Music genre · Angola
Semba
Semba is a popular music and dance from Angola that took modern form in the musseques (informal neighbourhoods) of Luanda in the 1940s and 1950s. Groups such as Ngola Ritmos, founded in 1947 by Liceu Vieira Dias and others, set Kimbundu songs and traditional rhythms to guitars, helping build an Angolan identity before independence; singers such as Bonga took it worldwide, and in the 1980s it fed the creation of kizomba.
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Music of the musseques
In colonial Luanda, the musseques — the sand-floored neighbourhoods around the Portuguese city — were home to most Angolans and to a rich musical life. Semba grew there from older Kimbundu songs and dances, and its name is linked to massemba, a dance step in which partners' bellies touch.
Ngola Ritmos and the idea of Angola
In 1947 a group of young men including Liceu Vieira Dias formed Ngola Ritmos in Luanda. They played Angolan rhythms on the acoustic guitar alongside traditional instruments such as the dikanza, a notched scraper, and ngoma drums, and they sang in Kimbundu at a time when the colonial regime discouraged African languages and culture.
That choice was political. Ngola Ritmos and the groups that followed helped create a sense of angolanidade — Angolan identity — that fed the push for independence. Several musicians of this generation were persecuted by the Portuguese authorities for their links to the nationalist movement.
The electric era
In the 1960s and 1970s, semba went electric. Bands such as Os Kiezos, and singers such as Elias dya Kimuezo, often called the "king of Angolan music", filled Luanda's dance halls with guitar-driven semba.
Bonga (José Adelino Barceló de Carvalho, born 1942), a former athlete who went into exile in Europe, became semba's best-known voice abroad. His 1972 album Angola 72, with songs such as "Mona Ki Ngi Xica", is a classic of African music, its raw, husky vocals carrying the sadness of colonial war and exile.
From semba to kizomba
After independence in 1975 and through years of civil war, Angolan musicians kept reinventing their music. In the 1980s, a slower, smoother, romantic style emerged in Luanda, influenced by semba and by the Caribbean zouk then popular across Lusophone Africa: kizomba. Kizomba became a global partner dance, while semba itself has been revived by singers such as Paulo Flores.
Related
Semba's sister song across the Lusophone Atlantic is Cabo Verde's morna. It shares a guitar-led, Afro-Caribbean history with Congolese rumba, just to the north. For Portuguese-speaking Africa's best-known painter, see Malangatana.
