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4. “Ngongo Jami” (My Suffering): Lyrics, Daily Life, and Musical Space, 1956–74
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110 4 w “Ngongo Jami” (My Suffering) Lyrics, Daily Life, and Musical Space, 1956–74 In the mid-1950s, the band Ngola Ritmos performed at the Teatro Nacional (National Theater) in Luanda’s baixa. The venue’s name referred, of course, to the Portuguese nation that embraced Angola as an overseas territory. This was no longer custodial colonialism but fierce possession dressed up in lusotropicalist discourse. Angolan “folklore,” which Ngola Ritmos represented, served to encapsulate and perform difference, making quaint what was potentially explosive cultural difference. The Portuguese nation would thus subsume Angolan specificity in a demonstration of Portuguese skill at including its tropical territories within the nation. Yet when Ngola Ritmos sang that night at the Teatro Nacional the emcee reinscribed the divide between musseque and baixa, African and Portuguese, thus disrobing the lusotropicalist fantasy. When the emcee presented the band he also announced the names of the songs they were going to sing and read their translations into Portuguese from Kimbundu.1 Zé Maria of Ngola Ritmos recounted the event: “We had a song that was called ‘Ngongo Jami.’ At that time we called it ‘Ngongo Jami’—my suffering. And the emcee said, ‘Well, not my suffering, theirs,’ when he presented us. But just like that: ‘Not mine, theirs.’”2 Zé Maria was obviously offended by the emcee’s condescending attitude. At the same time, the emcee’s gaffe baldly expressed the racism, economic deprivation, and absence of political representation or rights that most Angolans living in the musseques felt keenly. Musseque residents likely would have said, “My suffering, yes, but ours as well.” Music in late colonial Angola took private grief and by performing it publicly made it collective. The sound, and perhaps even the process, was 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. attractive to whites as well, and in an ironic twist on the lusotropical narrative, by the early 1970s whites made their way to the musseques in sizeable numbers to hear Ngola Ritmos and other popular bands play.3 In the end, it was Angolan music and Africans who succeeded in producing a culture, both cosmopolitan and African, that attracted European audiences. This chapter offers a glimpse at the relationship between musical lyrics and the pleasures, pain, and preoccupations of daily life. It also looks briefly at the different spaces in which music was performed and made meaningful by audiences. As the anecdote above reveals, context and location shape the interpretation of music. Furthermore, musical lyrics were just one of the elements of music that Angolans living in the musseques and throughout the country found so compelling. By looking at the lyrics of seven songs that were popular between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s as emanations of life in the musseques and representations of that experience, we can see how song writers and musicians explored the limitations of life under colonial rule while making people dance.4 By looking at the venues where music was performed we can get a sense of how music started in musseque backyards, took off in the club scene, and flourished and became more accessible through music festivals in Luanda’s streets and cinemas. In my interviews and conversations with Angolans, time and again I was told that day-to-day concerns occupied people’s attentions in the late colonial period: social and familial relations, getting an education, making enough money to feed one’s family, and maintaining one’s dignity under difficult socioeconomic conditions. In music, musicians interpreted, re-created, and transformed that world. Carlos Pimentel remembered the lyrics: Our music was oriented to the troubles we had, to the suffering we had. But we didn’t play music because we were political, no, but because we lived that reality and we saw that the rest of the people that lived in the musseques lived in bad and squalid conditions [mal e porcamente .] So we sang about our bitterness in Kimbundu and they didn’t know [what we were saying]. We even talked badly about them [the Portuguese] and they didn’t know it!5 Pimentel emphasizes that politics was organic to the situation. For the most part, politically driven musicians did not decide to sing in order to send a message or make a political statement. Rather, they sang about what they knew...