The sound of footsteps on gravel announces one of the most famous verses of committed music: “O povo é quem mais ordera”. The deliverance of Big Vila Morenasong a cappella by José Afonso, on Rádio Renascença at 00:00 on April 25, 1974 was the signal for the beginning of the Carnation Revolution and, consequently, the overthrow of the Portuguese dictatorship. This event alone, and the role he played in it, guaranteed Afonso a place in the history of human emancipation. But his work, his life, is not exhausted by that night half a century ago or by the idea of singer-songwriter with which his figure is usually associated. An intellectual of intervention, a poet with a broad register, the owner of a powerful and moving voice, the author of albums of a depth and risk barely reached by his contemporaries – from Portugal or elsewhere – there was a side of the polyhedron perhaps less frequented. to: the African. A group of Portuguese-speaking musicians from faraway latitudes have gathered to celebrate it and on September 29 they will do so in Santiago de Compostela, as part of the Maré Festival.
The proposal responds to the name of Lá no Xepangara, the same title as a piece of the world that is both splendid and dark. Choir of two tribunes (1974). Afonso wrapped this piece in Africanist arrangements – the artistic direction was provided by Fausto, another titan of Portuguese political music – memories of his days in Mozambique. He had moved in 1964. He was working as a teacher. Xepangara was a neighbourhood in Beira, the city where he lived, which he loved to explore and where he first heard Miriam Makeba or the rhythms of Soweto. The country was then a colony of Portugal and it was there that the musician completed his political awareness. “Africa is also important for José Afonso in political terms,” admits Manuel de Oliveira, artistic director of Lá no Xepangara, in a conversation with elDiario.es. It was not the first time he had set foot on the continent. During his childhood and adolescence, born in 1929 and the son of a judge, he had already set foot in Mozambique. Angola too. But the anti-colonial agitation of the 1960s marked his identity. And his music.
“He became a champion of the anti-colonial struggle,” confirms De Oliveira, “and as a teacher and humanist, a defender of the importance of music in the struggle for rights.” “A new man has come from the jungle / weapon in hand, he is not a soldier / by profession, he is a guerrilla / his mother says so in the village,” he sang in The new man sees the deada joyful apology for the anti-imperialist insurrection in Africa in the 1970s, irresistibly rhythmic. included it As soon as there is strengthhis 1978 album, which Zeca Afonso himself once said was his people’s favorite. It was at this time, that of the Revolution and the following years, that the African universe appeared with more intensity in his recorded work. Although it was not the first time, far from it: in Also trace another friendfrom 1970, recorded in London under the watchful eye of two Brazilian exiles – Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso – and with an austere sound, had included Angola Avenue.
Coimbra, Galicia, Portuguese-speaking Africa
“It is when he reaches a more mature sound that Africa is most present in his music,” explains De Oliveira. As if this now complemented what the Portuguese musician who directs La no the traditional melodies and forms of Portugal “and also of Galicia” – Achégate a mim, Maruxa, in Fura fura (1979), for example–; and Africa, Africa subjected to the Portuguese yoke and which obtained its independence after years of armed struggle in the aftermath of the Carnation Revolution. They and the dialogue with other musicians, José Mário Branco, the aforementioned Fausto or Júlio Pereira, allowed the author to Grandola to develop an astonishing sequence of albums, in which revolutionary politics and artistic experimentation intersect again and again. The singer-songwriter who emerged in the innovative environments of fado and traditional ballads and revolutionized them with Vampires either Menino of the Black Districtpractically belonged to another geological era. Before the Revolution.
“In Portugal, there is a certain lack of knowledge about José Afonso’s work,” explains De Oliveira. Not about his figure or his cultural and political role. Close to Luar (League of Unity and Revolutionary Action), a singular socialist organization with a libertarian imprint, linked to Maoism and often perceived as a fellow traveler of Álvaro Cunhal’s Communist Party, Grandola and its symbolic character has ended up obscuring in some way the unfathomable richness of its heritage. “The dehumanization of music also influences, which fuels the general public“, he adds. Lá no Xepangara is the operation that De Oliveira has imagined to help solve this lack of memory.
Contemporary and timeless
The distant origin of the initiative lies in conversations with Janita Salomé, a singer who collaborated with Zeca himself on his last two albums, How to delete your file (1983) and Chickens of the material (1985), who barely managed to fall seriously ill with the multiple sclerosis that would eventually kill him in 1987. His brother, Vitorino, had shared a generation and an activism in the intervention song –one of the names, not the least, of this Portuguese popular music– with José Afonso. Also recordings, Choir of two tribunes (1974), among others. “It was in 2010 that I spoke with Janita about the African influence in Zeca, but it didn’t go any further. Until now,” he says. He brought together musicians from Portugal (Edu Mundo, João Frade and Albano Fonseca), Mozambique (Selma Uamusse and Isabel Novela), Brazil (Fred Martins) and Angola (Dilson Pedro) to tackle something like Afonso’s African repertoire. Galician artists will join the Santiago de Compostela concert: Uxía, Faia Díaz, Carlos Blanco and A Pedreira. Afonso’s ties with Galicia were not minor, from his political-artistic friendship with Benedicto de Voces Ceibes to the public premiere of Grandola during an anti-Franco show in 1972.
“When you look at his work, you always discover new elements. The contemporaneity, or rather the timelessness of his humanist message, which has nothing to do with partisanship, continues to surprise,” he says, “and although in Portugal, as in Europe and the world, there are reactionary forces opposed to what he” defended: “There are also opposing forces.” People who resist, indomitable musicians. Like the one who resounded on Rádio Renasçença 50 years ago and who marked the opening of the paths to freedom in Portugal.
