Bonga
Pretaluz
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Portugal first occupied the southern African nation more than five centuries ago, and ultimately incorporated it into an empire that included Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and Sao Tome and Principe. The 1974 coup in Lisbon that toppled its dictatorship eventually caused Portugal to relinquish its African colonies, but Angola has been wracked by internal strife ever since. Although in 1992 the once Marxist ruling party won a UN-approved democratic election over the renegade forces of Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, backed by the U.S. during the cold war), Savimbi never accepted the loss. UNITA launched a brutal postelection attack on government supporters, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of Angolans. In subsequent years Savimbi has agreed to several power-sharing plans, but he’s reneged on every agreement, most recently at the beginning of this month. His profits from diamond mining have allowed him to build up his arsenal with black-market weapons, and many diplomats fear that the nation could soon erupt in civil war once again.
Though Angolan stars’ prominence at home has been somewhat diminished by the distance they’ve put between themselves and their native land, it has increased in this country of late. The success of Cape Verdean singer Cesaria Evora has brought about a strong interest in the music of Lusophone Africa, a subculture that evolved out of an old trade triangle including Portugal, Africa, and South America. In 1995 David Byrne’s Luaka Bop imprint issued Telling Stories to the Sea, and in 1996 the Tinder label released 1975-1995 Independencia!, a pair of compilations that suggested the breadth and wealth of music produced in the continent’s former Portuguese colonies. And last year the work of some of Angola’s most important singers became readily available in this country for the first time. Bonga’s debut album, Angola 72, is music of that country’s preliberation era, while Waldemar Bastos’s Pretaluz is a reflection of its more cosmopolitan present. But neither man lives in Angola–Bonga left in 1972 and Bastos fled ten years later.
Lyrically Bastos betrays a uniquely Angolan perspective: “Sofrimento,” “Morro do Kussava,” “Querida Angola,” and “Kanguru” all obviously relate to Angola’s plight, pleading for opposing factions to find peace. “Morro do Kussava,” for example, uses Mount Kussava, a hill in southern Angola that’s seen some of the most brutal fighting, in a metaphor for the nation’s suffering, but also as a symbol of hope (“You no longer possess the beauty / That you will one day possess again”).
