My Semba

It’s ironic. / They call us black market. / Us, 70% of the work force. / The enslaved maid who cleans their houses. / The present eloquent body that raises their children. / The gliding driver that drives their cars. / An animal’s catharsis at each kuduro dance move, / and the pain lays forgotten, in the party’s subwoofer.

These are the words X writes on the bus, about the people he sees around him and about himself. With them begins Hugo Salvaterra’s rap ode to the lower classes of Luanda, Angola’s capital, which we explore alongside X and his siblings Lelé and Maria. Their journey follows a batida-driven path toward X’s dream: the big stage, the seventy percent gathered before it, awash in colour and light, listening to his words of praise and worry for them.

My Semba is a city symphony and a rap musical, a gritty look at those who are downtrodden but not defeated. It moves between documentary attention and musical expression, forming an audiovisual poem shaped by rhythm, resilience and the lived realities of Luanda’s working majority. Or, as Salvaterra puts it, a manifesto.

– Vanja Kaludjercic