In this interview, Pascal Bianchini speaks to filmmaker Billy Woodberry, regarding ‘Mario’, a film about Mário Coelho Pinto de Andrade, the Angolan liberation hero and founder of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) (in English, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), which has been the ruling party since Angola won independence from Portugal. Mario was selfless and committed, giving everything for a revolution and getting nothing in return.
By Pascal Bianchini (with many thanks to Andy Rector for additional editing)
Pascal Bianchini: I know that you are an experienced filmmaker but unfortunately, I haven’t seen your previous movies. Sorry about this. So, this interview will be focused on your film «Mário » about Mário Pinto de Andrade. Could you tell us who Mário Pinto de Andrade was, especially for people who have not yet seen the film?
Billy Woodberry: Mário de Andrade was born in Golungo Alta in Angola in 1928, but he grew up in Luanda. His father was a retired civil servant, who was active in the Liga Angolana, along with some other men, either lawyers or civil servants… When Mário was nine years old or so, his father sent him by train to go to his hometown to see his mother. Afterwards, he had to bring his brother back to Luanda to live with them. Mário says that one of his most important events in his life was to go back on the train with him and then, share a house with his brother who was two years older. Another important person, was a black priest he met. Mário was then a choir boy. He was invited by the seminary to study like his elder brother. However, unlike his brother, Mário decided to leave the seminary for the Liceo (high school) to do his last year before the examinations. Another significant point is that Mário was very good with languages. In 1948, he had the opportunity to study with a scholarship at the Faculty of Letters in the University of Lisbon, more precisely in philology.
Pascal Bianchini: At that time, many students from Portuguese colonies were gathering in Lisbon?
Billy Woodberry: Just after arriving in Lisbon, while he was living with other Angolan students, he met Amilcar Cabral and he joined a group that Cabral had formed, with many of the other figures who would become significant in the forthcoming national liberation movements: Marcelino Dos Santos from Mozambique; Aida Espirito Santo from São Tomé; and other Angolan students such as Agostinho Neto or Lucio Lara who were to become important figures of the [Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola]MPLA [in English, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola]. They were gathering at the House of Students of the Empire (Casa dos Estudantes do Império) created by the government for the congregation of students from all over the Portuguese empire. It was intended as a place to socialize these students in order to assume the values of the educated native class and to encourage them to serve the Empire. In fact, it proved to be a fertile ground for meetings by this generation who would stand against colonialism. Had they not had this opportunity, it might have taken twenty years to ever come into contact with each other…
Pascal Bianchini: Here lies a paradox: the House of Empire has helped the African nationalists to organise themselves… What were their main activities in Lisbon?
Billy Woodberry: They were fairly serious young people, watching and noticing developments in the post-World War II era, especially the demand for independence in the other colonies, in Asia and Africa especially. In this process, poetry took a significant place. Through sharing poetry and also music, it was a way to realise a kind of awareness and consciousness. Another basis for later developments was the Centre for African Studies founded in 1951. They devised a program of study, to really know Africa, because they realized that their education was not focused on knowing the reality of Africa. They used to meet in the house of the Espirito Santo family, a house big enough to organise presentations. Mário would make a presentation regarding language, and the development of languages in different African countries, including in Angola, which had many different languages. Amilcar would do a report about agriculture, and land tenure, etc. They also took inspiration from the other African countries, and others who were thinking about Africa, or who had thought about Africa before. For instance, they were inspired by Leopold Sedar Senghor’s Negritude, in order to reject Portuguese assimilation. They realized that assimilation was an individual solution and not a solution for the whole society. So, their second language was French. It was very important and inspiring for them. The first publication they did was when they wrote in a special issue about students with Présence Africaine (‘the African Students Speak’).
Pascal Bianchini: Could they abandon their élite status and develop relationships with their own peoples?
Billy Woodberry: In Lisbon there was another important place: the African Maritime Club. It was set up by a group of dock workers. These workers in Portugal had connections with Africa, Brazil, etc. that could be of interest to the students. The other way around, the workers could find support from the students. Many of these workers were in fact autodidacts. They just never had the opportunity to study.
Pascal Bianchini: What about the political dimension of their activities?
Billy Woodberry: The main force of resistance to the fascist regime in Portugal was the Portuguese Communist Party. Some members of the group were actually members or very close to the party. However, for the Communist party, the first issue was to get rid of fascism. It was Mário’s primary position, and it was the same for his comrades who were even more involved with the PCP. The issue of independence for the colonies would come after. But at a certain point, they started to say that it should be possible for those fighting in the colonial context to organise autonomously in order to overthrow the colonial system. Then for this group––Mário, Amilcar, and Aida Espiritu Santo––their focus was about Africa with the idea that you should have an autonomous organisation, with the objective of overthrowing colonialism.
Pascal Bianchini: Then it was clearly political, not only cultural?
Billy Woodberry: They evolved fairly quickly from cultural issues to politics. For instance, Negritude was really important, as an assertion of the dignity of the black African people, but it was not sufficient to solve the problems. Some particular events may have triggered this evolution: in 1953 there was a massacre in São Tomé (the Batepa massacre where hundreds of people were killed). Mário was also concerned by this evolution. He was questioning his role as a student in Portugal.
Pascal Bianchini: A turning point in his life was his departure to France…
Billy Woodberry: He had been corresponding with Alioune Diop, and he decided that he would go to Paris. There, he enroled in the university to study sociology. At the same time, he was the secretary of the review ‘Présence Africaine’ and the secretary for Mr. Diop. He arrived in time to be a part of the organisation of the first Congress of Black Arts and Writers in Paris in 1956. It was a decisive moment for him because he met many of the African leaders and figures such as Césaire or Senghor but also Sekou Toure and Frantz Fanon. He also met important French people supporting the anticolonial struggles such as the publisher François Maspero and the filmmaker Chris Marker. He also met Basil Davidson, the British historian, who explained that Mário was the first of the figures of the liberation movement from Portuguese colonies that he encountered. He did very important work for the congress. He received the contributions and edited many of them though he never really assumed so much credit for that. However, he felt it was such a gift and privilege to have this experience. That was not something he was prone to, to brag a lot about himself. He was also able to bring some knowledge about what was happening in Portuguese colonies in Africa which was not widely known. The Portuguese state had been very effective in creating the idea that it was somehow less harsh than the others. This myth was propagated by Gilberto Freire, the Brazilian sociologist with his theory of Lusotropicalism. In ‘Présence Africaine’ Mário could combat that idea and differently publicise the reality in the Portuguese colonies; for instance, the forced labour and repression in São Tomé. ‘Présence Africaine’ was also a decisive moment in his life, because he met Sarah Maldoror there, who was to become his wife. She was a young actor, in a theatre troupe, the Griots. She was a dynamic force and a creative person.
Pascal Bianchini: Yes, and afterwards there is the creation of the MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola). Could you tell us about the role Mário has played in this process?
Billy Woodberry: In 1957, Viriato de Cruz arrived in Paris. Since 1948 he had done a lot of cultural activities and activism, and he was under threat of arrest. So, he had to leave the country. He arrived in Paris with two documents. The program of the Angolan Communist Party in one hand and in the other, the program of the MPLA. Mário read it and said: “I think it’s good but the forces you describe here don’t exist yet”. However, the international and African context was changing very fast with the independence of Ghana, etc. Amilcar Cabral, Guilherme Espirito de Santo, Marcelino de Santos, Viriato de Cruz, and Mário, decided to form the Anticolonial movement (MAC), incorporating all four colonies: Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, and São Tomé. They started to build a political project and an organisation. In 1958, Mário was invited to the Tashkent Congress of Writers, where he could meet Nikita Khrushchev, and also a lot of African and Asian leaders and people that would become significant later. In 1959, he was in Rome to attend a second congress of the black writers and artists in 1959.
Meanwhile with Sekou Touré, who had refused the French community to attain a complete independence from France, they could have a base on the African continent. They also made contacts with Mohamed V, the king of Morocco. They also received support and aid in Morocco. Mário lived there for a time. But they realised that people didn’t take them seriously because they didn’t constitute national organisations tied to a territory. So, in Conakry, where a lot of them had gathered, they organised the MPLA. Mário became the president and Viriato da Cruz the general secretary of the MPLA. Then, to be closer to the country, they established themselves in Leopoldville, in Congo. But the situation was difficult for the MPLA because another organisation: Union of the Peoples of Angola
(UPA) with Holden Roberto was already established and had made contact with many organisations and forums in Africa, for instance in Ghana in 1958 at the All African Peoples’ Congress that Nkrumah organised. In Congo, the activists linked to MPLA could only create an organisation for the relief and care of the refugees fleeing northern Angola. It was possible because they had several doctors among their members. However, they eventually had to retreat from that project because they were under attack from the UPA who said that the MPLA was an organisation led by mestizos not real Africans. So, they had to close their office.
Pascal Bianchini: If we go back to Mário, he was the first president of MPLA, but he had to leave the place to Neto?
Billy Woodberry: Yes, but let’s say a word on Augustino Neto. After his medical studies, he went back to Luanda where he became a well-known doctor because he used to treat the people of the musseques (poor suburbs). Then there was a crackdown in Angola against the rise of anticolonial sentiments. Augustino Neto was arrested with Joaquin Pinto de Andrade who had become a priest. They were accused of propagating these radical ideas and both were imprisoned in Portugal. While the MPLA was set up, he was declared the honorary president of the organisation. It was partly done to protect Neto because they were afraid that the Portuguese would kill him. He was one of the first prisoners designated by Amnesty International. A campaign was made to free him. He was no longer in jail but under house arrest. Then, he managed to escape from Portugal and arrived in Leopoldville. In the first congress he was elected president. Then, a clash occurred with Viriato de Cruz who had been the first secretary general. Viriato decided to leave.
Pascal Bianchini: We can see that, since the beginning, in the MPLA there were important conflicts. Your film openly speaks about these conflicts. There is the first crisis of MPLA with the clash between Viriato de Cruz and Neto. Afterwards there is another issue which is important for Mário: The Revolta activa that occurred in 1974. Why did you choose to deal with these conflicts inside the movement? Because you could have, not hidden, but chosen not to speak so much about these internal problems?
Billy Woodberry: It’s part of the story of the movements. Because when you try to change society, internal contradictions may appear for various reasons, not always personal. And it’s the organisation’s responsibility to resolve them in the most productive way. These contradictions can sometimes explain things that occur later. I think that’s more helpful than pretending or being celebratory or simply denouncing one side against the other. To speak about Mário in this congress, when Viriato went out, shortly after, Mário realised he was voted off the committee. So, he resigned from MPLA for a time. He stayed in CONCP (Conference of Nationalist Organisations of the Portuguese Colonies) which was the larger organisation combining all of the liberation movements. Eventually, he kind of rejoined the MPLA where he was in charge for external relations when he was in Algeria. If we speak now about Active Revolt, they tried to democratise the movement but before they could really campaign on that issue, the Portuguese Revolution happened. Then, the other faction within MPLA with Chipenda, joined the FNLA (formerly UPA). A third of the fighters were with Chipenda (Eastern Revolt) and fought on the side of the FNLA which is significant. Besides, with the exclusion of the members of Active Revolt a lot of the intellectual capacity was lost, because these people were the more intellectually developed, etc.
Pascal Bianchini: As for Mário De Andrade because of his involvement in Active Revolt, he became a kind of a pariah for the official movement until the end of his life. In the film, you were telling the story of his passport. He wanted to get an Angolan passport, and they refused to give him this passport unless he wrote to apologise for Active Revolt, which eventually Mário refused to do. Until the end of his life, he was considered a dissident…
Billy Woodberry: That is part of the tragedy. Active Revolt was a movement that was not unreasonable. And they didn’t take up arms against the leadership to overthrow them. They just wanted to have a debate about the organisation. Why was it so necessary to exclude and crush these people? And it was not only Mário. It was for example Gentil Viana. He was jailed and he lost his sight in prison…
Pascal Bianchini: I have another question about another issue: the violence of colonialism, especially against the figures of the liberation movement. The film shows that the Portuguese used terrorist methods to target leaders from this liberation movement. I think the first one was Eduardo Mondlane, if I’m not wrong?
Billy Woodberry: Yes, it was in 1969.
Pascal Bianchini: But it was not only the Portuguese. The Portuguese were also backed by the French state. He had problems with the French police. It’s an important detail that you mention in this film.
Billy Woodberry: The Western powers were clearly in support of Portugal. West Germany sent them weapons, as did the Americans. NATO weapons were used in these colonies outside of the defence of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance. The main exception were the Scandinavian countries. They were supporting the liberation movements in various ways. But what was important for instance in France was the support from leftist people, like Maspero. They were essential for the circulation of knowledge about the liberation movements. It was also the same in the United States. What must be said also is that the Angolans and the other liberation movements learned a lot from the Algerians. There is a photo where Mário appears at the United Nations, waiting for that vote about the Portuguese colonies: he was with three members of the Algerian diplomatic corps.
Pascal Bianchini: In your film, you talked about the relations between Fanon and Mário De Andrade. Could you explain their disagreement on the issue of revolution, social classes or racial analysis and so on. It’s an important point you made in the film…
Billy Woodberry: Mário disagreed with Fanon’s analysis about what he supposed was happening in the Angolan struggle for independence. Fanon thought that because Holden Roberto professed to be harsh and violent, he was the most serious one. Holden Roberto and his followers used to describe the MPLA people as a bunch of intellectuals, ‘mestizos’ or ‘assimilados’. Mário genuinely had a different analysis, because he knew something about that context. For him, Fanon’s ideas might have been in a way too general, and not specific to this context. Mário even thought that he misunderstood the Algerian revolution. It’s not every precept of Fanon he denied or rejected, but the absence of concrete analysis of the concrete situation. There was also another misunderstanding when Fanon in the name of the FLN made the proposal to the MPLA to train cadres to start the armed struggle. They replied to him that it was not yet possible because the repression was very harsh at the time. A lot of people were in prison. They weren’t making it up, this reason, because they were intellectuals afraid to fight.
Pascal Bianchini: Another significant period of Mário’s life is his stay in Guinea-Bissau when he was there for three or four years at the end of the 1970s. He was there in charge of the Ministry of Culture. How do you understand this moment in his life? Is it a kind of lesson given to other African leaders who turned their back on Pan-Africanism, becoming very nationalist, interested only in building their nation state? How do you understand Mário’s choice to live in Guinea Bissau? In the end it was again a tragedy that ended with a coup in 1980…
Billy Woodberry: Mário had always been very close to the people of the PAIGC. Mário had an official position in the CONCP. He was also very close to Amilcar Cabral, maybe the closest person to him. He knew and got on well with many leaders of PAIGC such as Pedro Pires; he had already started to work on the writings of Amilcar Cabral. Because after Amilcar Cabral was killed, there was this project with a contract that had been signed. When things went bad in Angola and his life was threatened, he decided to go to Guinea-Bissau to help them. Then, he was proposed as the Minister of Culture and he took the job with seriousness, with all his capacities. Luis Cabral, said to him: “As long as the Angolans are blind, take our house as your house. Come with us!” Then later, when that coup happened in 1980 and the split occurred, the people who were still close to him, and with whom he worked, were the Cape Verdeans, and they were PAIGC people too.
Pascal Bianchini: We can now speak about the end of his life in Paris in the 1980s. It was a return to Paris, as he was a student there in the 1950s. It’s a kind of paradox, to see him enrolled as a student in sociology at the École des Etudes en Sciences Sociales. I know Jean Copans quite well, the man who was the supervisor of his PhD. But a significant aspect, mentioned in your film by Sophie Bessis, the Tunisian historian and journalist, is that he was living in poor conditions, especially if you compare him to other people of this generation, who became African leaders of the independent States. At the end of his life, he was like a student, but a student in poverty. What’s the lesson, whether moral or political, that we can draw from the end of his life?
Billy Woodberry: First of all, we have to remember that when people like Mário made their choice to found and lead these movements, it was a radical kind of break with the career they could have had. They had their Portuguese expired passports and no more documents to travel… They had to get passports from other countries, newly independent States. The first time Mário got a new passport, it was in Morocco, then in Guinea, etc. He must have had 17, maybe 18 passports, but only five of them in his real name. The other thing is that joining a liberation movement was not a career move. You had to make profound sacrifices. Even if you consider Agostinho Neto, he was the head of State in 1975 and he died by 1979. He didn’t gain any fortune from petroleum. Amilcar Cabral, assassinated in 1973, didn’t leave a great fortune. Now if we take Mário, he could have had a big career, he had more publications than most academics who had books, articles, in multiple languages, but he had only a stipend from Cabo Verde, and sometimes some opportunities from UNESCO, because of his friends in the leadership of UNESCO, such as Henri Lopes. Mário never had an academic job though he was a man with vast knowledge. He could have gone to the USA or travelled elsewhere and gotten honorariums. But he was not interested in that because he and his comrades were working for a revolution, a transformation for all the people. Another thing to be said is that as a student in Paris, he had a subject he wanted to do. The research was important for him and as an enrolled student he had medical insurance, the opportunity to lecture or work in libraries.
Pascal Bianchini: I just came to a conclusion about the film. We can hear Mário saying that he will never regret what he had done with his comrades, that the essential project was attained: there was a colonial situation and now we are in a post-colonial situation; afterwards, the next generation will have to bring democracy and so on. However, in another passage of the film, five minutes before, Sophie Bessis, a journalist and an historian, was saying that he was obsessed by the question: “Why did we fail? We wanted to make the people free and happy, and you see what we have done”. I suppose it was your choice to put this together… How do you understand his position about independence and post-colonial state and so on?
Billy Woodberry: What he said to Sophie Bessis, who was one of the closest people to him, was what he believed. However, he did not want to bequeath despair to the next generation. He wanted them to continue and to fight. He never wanted people to be cynical. He wanted them to have their own experience. So, you have two different things inside Mário. His doubts, his pain, even despair, yes, it’s there. What he told Sophie Bessis, he meant it. But when he was speaking in a public forum, broadcast on TV, it’s not what he wanted to give to the future people.
Pascal Bianchini: About the way you made the film, what is remarkable is that it deals with a personal story, with a biographical trajectory about someone who had relationships with many people, as a friend, a brother, a comrade, and so on. But also, at the same time, you have the history of decolonisation, of the national liberation movement. How did you manage to follow these two parallel tracks in your film? It always shifts from one aspect to the other one, because Mário’s life was closely linked to this collective story? I suppose it must have been a lot of work for you to find the archives, the interviews, to read books and so on. How did you work to make this film?
Billy Woodberry: As Chris Marker says in his movie The Last Bolshevik, when you choose a figure, you realise that you’re making a story about a figure with a certain itinerary, and that you’re also making a story about a whole epoch, and so many related things. So, in this case, because of what Mário de Andrade was involved in, the moment when he comes about, the way that the process unfolds, the realisation of independence in African countries, etc., it allows us to suggest the larger context, the larger relationships and meanings. Reading books about this was a privilege and a pleasure. I am not tired of that thing. I have worked with different people. We were excited about the issue, and then it became a challenge of finding the best material and how to present it. We have a subject who was involved in that himself, who was generous towards others and gave us a lot of information about others and their contribution and describes different aspects of the process very well. The other thing is the idea of decolonisation. In fact, people are more interested in the concept, but they’re not so knowledgeable about the substance. They’re not interested in the leaders, and they’re not interested in the people. They’re interested in the symbols and the things to make arguments about it. But some people tried to make a difference and some of them were lost in the process. There is something to learn about that.
Pascal Bianchini: There is a long and fascinating interview with Mário. It’s a kind of autobiographical interview. How did you find this interview?
Billy Woodberry: It was in the archives of Portuguese television. The journalist who made that interview, Diana Andringa, was arrested with Mário’s brother Joaquim in 1971 and she speaks about this in the film. They had put some extracts online, but through her, we knew that it was longer than that. It belonged to public television. She only had the transcript, but we knew it was longer. First, they gave us the same ones that were online. We persisted pleasantly, and we were able to see the entire three hours. However, in this long interview, he doesn’t speak about the post-1970s years. He talks a bit more in a book-length interview with Michel Laban. That’s a good book and a good interview. The other one is Christiane Messiant[1].
Pascal Bianchini: A last word: what about the film now? We have a version in French, and an English one. It has been shown in several places.
Billy Woodberry: It has been shown in various festivals or other events in Rotterdam, Vienna, London, in Spain, and Montreuil in France, near Paris. I hope to also show the movie in Saint Louis in Senegal for a documentary festival.
[1] Michel Laban, Mário Pinto de Andrade, Uma entrevista, Lisbonne, João Sá da Costa, 1997, Christine Messiant, Sur la première génération du MPLA: 1948-1960, Mário de Andrade, entretiens avec Christine Messiant (1982). In: Lusotopie, n°6, 1999, pp. 185-221.
The film screened on 13 February 2025 at the 33rd Edition of the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles and will screen at DocLuanda in Angola, from 10 to 16 April, 2025. It premiered in theatres in Portugal on 28 November 2024 and stayed there a month and one half. It will be streaming in the U. S. on the Criterion Channel starting February 1, 2025 (https://www.criterionchannel.com/).
Pascal Bianchini is an independent sociologist based in Senegal. He has recently edited with Leo Zeilig and Nodongo Samba Sylla, Revolutionary Movements in Africa. An Untold Story (Pluto Press, 2024)
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