MALANGAT ANA'S FIRE

Judy Seidman

"If imperialist domination has the vital need to practice cultural oppression, national liberation is necessarily an act of culture."

— Amílcar Cabral, 1970

Flags across Mozambique flew at half-mast for two days in mourning when artist Malangatana Valente Nguenha died in January 2011. At his funeral, speakers declared that he was "much more than an artist — he is a part of us," naming him a hero and a freedom fighter. The government originally proposed placing his remains in the Heroes' Mausoleum with postcolonial Mozambique's founders, Samora Machel and Eduardo Mondlane. But in line with his own wishes, Malangatana was buried in his rural home town of Matalana, some thirty kilometers north of Maputo.

In a similar spirit, we need to place his life's work as an artist within the context of building revolutionary culture and national liberation for and with his people. As a painter, poet, musician, intellectual, and revolutionary, Malangatana gave voice to the struggles of the people of Mozambique, and indeed of Africa — in pain and trauma, in joy and victory, in line, color, and beauty. He himself wrote,

Art for me is a collective expression that comes from the uses and customs of the people and leads to their social, mental, cultural and political evolution. Art is a musical instrument full of messages. These are messages that the artist selects to put together in front of humanity.

Brought Up in the Culture of the People

Malangatana was born to a poor family in Matalana in 1936. As a child he herded animals for farmers, which meant that he provided child labor for the owner of the beasts. His was not a romantic carefree childhood spent wandering in the fields while watching over his family's wealth. His father was mostly absent, working in the mines in South Africa. His mother worked as a traditional healer, teeth sharpener, and tattooist. (These were skilled crafts in the Ronga community — the Ronga form one of the three major "tribal" groups of Southern Mozambique.) He learned from two of his uncles who were traditional healers. He absorbed the rich symbols and narratives of rural life from those around him. "Aside from making useful things like gourds, people carved things for witch doctors, and there were very strong, impulsive dances. And there was poetry," Malangatana recalled. "As children, my friends and I, we were already prepared to be poets, dancers, writers, even philosophers, but most important we were full of imagination."

His childhood fascination with his mother's work echoes in the teeth and claws that fill his mature art. That he adapted and built upon this imagery reflects in the title of a painting from the 1960s, "The mouth of society has sharpened teeth; the only way to destroy a monster is to pull out his teeth."

At age nine, Malangatana attended a Swiss mission school. Over his existing rich mix of culture he learned Christianity's myths and traditions. In addition, the mission school taught creative skills like pottery, wood -carving, and basketry. The Portuguese regime closed down the school after he had been there only two years. By age twelve, he left home to find work in the capital city of Lorenzo Marques (its name was changed to Maputo after liberation).

Art in the Liberation Struggle

Like all the young children who grew up with me in the 1940s I saw many things — many things which made my life political from the start. I saw my parents forced to work on the railway without food. I saw my aunts and my uncles being punished by the sipiao, the colonial police. I saw my cousins beaten with the palmatória. All this was preparation for a political life. Of course sometimes you don't care what you see. But I cared and feel it still today. — Malangatana

In Lorenzo Marques he worked during the day as a "ball boy" at the tennis club, and studied at night. When club member Augusto Cabral, an architect and amateur painter, kindly gave him a pair of sandals, Malangatana responded by asking for painting lessons. Later he worked as a waiter at the Club de Lorenzo Marques, and in his spare time studied art with Portuguese artist Ze Julio. He attended classes and events organized through the Núcleo de Arte da Colónia de Moçambique, an association of artists whose aim was to promote art in Lorenzo Marques, and to exchange art between the colony and the Portuguese metropole. He first publically exhibited his paintings in a Núcleo de Arte exhibit in 1959. Leading architect Pancho Guedes became his mentor and patron. Malangatana wrote:

It was here in the capital, in the 1950s, that I began to hear voices of protest against the colonial administration. There were strikes in the docks. ... In my spare time I was always painting. When I heard about the liberation struggles that were taking place in Tanganyika and Kenya I started painting in protest against the colonial situation. ... In Mozambique, FRELIMO [Frente de Libertação de Moçambique] was starting to operate in the north of the country. It was a long way from [Lorenzo Marques], but there was no girl or boy here who had not heard of them. At this point I changed from being a landscape or portrait painter to being more the kind of painter I am now.

In 1961, Pancho Guedes introduced the aspiring artist to Eduardo Mondlane (who at that time had been studying in the United States, and visited Mozambique on a UN passport). Malangatana talked about his desire to travel to the United States to become an artist. But Mondlane advised him not to leave Mozambique "because there was a need to develop the arts, and through them to capture the history and suffering of Mozambique's people." In June 1962, a year after visiting Lorenzo Marques, Mondlane launched the revolutionary party FRELIMO in Tanzania.

The young Malangatana took Mondlane's advice to heart. Later, he would argue that art must express the anxieties and aspirations of the people — it should be "a simple dialogue, comprehensible ... a vibrant thing, crying to the spectator, full of heat and life that makes him cry, or creates tremors in his body." He argued,

It's worthwhile to have art, to make it, to express it as a force of our veins and with the heat of our blood. It ought to be executed with the same passion in which lovers enter in that subconscious relationship at the exact moment of possession. In this manner we look at a statue, a painting, or we read a poem, as if hearing a guitar or an Xitende whose metal wires were forged in the ardent fire burning for centuries in the hearts of the people.

Malangatana saw his artistic passion increasingly driven by the liberation struggle.

He held his first solo exhibit...