The Angolan anti-corruption activist and journalist Rafael Marques de Morais recently made the pages of Africa Confidential, which discussed his having filed a criminal complaint against three prominent Angolans with the Angolan Attorney General’s Office.
Angolan Solutions
February 7, 2012 By 2 Comments
Rapping in ‘Father Banana’s Country’
February 1, 2012 By 2 Comments
The Angolan rap artist MCK (MC Kappa) released his third CD, Proíbido ouvir isto (Listening prohibited) in December 2011. Musically and lyrically it is his most complex and mature work yet and includes collaborations with well-known Angolan musicians of variety of genres like Paulo Flores (semba), Beto Almeida (kizomba), Ikonoklasta (rap) and Bruno M (kuduro).
Since his first album, Trincheira de ideias (Trench of ideas), MCK’s m.o. has been social and political critique. “A Técnica, as causas, e as consequências” (The technique, the causes, and the consequences) circulated on candongueiros (collective transport) and in the informal market. The song exhorted listeners: “clean the dust out of your eyes/open your eyes brother/switch off TPA [official television]/tear up the newspaper and analyze daily realities.” And then lamented the fact that “we have more firearms than dolls/fewer universities than discos/and more bars than libraries.”
Friday Music Bonus Edition
January 27, 2012 By 1 Comment
It’s Friday night, so we’re unwinding with some nice videos. We start with Liberians Nasseman and Takun J, on a pan-African roots reggae tune.
Angola Rock
January 15, 2012 By 1 Comment
A few days ago a young Angolan man I interviewed last year about a rock radio program, Volume 10 that’s been on Angola’s Radio FM/Radio Escola 16 years, posted this video on facebook. It’s by an Angolan rock band Café Negro and is called “Kilapanga do Orfão” (the Orphan’s Kilapanga). Kilapanga is a rhythm from northern Angola fused here with rock. Rock has been popular in Angola since the late colonial period (which ended in 1975 at independence) and has formed part of a complex urban soundscape.
Nas’s Angola Blues
January 13, 2012 By 2 Comments
In “If I ruled the World,” Nas raps: “I’d open every cell in Attica send em to Africa.” Then in the 1998 Hype Williams feature film “Belly” (costar DMX), Nas’s character wants to move his girlfriend and child to the continent as a way out of his life as a gangster. (He does not specify which country.) More recently Nas collaborated on the decent concept album “Distant Relatives” with Damian Marley, in which they aim to engage with the music of Africa. (They ended up sampling, among others, the music of Fela Kuti and Mulatu Astatke). Anyway, for all his symbolic politics, Nas has always made it clear he’ll play in Africa if the money is right and not because of some sentimental reason. (In video footage taken at a press conference a few years ago, Nas claims to have visited the continent three times.) Well, it seems over the New Year’s Nas had another opportunity to play in an African country. [Read more...]
Translating Angola
December 5, 2011 By 6 Comments
By Megan Eardley
Rhett McNeil’s translation of Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes’s “The Splendor of Portugal” received a lot of attention from the literary world when it was released earlier this fall. And with good reason. McNeil has interpreted Lobo Antune’s thick, cruel prose beautifully. But so far English-language critics have focused on the technical challenges of translating Antunes, as though they were somehow isolated from the text’s socio-political and ethical questions. Overall, many of these critics miss the edge of McNeil’s translation, which turns on Antunes’s language in order to address the reproduction of colonial violence on a global scale. We might go further to question why certain kinds of war stories–such as Antunes’s–are embraced by critics, and go on to find an international audience, while other finely written stories do not.
Angolan Independence
November 16, 2011 By 1 Comment
By Dan Moshenberg
On Friday, November 10, 2011, Angola marked its 36th Independence Day since the proclamation of independence, November 10, 1975. It’s a few days later but better way to acknowledge the day than to focus on … Angola asylum seekers? By and large, the Western media paid no attention to Angola on Friday, but then again what else is new.
The great exception was Radio Netherlands Worldwide, which sported a piece entitled, “The `Mauros’ who could not stay.” `Mauro’ is Mauro Manuel, an 18 year-old Angolan lad who was recently informed he could stay in the Netherlands, where he’s lived, with a foster family, for the last eight years. Mauro wasn’t given asylum, but, on Tuesday last week, he was allowed a reprieve. The Dutch Parliament gave him a student visa. What happens next is up in the air.
The “other `Mauros’” are women.
Amalia is 17, Tucha is 19. Their father was killed, for political activities, and the older sister was raped. That’s when they fled Angola. They lived in the Netherlands for five years. Then, they were denied asylum and, after five years, shipped back to Angola. No matter that Amalia was 16 at the time, a minor. No matter that no one knows where their relatives are or even if they are. A year on, they still don’t know if their mother is dead or alive.
“At the other end of the scale”, according to RNI, is Engracia. 33 years old. Completed her education in the Netherlands, where she lived for 14 years. No political violence. Supported by middle class kin in Angola and the Dutch Refugee Council, who paid for her ticket back and gave her 2000 euros.
So that’s the RNI Angola Scale: weeping, terrorized, impoverished failed asylum seeking girl, on one end; successful, entrepreneurial woman, on the other. On one end, desperately poor and with no apparent means of securing income; on the other, `gifted’ handsomely, as a `returning refugee’, by the largesse of Europe.
Really? That’s the scale?
What about all those other women in Angola? What about the ones who organize, struggle, and keep on keeping on?
Viva Kinshasa
October 31, 2011 By 3 Comments
One of the most exciting films to come out of the continent recently is the Congolese gangster noir, ‘Viva Riva!’ Sean already blogged about it here when it just started to attract a lot of hype. I saw the film at the Durban International Film Festival earlier this year, where it seemed to polarize the audience. Some felt it was entertaining and authentic, while others felt it was “socially irresponsible”. I found myself thinking the former. True to its genre, the film is a stylish rough-and-tumble tour of Kinshasa. There is violence and sex, but not to the point where it feels excessive or contrived. It’s a gangster film after all.
We follow Riva (Patsha Bay Mukana), a charming hustler who steals a truckload of fuel from some Angolan gangsters and returns to Kinshasa to make money off it. There is a shortage of fuel in town and word quickly spreads of Riva’s acquisition. He becomes hot property and everyone wants a piece of him. Throw a corrupt army official and a femme fatale into the mix and you’ve got yourself a thrilling ride through Kinshasa’s bustling streets.
Writer/director Djo Tunda Wa Munga, who has been called “an African Tarantino” has his filmmaking roots in the documentary genre. He was born and bred in Kinshasa and it shows. Kinshasa is not just a backdrop to Riva’s story, but a living, breathing character in the film. ‘Viva Riva!’ has been doing the rounds internationally and has thus far won an MTV award for Best African Film and six awards at the 7th African Movie Academy Awards.
I recently caught up with Djo Tunda Wa Munga in Amsterdam at the Africa in the Picture Film Festival, where he scooped the Best Feature Film Award. I sat in/hijacked Serginho Roosblad’s interview with him for Radio Netherlands Worldwide and asked a couple of questions of my own. Serginho graciously offered this interview to AIAC.
Is ‘Viva Riva!’ in a way a story about Africans who have emigrated and the experience of alienation when returning to their hometown?
The films of Sarah Maldoror
October 27, 2011 By 3 Comments
By Basia Lewandowska Cummings*
Sarah Maldoror’s film Sambizanga (1972) is a courageous and powerful piece of filmmaking. Beautifully shot in 35mm film, the director masterfully tells the story of a young couple – Maria and Domingos – who enjoy a seemingly blissful family life with their young baby, until Domingos is seized by the Portuguese authorities for being a suspected political activist, and taken to a brutal prison in the city. The film follows Maria on her heroic journey to find and save her husband; the narrative is punctuated by her heartbreaking cries; ‘Domingos!’, and her encounters with officials who turn her away, while Maldoror cuts to scenes of her husbands torture, creating a sense of frantic urgency to the film.
Sambizanga captures a moment in Angolan history where a tide turned. By deliberately setting the film in the past – 11 years previously – Maldoror is able to show the deaths and acts of brutality that served to both unify and advance the liberation movement. She shows, as she says in her own words ‘the political consciousness of the people had not yet matured’. Domingos’ torture and Maria’s struggle to learn the truth are symbolic of a generation of people becoming politically aware. At a time when a single death was still an inconceivable act of violent oppression, Maldoror’s narrative captures a society on the knifepoint of change. Later in this period, death and injury were common in the fight for freedom; it is estimated that by the end of 1961, the first year of the war, 50 000 Africans died as a result of rioting, massacres, mass executions and torture, while approximately 450 000 fled to neighboring Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo).
Maldoror is honest about the didacticism of her film; ‘to make a film means to take a position, and when I take a position, I am educating people. The audience has a need to know that there’s a war going on in Angola… I make films so that people – no matter what race or color they are – can understand them’.
We’re suppose to celebrate Miss Universe
September 14, 2011 By 5 Comments
Miss Angola, Leila Lopes, was crowned Miss Universe over the weekend. One of the judges, a former American TV newsreader, Connie Chung, told the AP:”… You have to keep in mind that these women are not objects just to be looked at. They’re to be taken seriously.” Yeh.
Meanwhile, here‘s what some other young Angolans–who are not competing in beauty competitions–are up to.
