Content area
Full Text
Essay reprinted from Nzambi (God): Hildebrando de Melo by Glen Nelson, a catalogue of de Melo's work produced by the Mormon Arts Center in 2018.
The artwork of Hildebrando de Melo rises from Angola itself-from the valleys near Huambo where he was born, through the urban streets of Luanda where he lives with his wife and children, amid the dynamism of one of the world's most expensive cities, between the sounds of Portuguese and tribal Bantu languages, in the art and artifacts created by centuries of Africans, from the history of his ancestral tribal kingdom of Bailundo, with the political fallout in a country emerging from decades of brutality and war nearly incomprehensible to a foreigner and the convoluted legacies of racism, slavery, colonialism, liberation, interventionist politics, poverty, riches, and injustice, with the artist's own history, his religious probing, the nation's budding contemporary art scene, the artist's global travels-and his attempts to reconcile and personify all of it.
De Melo was born in 1978,1 three years after Angola declared its independence from Portugal. The catalysts for self-rule were the death of António Salazar in 1970, the Portuguese dictator who ruled his country and its far-flung colonies ruthlessly for 40 years, and the Carnation Revolution of 1974, when the Lisbon government of Marcello Caetano was toppled bloodlessly in a coup d'état.2
The modern history of Angola-and it is a narrative caked in violence-is dominated by Portugal and mass migration from and then back to the Middle African nation on the Atlantic coast. Before that, a half million Africans were taken as slaves in the 19th century, nearly all of them men, and sent to Brazil, Sâo Tomé, and other destinations. A century later, a similar number of wealth-seeking Europeans moved to Angola for a slice of its natural resources.3 The African nationalist movement in the 1970s ejected colonialists from Angola but left a void of power for the Soviets, Cubans, Chinese, Americans, Congolese, and South Africans to attempt to fill. They backed, by covert or overt means, the warring forces within the country: FNLA (Front for the National Liberation of Angola), MPLA (Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola), and UNITA (Union for the Independence of the Totality of Angola).4 Angolan armies and rebels would brutalize...