27 May 1977

The day the music died in Angola

The day I die, mother, I don’t want people crying for me, I don’t want people lamenting for me
Tomorrow don’t say that I died angry
I just want my friends to play and sing that I may go by the grace of God
- “Kisua Ki Ngui Fuá” by Artur Nunes, translation from Kimbundu found in anonymous comments online

Naomi and I have spent countless hours with a favorite CD compilation called Soul of Angola: Anthologie de la Musique Angolaise 1965/1975, released in 2001 by French label Lusafrica. We stumbled on it at Twisted Village, our friends’ Harvard Square record store in the late nineties and the aughts. It was the height of an adventurous CD reissue era, with music surfacing from crate diggers everywhere. Each week, it seemed, something mindblowing arrived at Twisted Village that had previously only been known to aficionados. And often with liner notes by those aficionados, to boot.

This particular comp seized us and never let go. It’s a double-CD of haunting laments sung over percussion-driven grooves, with quiet acoustic guitars playing rhythm and electric guitars on lead. (If you take a look at our work since the 2000s, you might see where we got some of our ideas for instrumentation.) One artist on the comp in particular, Artur Nunes, I feel we could listen to ad infinitum – his voice is piercingly emotional, his melodies profoundly melancholy. It was clear from the compilation that he was a star of Angolan music. Yet I could find no releases under his own name. In the liner notes, printed in French and badly translated English, it only said, “During these disturbed times of the end of the colonial period, many were the artists who paid a heavy price for their engagement: Artur Nunes, David Zé and Urbano de Castro, all died during the aborted attempt of military coup in May 1977 at Luanda.”

Artur Nunes

I consulted every collection of Angolan music that I could find, but none had more information about what happened to Artur Nunes or the other artists mentioned in that sentence, David Zé and Urbano de Castro. In 2010, the German label Analog Africa released an extensively researched compilation, Angola Soundtrack: the Unique Sound of Luanda 1968-1976, with liner notes detailing interviews of surviving 1970s musicians whom compiler Samy Ben Redjeb managed to track down in person, including a brother of David Zé. But when Rejeb asked what had happened to David Zé, he was told, “Don’t get involved in that matter.”

“During my whole trip to Luanda,” Samy Ben Redjeb wrote, “I wondered why… records by David Zé, Urbano de Castro and Artur Nunes were nowhere to be found. I later discovered that after the events of 1977, the music of these three artists was banned from airplay and I have a feeling that people in possession of their records must have thrown them away to avoid any risk of being affiliated and seen as guilty by association.”

Two books in English fill out parts of the story, one by a scholar and one by a journalist. The scholarly book is Intonations: A Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, from 1945 to Recent Times (2008), by Marissa J. Moorman, Professor of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Moorman’s book is a history of colonial and post-colonial Angola focused on community building through music. She argues that music contributed to political structures of the developing independent nation while still under colonial rule. “Through the music scene Angolans declared a cultural sovereignty that did not simply lead them to politics but was political in its own right. Cultural sovereignty shaped their expectations about independence and nationalism,” she writes. Moorman documents not only how important but how extensive the Angolan music scene was throughout the period leading up to independence from Portugal in 1975. It was a thriving industry.

Tragically, political independence in Angola was followed by a protracted civil war between factions backed by competing cold war interests – a war that didn’t formally end until 2002. “What happened to music and the music scene?” asks Moorman. “Musicians describe the period from 1974… until the early 1990s as a hiatus in the history of Angolan music.” War is no better for music than for anything else we value in life.

The bitter irony of the events in May 1977 that took the lives of Artur Nunes, David Zé and Urbano de Castro alongside many thousands – some say many tens of thousands – is that it wasn’t a part of the civil war per se. It was a power struggle within a single party, the MPLA, which would eventually prevail and become the government of Angola. These artists had been members of the MPLA, even serving in a musical military unit sent by the party for performances in other African nations to help build alliances.

This explains why the murder of these musicians was followed by the silencing of their voices on existing recordings. Because they were killed in an effort to suppress a movement within the party that took power, their deaths were never publicly discussed as a martyrdom or even a loss. Moorman reports that decades later at the national radio station, RNA, “I encountered numerous vinyl discs with deliberate scratches and Xs through particular songs or with writing on the label that said não tocar (do not play).” Urbano de Castro, according to Moorman, was “the artist who produced the most records from 1969 to 1978,” and yet, “I found only one single by Urbano de Castro in the stacks.”

The silencing of these musicians extended to the story of their death. Moorman learned next to no detail about the incident in the course of her research in Angola, and although their loss is featured on the very first page as part of the initial inspiration for her book, they figure in a mere handful of paragraphs. “There are no published accounts of their deaths,” Moorman explains. She can only report theories she picks up in conversations with the few who are willing to discuss the topic.

BBC World Service journalist Lara Pawson, stationed in Angola starting in 1998, ran into the same wall when asking questions about the political events of 27 May 1977. She made it a quest to find out more, returning to Angola after her BBC stint to chase down as much information as she could from those who remembered and would talk about it. In the Name of the People (2014) is a first-person account of that investigation, which doesn’t result in an authoritative history so much as fragments of trauma, guilt, rationalization, and, again, competing theories from those who are willing to put them forward.

Pawson doesn’t delve into the musicians’ story, drawing on Moorman for that part of her account, but does uncover a good deal more about the May 1977 conflict. The power struggle within the MPLA, as Pawson details, had much to do with opposition between black working-class supporters from the Luanda neighborhoods known as musseques (shanty towns), and white and mestiço supporters who had through education and wealth inherited more of the Portuguese colonial institutional power. All were socialists, or at least part of the same Marxist-Leninist party.

On 27 May 1977 the institutional faction of the MPLA, if we might characterize it that way, purged the generally more working-class supporters of what they took to be a coup within the party. These murders extended far beyond any such political explanation, no matter how Machiavellian; Pawson learned that the bloodletting included petty grievances and grudges, not to mention widespread and no doubt random sadistic violence. Whatever the MPLA leaders thought they were doing, it was a horrendous, pointless, murderous and eternally shameful incident. No wonder no one wanted to talk about it afterwards, or even play records by the brilliant musicians who were killed by it.

A recovery of these glorious pre-war recordings finally began in 1997, when surviving musician Teta Lando of 70s Angolan band Africa Show started to compile suppressed tracks in a series of releases under his own aegis, Teta Lando Produções. One of those collections is Soul of Angola.

Teta Lando died of natural causes in Paris, 2008. The Angolan “golden age” recordings he and others worked to recuperate remain scarce as physical copies but continue to be shared online. And new reissues occasionally pop up, including this freshly pressed 1975 album by David Zé.

Listening to: Marisa Anderson, The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music

Cooking: a boiled egg