Bonga: The Angolan icon who went from athlete to revolutionary musician
As sparks started to fly into the carefully orchestrated colonial operation that was Portuguese Angola, a runaway used his strong legs and powerful voice to bring his people’s struggle to radios all over West Africa.
José Adelino Barceló de Carvalho was born into a normal Angolan family, speaking the Kimbundu indigenous tongue, and learning in all ways to be Angolan. Colonial oppression had torn the country apart, with hundreds of thousands of Angolans moving abroad to resist the constant threat of torture, exploitation by white landowners, and financial instability. Young José, though, managed to get away thanks to his Athletic prowess, being transferred to Lisbon in 1966 to break records and join the Benfica Sporting Club.
Carvalho had already had a musical calling, but it was politics that called him first. He used his decorated position to act as a mouthpiece between exiled Angolans and those still in the country plotting their independence from colonial rule while travelling between Europe and his homeland. Once caught, he immediately fled to the Netherlands.
“I left athletics with deep sorrow because I loved it, I loved Benfica,” he told Euronews in 2020, and in exile, he adopted his stage name, Bonga, and began to compose music that would soundtrack his country’s reckoning with imperial rule.
“It was necessary to do something,” he added. “In school, we learned the Portuguese rivers; in the Angolan station there was no Angolan music. It was necessary to fight the Portuguese colonists, imposing European rules, but also against the assimilated Black, which imitated the boss,” he told Buala.
Carvalho harnessed this passion and yearning for his homeland and released Angola 72 in 1972, a diverse and upbeat Semba album fusing Portuguese folk, kizomba, and Angolan instruments. It was a passionate call to independence that painted a picture of strife and governmental corruption that needed to be broken through, while his warm, husky vocals and the innovative use of Semba rhythms infused the album with homesickness that transported listeners to Angola’s beaches.
He described the traditional genre as ”Angolan music which is full of joy, peace, harmony and very positive vibes”. It’s a very fast-paced, electronic verging sound, passionately masking the album’s dangerous themes into a nostalgic, soulful mix of Latin influences and African pride. Its eclectic danceability is drummed in by its inclusion of mbira, an Angolan piano for melodic percussion, conga hand drums, and other traditional instruments from his roots.
His music moved him to be a wholehearted Angolan, which isn’t “only to eat Moamba and wear an African robe, [it is] to know the sayings, and certain rituals of great philosophical potential. That’s where I got my sources. I am an artist because of that”. Still in the business of moving African diasporas everywhere with his joyous voice, he celebrates his Angolan culinary origins in his latest track, ‘Kudia Kuetu’.
“I was asked if the strength came from ovomaltines,” he recalls from his days as an athlete, before refuting, “No, no, no, it came from the cassava!”
He performed his lyrical revolution across Europe, spreading Angolan music and raising awareness about the nation’s struggles until Angola finally broke from its chains of colonial oppression in 1975. Bonga’s music had already become a mouthpiece to freedom, to rebellion, and his music had become a household staple throughout the region. He subsequently returned to Portugal and proudly sings the story of his homeland to this day.
