Opera will no longer be considered elite entertainment in Switzerland after Hèctor Parra has given the world premiere, in the luxurious Grand Théâtre de Genève, of what is undoubtedly the saddest opera in the world. Created together with the playwright and director Milo Rau and the writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Justice leaves the public dismayed because, without seeking tears, it calls to share the pain of the people who are victims in the mining areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo – without repair – of accidents caused by multinationals that plunder raw materials in Africa. All to feed the insatiable technology industry in which every first world citizen participates.
All the misery of postcolonial Africa is felt in that tragic score that becomes a requiem and that emanates more lyricism than is usual in Parra. It is clear that he writes for the victims, for those who have died and for those who are still here, and he dedicates lines of song to them of shocking beauty. With the help of documentary material, the work reconstructs what happened in 2019 in Kabwe, Katanga, the town where dozens of people died – or were mutilated or burned – when a tanker truck with sulfuric acid collided with a bus. He was heading to the Mutanda mine, the largest cobalt mine in the world, operated by the Swiss multinational Glencore.
An overturned truck presides over the scenery in which it is not afraid to project video images that were taken in situ at the time: people lying in puddles of acid while their legs disappear from the sight of those who lament from the road. Help took a long time to arrive. You don’t hear the screams in the opera, but there must have been when it is explained that trapped children were dying consumed by a drip of acid. Then it started to rain and the acid ran. Animals died, more people were exposed.
“We are a colonized former colony,” says Fiston Mwanza Mujila when he takes the stage. The poet currently residing in Graz but born near Kabwe makes himself a librettist here. And he tells the facts directly… until leaving the public with no escape.
“I try to use a small voice: the best way to tell something is to make it simple, not use metaphors, use short sentences. We need global solidarity. “In Europe we talk all the time about climate change, but in the Congo we destroy nature and forget that children and women work to provide raw materials for our technology.”
This will later be explained to La Vanguardia while celebrating the success with the rest of the cast. Surrounding him in the opera canteen are a good handful of Congolese actors who have participated as extras. There is also the immense Axelle Fanyo who has played the role of the mother of a dead girl; the countertenor Serge Kakudji, who was also born near Kabwe and who gives voice to the young man who has lost his legs, or the Serbian mezzo Katarina Bradic as the alcoholic chauffeur, since for the role of the driver Parra wanted a female voice, in order to “get out of the cliché.” In reality, the person driving that truck one day in 2019 was a man who was in a hurry on a defective road.
The story has attracted a hundred international journalists to the Grand Théâtre. And a Swiss television program has dedicated a documentary to Justice in which Glencore has refused to participate… “Out of respect for the victims,” the company alleged.
“For a dead infant, the victims were paid $250 [in reality it was $500], and for an adult, $1,000,” the script reads. Justice is something that in this case has still not come. But… could an opera change reality?
“The crowdfunding that we are doing is going to modify the situation, it will reactivate the economic situation of the lawyers who defend these people,” explains Parra. The greatest wish of the victims we met in Kabwe when we traveled there is for their voices to be heard in the theater through lyrical singing. They live isolated in massacred places and want other people to share their pain. And that’s why Justice is worth it.”
The Barcelona composer traveled with a whole team to see the place and its people first-hand. And although he had already begun to compose, he let himself be immersed in folklore and asked the children to sing him traditional songs. On stage, a modern Congolese guitarist, Kojack Kossakamvwe, expresses himself with the rhythms of the place and an Afro slap… and sometimes Parra’s orchestration – with the Orchester de la Suisse Romande and maestro Titus Engel – seeks to emulate him in a curious journey into that culture.
It is the first production of this size in which Congo and Europe join hands. And it is also the first opera that addresses the topic of current mining. With more than six million victims, most of them from hunger and preventable and curable diseases, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the country with the most victims caused by war since the Second World War. And its mining wealth continues to be a reason for incursion by multiple powers. Switzerland also concentrates 70% of the world’s raw materials trade… although it also has the city of human rights and now, now, with the opera theater that knows how to put itself in the shoes of its unprotected people.
