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2023-2 Angola in the 21st century. Collective Imagination and Knowledge Production

Deadline for submission: 17 April 2023

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Editors
Dr. Dorothée Boulanger (University of Oxford)
Prof. António Tomás (University of Johannesbourg)

While Angolan elections have consistently led to the victory of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) since they were first held in 1992, the campaign for the August 2022 general elections had raised serious hopes for political change among its opponents. With Adalberto Costa Júnior, a new candidate popular beyond the circle of its traditional supporters, the historic opposition party UNITA (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola) succeeded in bringing together a broad coalition of parties and citizens' movements for political change, generating an unusual enthusiasm across the social, geographical and demographic strata of Angolan society. The hypothesis we raise is that this contested victory, which confirms the continuous erosion of the MPLA's voter base since 2008 (the date of the first general elections since the end of the civil war in 2002), marks the end of a cycle in Angola. The shift to the opposition in the capital, Luanda, is a strong sign of this. Luanda, a historical bastion of the MPLA, played a key role in the party's rise to the head of state at the time of independence in 1975. Similarly, during the post-election violence of 1992, the regime did not hesitate to arm the population to drive out UNITA. A showcase for the reconstruction of the country led by the MPLA after 2002, the capital now appears to be the main focus of contestation against the government. Although the party-state is holding up better in the provinces, it does not seem to be in a hurry to organise local elections there, which it expects to be unfavourable.

The day after the results of the 2022 general elections were announced, the discouragement and despair of those who had believed in a genuine change of government, particularly Angolan youth, was palpable. This political impasse is also the consequence and reflection of an economic impasse: since independence, Angola's offshore oil has provided the ruling party with considerable financial and geopolitical resources, enabling it to both maintain its leadership and buy civil peace, even within the ruling class. Now the largest oil producer in Africa, Angola remains stuck on an exclusively extractivist economic model: beyond oil and diamonds, which, at the time of the civil war, financed UNITA, the announced diversification projects concern above all the exploitation of new mining resources, Angola being rich in rare metals essential for high technology.

Thus, despite its revolutionary pedigree, the youth of its population, the wealth of its resources and the vitality of its cultural and artistic production, Angola seems to be stuck between authoritarianism and extractivism, with an exceptionally resilient ruling class that is locking up the country's future in order to better guarantee its own by betting on the frenetic exploitation of its subsoil. While the change of president had briefly raised hopes of a renewal of democratic and redistributive practices, in the end it only confirmed both the hackneyed mechanisms of the party-state and the seemingly unassailable horizon that it constitutes. The political crisis is all the more palpable as new challenges, such as the SARS-COVID pandemic or the climate and environmental crises, are added to the older problems (inequality, poverty, lack of education and opportunities).

These tensions between impasse and change, paralysis and dynamism are at the heart of our reflection: how to account for the contradictions that characterise Angola today? What are the methodological, conceptual, epistemological and artistic tools to be mobilised or invented in order to increase our understanding of the Angolan situation, and to produce knowledge that nourishes the emancipatory logics and the collective imagination of the country?

This special issue of Lusotopie seeks to nourish scientific reflection and interdisciplinary dialogue on the Angolan present and future. We will seek both to account for the diversity of the country and its people (often reduced to its capital Luanda, and its two and a half million inhabitants), to describe the impasses they face, and to consider the possibilities of transcending these impasses, politically, economically, socially, intellectually and artistically. In doing so, we will also be able to revisit the revolutionary utopia that carried the anti-colonial struggle in the 1960s and 1970s, and the nostalgia associated with it; to interrogate the springs of the ideological plasticity of a chameleon-like MPLA and its extractivist practices; and, in the literary and artistic domains, to identify Angola's contributions to Afro-futurism, in the knowledge that the country retains an ambivalent relationship with its own Africanness. Faced with a gerontocratised political class, it will also and above all ask who, today in Angola, is able to conceive 'new metaphors of the future' (Sarr 2019), to reinvent the tools that open up the field of Angolan possibilities. Half a century after independence and the combat poetry characteristic of the anti-colonial struggle, what functions do Angolan artists, intellectuals and writers, traditionally close to the government, occupy and claim? What is the role of the Angolan diaspora in the Afropolitan movement, which demands a new place for Africa in the world of tomorrow? What are the proposals, methods and objectives of the activist groups that, for the past ten years, have been carrying out political contestation on the fringes of the parties? Finally, the aim will be to grasp the deep and perhaps contradictory aspirations of the different segments of the Angolan population, and to measure the importance of imagination, utopia and hope in Angola today.

Potential themes and topics

  • The new crises (health, geopolitical, environmental, energy) through the lens of the lived and unlived experiences of Angolan society.

  • The country's political future, both in its official, institutional and party dimensions; in its informal, local and decentralised aspects; and at the intersection of these different levels: what alliances and coalitions can be imagined between opposition parties and civil society? How do they participate in the production of politics in Angola?

  • The geopolitical future of Angola, in the Africa of the future, in relation to the Portuguese-speaking worlds and beyond.

  • Angola through the prism of Afropolitanism and the role of the Angolan diaspora.

  • The relationship between the MPLA and the people, particularly through the lens of the rural-urban dichotomy, and past and present strategies of co-opting civil society.

  • The role of popular culture, the arts (performance, painting, photography, sculpture, cinema) and literature (fiction, poetry, comics, etc.): both in imagining Angolan futures, and/or in thinking about the ruptures and continuities between past and present in Angola.

  • New technologies and social networks in Angola, particularly their role in polarising debate in the public space and contesting state policy.

  • The structuring metaphors of Angolan history (anti-colonial struggle, civil war, etc.) in order to think about the manufacture of the Angolan collective imagination.

  • Angolan economic, productive and redistributive perspectives with or without oil, with or without minerals.

  • The Angolan city of the future, from Luanda to Huambo, from Lobito to Lubango.

  • Cross-border indigenous populations and their place in the Angola of the future

  • The coloniality of Angolan power and decolonial perspectives in Angola.

  • The gender of the future: while politically, economically and culturally marginalised, what are the possibilities for emancipation and equality for Angolan women, but also for sexual minorities and LGBTQ+ groups?

Abstract proposals (500 words) should be sent by 7 April 2023 to dorothee.boulanger@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk, atomas@uj.ac.za and the journal (lusotopie@gmail.com); and authors notified of acceptance or rejection on 30 April. If the abstract is selected, the full article (5,500-7,500 words / 35,000-50,000 characters) will be due on 31 July 2023.

The journal publishes in French, Portuguese and English.

Bibliographie

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Tomás, A. 2023, “A brief history of five elections in Angola”, Africa is a Country (blog), 6 February 2023, https://africasacountry.com/2023/02/a-brief-history-of-five-elections-in-angola/.

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