For the first time in African postcolonial history, citizens of a former European colonial power are seeking improved living conditions in an ex-colony on a massive scale. The long line of Portuguese women and men outside the Angolan consulate in Lisbon is a telling sign of a new era. In the queue, people from different walks of life wait anxiously for the consulate to open its doors. The majority of them have their hopes pinned on acquiring an immigration document that would allow them to earn a secure income in Angola. The queue outside the consulate indicates a reversal of migration flows. Up until the early 2000s, many Angolans moved to Portugal in search of personal security and a stable livelihood, but now migrants move from the former metropole to the former colony. An indication of the magnitude of this reversal is that in 2013 economic remittances from Angola to Portugal were 16 times the remittance transfers in the opposite direction (Observatório da Emigração 2016).
This unexpected event in European-African relations has its origins in the accidental conjunction of Angola rising1 and Portugal falling. In 2008, the North Atlantic financial crisis hit Portugal with the force of a gale. Drastically decreased salaries, massive unemployment and deep uncertainty soon overshadowed the life of many Portuguese, and a prolonged recession begun. In 2013, one fifth of the population was unemployed, the minimum salary was 485 euro and a normal age pension was less than 500 euro (Instituto Nacional de Eststística 2016; Portugal 2015). Most Portuguese experienced a rapid decline in their social and economic situation, and many found it impossible to sustain themselves and dependent family members. Simultaneously, a flow of international and Portuguese media reports described a rapid economic development in the former colony of Angola. Various sources made estimations of two-digit gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported a record macro-economic growth of 27% for the year 2007 (OECD 2011: 52). The prolonged civil war had finally come to an end in 2002, and a few years later the state had launched a comprehensive infrastructure reconstruction programme. The oil -fuelled economy controlled by the party-state was characterised by “turbo -capitalism ” (Schubert 2016a), and in combination with a lack of experienced professionals in most sectors the economic boom created a high demand for skilled and semi-skilled labour . Owners of Portuguese companies threatened by economic failure also came to see Angola as an opening, and many of them hastened to develop trade and business relations with Angolan economic interests. In a short period of time, this development created new and fortified economic ties and dependencies at multiple levels between the two countries.
Global discourses on migration as well as international migration regimes tend to build on and reinforce the image of economic migrants’ border crossings as solely taking place in a South-North direction. This book unsettles this idea by looking at the contemporary Portuguese labour migration to Angola, which arguably is a novel historical development. As such, it challenges stereotypical understandings of contemporary mobility and makes us remember that the directions of people’s migratory trajectories largely are unforeseen. In the 1990s and early 2000s, public debate and migration research in Portugal had been preoccupied with the integration of citizens from the former African colonies (e.g. Machado et al. 2011), but in the second half of the 2000s the discourse changed. Also, in relation to the field of international migration studies, contemporary European labour migration to Africa represents something new. While there is a wealth of literature on international economic/labour migration, this literature is mainly focused on South -North migration and, to a lesser extent, South-South labour migration. However, there is of yet little research on economic migrants moving North-South. Moreover, the existing literature on North -South migration tends to focus on privileged travel and so-called “expatriates ” (e.g. Amit 2007; Hindman 2013; Leonard 2010). Estimates indicate that between 3% and 6% of all migrants move from the North to the South and that China and Brazil are important countries of destination (Laczko and Brian 2013). While Portugal constitutes a specific case in Europe because of its severe economic crisis and its history as both a colonial power and a country of emigration , it is possible that North -South migration will increase in the future. Such new movements will give rise to new questions that need to be addressed within the vast research field attending to international migration, and this book represents a step in that direction.
The need to secure a reliable income is a reality shared by economic migrants all over the world and also by the Portuguese in Angola. Often, their main motive for migrating has been to get out of unemployment or precarious employment conditions in Portugal and thereby avoid social degradation. Some were heavily indebted, others wanted to be able to keep their house in Portugal or continue financing their children’s studies. In Angola, they have identified possibilities of finding a stable job and comparatively higher income and often also socio-professional advancement. Some of the migrants have opted for earning enough money to raise a family or to sustain family members left behind in Portugal. Thus, acquiring a status as a legal immigrant and successfully integrating into the labour market is the goal for most of these migrants, as for other international labour migrants. Yet, like other international migrants, the Portuguese do not always obtain these objectives, and they often find themselves in a subordinate position in relation to powerful representatives of the Angolan party-state. What is special in this case, however, is that the Portuguese migrants’ inferior position in relation to the Angolan party-state is combined with a position of symbolic power grounded in the Portuguese historical identity as coloniser.
Thus, this is a case of ex-colonisers moving to the ex-colony. In the African context, there is no other example of a high number of people moving from a European ex-colonial power to an ex-colony on the continent. On a global scale, there is a limited European migration to Latin America ex-colonies. Some Portuguese have left for Brazil (Marques and Góis 2016) and there is a recent Spanish migration to Ecuador, Bolivia and Colombia (Laczko and Brian 2013). In this last case, however, many of these migrants once left Latin America for Spain, and now they are returning to a country where they are perceived to be a part of the native population. As I will make clear, some of the Portuguese are actually also returning to Angola where they grew up as children to Portuguese settlers in colonial times. Thus, they are returnees, but they are hardly considered to belong to the native population.
This book explores everyday postcolonial encounters (Faier and Rofel 2014) between the Portuguese ex-colonisers turned migrants and the ex-colonised Angolan “hosts” in the Angolan capital of Luanda . The thrust in the chapters to follow is an analysis of how the Luso-African postcolonial heritage interplays with the recent migration from Portugal to Angola in the (re)construction of power relations and identities . In doing that, the book proposes an interpretation of the Angolan-Portuguese relationship as characterised not only by hierarchies of power but also by ambivalence and hybridity . Arguably, the identities of the ex-colonised Angolan and the Portuguese ex-coloniser are mutually constituted and constructed out of a history of interdependence. This history has been marked by deeply unequal and often violent power relations, yet it has produced two tightly interwoven identities and a sense of intimacy between the two, though of a very fraught and conflictive nature. The Angolans and Portuguese who meet in Luanda are well known to each other; when they meet, they construct their identities interdependently.
The focus on power relations and identities implies that inquiries into postcolonial continuities and discontinuities are central to this book. In researching continuities and ruptures , I take the “post” in “postcolonial ” to signal both “continuance” and “after”. On one hand, many of the colonial relations of power are still in place, not the least in terms of inequalities between Angolans and Portuguese with regard to accumulation of cultural and symbolic capital (Bourdieu 2005). On the other hand, enormous social, cultural, political and economic changes have taken place in both Angola and Portugal since Angolan independence in 1975, and these clearly rule out any notions about the postcolonial period as simply an ongoing and continuous process in relation to the colonial past. As Stuart Hall remarks, the postcolonial not only is “after” but also “goes beyond” the colonial (1996a: 253) and in that process new identities and power positions emerge.
Explorations of identity constructions play a key role in postcolonial studies, highlighting the ways in which identities are relational and shaped by shifting power relations (Hall 1996a). Identities are made and remade through discourse and practice; they are fundamentally relational and shaped in interaction with important others. It is only in relation to its “constitutive outside” (Hall 1996b) that identities can be construed. In Luanda , it was obvious that Angolans’ and Portuguese’ talk about the Other also reflected understandings of Self. This implies that while I use the term...