Henry e a magia dos celulares

Artista de Kampala, Uganda, nosso amigo Henry Mujunga também nos concedeu uma grande entrevista. Dotado de uma bela retórica, Henry nos contou parte da história de Uganda, a chegada ao poder do ditador Idi Amin Dada, o seu ponto de vista sobre a sociedade sul-africana, e sobre a magia dos celulares...

“It’s not xenofobia. This is some kind of a self-hate that people have suffered. Usually what happens is that the oppressed are supposed to confront the oppressor. Unfourtunately, in the south african case the oppressed, who are the black majority, the masses, did not get a chance to revenge themselves upon oppressor, who happen to be the white minority, because of a Mandela’s theory of rainbow nation, reconciliation and friendship. So, he created a situation where these guys had a lot of anger, and a lot of retreat and resentment, but because he was their leader and contained all that retreat in themselves, and south africa went through a seemingly peaceful transition from white minority rule, to majority rule… but unfourtunately you cannot hide human problems like that. Human being cannot store anger and retreat for a long time. They have to find a way of getting it out. So these people, slowly by slowly, began hating themselves. That’s why you find them using drugs, turning to crime and things like that, because they hate themselves. And sometimes they hate themselves for not reacting to the oppression that happened and also they hate themselves because they feel weak and unable to do something about the situation. So what happens is they look around for a weak target and the weak target is usually these poor immigrants who come around… because these guys hate! And they cannot kill themselves. So they look around for something or someone who looks like them, and then they attack and kill that! And hoping that the pain will go away. But it will not! Because in the end, the thing that cause them all this suffering, all this so called ‘economic deprivation’ still around!”

“I think we are very very powerful in Africa. We have a lot of power and a lot of knowledge. The science of the west is just discovering, in africa we always knew, that you can communicate with the wind. That I can seat here and make a talk, and talk and talk. And you hear me in Mozanbique. We knew that already, as a concept. But we did not bother with trying to create machines or ways to make it happen the way the “scientific world” wanted to happen. Now you seat there with your mobile phone, and them you get your finger and you touch something… What are you doing? You are doing Vudu! You are doing magic! Mobile phones are now like 10/15 years old in Uganda. Before that you had to go, get a phone which had the line linking this phone all the way to the other phone. Now you just hold a peace of thing, and then you talk to yourself. And then, when you run out of time, you go to the man and you say “can you sell me some air?”. Air time. Air, you know, air is air. In the past in kampala, if someone said “I have sold you air”, that means they have cheated you. But now you get your money out of your pocket, and you go to this guy and you say “sell me some air”, and they give you a small piece of paper, you scratch it, you do your magic, you type somewhere and you put it in there, and you have some air time, now you can make a call to UK. You are really doing vudu, magic, but because you at now think that’s new knowledge, you don’t relate it with magic. But the african already knew, long time ago, that we are one with the universe. That you can do anything you want. You can just seat here and everything happens.”