5 - Lisbon

Johny arrives in Lisbon, deconstructing the myth of the ‘good coloniser’ through conversations with innovators and intellectuals of African descent in Portugal. He hears from Kalaf Epalanga of the band Buraka, who pioneered the frenetic Angolan afro-techno musical genre kuduro and then speaks to artist and activist Raquel Lima, whose research on slave rebellions in the former Sao Tome colony inform her resistance to social inequality in the present day.

 

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Afropean podcast.
Welcome to the Afro Podcast, a newseries traverse in the Afro European
diaspora, sharing the voices of peoplewhose identities and experiences

(00:24):
shed light on Europe, often missingfrom official national narratives
and pocket size tourist guides.
We aim to explore what it meansto be at once African and European
in a Europe that is culturallyand politically redefining itself.
I'm Johny Pitts and in thisepisode we're in Lisbon.

(00:59):
Portugal's history in European colonialismlooms large As one of the longest
empires in world history, the Portuguesewere the first to colonize and, under
the long serving dictator Salazar,the last to bow out of the colonial
game, with colonies such as Angola onlygaining independence as late as 1975.

(01:21):
Lisbon was the seat of this empire, atone time the European hub of trade with
Africa, the Far East, India and Brazil.
Even the city's much lovedfootball club, FC Benfica, and
Portugal's national football team.
Football team were tiedup with colonialism.
They're all conquering 60s heydayfueled with players from the colonies,

(01:41):
such as the legendary Eusebio.
But over the last decade, it'sseen a boom of a different kind.
A growing number of tourists,tech startups, and people buying
second homes in this city.
And it's not hard to see why.
Beaches are never far away, it has thesoul of a village where every street seems
to lead to a convivial public square.

(02:03):
You can smoke indoors and drink outside,and there's always a good party to be had.
Perhaps the current trend ofgentrification in Lisbon begins
in 2008, paradoxically at thesame time as the financial crisis.
Around 2008, 2009 The economical crisishit really hard Portugal, Spain, and

(02:27):
Ireland, and all those countries.
And the austerity measureswere put in place, and the
country was really suffering.
Kalaf Epalanga is an author andmusician, and his first book
had a title that caught my ear.
The Angolan who boughtLisbon at half the price.
At that time, we hadAngolan political elite.

(02:47):
coming to Portugal and buyingeverything, bank, insurance companies,
they were bidding to buy the airlinecompany, like the Portuguese TAP.
And it was quite bizarre for mebeing in Angola and observing that.
And even like the newspaper, likeNew York Times and The Guardian was
talking about that reverse colonialism.

(03:09):
Of course, it didn't happen that way.
And it was just like a goodheadline to sell newspaper.
I was living downtown Lisbon at the time.
To buy bread or milk, I would just, like,put my suit on and go to the supermarket.
You know, it was my sartorialchoices at the time.

(03:29):
And it happened that I was goingto my day and, and, end up having
lunch on this really tiny restaurant.
Downtown, nothing fancy.
We call those restaurantsin Portugal, Tascas.
That was a restaurant really like,uh, five minutes walk from my house.
And a place that I used to go therefor lunch, like, almost every week.

(03:52):
So I was having my lunch, I finishedmy lunch, and then, when I was asking
the bill, I Came the owner of therestaurant asking me if I was Angolan
and I said, yes, I'm Angolan And heinvite me to follow him to the kitchen.
So I go to the kitchen andhe start showing me, Oh, I
just bought this machine.

(04:13):
I just refurbished the kitchen.
This is all new.
Really like explaining the whole business.
And then in the end he saidlike, you know, I'm selling.
Are you interested to buy?
And I look at the man.
You know, I was really kind ofshocked, and also at the same
time concerned, and I felt bad forthe man because he was desperate.

(04:37):
And of course, beingAngolan, I asked, how much?
After that, I was like,okay, I have myself a book.
Calaf is also a member of the bandBaraka, an electronic dance music
project specializing in a fusion oftechno beats with African genres such
as Zouk, Kuduru, and as you can hearin tracks like this one, Kalemba.

(05:02):
Their music and aesthetics carry with thema sense of Portugal beyond its borders.
and the African influence within them.
Wig it!
Wig it, wig it, wig it!
Wig it, wig it, wig it!
Wig it, wig it, wig it!
Buraka belongs to a borough, Amadora,which is the place in Lisbon that

(05:27):
has the largest black community.
Most of the Africans somehowend up living in that area.
And also Linha de Sintra, which is thetrain line between Lisbon and Sintra.
And Sintra is basically a royalneighborhood, very beautiful
with palaces and stuff like that.
It was the place where the royalfamily spent their summers.
Between Lisbon and that place,you have basically the slums.

(05:50):
Yeah, you have the projects,you have the ghettos of Lisbon.
Every time there is a news relatedto African community with either
crime or anything like that.
always happened in Liga de Sintra.
And for us, growing up and being partof that community, even though we're not
the neighborhood that I lived in, but twoof my band members grew up in that area.

(06:11):
When we were choosing the name, we wantedto have a name that is unequivocal Lisbon.
A name that also shows that on thoseplaces, You have beauty, you have art.
For the first time you add the name Burakabeing associated with something great.

(06:32):
We had a show in a city here in theAlgarve and somehow when we got to the
show we saw extra amount of police,you know, in front of the stage.
Sometimes there is like one ortwo but never really that amount
of police in front of the stage.
During that week, the radio wasadvertising the show, uh, saying

(06:57):
it's coming people from Burakaand basically everything that
is related to Buraka is crime.
So basically hide your children,hide your daughters because the
guys from Buraka are coming.
People don't really knowwhat's going on in Buraka.
Those were the thingsthat we were challenging.
Our choices in terms of, uh, the videos.
The, the whole aesthetic.

(07:18):
The, the way we treated the sound.
Everything that was related to thegroup identity was reflecting the
lives of the African community.

(07:43):
I'm Paulo Pascoal, Paulo NunoPascoal, that would be my full name.
Paulo is an actor, radio host andactivist who in his personal and
professional life speaks out aboutracism in Portuguese society.
We have a big problem inPortugal right now, uh, for us.
It's like Portugal hasno ethnical, racial data.

(08:04):
So we don't know the exact numbers of howmany people from Afro African diaspora
and Afro descendants, or how many blackPortuguese people There isn't a country,
we don't know and I think that's theinformation that the government is trying
to hide is actually not to face thereality of how hegemonic it's trying to

(08:25):
remain painting this picture of a wholewide country with all these colonial,
uh, costumes and all these romantic ideaof what was their colonization in the
African countries, you know, becauseI've, I've, I've heard so much Uh, in
here, when I first got here and when Istarted talking about this from my white

(08:45):
friends, oh no, we were good colonizers,you know, we mixed, we created a, a
third race, you know, there's, there'sbiracial people because we were the first
people to actually interact with the,the colonized, with the enslaved people.
And so this is something that is reallypart of the, the collective knowledge.
It's taking too long to deconstructthat idea of there is no.

(09:08):
good colonization.
You know, there is no discovery.
It was invasion.
And, and, and only last year, he actuallybecame a public and a political talk.
Portugal was the last countryto abandon the colonies.
And it's only been like45 years, 46 years.
So a lot of the people thatwere actually in Africa through,
you know, this whole process ofcolonization, they're still alive.

(09:31):
They're still the grandparents.
It's only in recent years that Portugal'scolonial history has begun to enter
the public sphere, partly becauseSalazar was a hermit leader determined
to keep Portugal a hermit country.
He once said that happycountries have no history.
1975 was the Angolan independence.
Kalaf Epalanga.

(09:52):
All the colonies, uh, beside, um,Guiné Bissau, because they had the
independence in 74, but all the rest,Mozambique, Angola and Cabo Verde.
But 75 is not long ago.
I have discussions with peoplethat were in those countries.
I encounter people that almost had slaves.

(10:12):
They used the word contratar.
Those employees, but of course with verybad condition, very poor conditions.
And the word contratar was upuntil the independence, until 75.
So you have generationsand generations of people.
Portuguese people that returned backto Portugal that had that relationship,
that had those concepts on their lives.

(10:34):
And I believe this clashis happening today.
They are happening now.
I'm 39, so my mom, you know, was bornand lived half of her life in an Angola
that was still Portugal territory.
And so it's a very delicateconversation to start because there's
a big resistance into understandingthe real wounds it has created.

(10:58):
Once you get to realize that, I thinkwhat's happening now is creating a
lot of Now the people who defend thatromantic idea of the colonization,
they really don't want to speak about,they don't want to maybe see the people
that are highlighting these topics.
And so when you decide to talk aboutthis, you have to be ready to be

(11:19):
cancelled and to just know that it'snot going to be easy and that, um, you
will not fully be accepted into what'sthe general idea of what Portugal is.
Through conversations I had, it seemedto me more and more that Portugal is a
country which is full of people promotingsolidarity among the black community.

(11:40):
But the issues they're facingare embedded so deeply that even
the language around talking aboutblackness itself is often confusing.
We accept the label of blackbecause someone say that.
Someone say, oh, you are black,therefore you identify as black.
The idea of claiming that andhaving ownership to that, it start

(12:00):
in the 90s because of America.
Even today, we have two words, pretoand negro, would say black and negro.
in a way, even though the translationis not really correct because it's more
complex than that, has more layers.
But there are people, for example,that have issues with the word
preto and prefer to be called negro.

(12:21):
Yeah, and there are people thathave issues with the word negro
and prefer to be called preto.
And you can really see thatin generations, and not only
generations, but also communities.
For example, the Angolan communityprefer the terms, uh, negro, but the
Cabo Verde prefer the term preto.
And also when it comes to Brazil,it's even way more complex because

(12:45):
Brazilians have the most wordsand synonyms for the word black.
When these are relatedto race, for example.
But those discussions were becominglouder and louder throughout the 90s.
One of the key ways of bringing theblack community together, of forming
a shared collective understanding,is through the arts and music.

(13:08):
The track you're hearingright now is called Kizomba.
We asked Kalaf about some of the musicthat's influenced Baraka and some of the
scenes you might find in Lisbon today.
The African community didn't reallylearn how to claim the, the, the,

(13:29):
let's say, the culture manifestationsin the sense of, for example,
the Kizomba community is huge.
Yeah, like Kizomba is a musical genre thatwas born in between Angola and Cabo Verde.
Yeah, uh, even though Angolans claimfor it, even the word Kizomba is
a Kimbundu word and means party.

(13:53):
Uh, but Cabo Verdeans definitelygave a huge contribution to it.
We need to create a Kizomba museum.
Just because the importance of thismusic genre for our own identity in terms
of during the day or during the week.
Most of us don't have a name, yeah?
We are the construction workers.
We are the cleaners.

(14:13):
We are, like, we are on the bottomof the bottom in the society.
But then comes Friday.
We go out, you know, we dress up,we go to the club, and we dance.
And kizomba is also adance that you dance to.
together.
It's like a bachata.
Yeah.
It's like, uh, it's ball dancing.

(14:34):
You hug.
It's beautiful because, you know, youfeel that connection with the other
and on a really transcendent way,you know, there's nothing more poetic
than that for in my, in my opinion.
So those spaces arereally important for us.
Yeah.
The space where Kizomba happens.

(14:56):
And that's the place where Kuduro started.
Baraka smashed onto the internationalscene, collaborating with artists like M.
I.
A.
and this track, Sound of Kuduro,and bringing this fast paced
music from Luanda via Lisbonall the way to the global stage.

(15:19):
Kuduro started as an extension of what wastaking place Uh, in, in the zomba space,
and this is also like the music genre thatwas in dialogue with the outside world.
It happened like in the late ninetiesthat you had, that you had Angolan

(15:41):
kids experimenting with housemusic, experimented with techno,
and that basically created duo.
Duo is basically, uh, 140 BPM.
Afrotechno, created with reallycheap computers, cracked software.
Fruity Loops is basically thego to software for Kuduro.

(16:03):
And those guys managed to create a musicgenre that really represents Afrotechno.
Luanda, the capital of Angola, is, yeah,a really fast, hard city to live in.
A country that only got ridof the civil war in 2002.
From 75, uh, To 2002, we are thechaotic, uh, society, but Kru somehow

(16:33):
became the soundtrack of that society.
It's fast, it's aggressive, it's ugly.
I will not use the wordbeautiful to describe it.

(16:57):
But at the same time, all that roughness,all that rawness evokes raw feelings when
you listen to it, when you dance into it.
It's kind of like a really, anexpression of an African metropolis is.
There's nowhere else to go.
Yeah.
Like there's no, there'sno escape from it.
The only thing you can do inorder to survive is to dance.

(17:21):
Yeah, it's to manifest andexpress, scream, and trying to
go beyond your circumstances.
And for me, Kuduro is that.
Yeah, Kuduro is, is a manifestationof what Angola, what Luanda is today.
Groups like Baraka are a true exampleof what Afropean is all about.
Baraka brought together the music ofEurope with these fresh, raw sounds

(17:44):
coming straight out of the Africancontinent and carved out a new direction
with their music, politically andculturally, right here in Lisbon.
Lisbon,
Lisbon.
Talk about Lisbon.
It was really huge and fast, theway that Lisbon gets gentrified.

(18:05):
The process was really violent.
Suddenly, they closed alot of our special spaces.
With gentrification, welost the possibilities of
finding, um, our own places.
And this is the bad part of Lisbon.
A lot of places I used to go when I wasgrowing up, like bars and coffees and, uh,

(18:28):
even houses and restaurants, they closed.
I feel very sad whenI'm in Lisbon right now.
I feel that, uh, I lost part ofmy identity also because, uh,
all these areas, uh, disappeared.

(18:57):
Hi, my name is Raquel Lima.
I'm a Portuguese poet.
I'm also a performer.
My mother is from Angola.
My father is from São Tomé.
My grandmother is from Senegal.
My great grandmother is from Brazil.
And I'm currently doing a PhDin the University of Coimbra,
working on orator and slavery.

(19:43):
In recent history, Portugal, aswe've heard, was some of the last
colonizers to leave, but also the first.
Until recently, there's been a lackof historical material exploring the
Portuguese Empire from the perspectiveof those who've been colonized.
Raquel Lima is someone who is seekingto change this, and through her work
as a scholar, poet and activist,is building an archive with direct

(20:06):
reference to her roots in São Tomé.
There was a slave rebellion in 1595and uh, basically two thirds of the
slaves, they rebelled and they tookout the country for some, some versions
say six months, others say one year,but anyway, it was a rebellion.

(20:27):
Because we are talking about acountry that was basically destined
to the production of coffeeand then sugar and then cacao.
So the, the system there werereally aggressive and, um,
organized in the way that peoplecouldn't get out of that system.
So for me, it's very importantto study rebellions because they

(20:50):
have the seeds of rebellion.
of struggle in the, in theworst condition possible.
So I'm trying to understand whatcan we learn from that experience
of a quilombamento, when slaves,they run away and they create
their own communities separately.
So what can we learn aboutthese ancestral technologies?
How can we update it throughorality, through orator?

(21:16):
And of course, after that,There was a lot of massacres.
Of course, today the country isstill suffering from the social
stratification that is very strong tothink how people are organizing and
still struggling in that conditions.
And, um, yeah, for me,that's really fascinating.
And I try to learn from that.

(21:43):
I am Afro descendant, Afro diesiac,Afro diasporic, Afro conscious,
Afro futurist, Afro resilient,
Afro non condescendent.
I would like Africa not to be aninconsequential province, but a

(22:04):
planet instead of a continent.
It's called the Planet Africa.
I'm Afro descendant, Afro diesiac, Afrodiasporic, Afro conscious, Afro futurist,
Afro resilient, Afro not condescendent.
I would like that Africa wouldn'tbe a inconsequent prefix.

(22:26):
I think it's a poem about frustration,about what kind of Africa do we create in
our heads, being in a diaspora, and howwe also want to find a peaceful place,
and how a planet will be that place.

(22:56):
And if nothing I say
and nothing I do makes sense withwhat I write then I read and don't
read I stay and don't stay Raquel wasinvolved in holding the Afro Europeans
Conference in Lisbon which broughttogether thinkers and artists from many
different countries and disciplinesto talk about the formation of an Afro

(23:19):
European identity across the continent.
I believe we have a lot to learn withother realities, uh, even in, in a more
philosophical way of thinking time, ofthinking space, of thinking borders, or
thinking, uh, uh, how to share history.

(23:40):
So, What, uh, what I think is,um, is important for us is to not,
not be completely closed in onlyone version of the, of the story.
So for me, filling these gaps, it's,it's in one hand, it's a political issue.
On the other is to understandhow I, am I continuing.

(24:02):
Uh, this legacy somehowin a very intuitive way.
Uh, so there's a lot of influencesthat probably come from, uh, these
influences that we don't know, these,uh, these, uh, roots that we don't know.
That's why I think it's important.
Raquel's research is about orator, aform of orality that works to build

(24:24):
stories that might otherwise be erased.
I wanted to know more about thisidea of orator and how we can use
this process or method to build amuch needed archive to understand
the history of an Afropean Europe.
Orator is for me muchwider than oral tradition.
It is a concept that was coined bya linguist from Uganda, Pius In the

(24:48):
60s, he created this, um, concept toexplain exactly another way of telling
stories and of telling the world.
Auditour is something for me verytransversal that we are still doing
through anecdotes, through proverbs,through hip hop, rap, spoken word.
I mean, all this way of making communitytexts, ways of participating on society

(25:12):
that has to do with telling collectivestories orally and conserving them,
I think it has a lot to do with otherway of um, explaining the world that
literature does not because I think theyare basically complementary dimensions.
Literature has auditor on it andauditor has literature, but they are
separate dimensions that communicate.

(25:45):
In Lisbon, a group that are doing a lot topreserve and collect stories and to build
a living, breathing archive is Teatro
Griot.
Producing memory about oneselfis a political act, as memory
is the critical conscience.

(26:07):
I think that producing memoriesthrough performance is also to
build an archive in our body.
An archive that obliges a constantrefiguration of the world.
And being black, uh, thisarchive gains a bigger dimension.

(26:31):
My name is Zia Soares.
I am the ArtisticDirector of Teatro Griot.
And also I am an actress.
Griot, it is a Frenchword that means warehouse.

(26:53):
And the griots, they are the keepersof the African oral tradition.
They are the poets, thestorytellers, the musicians.
And also some people believe thatthey have supernatural powers.
We tell about a lot of stories.

(27:13):
Most of them are connected withour condition of being black in a
white country, white continent, youknow, the shows that we choose to
put to the stage are related to theexperience of the bodies in territory.
It can and it has the power toundermine or to shake its structures.

(27:37):
The music that you're hearingright now is the original score to
their piece, The Laughter of theScavengers, by the artist Xullaji.
The Laughter of the Scavengers, it's aplay staged by me, and it has as starting
point the remains of the Trindade War.
that took place in Santo Me andPríncipe in, in February of 1953.

(28:04):
In this war, countless number ofSantimians were brutally killed
by the Portuguese colonial regime.
To celebrate, uh, the memory of thedead, Each year in February, the
centenarians, they perform a ritualisticcourse parading for several hours.

(28:28):
It's almost like a funeral marchthat amplifies songs, sounds, spoken
words, laughter, and the play,the laughter of the scavengers.
It's like a continuationof this celebratory march.
in which the performers manipulatetimes and images and they try

(28:53):
to reconfiguring the remains ofthe fragments of the slaughter.
We had to confront ourselveswith the colonial library,
uh, that did not suit us.
So we started to developother dramaturgies based on

(29:14):
gestures, on voices and images.
And our work, uh, become progressively,I would say, more visual and more aware
of the importance of the productionof images that feed and simultaneously
update the collective imaginary.

(29:36):
I'm struck by this idea ofupdating the collective imaginary.
Groups across the continent are workinghard to produce forgotten histories and
to create links to ancestral narrativesand methods of rebellion that are so
crucial to an ever divided Europe.
Portugal, once so silent over its coloniallegacy, now finally seems to be addressing

(29:57):
its past in order to move forward.
And Lisbon is perhaps the city at thecentre of this change where Afropeans
are beginning to make their voicesheard and their identities felt.
Addressing that history that Salazarso wanted to shield Portugal's citizens
from is the key, I believe, to healingold wounds and building new bridges.

(30:19):
The Afropean Podcast is a coproduction brought to you by
Afropean and Reduce Listening.
It's written and presented byme, Johny Pitts, and produced
by Femi Oriogun Williams.
Charlie Towler was the assistant producer.
This episode was supportedby National Geographic.
You can read more stories from BlackEurope in my book, Afro pean Notes from
Black Europe, which is out now, publishedby Penguin in the UK, and translated

(30:43):
into French, Spanish, Italian, German.
Polish, Dutch, and Portuguese.
Afropean, the journal, a photographicessay, bringing together 20 years
of images and ephemera from mywork, is out now published by Morel.
And don't forget, you can contributeyour own story to the website I run
with Yomi Bazawe, Natalumin, TolaOsitelu, and Nina Kamara, afropean.

(31:04):
com.
Do get in touch.
Next time for the last episodein this season of the Afropean
podcast, we land in Paris.
When people will look at you, theywill always see a black woman.
And as soon as you will open your mouth,they will realize how French you are.

(31:26):
I was a young black man livingin the middle of Paris, asking
myself a lot of questions.
Uh, do I belong in here?
What am I doing here?
Am I legit to be their Parisian guide?
And we're like, Afropean, yeah.
Afropean soul.
It's from my soul to your soul.
It's for our souls.