The Fire is About to Start: History and Memory in Independência
Independência, Marío Bastos (2015)
"When you are suffering you can't see, you just feel. Whereas when others are suffering, we can see and we feel things so much more"
- Augusto Loth, Political Prisoner, MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola)
The first minutes of Independência move from images of deserted fields, to rivers, bushes, and a bare room in a house, while a narrator wonders how many fragments of the struggle that led to Angola's independence are left in the nation's collective memory. The emptiness of this initial sequence contrasts with the rest of the film, which is populated by the men and women who passionately fought and dreamt, suffered and lost their lives in those spaces. The beauty, the vastness, but mostly the stillness of the sites are an invitation to consider the uncertain ties between space and history, history and memory.
Independência delves into those relationships. The film moves from one region of Angola to the next and beyond the country's borders to neighboring nations, exploring the places that witnessed the uprising of anti-colonial sentiments, nationalism, and guerrilla movements. A little over forty years after the nation's independence on November 15, 1975, this collective work is the result of a monumental research project led by Geração 80, a post-independent Angolan film production company, and the Associação Tchiweka de Documentação, a non-profit created in 2006 that supports activities contributing to the preservation of memory and knowledge about the struggle for independence and national sovereignty of Angola and other African peoples.
For five years between 2010 and 2015 the film production team interviewed leaders from major organizations, guerrillas, political prisoners, church members, peasants, and intellectuals involved in the struggle, from Luanda to Lisbon, from Paris to Congo-Leopoldville. The detailed film diary of their journey shows their visits to the most recondite locations, many of them remote and void of people, filling them with the faces of men and women who, in several cases, went back for the first time in decades.
Projeto Angola – Nos trilhos da Independência (Angola – Pathway to Independence)
Angola's fifteen-year path to independence was so intricate and complex that to capture it seems an almost impossible task for a single documentary. Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Principe are also mentioned in the film as part of a Portuguese empire that, in the 1950s, was reluctant to concede independence even as anti-colonial feelings were growing throughout the African continent.
The naked exploitation, forced labor, the spatial segregation of the natives in their own land, and the racism they suffered at the hands of the Portuguese are established from the film's first frames. Angola's capital of Luanda suffered that spatial divide in particular. "Downtown for the Portuguese, and the museke for the Angolans," remembers Noé Saúde, then a student and political prisoner; he lived in the bairro indígena, a neighborhood built for black Angolans. María Luísa Gaspar, a student and activist, explains how the women were not allowed to have their hair braided; they were forced to comb it the "European way." Former guerrilla commander Benigno V. Lopez laments, "I don't know how we forgot that," recalling the intense racism and exploitation. "Simple things… if you were black, you couldn't be a bus driver."
Independência, Marío Bastos (2015)
Abundant oral testimonies from men and women, personal letters, pictures, maps, and newsreels from those years inhabit Independência. The film unapologetically turns to a time not so distant, but so foreign and strange to Angola's youth today that seems almost impossible to grasp—a time marked by the Cold War, when world powers settled their conflicts within countries they considered peripheral. Post-WWII Africa was a central location of those proxy disputes.
The documentary masterfully restores that era, revealing the diverse emergent groups from the late 1950s and their affiliations with distinct ideologies, leaders, and countries. Source of inspiration and support for the central groups portrayed in the film—the mentioned MPLA, UNITAS, and UPA/FNLA—included Kwame Nkrumah, prime minister of Ghana and a fierce advocate of Panafricanism; Congo's independence leader Patrice Lumumba; the government of Fidel Castro's government; the USSR; the Congo/Zaire regime, and the Chinese revolution.
Independência, Marío Bastos (2015)
The intensity of the repression exerted by Angola's colonial secret police (PIDE) led to thousands of imprisonments and deaths. Prison terms are remembered as a cruel, dreadful experience, but also as a space to recognize the needs of others; a place where solidarity and love blossomed together. Independência, nevertheless, escapes the romanticism often present in revolutionary chronicles of those years. Deolinda Rodrigues, an MPLA fierce activist, writer, and teacher whose inspirational letters are read throughout the film, is shown as a martyr of the struggle. Rodrigues was captured along with four other women by the UPA guerrilla group in 1967. They were tortured and taken to a camp in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where they were executed.
And yet, despite the sadness and despair of the brutal internal disputes within the independence movement and the nearly interminable civil war that consumed Angola until the early 2000s, Independência tells us there may be a better world at our fingertips, a place where our dreams of a collective and more compassionate future is not so far away. It is a world like the one the film portrays; it starts with empty, vast spaces and ends with the faces of the men and women who built it.
Independência, Marío Bastos (2015)