Sambizanga: Everyday Revolution

Maldoror, who shortly thereafter began her directorial career in Africa, operated outside of the national structures that have shaped much of African cinema. While her father was Afro-Caribbean, she herself had no direct attachments to Guadeloupe, and her identification as an African was perhaps most closely tied to her chosen Pan-Africanism. This was reflected in the geographic dispersal of the locations where she filmed, scattered across Algeria, Cape Verde, France, Guyana, Guinea-Bissau, Martinique, and the People’s Republic of the Congo, where the Angola-set Sambizanga was shot. Her first film, the eighteen-minute Monangambééé (1968), was inspired by the short story “O fato completo de Lucas Matesso” (1967) by the Angolan writer José Luandino Vieira, whose novella A vida verdadeira de Domingos Xavier (1961) served as the basis for Sambizanga. This short was made in Algeria and scored by the avant-garde jazz group the Art Ensemble of Chicago, making this her first of many exercises in cultural Pan-Africanism. The narrative concerns an Angolan revolutionary sympathizer whose wife visits him in prison, where he is being tortured by the colonial authorities, with promises to bring him a complet—described in an opening title card as “a dish of beans with fish, palm oil, and bananas.” The couple’s tender reunion takes place under the surveillance of the Portuguese police, who incorrectly assume that complet refers to an insurgent plot. Monangambééé highlights the vicious consequences of willful ignorance within structures of colonial power while exemplifying Maldoror’s vision of care as a form of decolonial redress.

Maldoror was adept at conveying the brutalities of the colonial regime without reducing suffering to a consumable spectacle. There are no scenes of torture in Monagambééé, and while Sambizanga does contain depictions of Domingos Xavier being kicked and beaten by the colonial police, Maldoror places limits on the visualization of violence. When one scene seems primed to escalate beyond the others, with a prison official picking up a thick wooden paddle while a guard looks on with concern, she truncates the sequence, cutting quickly to show some boys playing with marbles on the ground as the camera swings upward to reveal Maria walking past them with her baby in her arms. Maldoror uses astute montage throughout the film to maintain Maria and Domingos Xavier’s bond, crosscutting between them to keep the couple formally connected even as they are narratively separated. Images of Domingos Xavier being man­handled in the police van alternate with shots of Maria’s quiet grief as she sits flanked by two elderly women murmuring words of comfort, and, later, his first appearance in the prison is paired with shots of his wife sitting forlornly on a bus with their baby, on her way to find him.

The ethics of this approach, in concert with Maldoror’s nondogmatic feminist leanings and her equal prioritization of political rigor and aesthetic pleasure, carry through a filmography of which the singular Sambizanga is only one part. The extraordinarily prolific director’s oeuvre of over forty films is made up of mostly documentaries, including numerous shorts. Many were also made for television, which was in some ways a natural choice given her prioritization of the public-facing, accessible, educational potential of the moving image. This makes Sambizanga a formal outlier whose closest analogue would have been Maldoror’s unfinished, and now lost, feature film Des fusils pour Banta (Guns for Banta, shot in 1970), a true guerrilla production that was set to be about Awa, a woman of the people who takes up arms against Portuguese colonizers as part of a militant group in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. But these two fiction features share with Maldoror’s nonfiction work a project of cataloging Black culture, celebrating African liberation movements, and creating revolutionary forms of historical memory.

An essential component of Sambizanga, then, is the way it situates itself historically. Maldoror’s feature is named for its setting, a working-class suburb of Luanda, the capital of Angola, which was also the site of a Portuguese prison. The Angolan resistance movement erupted in the city on February 4, 1961, when MPLA militants assailed key state structures, targeting carceral institutions first in order to liberate prisoners. The film’s opening title card, introducing this background, notes that in the years before the struggle reached this point, thousands had been patiently preparing the terrain for insurrection. By setting the film a few weeks before February 4, Maldoror underscores the ongoing nature of anticolonial resistance, as a process that exceeds the cataclysmic events to which many accounts are limited. Given Domingos Xavier’s incarceration and the way the narrative leads up to the prison attack, Sambizanga may also be seen as abolitionist cultural warfare: the very antithesis of Maldoror’s cinema of openness is imprisonment. This is echoed in Maria’s movements throughout the film, in frequent defiance of being pushed back into the domestic space and told over and over to go home. Sambizanga presents the colonial apparatus as a cold bureaucracy and a ruthless force of containment to make an argument for the transformative mobility of the oppressed and to accent the film’s call for mass mobilization.

In keeping with Maldoror’s unwavering commitment to collectivity, Sambizanga makes a focal point of the communal nature of grief and mourning among the Angolans. From the moment Domingos Xavier is taken, through the end of Maria’s journey between colonial police outposts to find him, she has numerous breakdowns of embodied grief during which she wails, screams, falls to the ground in despair. Every time this happens, she is immediately surrounded by other people, particularly women, picking her up, giving her food, looking after her child, and even joining her in her expressions of mourning. These actions are mirrored after Domingos Xavier is killed and his body is brought back to a room with other prisoners: they gently pat the blood off his face and call him their comrade, one man beginning to sing before they all join in, with “Let us never forget him” as a recurring refrain—one that’s picked up in the film’s celebratory close-to-final scene. During this party, which was discussed earlier as an occasion of joyful gathering that could also mask a clandestine exchange of information among the militants, an exuberant tangle of people dances to a live rendition of the song that opened the film. Having heard of Domingos Xavier’s fate from Zito and his grandfather, one of the insurrectionists, the Marxist tailor Mussunda (Lopes Rodrigues), gets on the stage to announce his death to everyone gathered, insisting that this is a day of both mourning and joy, as their fallen comrade “begins his real life, in the hearts of Angola’s people.” He then hops back off the stage and joins the dancing.

The final scene is a conversation among revolutionaries planning to free prisoners, with the date set as February 4, bringing the film full circle from the opening title card’s announcement of this plan—and emphasizing yet again the ongoing commitments that transformative political projects require. In focusing on the everyday people engaged in struggle, in honoring women’s often overlooked contributions to revolutionary efforts, and in pushing back against both material imprisonment and the symbolic enclosures of colonial stereotypes, Sambizanga is a work of openness and redress. The principles guiding not only Sambizanga but all of Maldoror’s cinema involve the recuperation of suppressed histories of anticolonial militancy, and a recognition that everyone has a different part to play. Maldoror was fundamentally a woman of action, always on the move, as Maria is in Sambizanga, living out her conviction that political commitments are not nearly as much about what we say as what we do.