People in Angola Are Making Death Metal in an Act of Rebellion Against Their Society

The most amazing fact about Angola is that the capital, Luanda, regularly beats the likes of Moscow, Oslo, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Melbourne as most expensive city for expats in the world. Why? Firstly because Angola has mineral wealth coming out of its arse - oil, diamonds, gold, you name it – so they're generating forex like there's no tomorrow. Secondly, because most of the infrastructure was blown to bits in a civil war that lasted from 1975 – 2002 (with a few gentlemanly gaps in the middle for re-grouping). So if you want a decent hotel room, you often also have to find someone to build it for you.

It is into the mangled heart of the country's third-city, Huambo, that Jeremy Xido's film, Death Metal Angola, pitches you. The place was once called 'New Lisbon' – the Portuguese colonists had envisaged that its rows of elegant baroque buildings would make it a fitting future capital. Now? They might as well just bulldoze the scraps of carcass that remain and start again. Huambo was the Sarajevo of the piece. Under siege for months. Shelled daily. It entirely lost its mind somewhere around 1998. The film's heroine, orphanage-owner Sonia, recalls “People wandering the streets for days because they just didn't have anywhere to go anymore”. She still runs a home for fifty kids orphaned during the last days of the war. Sonia's rebellion against living in an insane society was hard rock, and now her boyfriend, an unrepentant metalhead called Wilker, wants to start the nation's first death metal festival on a grassy traffic island in the centre of the city – allowing Xido to pull a classic 'quest' narrative frame around these people and their small but fervent style tribe.

Xido met the pair entirely by chance, while he was filming a documentary about Chinese railroad workers. In a cafe, a guy with short dreads and a dapper blue Oxford shirt approached him. They talked. And before he knew it, Detroit-native Xido was being treated to a generator-powered one-man death metal concert lit in the headlights of a truck. He'd found his next project.

I caught up with him after Copenhagen's CPH:DOX documentary festival, as he was on his way back to Angola to premier the film there.

Noisey: Hi Jeremy. Huambo looks desolate in your film. In terms of the buildings, is there still much worth saving there?

Jeremy: Most of the reconstruction projects have taken place in Luanda, where they're turning it into a kind of Miami Beach. Huambo suffered most, but it hasn't had the same investment. Right now, a lot of the stately old Portuguese building are starting to be repaired. But it was really fucked-up. It's a pity, as it used to be absolutely stunningly beautiful.

Are there still the descendants of white Angolan ex-colonists in Angola?

Absolutely. There are plenty of white Angolans. Also a lot of Portuguese now. In fact, since 2008 it's been a centre for inward migration: if you wanted to go away and make money in Portugal, the dream was that you'd go to Angola and work in mining or construction. In fact, the reason I first became interested was that I had been commissioned to create a theatre piece by a big theatre in Lisbon, and I met an Angolan woman there, and I naively asked her if she was going to stick around in Portugal after her studies or if she preferred another part of Europe. She looked at me like I was completely insane and said: “Europe is dead. The future is Angola.” Because there's so much

potential wealth there.

What's their relationship with the internet like? I imagine that has paved the way for a metal scene to even exist.

It's definitely made the scene possible. It's allowed them to learn there's actually other people out there in other cities who are thinking the same. Because one of the biggest effects of the war was a fragmentation of communication within the country. So even though before the war you could drive in an afternoon from Benguela to Luanda, at the end of the war it would normally take two days. In the interior of the country the wires are all gone. For the coast, the ocean-bound fibre optic cables are still there to provide internet. But in the interior, because everything was land-mined you couldn't dig up anything to lay cables. You'd get blown-up. Or in very poor areas people would start to dig them up thinking they could get copper out of them.

So what was the solution?

The only thing that made it work at all was when you had satellite internet - everybody very quickly got a mobile internet stick that they could plug into their computer. And that actually made every bit of difference. It's a country where even now it's very difficult to mail someone something physically, because the mailing addresses don't exist often. But everybody has an email address. Everybody's on Facebook. That's where you find each other. It allows everybody to organise concerts and create a community. It's absolutely enormously important to the extreme rock scene.

Would this be a good point to mention the general risk of Death Metal Angola seeming a bit 'Heavy Metal In Baghdad'?

Yeah, just in marketing there's a potential issue there: unexpected music in an unexpected place, right – how exotic. But for me, I was just interested in telling the story of these guys. And therefore I felt this was a music that could withstand the sorts of stories they had to tell about their lives and the stuff they'd seen. In a Nordic context most of the lyrics are phantasmagoric, fantasy really. But for these guys, because of what they've been through, reliving the extremes of pain that go into extreme metal in an Angolan context is almost journalistic. It's almost reportage.

And of course the best stuff isn't necessarily even the metal. It's just the view of people trying to rebuild any kind of culture in a place where culture itself has been eradicated.

What really changed this for me was knowing Sonia who runs the orphanage. And realising that there's something great about picking up fragments of history and starting from scratch, you could create a story: a story of them imagining what sort of city they were going to build 20 or 30 years in the future. It had a lot of parallels for me with Detroit, where I'm from. They've also been decimated. And now, they're trying to rebuild. They're looking around, and they're thinking long-term. They're saying: where are we as a society gonna be 20 years from now?

Had you been to Africa before?

No I hadn't. Like I say, I grew up in Detroit. And for everybody in my neighbourhood including myself, the whole Going Back To Africa thing was huge for us – I actually don't think I was totally aware of the fact that I was white at that age… But I'd never had the opportunity. So happily Angola was my first chance to go.

In Last Train To Zona Verde, Paul Theroux talks about how most black Americans – the ones who are descended from slaves – are actually descended from Angolan stock, because that was the real heart of the slave trade. You'd say there's truth in that?

Absolutely. Fifty percent of all slaves that went into Brazil were from Angola. And twenty-five percent of those in the US came from Angola. What that means over the generations is that pretty much everybody who is of former-slave ancestry looks back to Angola. One of the biggest prisons in the United States is referred to as 'The Farm'. It's huge, and colloquially it's still called 'Angola'. It's a huge part of the culture.

Now you're using Rockethub to fund a project to take the bands from Death Metal Angola on a tour of a range of dying Rust Belt USA towns – from Detroit to Cleveland to Baltimore to Gary, Indiana. I'm still not quite sure I see the connection.

The connection is everything to do with Detroit. When I was in Angola, I kept being struck by the visual similarities between the place and Detroit. It reminded me a lot of the neighbourhood I grew up in. I grew up with a lot of gunfire. I didn't grow up in a war zone. But the thing that I take from the Angolan scene is resilience. The ability to bounce back from adversity. So we teamed up with the Fulbright Association to go to the places in the United States that have been hit hardest by de-industrialisation. And we would show the film as a springboard, a jumping-off point for how you talk about rebuilding a community.

I guess the problem with hip-hop is that it has won – it is effectively the language of the US mainstream now. So if you want to talk about the music of the underclass and the outsider, metal is still that.

It is and it always was. It's really fascinating to me, because I grew up not liking the music. Thinking that metal was what white kids in the suburbs were into. But the more I got into the project, the more I understood it. It's deeply working class. And there's an ethic of skill. So there's ambition at the core of it: you have to be really good to play metal. You don't have to be so good to start a punk band. There's also a thing there in terms of the learning you have to go through, which is important in the Angolan context: some of the people who are playing this music out there are some of the smartest people I've met.

Follow Gavin on Twitter: @hurtgavinhaynes