alter-égaux angola espaces Soyo marché de fortune

February 25, 2002

A bit of madness
Crucified cats, death masks and gender bending all form part of carnival time in Luanda

JUSTIN PEARCE

The tiny ginger kitten had been crucified. A procession of men, dressed in blue robes that matched the blue paint daubed on their faces, were chanting solemnly as they carried the cross with the kitten nailed on to it, still alive. They passed on their way, through the crowd outside the stately pink facade of the National Bank of Angola on Luanda's seafront.
Welcome to carnival in Luanda — Angola's version of the festival that many Catholic countries in Europe and Latin America celebrate on the last day before the start of the Lenten fast. It's clearly not a good day for cats. As well as the kitten, I saw an adult cat being borne aloft on a crucifix, not to mention the crucified chicken that was heading up someone else's procession. Then there was the young man with the freshly severed head of a tabby cat hanging on a string round his neck, while the animal's headless body dangled down his back.
“Why have you got a cat's head round your neck?" I asked.
“Porque o gato é gatuno [Because the cat is a thief],” he replied.
The alliteration in Portuguese sounded good, but shed no more light than any of my local inquiries about the origins of what I saw.
“Why have you got a piece of dried fish hanging round your neck?"
“Because it's nice."
Someone else had what looked like a butchered goat's leg hanging round his neck — another man was munching happily on something that looked tubular and scaly.
“Have some snake meat," he offered.
“Why are you eating snake meat?" I asked.
“Because it's tasty."
The official version of the Luanda carnival's history puts its origins in the carnival traditions of Europe, brought to Africa by Portuguese seafarers and settlers. Carlos Vieira Lopes, the Angolan government's director of arts and culture, says that local traditions first started to enter carnival through the participation of slaves.
“At some point, we Angolans started reclaiming our rights, singing songs in our own languages," he said.
Long before independence, the carnival was already considered something essentially Angolan rather than a colonial import. The government sponsors the official part of the carnival: a procession of dance troupes in coordinated costumes in the manner of a much more famous carnival in another Portuguese-speaking city just across the Atlantic: Rio de Janeiro.
While the everyday Angolan cultural diet includes more than a healthy dose of Brazilian soap operas, Vieira Lopes insists that in the case of the carnival, the influence worked in the opposite direction — that the kind of rhythms heard at the Brazilian carnival were brought there by Angolan-born slaves.
And in today's capitalist Angola, business is cashing in too. I realised this the day before the main celebration: walking into a supermarket and coming face to face with a security guard wearing a death's head mask. After that, the fact that the women working at the tills were all wearing gold or silver tinsel wigs hardly seemed strange or disturbing.
Yet the commercialisation did not go as far as it might. Luanda's street vendors last week seemed more interested in peddling artificial roses for Valentine's Day than selling carnival masks. And for most of the people who poured down to the seafront on carnival day, the sponsored parade seemed of secondary importance. What really matters about carnival is that it is a chance to dress up in whatever you can find lying around.
The first hint of the season came the weekend before the main event, when a band of a dozen or so singing children trooped along the beaches of Luanda's Ilha island, accompanying their songs on plastic container drums and tin can cymbals. Two of them were got up as the carnival king and queen, with elaborate crowns cut out of milk powder tins.
I was sitting on the terrace of a Chinese restaurant as they approached to collect small change. When a dangerous-looking group of sailors at the next table declined to cough up, the restaurateur shooed the children away lest the situation become violent.
Some of those attending the carnival paint their faces with patterns of stars or dots, or just slap on the colour any old how. And those who cannot afford paint simply smear themselves from scalp to toe with yellow mud. Others improvise with whatever they can find.
One boy wore yellow sunglasses, a banana skin draped over his shaven head and cigarettes sticking out of his ears and nostrils. Another had stuck a mango pip on to his face like a clown's nose and condoms for earrings. A man leading a dog that had been dressed up in a T-shirt, shorts and a cap — carnival is clearly a better time to be a dog than a cat.
A woman with sweets decorating her Java-print turban, and cigarettes suspended from her ears. Father Christmas hats. A posse of middle-aged aunties in what looked like some kind of European folk costume in red and yellow satin. Someone in an Osama bin Laden mask, followed by a procession no less manic than the killers of cats chanting “Bin-la-den!"
And in this society where a man in the kitchen is considered an outrage and women are still a rarity in most professions, carnival provides an annual opportunity for gender bending. The tight mini-skirts and bra-tops that are the fashion choice of most young women in Luanda get stretched over male thighs and shoulders; other men pass almost incognito in the figure-concealing skirts and sleeves of a more conservative kind of African dress.
Little girls dress up as adult women with bright pink lipstick, and padded bras tied round their skinny chests. Little boys shove socks down their underpants to create a masculine bulge — one of them had a 100 kwanza note visible under his see-through pants as well.
This do-it-yourself side to the carnival is nowhere to be seen in the official versions of its history. Some who have attended the carnival for several years say the tortured cats only started appearing recently, crushing any speculation about origins in ancient witchcraft. The participants seem not to care too much about why they are doing what they are doing.
“It's our tradition, from Angola," said one schoolgirl, part of a group wearing bikinis and with exquisitely painted patterns on their faces. But it was a guy who must have been in his early twenties, wearing a headscarf, strappy sandals and an orange floral skirt borrowed from his sister, who stated it irrefutably: “It's a bit of madness for all of us."

-- The Mail&Guardian, February 25, 2002
http://www.mg.co.za/