{"id":42858,"date":"2017-01-11T13:31:00","date_gmt":"2017-01-11T11:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/in-luanda-portuguese-taxi-drivers-wouldnt-take-you-wherever-you-want-if-you-were-black\/"},"modified":"2020-04-27T03:39:46","modified_gmt":"2020-04-27T02:39:46","slug":"in-luanda-portuguese-taxi-drivers-wouldnt-take-you-wherever-you-want-if-you-were-black","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/in-luanda-portuguese-taxi-drivers-wouldnt-take-you-wherever-you-want-if-you-were-black\/","title":{"rendered":"Luis Visconde: Taxi Driver and the route to Angolan independence (1968)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

In Luanda, Portuguese taxi drivers wouldn’t take you wherever you want if you\u00a0were Black…<\/h3>\n

Luanda, November 1968. It’s a heavy rainy day in the Angolan capital. It’s 5pm on the main square downtown when Nzinga, a young Angolan renamed Ant\u00f3nio by the colonial administration, hails a taxi. He jumps at the back, and the old mini-van with deflated tyres and broken suspensions leaves the square along the asphalt road. Jo\u00e3o, the Portuguese taxi driver, asks where his client wants to be driven : the musseque of Sambizanga. The driver immediately brakes, arguing that the sandy track is too damaged because of the heavy rain that has been falling on Luanda for the last three days. The young client insists, anxious to join his girlfriend and impress her with his arriving in a taxi, yet old and battered. The wheels laboriously hit the road again, until touching the sandy track that leads to the musseque, but stops just in front of the large lagoon made of the constant rainwater. For the taxi driver, there’s no way his tyres touch the water. A few cars cross the mud puddles, but most of the people – all Angolan – join their houses by crossing bare-footed, the water reaching their thighs. Senhor Jo\u00e3o orders the young Ant\u00f3nio to clear out his car and to end his journey by swimming until joining his “slum”. “I am a taxi driver, not a boatman!”<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1968, Angola was living its last years under the Portuguese colonial domination – that started\u00a0in the\u00a016th century\u00a0– and had been\u00a0waging a war for independence\u00a0for the 7 previous years, since the first popular insurrection attacks\u00a0in 1961, by the MPLA, and soon the FNLA and UNITA. In Luanda, the country’s capital, while the Portuguese settlers and the African assimilated people (“assimilados” who speak Portuguese and eat with a knife and a fork) occupied the city centre (“baixa”),\u00a0the African population was living mostly inside the\u00a0musseques<\/em> – a kimbundu word (“mu seke”) meaning “the red sand”.<\/p>\n

These slums located at the outskirts of the city were made of\u00a0frail houses erected on the red sandy soil where 300 000 people lived together – half the city’s population at the time. They were both a bottomless pit of social misery, and a stronghold for the anti-colonial resistance. Its winding and narrow streets (only\u00a0one person at a time could walk in these) prevented easy access to the Portuguese colonist, and\u00a0provided enough room to build a strong local identity and a revolutionary culture. Even the taxi drivers – most often Portuguese people – did not dare to enter the\u00a0musseques<\/em>, both out of fear and out of social and ethnic discrimination.<\/p>\n

\n

BEHIND THE HUMOROUS\u00a0LYRICS – “I’M A TAXI DRIVER, NOT A BOATMAN!” – HERE IS A STINGING CRITICISM OF THE COLONIAL\u00a0POWER AT THE TIME.<\/h3>\n
\n

This is the sad story told\u00a0by Luis Visconde<\/strong> (sometimes spelt Luiz) in\u00a0“Chofer de Pra\u00e7a”<\/strong> (“Taxi Driver”, in Angolan Portuguese language). Behind the humorous\u00a0lyrics – “I’m a taxi driver, not a boatman!” – here is a stinging criticism of the colonial\u00a0power at the time. Stinging, because the slightest anti-government opinion was forbidden and immediately repressed. Stinging, because whilst most of the protest songs were generally sung in one of the local languages (kimbundu) so they could go unnoticed by the censorship of the local power police (the “bufos”) and the Portuguese State political police (the PIDE), Luis Visconde used the colonist’s Portuguese language to denounce the ghettoisation of the African population in the\u00a0musseques<\/em>. It contains a hint of social irony, through the different uses of language between the narrator and the taxi driver : the former speaks a perfect Portuguese, with delicate words, while the latter – a settler – uses a very oral and slang form of it. Here was a way for Luis Visconde to show that the stigmatised Angolan population\u00a0had a proper education.<\/p>\n

This song is one of the most emblematic of all Angola’s protest songs. Six\u00a0years later in 1974, once\u00a0Angola would gain\u00a0independency, thus\u00a0one could think the taxi drivers would no more be reluctant to drive\u00a0to the musseques<\/em>. Maybe, only if it wasn’t for the immediate 18-year long brutal civil war the country would wage, and the inertness of the political power who until today in 2016, has not resolved the major rainwater flooding issues that occur almost everyday during the rainy season, on the road to the musseques<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Personally, “Chofer de Pra\u00e7a” is one of the very first afro-lusophone songs I ever heard upon\u00a0settling\u00a0in Lisbon, via the essential compilation\u00a0Soul Of Angola – Anthologie De La Musique Angolaise 1965\/1975.<\/em><\/p>\n