Woya hayi mawe: where are you going to?

Woya hayi mawe: where are you going to? These lyrics echo Mozambican musician Lenna Bahule’s explorations both in her birthplace – Maputo – and in her adopted home of São Paulo. From the stage to the urban outskirts, we see how Lenna deals with the difficulties of being a black female musician in both Brazil and Mozambique. The artistic world of São Paulo demands her Africanity, her African references, her roots. Yet in Mozambique Lenna is now known for her success in Brazil: she brings some of Brazil’s cultural power to the stage in Maputo. Returning to Mozambique, she rediscovers her home country with new eyes. Lenna meets and works with an inspirational new generation of Maputo-based musicians, who she involves in the production of a show in Maputo’s Centro Cultural Franco-Moçambicano. From this major cultural institution, to her grandmother’s farm and a social project in Maputo’s outskirts, we see Lenna and the Maputo artivists investigating Mozambique’s traditional and popular musics and discovering new musical and activist routes. Navigating between activism and the stage, between an imagined ‘Africa’ that Brazil demands of her, and a Brazilian cosmopolitanism São Paulo has given her, Lenna discovers – in a traditional Chopi song that travels – that her musical roots were even more powerful than she imagined.