Home Chronicle Still blacks on battery radios

Still blacks on battery radios

Jos]e Kaliengue*
José Kaliengue, Director of the newspaper OPAIS

I live in what can now be called a “place of silence”.
Parents have their children locked up at home and at this time they are still
enjoy the hot days with the air conditioning on. No laughter
of children offered in the wind, nor cries suspended in the air to
move adults.

It’s been months since I heard the first start of a discussion between
neighbors, it was a “don’t upset me, find something to do and
don’t make me speak ”. Suddenly, after all, there was life in the neighborhood,
a woman showed it in her perfect, audible voice in the middle
kilometer. But that was it. Too much for Luanda.

Two days ago I heard screaming, I approached the window, around noon,
a stranger was passing by, life came from afar, garnished by some
psychedelic headphones. A kind of green headband,
fluorescent, glued to the ears of a young man in blue jeans
two wine-colored earbuds were clamped under the buttocks. He thought
be singing something that was transmitted to your brain by a
cable that escaped from the pants pocket. The pace of your steps
he drew a dance that was decoreographed, but loose, free. Happy. It was like
a remake of the image of “Negro do Rádio de Pilhas” sung by Rui
Fleece. Music continues down the avenue where it doesn’t rain and shines
the sun. And it can even rain, they can invent other radios, there will always be
African bodies that are music by themselves …

Yesterday was different. The neighbor’s maid made a sound. Sang with
lungs proof of all sorts of Coronavirus church praises,
passed by the Brazilian choradinho and went by the crazy Kuduro when a
neighbor (after all there is. And maybe I have now found what to do)
shouted a “sing lower, we are in a condominium”. She doesn’t
listened to, certainly hidden from the world in headphones that
offered a very private territory.

I found myself on my mother’s lap wrapped in a lullaby,
I saw the unflappable happiness of the young man in the psychedelic headphones,
I picked up the children’s laughter and cries from the air before the pandemic, left
waiting in the garden next door. Life has to have a soundtrack. Luanda is
sound, is the origin of all the music of all Black Lives Matter, from
all the music that was after all the pill of life for millions of slaves
before the invention of the battery radio. It broke out, there would be no dams
labels that stopped me: “I’m glad she sings,
dead, ”I shouted.

*Director of the newspaper O País

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