Images of a Revolution

I'm in Maputo, slowly learning Portuguese and learning to find my way around. The phone rings in my apartment and a very British voice gives her name. She invites me for dinner at the Polana Hotel, and I say yes. They serve beautiful prawns and it's a nice place to go – a calm, elegant, relic of the past that was now serving the revolution. I turn up there, I meet her, and she introduces me to her husband who had come from Britain with the reputation for being the world's leading Marxist expert on trees and was helping in the Ministry of Agriculture. With them is Jaime Toha who was the Deputy Minister of Agriculture and his wife Moira Toha, who is a landscape architect. She says, 'Albie, if you're interested, at 6am tomorrow morning I'm working on a mural at the Ministry of Agriculture. Would you like to join us? We can pick you up at 5:30am.' So now I'm very excited. As a young university student, I've been fascinated by modern art.

So, half past five, I'm picked up, and six o'clock I'm at the mural, and there's a big pot of black paint. There’s a brush, and I'm told we just dip the brush in the paint and follow the line that had been drawn by Malangatana. It is joyous moment, and in a way, very strange, because Moira Toha was a very solemn person, having experienced a lot of tragedy. She's living in exile, she's quiet, she's inward, but she paints a girl on a swing with a big rainbow. And Malangatana is jolly, singing while he's painting, joyful, cracking jokes, yet he paints sad faces. It was like the artist was the other of the person that you saw, and it worked as a joint project.

That was another thing I learned in Mozambique, that many hands can make bright, lovely work. Even if their styles and techniques are very different, they interact with each other at that particular space. So that was now a little personal involvement for me, and I think it was the beginning of my friendship with Malangatana, which became strong and rich afterwards.

So, I was very taken by the whole way that art came into life in Mozambique, and I connected with the revolution, transformation, and change. It also went with the fact that the country was very short of resources, and the whole visual arts and murals movement stopped because we ran out of paint.

The murals of Maputo had enchanted and given spirit to me. It wasn't just something nice to see. It was part and parcel of my own revival as a passionate freedom fighter, and I decided we've got to capture these images. The first person to go to was Moira Forjaz. She and her husband, José Forjaz, a brilliant architect, had come to Mozambique with independence, and she was now working as a photographer. She very graciously offered her services and produced slides for me of a number of murals. At some stage, a young photographer from the United States named Susan Meiselas rolled up in Mozambique with a camera. She'd heard about the revolution and wanted to get pictures, so I asked her to take some images of the murals. So, we now had two outstanding photographers providing a big bunch of photographs of the murals. What to do with them?

I'm not sure who put me on to David King in London, a brilliant designer, very much connected with world revolution and transformation. I produced a text, and he selected the images and divided the book up into chapters dealing with different works of art, and this rather wonderful book emerged and was published.

Recently the idea occurred to us that with modern digital techniques of reproducing books, we can give it another go, enhance the colour and add some pictures that we hadn't used in the original print such as me standing in front of the mural that was painted in front of the Ministry of Agriculture. I'm sad to say, it's been painted out subsequently, but happily, the main mural, which is the mural near the airport at a big circle with the big star, and where five top leaders of Mozambique, including Samora Machel and Eduardo Mondlane, are buried. Outside the circle, along this winding wall, must be one of the most powerful, rich, thoughtful, meaningful, imaginative murals ever produced anywhere in the world. And it came out of that moment, out of those energies, and out of a revolutionary spirit that picked up on the passion for change and the importance of artistic representation.

There's not much of the Mozambican revolution left in Mozambique, but at least that mural is there. The book is a way of keeping that spirit and imagination alive, linking up across frontiers in Africa, moments of history, moments of production, moments of imagination. We produced the book out of nothing; just imagination, skills, hard work and focus, with a wonderful design from the British designer who saw himself as a socialist, happy to be involved in the project, not asking for any funding. The photographers didn't ask for any funding. I didn't ask for any funding. I think the printers got some funding for their costs. But it's for the nation. It's for the people. It's to capture part of the history and the vision. We decided we must have a launch in front of Malangatana’s mural at the back of the Museum of Natural History, in the spirit of the making of the murals, with spontaneity and energy and creativity,

So, seeing these books having a later life map gives me great joy, reminding me of not only the time when I had two arms, but the time when, in the midst of war and hardship and difficulties, we kept alive at that core flame of struggling for humanity.