| When the rain stops for some men |
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When the rain stops for some men. Gilberto Gil is a Brazilian musical superstar. He's also Brazil' s minister of Culture. Last week the minister superstar was in Maputo, Mozambique, for the 3rd reunion of the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP). He performed two sellout concerts. Iain Harris was there. Chove Chuva Just as Gilberto Gil began his set last Wednesday night, it began to rain. The night before, for his first of the two performances, the producers had feared it might rain and moved the show from the spectacular outdoor Espaco Artistico venue - right on the waterfront looking onto Katembe Island through a row of palm trees - to the Cine Africa on Avenida 24 do Julho. It did not rain. For the second night there were nonesuch fears. And so of course the rain fell. As the rain began to fall on the audience of some 2000 people, they spontaneously chanted the chorus of the Jorge Ben Jor classic, Chove Chuva. "Chove Chuva", they sang, "chove sem parar". It means (rather crassly translated) It's raining rain, raining without stop. The rain, after 10, minutes stopped. The weather is with us On Tuesday night, Chico Antonio the musician, Anita the photographer, and Salimo the musician were taking beer at Goa, an all night joint on Avenida 24 do Julho in Maputo. This is where the musicians of the grand city gather when everything else is dead, to celebrate, to comiserate. And certainly to speculate. Salimo - he' s one of the great men of Mozambican music - had just been to the Gil show at Cine Africa and was taking a whisky. He was wearing a cowboy hat, the kind that would keep you high and dry if it did happen to rain. "The sound was shit!" he complained. "Why do we have curious engineers here instead of experienced engineers. This superstar arrives and they can't get the sound right. Ah, Mozambique!" he frowned. "The difference is," explained Chico wryly, "that where we don't ever have the sound on our side, we have at least got the weather on our side. Here in Mozambique, the weather listens to the people." Cultural Movements On Wednesday night we had the weather and the sound with us. The sound was perfect. The audience was delighted. While they chanted the rain to a halt, the cultural illuminati of Mozambique were hanging out close to the bar, immersed in the sport of close friends and family at a great concert. Here were poets and writers like Mia Couto, filmmakers like Licinio Azevedo, musicians like Chico and Jose Mucavel, and the famous painter Malangatana Ngwenya. It was a sitting of the great voices of Mozambique, relaxed and `batendo papo', as Gilberto Gil would have said. Shooting the breeze. A sitting of voices in the same elegant and masterful tradition of the movement that Gil was a pioneering part of in the 60s: Tropicalismo. And so it was a grand and important gathering indeed, such that the weather and the sound could only perform admirably. The key purpose of Gilberto Gil's presence in Maputo was the meeting of the ministers of culture from the member countries of the Community of Portuguese Speaking nations (which is slightly broader than the PALOP grouping which was formed for Portuguese speaking nations within Africa). Gil was the star of this the 3rd gathering, held in Maputo last week at the Hotel VIP, where ministers of culture from Sao Tome, Cape Verde, Angola, Brazil, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Portugal and East Timor conferenced on the means of creating a movement of culture between their nations. Minister of faith Where all the other ministers are diplomats, Gil is both an icon and a diplomat. He has earned, in his almost forty year long career as musician and voice of a nation, and almost twenty years in the service of the government as councilor and alderman, the respect and blessing of the people. And he has the right in a world of conservative suits and excruciating protocol to wear dreadlocks. He might feel that President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva should have chosen somebody more conventionally qualified for the job, but Lula chose well. Gil is both the medium and the message. As a young man in the Tropicalismo movement, music was his weapon against the military regime. He was heard. And he was a threat. So he was arrested and exiled together with Caetano Veloso. Now as one of the elders in a populist government, culture is his weapon against poverty and inequality in Brazil. The nature of the battle has changed, but the faith in the general remains. Because when Gil sings songs like Everything's Gonna Be Alright, people believe him. The audience at Espaco Cultural raised lighters to the disappearing clouds, raised lighters in tribute to Bob Marley and his message of hope. They raised lighters because they believed that, indeed, every little thing is going to be all right. A future in film It's not clear yet what policies will come out of the meeting of the ministers. What is clear though is that Gil is seen as the figure to spearhead the movements. And that film will be a key area of exchange. At a conference with the artists of Mozambique, the night before leaving Maputo for Luanda, Angola, Gil dedicated much time to the subject of filmmaking. His department has earmarked funds to ensure that 30 more feature films can be made this year than in the previous year, and harnessing digital technology will be at the centre of this. Film has played a significant role in communicating to the world the nature of Brazil, from Glauber Rocha's revolutionary vision (God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun), to the current prince of Brazilian cinema, Fernando Meirelles (City of God). And film, says Gil, is one of the most powerful mediums of exchange between our nations. To illustrate this, the Mozambican film Marrabenta Men will close the Bahia Film Festival in Salvador in August this year. The flight of the seagull Gil is like the enlightened Jonathon Livingstone Seagull, vibrating luminously and moving between the flocks of Angola, Mozambique and Brazil to gather them in his momentum of social transformation. Not a god, not superhuman, fallible - and certainly human. But with a powerful sense of how change can be effected. There has been no-one before him in the Portuguese speaking world of arts and culture with quite the same capacity for drawing people together. The timing is right, and with Gil as the manifestation of `60s counterculture made mainstream, a model for transformation is being tabled that is real for everyone. Originally published in This Day SA newspaper |
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