By RODRIGO MAIOLINI REBELLO PINHO*
To speak of a soil without divisions is certainly not talking about this Brazil, still a homeland of merchants without blushing.
The murder of Moïse Kabamgabe once again places before the eyes of the world, as in an anatomy in a living body, the guts of what is called Brazil. It exposes a past that has not been overcome, which does not exist as a mere remnant, but lives on as a legacy. Like the dead grabbing the living by the hair, the slave colonial way of objectifying capital pulses.
Now, what is the infamous Tropicália kiosk if not a commercial venture aimed at satisfying gringo stomachs and fantasies? What is Brazil if not a machine for grinding its own people, which feeds on its own flesh and blood to satisfy foreign needs?
A Moïse tortured and murdered by the beach, the waves that come and go lapping, the wind whistling, targets and tourist couples buying cold beer, looking with dismay at a black body bound and gagged, already helpless and inert , as if it were a natural component of the useless landscape.
The Atlantic at the bottom of Tropicália was perhaps not the most appropriate landscape for Moïse's martyrdom, but the organic mud dyed in blood flowing from the hills of Petrópolis through the arms of the capital, which destroys the only two sources of all wealth: nature and the human being.
The death of Moïse Kabamgabe makes us want to call on Columbus to close the door to these seas. For Moïse escaped life in the Congo to find death here. Before ultimate reality he still experienced exploration. He worked at Tropicália, served tourists, slept on the sand, worked the next day, didn't get paid, demanded what was his and, for that, he died. He died on the public promenade, interfering with traffic, because his mother, like an Antigone, did not accept the iniquitous silence and stopped the traffic of cars, whose nuisance thus gave birth to Moïse's death.
In addition to hope, a stranger in this land, Moïse arrived here carrying nothing but the brands of builders, all strangers to this land: workers, blacks, immigrants. But if Moïse wasn't born expropriated, wasn't born black and wasn't born an immigrant, if it was the world that made him a worker, black and immigrant, one has to ask himself, a thousand times, if a social soil that wasn't divided into classes, that If it weren't divided into races, if it wasn't studded with national States, would it be such a fertile soil for the fact, the perpetrators and the victim of the horrendous crime to thrive?
But to speak of a land without divisions is certainly not talking about this Brazil, still the homeland of merchants without blushing, still a land that already in the name reveals its bloodline face, its mercantile purpose.
Of all that can be said, there is nothing to console those who remain from the so unfair departure of those who are so awkwardly hampered from receiving the minimum that was owed to them by the pioneering, liberating and booty capitalism.
It remains, however, for the living to live. And, living, stir up this rotten soil, so that a Moise in ashes may never return to it, but a Moise in bloom.
*Rodrigo Maiolini Rebello Pinho Master in History from PUC-SP.
