Ricardo Rangel
Untitled, Maputo, Mozambique 1969
In 1996, I was told a story of a Portuguese cattle breeder who branded a young herdsman. Shocked by this account of extraordinary inhumanity, I decided, along with a friend, to find this young man to photograph him and publish his image in order to alert society. One day, while passing through a tavern in Changalane, a region about 70 km from the capital, I commented upon this story to the barkeeper who exclaimed, "Oh yes, el ocho! You two are looking for el ocho. Yes he lives nearby, but he's not around today, he went into the city." And so we went in search of the cattle breeder who admitted to the act, arguing that the herdsman had lost a head of cattle and in order to punish him, he had decided to brand him with the same branding iron used to mark his cattle. We returned to the city and found the young man and photographed him. However, the publication of this photograph was prohibited by the colonial censor that controlled all journalistic publications at the time. Only after independence, in 1975, did I succeed in publishing that photograph. To me it is an infernal document.