Art Historian, Nancy Dantas: Bertina Lopes was a trailblazing figure, considered the mother of modern art in Mozambique. She was known as “Mama B.”
My name is Nancy Dantas, and we are in front of Bertina Lopes's Grito grande or Big Cry.
It's composed of a central female figure, surrounded by a boy to the left and an inyanga, a practitioner of Indigenous medicine, to the right. Between the mother and the child, Lopes includes a solitary stalk of maize, one of the main staple crops. Also, this female figure has open arms that extend across the canvas, and her splayed upturned hands suggest supplication.
Mozambique, at the beginning of the 20th century, was colonized by the Portuguese. She paints this in 1970, a year of great upheaval in Mozambique's war of independence against Portugal. And this painting coincides with a number of events. The leader of the Mozambique Liberation Front, was killed. Shortly after that, the Portuguese initiate the Gordian Knot operation, one of the largest operations aimed at stifling the Liberation Front.
On the top half of the painting, one of the predominant colors is crimson, suggestive of blood or a consuming fire, as a visual reference to one of the Portuguese scorched-earth tactics. The colonial soldiers would uproot plants, and burn down huts and fields to force families out of liberation zones. So what we see in Loud Cry is the encroaching fire on mothers, children, and nature.