In Santiago, the largest island in the Cape Verde archipelago, Funaná was a daily insubmission act against the colonial regime in the time of the Estado Novo.
O FUNANA was not part of the sound band of the independence movement of Cape Verdebut playing this genre repressed by the colonial authorities was a act of daily insubmission by musicians.
“They said we [quando] We were in the harmonica touch, It was as if the demon was therewe were people who had no faith in God, ”recalls Etalline readyFunaná player, interviewed by, author of the book “Funaná, Race and Masculinity”.
Funaná, Just like Batuco and Tabancathey were seen by the Portuguese colonial regime as marginal practices that would eventually suffer a “series of coercive measures imposed by civilian authorities as well as religious authorities,” the Lusa investigator of the Institute of Contemporary History of the New University of Lisbon tells the Lusa.
These practices were “understood as threatening of the so -called good order”Note Rui Cidra, believing that the association of these genres with an idea of Africanity legitimized the constitution of the people who practiced them as “a subordinate population in Cape Verdean society.”
Having interviewed players who were born between the 1910s and 1930s, on the island of Santiago, Rui Cidra recalls that many of these musicians reported the surveillance of parish priests and catechists, often ending up because they were arrested by the police and forced to pay fines.
However, even with a regime that oppressed those practices, the players were arranging “disguise strategies” to keep Funaná alive.
Drunk police to play
As an example, the anthropologist says that players delude the authorities in various ways, among which drunk “the local authority figure so they can play at night. ”
The songs, although they did not have a political penchant, reported social problems and difficulties of a people under a colonial regime, such as hunger or forced migration to Sao Tome and Principe, to work in the fields, where many players arranged money to buy their concertinas.
In fact, the path portrayed in the well -known war was also present in Funaná, in which one of his most popular works, by Codé di Dona, speaks of a hungry man who emigrates to Sao Tome.
For the Cape Verdean sociologist Redy Wilson Lima“Fomi 47”, even if it did not have a contesting intention in its creation, “a strong political connotation, speaking of the abandonment to which people were voted.”
For Rui Cidra, Funaná did not express any nationalist project, but had in itself a dimension of struggle against regime oppression.
Redy Wilson Lima, a doctoral student in urban studies at the New University of Lisbon, underlines that players, even being arrested and detained, “played in the same.”
The relationship of the Estado Novo and Funaná, whose central instruments are iron and harmonica (concertina)it also affects the history of the genre itself, which remains a marginal practice and almost circumscribed to the interior of the island of Santiago to independence, explains Rui Cidra.
“There are many Cape Verdeans who didn’t know these practices,” he notes.
Funaná away from the elites
author of the book “Batuku de Cape Verde”, recalls that also That genus did not go up to the Planalto of the city of the beachthe central and noble zone of the capital, during the Estado Novo.
With independence, Funaná becomes popularespecially from stylistic innovations by bands such as Bulimundo, who exchange the harmonica for electric guitars and synthesizers.
Its popularization arises “more or less” at the same time as iron, which recovers the harmonica in Funaná and gives it a rapid pace.
Funaná forever
For Rui Cidra, if playing Funaná during the Estado Novo was “an act of insurgency” and an “desire to fulfill a sense of individual freedom”, the posture of Insubmission is todayin the face of fractures that still exist between groups and social classes, which, despite being blushed, still contemplate certain inheritances.
“I think the population of Santiago had numerous achievements from the point of view of their integration in the new nation, but these achievements were very much of their own struggle and their own work,” he says.
In this sense, if Funaná is today heard in Cape Verde and the diaspora and has gained national musical genre status, “the creativity and action of the musicians”.
In his thesis, the words of Dju di Mana, a young player who contributed to the ethnographic work in Cape Verde de Rui Cidra, summarize the feeling: “You have to talk about this: this strength, this resistance, this survival”.
