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Introduction
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Introduction Em Angola, até o passado é imprevisível. (In Angola, even the past is unpredictable.) —Christine Messiant In May 1998, Alberto Teta Lando, a musician and local businessman in the capital Luanda, told me that three of the most popular musicians from the late 1960s and early 1970s had been killed by the government of independent Angola in 1977.1 They had too much power over the people, he said. Teta Lando implied that these musicians were more popular and better-known among the populations of Luanda’s musseques, or urban shantytowns, than were the new leaders of the ruling MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola ). In fact, these three were among thousands of people massacred in the repression that followed an alleged coup attempt against the leadership of the ruling party in 1977.2 Civil war had broken out with independence in 1975, and in 1977 contention within the ruling party erupted into a violent purge when the attempted coup was squelched. Most people I asked later about the murders of the three musicians claimed that the men had been involved with the coup plotters. But it was Teta Lando’s suggestion that their demise was related to their music and to their power as musicians that intrigued me. A few months after that interview, on August 8, 1998, Fernando Martins, a Luandan journalist, opined in the local press that “it is unpatriotic (with all the excesses that the expression implies) to be Angolan and over the age of 15 and to never have heard of Os Kiezos. Perhaps it would be easier to tolerate someone who did not know the name of the ocean that bathes the Angolan coast.”3 Os Kiezos was a band formed in the late 1960s. It was one of the most popular bands, if not the most popular, during the period in which David Zé, Urbano de Castro, and Artur Nunes, the three murdered musicians to whom Teta Lando referred, were also at the height of their popularity. Martins’s claim 1 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. appeals to the cultural bases of the nation more than to the politics of nationalism . He humbles the bombast of nationalist politics by locating patriotism not on the battlefield or in the political arena but in the practices and sounds that permeate everyday life, such as music. He is concerned with what makes the residents of the country Angolans. It is not enough, Martins implies, to be born in the territory. To be Angolan is located somewhere beyond the happenstance of birth and geography, if not in having heard this band then at least in having heard of them, and in knowing their style of music and the context of its creation and performance. In other words, one’s angolanidade, or Angolanness , is less about knowing where one is located physically than about knowing where one is historically and culturally. And, in Martins’s estimation , that place is fundamentally defined by the music of the 1960s and 1970s. Lando’s sketch of the political power of musicians and Martins’s evocation of Os Kiezos and its milieu summon a history normally associated with the nationalist armed struggle for independence waged between 1961 and 1974. Their comments link music and nation, culture and politics, and in doing so they force us to reconsider the dominant nationalist narrative of Angolan history . In temporal terms, the dominant narrative reduces culture to a protonationalist moment of “discovering our identity” and to a postindependence nation-building project. In spatial terms the narrative pivots on the actions and thoughts of political leaders, primarily men, who were in exile or were part of the guerrilla forces based along Angola’s borders. It is a curious feature of the narrative of Angolan history that the story of nationalism unfolds almost entirely outside and on the margins of the country.4 The absence of activity with political consequence within the Angolan territory is improbable. Therefore , at the simplest level this book tries to answer the questions that emerge from the contradictions between Lando’s and Martins’s comments on the one hand and the dominant historical narrative on the other. What was the relationship between politics and culture inside Angola while the war for independence , for political sovereignty, was being...