Mozambique: Celebrating Eduardo White @ Fundação Couto
Photo: O País
Here we are again. Bearing witness of the harshness of being a musician in a country where it seems that art only serves to entertain and not to provide a living.
How many questions do you need to write the manual of doubts about being a musician in our country? It seems that the “old guard” is forgotten and kept in an old suitcase of bitter memories. The list of musicians who died without any support or the joy that they provided us with their songs is long.
We wept a lot last Friday when the coffin went down. It was a coffin that carried the body of Zeca Murasse. It was heavy because it had a twofold weight: a body cut from us by death and poverty fuelled by oblivion. We wept a lot at the Michafutene Cemetery, Marracuene district, Maputo province. Tears seemed to flood the streets where Zeca Murasse sailed like leaf blown by the wind.
It was the late morning August when Zeca descended into the subsoil of the earth; it was the end of August and the end of Zeca Murasse. He got a coffin because some gave what they had. Social networks groups of admirers shared the contact of Tia Joana, Zeca’s sister, and transferred money to help with the musician’s final departure.
In the 1990s, when the Halakhavuma Band was created, Zeca Murasse was chosen as the lead vocalist. What lead vocalist? In the last days, Zeca was vocalist of the streets of the city of Maputo. Handcuffed with dirt, his hair smoothed by no comb, carrying sacks full of “madness”, this was how he could be found. His song “Mamana wa Murasse” entered upon the stage of his life. Sad reality. He sang a sad song and the song in turn sang his sad life.
But stupidity can speak still louder, and ask us in our foolishness: “Who died? Just some madman, or a musician?”
It is true that a musician died, but an empty place will remain in the streets of the city. Zeca Murasse sang with other greats like Filipe Nhassavele, João Bata and Diniz Magaia. And the coffin went down in Michafutene Cemetery. And the weeping thundered in the midst of it all. The coffin loaded with Zeca’s body went down. Zeca’s feet, which tattooed footsteps in every corner of the city, stood there, immobile, frozen in death.
And the coffin went down. Miguel Torga already said “the greatest misfortune that can happen to an artist is to start with literature, instead of starting with life”. So there was an inverse disgrace to Zeca Murrasse: it began with music and not with life. Zeca Murasse. Zeca.
By Sérgio Raimundo
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