This poignant and painful poem, one of Agostinho Neto’s longest, documents in stark detail the conditions of life for poor Africans in the shantytowns surrounding Angola’s capital city, Luanda. The poem Sabado nos musseques expresses the anxieties experienced by the poor. The word anxiety occurs throughout, appearing as an angry shout as the poet articulates the numerous manifestations of alienation, fear, and deprivation—emotional and psychological as well as material—afflicting the poor residents of the slums.

These anxieties, rooted in poverty, exclusion, and colonial oppression, are embodied in almost every aspect of life, in both the surrounding social environment as well as specific activities undertaken as people try to escape the circumstances of daily life in the shantytown.

Anxiety is stirred by material deprivations such as the lack of running water and electricity or the lack of proper building materials for housing:

“Anxiety / in the skeleton of stick and mud / bent threateningly / as it bears the weight of the zinc roof // and in the backyards / sown with excrement and foul smells / in the grease-stained sticks of furniture / in the streets full of holes / and in beds without mattresses.”

Poverty is part of the general state of anxiety expressed in the presence of police and soldiers assailing the populace:

“Anxiety / in the lowly child / who flees in fear from the policeman / on duty,”

by adults molesting children, in partners fighting over old debts, and in domestic disputes over household finances. This anxiety comes to encompass the very being of all who experience it:

“Anxiety / in those who laugh and in those who cry / in those who have insight / and in those who have breath but no understanding.”

The poem is an indictment of the exploitation suffered by Angolans under the apartheid of Portuguese colonialism. At the same time, it sounds a note of hopefulness in the sense of purpose growing within the shantytown:

“Saturday jumbled night / in the townships / with mystical anxiety / and implacably / marches on unfurling heroic banners / in the enslaved souls.”

The poem gives life to Neto’s belief that in resistance people might turn despair into defiance and deliverance:

“In men / burns the desire to make the supreme effort / so that Man / shall be reborn in every man / and hope / shall turn no longer / into the lamentation of the crowd.”

This rebirth is, for Neto, the promise of liberation and socialism.

Bibliography

Appiah, Anthony Kwame. “Antonio Agostinho Neto (1922–1979).” In The Poetry of Our World: An International Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jeffery Paine, 341–353. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.

Neto, Antonio Agostinho. “Saturday in the Sand-Slums.” Translated by Michael Wolfers. In The Poetry of Our World: An International Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jeffery Paine, 345–352. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.

Categories: Literature, World Literature

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