CHAPTER 1

2002, Year Zero

The Foundations of the New Angola

In 2011, RĂĄdio Mais—“a rĂĄdio da Nova Angola!” (the Radio of the New Angola)—repeatedly played a short jingle that cut together snippets of Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, Kofi Annan’s farewell speech, and a previous State of the Nation speech by President JosĂ© Eduardo dos Santos.1 The message of this New Angola was clear: President dos Santos was on an equal footing with those renowned world leaders. Since the end of the war, there have been concerted efforts to rebrand dos Santos as the “Architect of Peace.” He is hailed in public media as a “Great African Statesman” or compared to Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu.2 A constant barrage of speeches and media reports extolling the virtues of “the executive,” singing the praises of the president, and praising the successes of both in reconstructing the country hammers home the message that the MPLA is the party of peace and material reconstruction.
In this chapter, I examine the production of the Angolan postwar master narrative as the discursive underpinning of the system, and its effect on the sociopolitical and physical environment of Luanda. I contend that the Angolan narrative relies on, and has promoted, a very selective reading of the history of the Angolan conflict, a reading that involves shrouding the conflict’s ideological or political root causes and silencing the more unsavory aspects of the ruling MPLA’s part in the conflict.3 Although the MPLA’s past as an anticolonial liberation movement has been subject to patriotic rewriting, its position after independence, as both the legitimate government of Angola and, at the same time, a participant in the civil war, has proven much more problematic for straightforward political appropriation. Because of the MPLA’s role in Angolan postindependence history, especially with regard to key events such as the 27 May 1977 coup attempt and the 1992 elections, even a tailored version of the past would stir up too many unwanted questions. The postwar master narrative thus selectively conceals the conflict’s postindependence period. According to this reading of history, the end of the war in 2002 functions as Year Zero of the country’s independence, which was delayed only by the conflict.
It is a teleological reading of history, one which starts with the heroic independence struggle of the MPLA, in which the movement prevailed over internal and external enemies. The Angolan conflict, in that perspective, was thus merely the continuation of this struggle to overcome the last obstacles keeping Angola from fulfilling its manifest destiny. All the promises of independence that were never fulfilled because of the civil war can now finally be honored. As all blame for the conflict is laid on UNITA’s insurgency against the state, peace and the rightful predominance of the MPLA are the just rewards of this luta contĂ­nua.4 Finally, the New Angola is entering history and taking up its rightful place in the community of sovereign nations.5 Through this hegemonic discourse of peace and national reconstruction and a selective silencing of postindependence history, the MPLA and President JosĂ© Eduardo dos Santos have been recast as the sole guarantors of peace and stability.
Based on this image of the Architect of Peace, the second core element of the narrative is the reduction of the Angolan conflict to its material effects, in which the war has been resignified as a technical, material issue, as a largely actor-less calamity that befell the Angolan people as a whole. In this perspective, 1975–2002 was a time of “massive destruction of lives and infrastructures,” but was not in any way linked to personal agency or political agendas, ideologies, or economic motivations. It was, rather, a situação (situation) beyond anyone’s control.6 The war is spoken of in terms of “material and human losses” and “large-scale destruction of infrastructures,” often quantified in terms of monetary costs, or depicted as an obstacle to economic growth and progress that has held back the country for too long on its path to prosperity and subregional influence.
More important, if peace equals infrastructure reconstruction, there is no need for reconciliation (i.e., a political dialogue between former enemies, or any form of institutionalized dealing with the past). There is no need to revisit the past in this New Angola, a country of promising futures, manifest destiny, and unparalleled economic growth. Ideology, when it is hegemonic, is couched in the language of reason, commonsensical knowledge, and the greater good; any dissenting opinion, by contrast, is denounced as ideological, irrational, and antithetical to the will of “the people.” And it is on this dominant discourse of peace, stability, and reconstruction that the MPLA today bases its claim to political legitimacy.
In the first section, I review the historiography of Angolan nationalism and of the civil war by juxtaposing the dominant narrative with how scholarly literature has addressed these periods. This more historical section of the chapter allows me to build my argument about why the MPLA’s relationship to its past is so tenuous, and why memory politics in Angola focus on the liberation struggle rather than on the postindependence Angolan conflict. This also provides the reader with an overview of the Angolan conflict. Here, I specifically look at two key events of postindependence history, the 27 May 1977 coup attempt and the elections and postelectoral violence of 1992–93, which despite official silence continue to strongly impact debates, discourses, and practices.
Having thus laid the groundwork for my analysis, I examine in the second half of the chapter how, since the end of the war, the Angolan conflict has been resignified in dominant discourse. By unpacking the core elements of the master narrative, and the discursive strategies, tools, and performative acts employed, I look at how the MPLA is projecting a forward-oriented, materialist conception of national reconstruction to promote the idea of a New Angola, one that starts with a clean slate. Rather than ascribing intentionality to specific social actors (which would be hard to prove empirically), I aim to demonstrate how this dominant discourse structures the terms of the debates; that is, how it creates the conditions for what can be thought and said publicly. The circulation of these ideas then produces certain kinds of subjectivities and, in turn, shapes material reality.7 To the extent that reconciliation has been equated with, and limited to, infrastructure reconstruction and a politics of concrete, so has the built environment become a key site of contestations over history and meaning. This is nowhere more evident than in Luanda. I thus argue that the destruction of historic neighborhoods and key mnemonic sites also works as the material manifestation of the MPLA’s will to impose the ideology and vision of a New Angola on the cityscape.8
In this chapter, then, I read the transformations of the urban environment through the totalizing effects of the dominant postwar political discourse rather than retrace the history and development of urban planning per se.9 Instead, I look at the physical transformation of the built environment as the material effect of the political project of the creation of a new country. Although these large-scale infrastructure and building projects invoke the imperatives of (neoliberal) economics, safety, health, and urban planning, I argue that these processes of urban upgrading (requalificação urbana) are better understood as practices of “spatial cleansing” (Herzfeld 2006). Moreover, in this first chapter I very much focus on the public transcript of Angolan history. Numerous hidden transcripts and popular memories about national history circulate, of course, that more explicitly contest and subvert the master narrative. I address these in chapter 2.

Memory Politics in Southern Africa

Ever since Werbner diagnosed a “postcolonial memory crisis” in Southern Africa, it has been taken almost as a given that former liberation movements across the subregion instrumentalize and appropriate national history for their own means to assert their claims to national leadership and discredit political opponents (Werbner 1998).10 Primorac, writing on Zimbabwe, describes the creation of a “master narrative” by which the state “seeks to govern the production of all other socially constructed meanings” (2007, 434). Because of the conflicts and discrepancies between state and popular readings of national history, memory then becomes a political space where ideas of nationhood, political legitimacy, and identity are contested (Werbner 1998, 95).
Over the past fifteen years, such processes of memory making have received sustained scholarly attention, especially in Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Mozambique, which share with Angola certain characteristics of postliberation dominant-party regimes. In Zimbabwe, the ruling ZANU (PF) has monopolized the history of the independence struggle “as means [sic] of reasserting its own legitimacy whilst also undermining the ‘liberation credentials’ of the opposition party the MDC” (Fontein 2009a, 15). This resignifying of history includes promoting a “patriotic history” in school and university teaching, a history that is, as Ranger explains, “narrower than the old nationalist historiography” and resents “disloyal” questions about nationalism (2004, 218). This patriotic history promotes a kind of “exclusive nationalism” to discredit any opposition challenges to its political primacy (Alexander and McGregor 2007) and helped reconfigure the political crises of the 2000s as “Third Chimurenga” to justify the fast-track land reform and position violence as the main form by social and political conflict was acted out (Kössler 2010, 41).
Namibia has followed similar paths of using national history for political means: the former liberation movement and ruling party, SWAPO, has promoted a narrow reading of the history of the liberation struggle, premised on its heroic role and sacrifices in freeing the country from the South African yoke (Becker 2011, 520). This one-sided history is embodied in the National Heroes’ Acre (based on the Zimbabwean model and designed and built by a North Korean art workshop) and in a selective canonized set of materials and national holidays (Kössler 2007, 363–4). As both Kössler and Becker show, individual and collective contestations over this history are played out in a variety of arenas, including alternative sites of commemoration and community memorial practices, with varying success.
In Mozambique, history remains a main site of political contestation, with the former civil war opponents, the ruling Frelimo (Mozambican Liberation Front, Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) and main opposition party Renamo (Mozambican National Resistance, ResistĂȘncia Nacional Moçambicana) both openly trading accusations about the civil war in parliament and “us[ing] memories as weapons to settle accounts with former wartime foes” (Igreja 2008, 539).11 For example, both the root cause of the civil war and the creation of the newer, second-largest opposition party, MDM, can be traced back to Frelimo’s killing of Uria Simango after the assassination of Eduardo Mondlane. The resurgence of armed conflict in Mozambique since 2013 is arguably also made intelligible through the history of the civil war, with Renamo justifying their return to arms with the fact that Frelimo “violated the Rome Accords” (the 1992 Rome General Peace Accords), an argument that finds surprising resonance even outside of Renamo’s traditional central heartlands.12

The Public Transcript of Angolan History

Similar observations can be made if we look at how the history of Angolan nationalism and the independence struggle (1950s to 1975) has been reworked in official discourse for political aims. The social roots of Angolan nationalism have been explored elsewhere in great detail, and I will therefore limit myself to the most salient points here.13
In her analysis of the sources of the MPLA’s history, Christine Messiant (1998) explains how and why the MPLA has rewritten its history, and why national history is still the object of strong polemic. Her central argument is that the MPLA never was, despite later efforts to portray itself as such, the first or only expression of Angolan nationalism, and has only a tenuous claim on having won independence for Angola. In Mozambique, Frelimo was, at the moment of independence, the sole recognized representative of the Mozambican people; in Angola, the three nationalist movements, the FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola, Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola), the MPLA, and UNITA, had already rivalled and fought each other before independence—rivalries that the Portuguese colonial power skillfully nurtured to play off the groups against each other.14 The Alvor Agreement of 15 January 1975, which stipulated the gradual withdrawal of Portugal and a power-sharing transition government composed of the three movements, soon fell apart. Negotiations failed, and “elections were foregone for military engagement between the three parties, each emboldened by Cold War resources and rhetoric” (Moorman 2008, 169).
Armed confrontations escalated from June 1975, with the three movements trying to extend their territorial control and thereby strengthen their claims to representing a majority of the Angolan people in view of the planned elections (Pearce 2015a), and the MPLA holding on to the capital. The FNLA and UNITA marched on Luanda, but the MPLA, with Cuban help, prevailed in its control of the capital, defeating the FNLA on 10 November 1975 in the Battle of Kifangondo, and pushing back the South African Army that was moving on to Luanda from the South in support of UNITA at Sumbe. Reflecting these realities, there were then two separate declarations of independence on 11 November 1975, one by the MPLA in Luanda and one by UNITA in Huambo, both claiming sovereignty on behalf of the Angolan people.15
Witnessing the intervention of the South Afric...