After slavery - darkness at noon on the equator

This interview was first published in The Prisma Multicultural Newspaper on June 24th 2024, and can be read in full with stills from the film here: https://theprisma.co.uk/2024/06/24/after-slavery-darkness-at-noon-on-the-equator/

In the film "Banzo", the story of the persistence of neo-slavery, long after slavery was banned builds on the small details of life, and the documents often passed over. The normalization of violence affects everyone involved, but for the labourers it destroys their motivation to engage with life. And, continuing the denial, doctors are called to investigate this new 'sickness'.

Slavery was long abolished but the system of indentured labour (contratado in Portuguese) persisted for longer. By charging labourers for food and accommodation their wages were cancelled, and this only ended in 1975 after independence in the islands of Sao Tome and Principe, whose plantations produced cocoa and sugar to sweeten the lives of Europeans. The story is recounted in the best-selling novel "Equador" by Miguel Sousa Tavares.

The workers were Angolans who had been marched often hundreds of miles to a coastal station where they were sold to agents who 'contracted' them for 5 years, when they could not even read Portuguese. Labourers were in theory protected against exploitation and could leave, but none of them returned to Angola before 1908, and the film is set just before then.

In Margarida Cardoso's film "Banzo" the violence of slavery is not explicit as she prefers to make films that expresses the dragging atmosphere of silence and normalized exploitation far from western eyes. Banzo is the sickness of displacement, despair, which is often expressed as alcoholism among other colonized peoples such as the Aborigines and Canadian First Nations. Margarida's father was an Airforce pilot sent to Mozambique when the colonial war started in 1961and she lived there until the Portuguese revolution in 1974 when she was 13. She is also known for her film "Costa dos murmurios" ("The murmuring coast"), set in Mozambique.

Margarida spoke to me for ThePrisma at the Indielisboa film festival in Lisbon.