa, and were always kind of pushed. Why is it like that in your country? How can you be so cruel? And so we were pushed to think about this stuff a lot. But I can just remember one gathering we had in England, and there was a lot of stuff going on in S. Africa, a lot of violence. We really were being pushed into a corner, How can you be like this for such a long time? We were kind of taking the blame for centuries. And Mandy suddenly said to one of them, How many black friends have you got? And there was silence. They lived in a free society, but they had absolutely nothing to with black people.

KM (Deb): Mandy said something this morning, too, that I really appreciated, when we were having breakfast. She said, You know, when I leave here and I travel to other countries, I miss black people!

CC: That's it, and that's what I'm getting to, is that there is a relationship in this society that's got under your skin totally. It has rubbed off on us big time, but at the same time, there is just such massive damage, such massive hills that have to be climbed. And also, things that within traditional society have got to be faced head on. They can't be ignored any longer. That will only come out of a position of self esteem and self-confidence. But, there are definite gender issues within this society, there are definite leadership issues within this society that need to be faced head on. Democracy is often a joke, because I think we are still in a big man syndrome within Africa a lot of the time, where big men can't do any wrong. There is a blind following, especially among the young people. The culture has got to face those things head on, but as I say, it has got to come out of a position of self-assuredness and strength.

KM (Deb): On the part of ...?

CC: Of Africans. And how do we get there?

KM (Deb): Well, we get there by people like you being here. You can't climb a mountain in Britain. You came back here and are making a difference. And you create joy here with the people that work for you, playing music all the time. I mean, it's clear that that is important to you.

CC: Yeah, for sure.

KM (Mark): Have you gone to my website and looked at the customer feedback link? At this point, there are hundreds of comments, and I like to think that they reflect on me—some of them do, some of them are about my music or my books—but most of them reflect on you, AMI, and the instruments. They are truly inspirational. There are people who say, I just got my kalimba—I'm so excited, I spent six hours playing it until my thumbs bled, and I've never had so much joy in one day before in my life. Things like that.

CC: That's wonderful!

KM (Deb): It's a small part, it seems, but making that available to the people that are making the kalimbas, but this comes from all of Africa. This is something that everybody could hear and get something from.

CC: Yeah, that's it. But their music, they need to know that their music has changed society. I use that line often. Every year, I would get asked to do a thing for a course done by the business school here, because the professor there was quite keen on my perspective. And I'd often say to them, What has Africa done that has changed the rest of the world? What has changed society on the face of this earth irrevocably? What's been exported from Africa? Gold, diamonds, uranium? And I say, No, music. Music has changed it completely.

Black Empowerment and South African Politics

CC: There's the black economic empowerment thing... My sons, for example, will definitely be at a disadvantage when it comes to looking for jobs, because we're white, and those things probably are necessary initially. But the focus I think is wrong. The focus is wrong. I think those things will be looked back in the future, somebody said, as being mistakes. I don't think it's got to do with economics; it's got to do with spirit.

KM (Mark): Self esteem.

CC: It's got to do with self-esteem. It's got to do with that not being the issue anymore.

KM (Mark): When we ate lunch today, I spoke with our server, Uhuru (Swahili for Freedom). He was in his early twenties. Nelson Mandela was elected in 1994 when he was in second grade, and he had no memory of that. He says, you know, when you're a kid, you just worried about playing. You don't have that kind of consciousness. It was like he had none of the shackles of apartheid. He said, it's true, I'm not rich, it's true, I'm not privileged, but it used to be that I was locked in, and now I'm free to do what I can. He had a great spirit.

CC: There is a lot of that.

KM (Deb): I think you have to consider that it's almost like a baby, a child, and it will grow.

CC: It will definitely grow. There is the added complication of what people regard as success, and so often it's sort of Western trappings. It's the big cars, the BMW, the big thing is to own a BMW, and have the latest cell phone. It's getting beyond that you realize that that's not the ultimate goal. Your individual contribution, and the legacy that you leave behind in terms of family and values is what's going to have the lasting value.

We came out of the violence before the change, and it started with Sharpeville, it started with school kids protesting against being taught in Afrikaans, and that led to bloodshed, and then it led to basically addressing every problem, everything, with violence, and we have that left over. We have that expressing itself now in this xenophobia, in statements by the ANC Youth League, that they'll kill for Zuma. Basically, they must throw out the case, because if they don't we are going to go out there and kill somebody.

KM (Mark): That sounds like Zimbabwe.

CC: Well, exactly, I mean, you've got Mugabe basically saying he's not going stand for Morgan Tvangirai to get in.

KM (Deb): Such a thug mentality.

CC: Yeah, but you can't say that. You can't say that. This is what the architects of apartheid were fearing.

KM (Mark): Well, we've seen Mandela. He was the most gracious president, at least from my side of the ocean. He was the best thing that could have ever happened to S. Africa.

CC: Yes, but the scary thing is that now, you have the trappings of the Mandela legacy, but scratch the surface, and there are demons, big demons. A musician on the radio was saying the other day, she said, nothing was done when everybody got back from exile. Nothing was done to educate those kids who burned the schools and whatever, that there was a much bigger picture, there was a larger world out there. Part of the change in S. Africa had to do with other countries having massive support for S. Africans, and now they're being beaten up. There's people being told to go back home.

I still keep going back to this thing of self-esteem, self-value. It's got to come from that place. It's got to come from the place where people actually believe in themselves, and believe that they can express themselves.

Christian and Empowering AMI Workers

KM (Mark): When I talk to the people working in the shop here, I hear self-esteem in their voice. They know that what they are doing is connected with their history and their past, and I also hear it when they play music at break time. You're doing a good thing here.

CC: That's what I'm hoping. We started going back to the story of actually getting the group going in the company, it was partly because I believed it would make a difference, and it has. It has made a huge difference. I talked about nonverbal communication, getting to that place in the music where you're of one mind. I feel it with you a lot, you're very intuitive as to where the thing's going.

CC: You feel very much... and we've known each other for a very short time, but amongst the staff, how that's really developed hugely. And then the kind of respect that's happening.

KM (Deb): See, that's what I mean, you have grown that. It never hurts to be explicit about it. You're concerned you're not being explicit enough, but your actions are there repeatedly, day after day.

CC: Sure. It was a test case, I was trying to see if this thing worked, you know. I really did inherit a pyramid structured business. Roland [the former workshop foreman before Christian] was very much a top down man. He was the guy who held the knowledge, he was the guy who told everybody what to do.

KM (Deb): What to do, when to it, and how to do it.

CC: Yeah, and he's like, leave your brains at the door in the morning. Clock in in the morning, but make sure you leave your brains outside, because I'm the one with the brains.

KM (Mark): Mark Komsana, he figured out what was wrong with the pickups, and how to fix them. He's got expertise, and that's just one example.

CC: This is what I was pushing for, because in the past, something would go wrong, like they'd start making these half rounds [the wood backstops on the kalimba] too high, and you know what happens— it sounds like it's got a cold. The thing sounds like it's got influenza. It starts being bunged up.

KM (Mark): Nasal.

CC: Yeah, because you're putting so much pressure on the thing that you don't actually allow enough vibration through to the thing.

KM (Mark): I achieved that once by taking a G Alto and trying to turn it into a C alto just by pushing the bridge up. It sounds pretty crummy.

CC: Yeah. But, anyway, they'd start doing it and then carry on doing it. I'd come to inspect and I'd have three hundred of those things out there, and every one was wrong.

KM (Deb): And that shouldn't happen.

CC: And now, it doesn't. And now they pick it up beforehand.

KM (Deb): Because nobody was responsible before...

CC: Because they were never asked to be. The other things that have happened, the jigs and the new ways of doing things, that's what I was aiming for. Because it wasn't there, it was all me. There were a huge number of things that changed about the way instruments were made here from Roland's work. And so it encouraged people to think like that. And I was really frustrated, and it never happened, until we started regularly making music together... As I said, it's part of the whole bucket of things that you get from it: the ability to create, the ability to think laterally, the ability to change the paradigm. It's learned stuff. It's learned stuff, it's not inherent. And it comes out of making the music together.

KM (Deb): Right, I think that tears down a lot of mythology that we live under, and it just lets you start over.

CC: Yeah, the thing I really hate, and it's something that everybody says—you know, Africans are so naturally musical! It's rubbish.

KM (Mark): Well, they learned it.

CC: They learned it. Inside their mother's womb they learned it, but they learned it. They grew up with it. I deal with kids these days, kids who have been removed from their rural past, and they have no clue of where it comes from. But, what's interesting, is you play Xhosa kids the Uhadi [an African musical bow], for instance. They've never seen one before. It's never registered on their radar before. You play it, and you can just see the cultural lights come on. I say, "Do you like that sound?" Yes. You've got that harmonic series that makes up the scale, and it is very deep in their culture. And they've heard it through songs, they've heard it through their mother singing to them. But you can just see their lights come on. You like that? Ya, ya! Sounds good!

KM (Deb): Yeah, I mean, there's a recognition that there's something to be human about, that you're not just plodding along.

CC: Yeah. Anyway...

KM (Mark): Well, you're doing something really good here, Christian!

CC: I hope so.

KM (Mark): I bet they don't play African music in Pakistan [where they make the Hugh Tracey knockoff kalimbas].

CC: No, I don't think they get together at lunchtime. I don't think they get together at lunchtime and play African music.

KM (Deb): I don't think they play any music on those.

CC: That one is just a product. These [pointing to the Hugh Tracey kalimbas on his desk] these are musical instruments—African Musical Instruments!

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