outrage

Yesterday I was watching a programme in RTP2 which normally irritates me - "Por outro lado". It did irritate me a little bit but I was interested in the interviewee, an architect from Mozambique. You could see he was a bit irritated, like me. Anyway, apart from his clever answers and no fear of saying the truth, one of his projects caught my attention. The Bmuzini Memorial, designed by José Forjaz as a remembrance for Samora Machel. The first president of Mozambique, and other 34 people died when the presidential plane, returning from a summit in Zambia, crashed at Mbuzini in South Africa on 19 October 1986. The cause of the crash has not been officially determined, although circumstantial evidence points to a false navigational beacon placed by the former apartheid regime in South Africa to draw the plane off course.

The monument, sited in a barely accessible hillside, features 35 vertical steel columns -- one for each person killed in the plane crash -- inserted on a concrete platform that tapers into the ground. As one approaches the columns a constant, wind-induced whistling can be heard as a result of the small incisions on each pole, a sound described by some as troublesome. The interviewer insisted “it’s a lament, a cry”. “No, it is rage”, he said. He was a closer friend of Samora Machel.

Today, I discovered José Forjaz on the web and found this. The architect's site opens with an appeal, written with rage about the plans of the South African province to “upgrade” the memorial, in a project that will destroy the initial intent of the creator who was not officially informed about it. I think I’m with him. Worth taking a good look at the pictures of the memorial and the “upgrading”, which will include an amphi­theatre, a helipad, an exhibition centre and a library.

“The memorial has a number of meanings -- symbolic, aesthetic and even acoustic. By adding a lot of stuff to it, the monument will disappear.” José Forjaz