Agostinho Neto: President and Poet
The world is full of poets. Everyone uses language to convey the emotion, the imagery, the rhythm of poetry. But not everyone can achieve such a mastery of language. It takes time, experience, and passion. Great poetry requires having something to say, something that people want and need to hear. Africa is a place where millions have been gagged, billions have had their voices muffled, so it should be no surprise that among the vocal anti-colonialist movements there were the voices of poets, voices such as Léopold Sédar Senghor’s, the first president of Senegal, and Patrice Lumumba’s, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who were both poets in their own rights and fought their own battles for freedom. But one African nation’s fight for freedom was much more complex and more globally affected and among the many moving parts, the many shouting voices was the voice of Agostinho Neto. Angola’s first president was a poet who was telling a nation’s story, a people’s tale after so many years of suffering. Agostinho Neto had more than enough to say and said it with a mastery of language.
Before one can begin to understand a poet’s words and passions, one must know where the poet came from and how they lived and Neto was more than just a poet. He was born António Agostinho Neto on September 17, 1922 in Bengo, a province of Angola, to a Methodist minister and professor. He “...had his early education at Luanda Secondary school…” (Umar, 2014) before going on to study in Portugal, where receive his degree in medicine, adding practicing physician to his growing list of achievements, and where “he befriended future political leaders such as Amilcar Cabral, from Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, and Marcelino dos Santos, from Mozambique.” (Dr. Y, 2011) But Neto was first known for his poetry when in 1948, he published a volume of poems in Luanda and “joined a national cultural movement that was aimed at ‘rediscovering’ indigenous Angolan culture” (The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, 2016). His first arrest followed soon after in Lisbon, where he was studying medicine. It would be the first of many as other arrests would follow for his political alignments and his vocal opposition of Portuguese colonialism and would disrupt his studies.
“He joined the Movimento Popular da Libertação de Angola or the MPLA, People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, when it formed in 1956,” (Dr. Y, 2011), which he would come to lead. In 1958, he was able to complete his studies and in 1959, Neto returned to home as a practicing doctor. A year later, in June of 1960, Neto was arrested once more, in front of his patients for “his militant opposition to the colonial authorities. When his patients protested his arrest, the police opened fire, killing [30] and injuring 200” (The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, 2016). The day would go down in history as “the Massacre de Icolo e Bengo” (Dr. Y, 2011).
Neto was then exiled to the Cape Verde islands and then jailed in Portugal, where he produced another volume of poetry over the next two years. “After international pressures, the Portuguese government put him under house arrest; a move that allowed him to escape, first to Morocco, then Zaire” ( James, 113). It was in Zaire that Neto became the president of the MPLA and took up the armed struggle against Portuguese colonialist, which began in 1961. He looked for American support against Portugal, a poor country who was determined to hold onto their colonies even if it took a bloody fight. But this small European country was a member of NATO, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to whom the United States and other European nations were providing support. It was not only Portugal that Neto had to compete with and had to fight for control of Angola.
“From 1961 to 1974, Neto labored to keep the MPLA from factionalism while suffering battlefield defeats from the Portuguese, FNLA, and UNITA” (114) as Angola had not one, not two, but three armed anti-colonial movements. There was the FNLA, the National Front for the Liberation of Angola, founded by and led by Holden Roberto in 1954 and UNITA, National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, founded and led by Jonas Savimbi, and of course Neto’s MPLA. Each was getting support through different outside forces. President Mobutu in Zaire was supporting the FNLA, forcing Neto to move his base of operations to the Republic of the Congo and forced Neto to turn to the Soviet Union for support. He went to Moscow in 1964 and “received assurances for future Soviet military aid” (114), although the MPLA received the most support from Cuba, with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara taking personal affront to the colonialism in Angola and providing “12,000 combat troops” (114) when the time came.
With the help of Cuba and by extension the Soviet Union, the MPLA won the 1975 battle for independence and Agostinho Neto became the first president of the People’s Republic of Angola. Once he became president, his nationalism and duty to Angola became more important than his Marxist ideals. “Neto allowed Western companies to develop Angola’s petroleum resources, sought some type of detente with Washington and sacked Marxist ideologists in the MPLA, most notably Nito Alves and Lopo do Nascimento” (114), which lead to an attempted coup by Alves in 1977. In September of 1979, he traveled to Moscow, over a scheduled summit meeting in Havana.
There were conflicting reports about what followed those days in September, reports that said he suffered from “inoperable cancer of the pancreas” (114), of leukemia and of “‘hepatis which developed into cirrhosis of the liver’ and an obstructed bile duct” (114), but whatever the cause, Agostinho Neto died on September 10, 1979. “Neto’s death in a Moscow hospital surgery ward led to questions about possible Soviet involvement in his demise. Moscow had invested heavily in the MPLA government. A 20-year friendship treaty had been signed, yet from the Soviet point of view Neto was slipping away from Marxism to nonaligned nationalism” (114). This, however, was never proven and there are reports of Neto’s sickness before his trip to Moscow. “I recall him now as having been a little gaunt-looking, tired, undoubtedly acutely feeling the cancerous leukemia surging through his body” (Nesbitt, 52)
No matter what the involvement the U.S.S.R had in Neto’s death the results were the same. Agostinho Neto was dead and all he had done for the future of Angola, of Africa, of the world was left to continue in the effects of his actions as a president and leader, his works as a healer, and his words as a poet. Neto managed to achieve fame for his poetry because he had plenty to say and that mastery of language. He went down in history as one of the most influential political and literary forces in Angola. There are still many questions to be answered by his works, like:
can poetry carry enough sorrow, enough strength, enough fire, enough love, enough wisdom, enough care, and enough horror to penetrate the hearts and the souls of the oppressed and the oppressors so that both will desperately want to escape their sinister labels... How exactly is Neto's poetry interconnected with the socio-political condition of his country, his people and himself? Can one say that his poetry is the very arena where a new African consciousness is being created/recreated and where old European myths are being unmasked? What are some of the most successful poetic strategies used by Neto to fight the Portuguese colonial power? Is Neto's poetic enterprise sufficient for the "real" revolution? Are his words able to move mountains or just hills? (Marques, 2003)
His struggle and the struggle of his people will forever be captured in the number of poems he produced, there is no question of that, but there is still the question of how he mined the depths of colonial suffering, the very thing he spent his life fighting against, and the depths of Angolan culture, the very thing he spent his life trying to restore.
He published his most famous works in 1974, a year before Angola gained independence and he gained the presidency, in a book called Sacred Hope. “The poems included... illustrate well the oppression, apartheid, (un)civilization, and (un)Christianity brought to Africa by the Portuguese” (Marques, 2003). One such poem, translated in English, is called “Western Civilization” and provides an excellent example of what exactly the Portuguese enforced upon their colonies throughout Africa. With the repetition of “‘Breaking stones / carrying stones / breaking stones / carrying stones’” (Marques, 2003) and the poems end of “‘Old age comes early / A reed mat on dark nights / enough for him to die / thankfully / and of hunger’”(Marques, 2003) shows the slave labour inflicted by the “Western Civilization” and how the endless work leads to nothing but the sweet freedom found in death. Neto turns the one of the common Western excuses, the mighty quest to civilize and convert the savages, for colonization on its head and shows its true nature, the exploitation of people and resources for personal gains. “As in many...poems in Sagrada Esperaça (Sacred Hope), bushpaths, enforced labor, suffering and pain, human exploitation and the plundering of the earth’s wealth by using the local labour force—this is what colonialism is about—became “the pathway of owers / owers of love” (“Caminho do mato”)” (Mata, 2007).
Agostinho Neto produced many works and many about the effects of colonialism on Africa, of white colonialists using religions among other things as excuses for exploitation and horrid violations of human rights. Let’s look at a poem in full to achieve a greater understanding of Neto’s style and how exactly he compacts such topics into a few powerful lines, although I am positive something of the power of the poetry is lost in translation. Here is Neto’s “Night” :
I live
In the dark quarters of the world
Without light, nor life
Anxious to live,
I walk in the streets
Feeling my way
Leaning into the shapeless dreams,
Stumbling into servitude.
--Dark quarters
World of wretchedness
Where the will is watered down
and men
Are confused with things
I walk, lurching
through the unlit
unknown streets crowded
with mystery and terror,
I, arm in arm with ghosts
And the night too is dark.
The piece is powerful in such a compact way, because it’s not trying to give some grandiose explanation of suffering. It’s not listing out, preaching or condemning. It’s simply providing a vivid snapshot of the narrator’s existence and relating it to the world at large with the lines “and men/are confused with things” (Neto 12,13) and “I, arm in arm with ghosts” (18). It hits on personal experiences, with the line “Leaning into shapeless dreams” (7), for most enslaved peoples forced to live by another’s agenda and for Neto himself as the Portuguese detainment of him put his dream of a medical degree into question. Even though Neto never lived as a slave, he was still personally affected by colonialism and was personally moved by the plight of fellow Angolans, who were among the most Africans forced into slavery.
Neto doesn’t just speak for Angolans. In more than a few of his poems, he speaks of the whole African experience, as the suffering was not confined to the artificial borders the Europeans created. Take a look at a section of the poem “Grieved Lands”:
The grieved lands of Africa
in the tearful woes of ancient and modern slave
in the degrading sweat of impure dance
of other seas
Grieved
………….
They live
the grieved lands of Africa
because we are living
and are imperishable particles
of the grieved lands of Africa.
“Very few stanzas in the African poetic discourse can match the lyricism of the above lines. The logical exposition, the ethical dimension, and the emotional thrust of the images employed are lucid, precise and profound.” (Umar, 2014) The very few lines are moving in a number of different ways and in the rest of this rather long poem it lays out Neto’s arguments and ideals even further. “The ‘flower’ that is ‘crushed’ in the ‘forest’ is certainly the African continent, while the ‘wickedness of iron and fire’ that commits this heinous act of destruction symbolizes the Western colonizers…. In this middle section of the poem, Neto speaks of the ‘corpses thrown up by the Atlantic /in putrid offering of incoherence and death’” (Umar, 2014). He captures the horrific acts Africa has suffered by the West in profound, vivid and beautiful ways.
On one hand Neto produced pieces that were meant to capture the larger image of the whole continent, like “African Poem”, which clearly shows his love and affection for Africa, but on the other hand, Neto saw a lot fighting for independence and held a very strong sense of nationalism and wrote a number of pieces on and for Angola. The poem, “Hoisting the Flag”, celebrates the specific people or objects in a way to show his national pride and the nation’s identity. “Voice gladdening with hot rhythms of the land / through nights of never-failing Saturdays,” “sacred and ancestral music / resurgent in the sacred sway of the Ngola’s rhythm,” the “resurrection of the seed.” the “dynamic symphony of joy among men,” and “certainty / more than goodness -- it was love.” The love for his country is never in doubt in this piece nor is the question of independence. It is something that will be achieved, because Neto has faith in his people. Take a look at the last stanza of “Hoisting the Flag”:
Men’s strength
soldiers’ courage
poets’ cries
were all trying to raise up
beyond the memories of heroes
Ngola Kiluangi
Rainha Jinga
trying to raise up high
the flag of independence
It’s honorific of the people Neto knew, who fought by his side for independence and it helps capture not only the joy and the love Neto had, but also the fight and the strength of Angolans in a lighter happier tone, giving hope for Angola’s future. It also captures the historic time of Angola, which not many people have the foresight to achieve.
Given the times in which Agostino Neto wrote his poetry and the fact that he was heavily involved in the political world, perhaps only a famous poet due to his political fame, it is only logical that the bulk of his poetry is politically motivated and the critical analysis and studies of his poems focus on the works relating to his struggle for independence and the suffering of his people. “Neto the poet is Neto the politician, sublimating his personal plight into the greater goal of speaking for the Angolan people… his poems [are] both evidence of his political commitment and [are] examples of his political vision” (Chabal, 21, 15) He probably wrote more personal poems that simply did not reach the same level of importance or impact that Neto was looking for with his poetry. His love poems were for his love of Africa, of Angola, of his people because that was who he was trying to reach and restore.
Now no poet can write as effectively as Neto did without having some source to learn from, develop from and “...there were three distinct literary movements which are of relevance to Neto's poetry... The first and earliest was the development of modernists Brazilian literature which followed the 1922 'Semana Cultural'. The second was the Cape Verdean literary 'revolution' associated with the publication of the review Claridade. The third was Portuguese neorealism, the new direction chosen by many Portuguese writers...” (20-21). These movements along with the strong oral tradition in Angola influenced his poetry. From these movements he learned his strong sense of ‘I’ as a way to humanize the narrator of the poem and from Angola’s literary history he learned “two aspects of his poetic language [that] stand out: rhythm and metaphor.” (23)
Agostinho Neto was a poet with a purpose, with something to say. He didn’t wax long lines about natural beauty or the perils of love and broken hearts. “Neto never gratuitously bathed in pathos. He sought solutions.” (18) He wrote as a way to get his message out to the people. The reasons he wrote are “twofold: to write a poetry of Angolanidade, that is, a poetry which is inspired by Angola's cultural heritage and which contributes to the emergence of a national consciousness; to help rally Angola's people around the political project of the anti-colonial struggle” (21) He succeeded in both of those goals. There are Neto literary awards in Angola and his name is embedded in not only the political history, but also the cultural and literary as well.
He did so much for his country. He healed. He fought. He wrote and he wrote well. He managed to a lot through the few books of poems he published, using them as a voice for his people for them, for those they fought against. Agostinho Neto was a practicing physician, a political leader, and a poet all to better his people, his country, his contient, which he did during his life. While the actions of his political life gained Angola independence after his death the country suffered a horrid civil war. At least his poetry had more a lasting effect on world as it captured the suffering of colonialism, of Angolans and a struggle for freedom. Neto had a mastery of language that he used as a tool in his resistance, his fight for liberation. His words and actions left a mark on the world at large, which is evident in the following poem entitled “Agostinho Neto” by Chinua Achebe, which mourns Neto’s passing.
Agostinho, were you no more
Than the middle one favored by fortune
In children's riddle; Kwame
Striding ahead to accost
Demons; behind you a laggard third
As yet unnamed, of twisted fingers?
No! Your secure strides
Were hard earned. Your feet
Learned their fierce balance
In violent slopes of humiliation;
Your delicate hands, patiently
Groomed for finest incisions.
Were commandeered brusquely to kill.
Your gentle voice to battle-cry.
Perhaps your family and friends
Knew a merry flash cracking the gloom
We see in pictures but I prefer
And will keep that sorrowful legend.
For I have seen how
Haifa millennium of alien rape
And murder can stamp a smile
On the vacant face of the fool.
The sinister grin of Africa's idiot-kings
Who oversee in obscene palaces of gold
The butchery of their own people.
Neto, I sing your passing, I,
Timid requisitioner of your vast
Armory's most congenial supply.
What shall I sing? A dirge answering
The gloom? No, I will sing tearful songs
Of joy; I will celebrate
The man who rode a trinity
Of awesome fates to the cause
Of our trampled race!
Thou Healer, Soldier and Poet!
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