A música de protesto na África do Sul

Neo Muyanga estudou música e é o autor do projecto Revolting Songs. É um dos artistas sul-africanos empenhados em constituir um arquivo de música de protesto, partindo desta para reconstruir uma parte da História, a dos negros sujeitos ao apartheid que tiveram nas canções uma forma relevante de expressão e representação, num tempo de violenta opressão.

“Ntyilo Ntyilo is about archiving township memories through song. A lot of times, it seems people started living in the townships voluntarily. The new ‘kasi is cool’ storyline sometimes dilutes the history of why people live in a place without trees.

“What makes this editing of history even more inexcusable is the way songs like Meadowlands and Shosholoza, songs that were essentially the soundtracks to dispossession and subjugation respectively, are being constantly remembered and performed as though they were party songs.

“So I felt I had to bring back the sadness into Meadowlands, recentre it to its narrative.

“People are still being evicted from their homes. I drove through Hillbrow the other day and saw the utter disruption of families with their possessions in the street. I didn’t see anybody dancing.”

Motana is one of a handful of artists interrogating and activating the archive of what we now call protest music. Neo Muyanga, a composer and librettist is working on a project called Revolting Songs, which is seeking to do the same. He has spent the past 18 months looking at protest music and what, as he says, “drives it aesthetically”.

Both these projects challenge what we accept as protest music, forcing us to look at it in dialogue with our current lives, and not as stagnant, unmoving history.

As Abdullah Ibrahim, aptly surmises in Lee Hirsch’s 2002 Documentary: “The revolution in South Africa is the only revolution anywhere in the world that was done in four-part harmony.”

Artigo completo em The struggle is in the songs