by Marissa J. Moorman 

When I moved to Luanda in 1997, Angolans were five years into another period of civil war, living again in an extended state of various vulnerabilities.  

From November that year until my departure in August 1998, I conducted research in the national archives and explored Luanda’s music scene, work that would become a cultural history of Angolan nationalism and the popular music scene of the 1960s and 1970s.

During that ten-month stay I learned that the city’s nightlife provided a respite from daily responsibilities, the draft, food shortages, and electricity cuts. More than that, it was a place where one invested energy, love, and invention. Family events, like late afternoon funjadas, birthday parties, and weddings, pressed into the night. Festas do quintal animated into the morning hours. In the midst of their overexposure to violence, economic duress, and constraints on peoples’ movement, music and social dance centered life, joy, and creativity. 

A few months into my stay, my friend Cesar took me to dance kizomba for the first time. We went to Brasília, a club that hunkered on a corner of Estrada do Samba, a well-trafficked road, and a quieter street forming an entrance to the Bairro Azul neighborhood. The club was a mostly windowless space containing squat tables, plush stools, low lights, and mirrored walls. I realized immediately that ‘dancing’ meant partner dancing. It was a kind of dance I had managed to evade, up to that point in my life. Cesar, who would later become a well-regarded salsa and kizomba instructor in the United States, had not yet crafted a pedagogical vocabulary beyond “feel the music!” And I, with only rudimentary Portuguese, couldn’t describe my inhibition verbally and instead, stiffened physically.   

Kizomba is a competence. Everyone from small children to teenagers, young adults, and elders dances with various degrees of virtuosity. While one or another person might be known as a particularly talented dancer, most people dance kizomba to participate in collective life. 

So, despite my resistance on that first night, I understood intuitively that my learning kizomba was a necessity.  Even though music was everywhere in Luanda, during my initial weeks of research, it had been difficult to locate and hear Angolan music from the 1960s and 70s. I had to dance kizomba to participate in collective life in late 1990s Luanda and I had to move through it to understand earlier forms and contexts of Angolan music. 

Kizomba provided a portal into an enduring, if ever changing, cultural world. At nightclubs and quintal parties, DJs spun a variety of music from Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, Brazil, the DRC, South Africa, the US, the Caribbean, and Hispanophone Americas. Alternating between kizomba and other dance styles allowed my limbs time to adjust.

In Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers (1966), there is a scene plucked from Frantz Fanon’s “Algeria Unveiled,” a chapter in his book A Dying Colonialism. Three women remove their head scarfs, cut and color their hair, don calf-revealing skirts, and re-orient their gazes and gestures to extend and contract in different dimensions. Then they head out to flirt with military security to cross checkpoints and plant bombs in the European city center as part of the national liberation movement. My task was minimal in comparison, though I did have to grow a different sensibility of my body in space. Learning to dance kizomba was not only a technical exercise; it was a cultural education too. Memorizing and practicing steps is one thing, what Raymond Williams calls “structure of feeling” is quite another. 

Sound provokes emotion. Luanda’s sounds are particular. In the late ‘90s, the city was busy with international workers – from NGOs, to the UN, to journalists, to Cuban cooperantes who had stayed beyond their government contracts – and giant white Landcruisers shared streets and sidewalks with kitandeiras, kinguilas, and men and women disfigured by the war. Kinguilas sat in groups and whispered the day’s black market exchange rate while zungeiras turned the city’s streets into an ambulant shopping center and car horns beep-beeped or blared as drivers slowed down to view and purchase everything from cold drinks, to popcorn, to office furniture.

I often spent my days in the Arquivo Nacional de Angola in Luanda studying old publications. Archives are state-sacred, quiet places, guarding a country’s past. This one sat just a block away from the transportation hub at Mutamba on one side, and the imposing Parliament building (a former six-theatre cinema) on the other, in Luanda’s baixa. Occupying what used to be a grocery store in the late colonial period, the archive was an improvised postcolonial space. Inside people spoke quietly, but outside, layers of sounds composed the city’s rhythms. The insistent, plaintive cry of the city’s female fishmongers – “é peixe, é peixe, é peixééé!”; the street kids’ pleas for bread or change; the blanketing hush of a power cut followed by the rumble of generators; the voice of radio announcers on battery operated radios in the hands of security guards; and music all vied for the ear’s attention. 

One afternoon in the archive, I sat in range of the fan and near the shade covered window to catch a little natural light. A quiet settled in - the compound fluorescent tube bulbs stopped their insistent hiss and the whirr of the fan blades faded. Another power cut. From across the street, in the one-chair barbershop where men of all ages stopped for haircuts and shaves, the rectangular, battery-operated radio played “Yolanda.”

Irmãos Verdades’ hit “Yolanda” was on eternal rotation in Luanda in 1997 and 1998, soon after its release. Though I heard a lot of music during my first extended stay in Luanda, “Yolanda” captured something particular about nightlife and daily life at that point in time. Love songs are never in short supply. “Yolanda” offers the emotional complexity of betrayal, unanswered questions, heartbreak, and undying passion distilled into simple lyrics. Electronic programming permeates the guitar and percussion. Horns add all the brightness and ache of breath through brass. And if someone extends a hand, you will dance. 

Love songs like “Yolanda” are public expressions of emotional vulnerability. “Procura, ao menos, entender/Tudo o que fiz foi sem querer/Eu não entendo a tua dor” Irmãos Verdades sing. 

Understanding these song lyrics built my confidence in Portuguese. To my ear – untrained in music and still new to the language  – it took me a little time to realize that not all the music we danced kizomba to was Angolan. Roger’s Nos Dilema and Cabo Love’s Mim Ma Bo, played regularly and introduced me to the creoles of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde. They proclaimed kizomba’s capacity to summon people to dance floors from Praia to Maputo, Bissau to Luanda, and São Tomé to Benguela. If these countries bound themselves together in 1992 as PALOPs (Portuguese speaking African Countries) committed to knowledge transfer, economic development and inter-institutional support, kizomba was its unofficial cultural pulse.

Kizomba is a kimbundu word meaning party. The name proclaims kizomba’s Angolanness. Tundoya mukina ó kizomba - there’s a party in my house - as a late colonial period radio show called itself. But kizomba as a dance practice and musical genre is the product of circulation, of migration, of diaspora, of war. It is a capacious and welcoming category, built from various Caribbean and South American sounds, the crumbs of semba as a cultural practice, and a history of partner dancing among the Luanda elite that dates to the late 19th century. 

Kizomba emerged from life in independent Angola, especially after the death of Agostinho Neto (something musician Eduardo Paim notes), which marked an accumulation of new lows. It grew from the ways the war pinched the economy, making access to imports like instruments and recording equipment nearly impossible, from the marginalization of semba, and from the desire to dance. Radio Nacional de Angola played an important role for Paim and his bandmates in S.O.S. who borrowed instruments from the musical group Afra Sound Star and had access to CT1, a well-outfitted recording studio at RNA. 

It also sprouted in and because of diaspora, in the back-and-forth between Angola and Portugal, in Lisbon’s African communities (from Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tome and Príncipe). Living in Lisbon at the time, in the shadow of his father’s giant music collection and the sounds spun in the discos his father ran, Flores recorded the album Kapuete Kamundanda in Luanda in 1988. It was deeply shaped by the experience of living outside a war-torn Angola, by the saudade shared by many Africans living and working in Lisbon in the wake of postcolonial strife. By the early 1990s, other bands formed in the greater Lisbon area. Among them, Irmãos Verdades. Started by Angolan musicians, featuring the vocals of Gaby Fernandes, their location in Portugal gave them range. Like Flores, their music played in Lisbon area parties that gathered folks from across the PALOPs. 

Some people consider Paulo Flores’s song “Cherry” (1988) as the first kizomba. The lyrics tell a Luanda-based story but the official video shows us Lisbon nightclubs and Flores and Cherry of his dreams dancing in the eighteenth century urban architecture that characterizes Lisbon’s baixa. Nearly a decade later, Irmãos Verdades’s “Yolanda” is a diasporic product unafraid of its location that circulated widely in the PALOPs and was among the top-played songs in Angola in 1998. Unlike “Cherry,” the lyrics are devoid of place, and speak from the space of a broken heart. The official “Yolanda” video features musicians and young women in a circle or dancing as the band plays. As in the “Cherry” video, dance unites, it isn’t a space to distinguish oneself so much as it is a place to be together, to rend what has been torn by heartbreak or war, by a shared history of Portuguese colonialism, by the disappointments and challenges of independence, by distance or economic opportunity. 

On a sunny Luanda afternoon in 1998, I walked to a friend’s house in Maianga. Near the curve where I turned off Hoari Boumedienne/Antonio Barroso, two young men hawked cassettes. I paused to look at what they had. Pirated or mixed tapes boasted improvised and printed covers photocopied and cut to size. Because I had only heard the music at backyard parties and in clubs, I did not necessarily know the musicians or titles of songs. I lamented out loud that I didn’t know any names. Immediately, one of the young men started singing, bringing the cassette in his hand to his chest, and swaying his body along. Such is the power of kizomba.