Manhood, Morality & the Transformation of Angolan Society: MPLA Veterans & Post-war Dynamics 1847012507, 9781847012500

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During the 1975–2002 Angolan Civil War much of the non-elite male population was conscripted into one or other of the contending armies, the country urbanised very rapidly, and colonial-era political and moral economies were radically reshaped. This book examines the pronounced changes this wrought on Angolan society, and, in particular, the gendered impacts on a generation of Angolan men recruited by the governing MPLA. Spall shows that the war’s effects went far beyond the political and economic, to affect sexual relations, the social valuation of money, respect for elder male wisdom and what it meant to be a senior man, as well as the discourses and practices of Christianity. Masculinity was central to how the social transformations of war were intimately experienced by Angolan soldiers; the author investigates the consequences of the men’s experiences when they returned home and the particular role of military service in fashioning Angola’s post-war social trajectory. John Spall is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of African Studies and Anthropology at the University of Birmingham, UK. Cover image: FAPLA soldiers playing on a captured South African Olifant battle tank at Cuito Cuanavale, 1988. © Jeremy Harding.

MPLA Veterans & Post-war Dynamics

‘Offers important insights on the establishment of Angola’s import-dependent coping economy in the provinces after the war. . . its analysis of masculinities and moral economies gives it a completely different focus that opens [it] up to wider, comparative debates beyond Angola.’ Jon Schubert, Brunel University

Manhood, Morality & the Transformation of Angolan Society

‘An important contribution to the growing fields of study on gender and conflict and on the post-war social reintegration of combatants.’ Justin Pearce, University of Sussex.

Manhood, Morality & the Transformation of Angolan Society MPLA Veterans & Post-war Dynamics

John Spall

John Spall

Manhood, Morality & the Transformation of Angolan Society

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Manhood, Morality & the Transformation of Angolan Society MPLA veterans & post-war dynamics

JOHN SPALL

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James Currey is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) www.jamescurrey.com and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue Rochester, NY 14620–2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com © John Spall 2020 First published 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review The right of John Spall to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library ISBN 978-​1-​84701-​250-​0 ( James Currey cloth)

The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate This publication is printed on acid-​free paper

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Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgements ix List of Abbreviations

xi

Glossary xiii Introduction: The moral economy of masculinity, soldiering & war

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1 ‘My life is not a secure life’: Manhood, ethics & survival amidst the social transformations of war

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2 The moral economy of veterans’ political disengagement

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3 ‘These things are going to ruin the country’: The moral economy of social mobility & enrichment

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4 ‘At the bottom of everything, it was a lack of economic means’: Love, money & masculine dignity

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5 Two cultural styles of masculinity

149

6 Conclusion – Veteranhood & beyond in comparative perspective

175

Bibliography 187 Index 201

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Illustrations Map Map showing location of Huambo province in Angola

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Figures 1 Political engagement & group membership amongst FAPLA veterans in Huambo province

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2 Correlations between economic variables & the likelihood of feitiço (sorcery) attacks

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3 The correlation between intimate partner violence (IPV) experienced by the wife (plus 95% confidence intervals (CI)) & spouse’s income

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4 The correlation between heated disputes experienced by the wife (plus 95% confidence intervals (CI)) & spouse’s income

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5 The correlation between the husband controlling the wife’s interactions with friends (plus 95% confidence intervals (CI)) & spouse’s income

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6 The correlation between the husband controlling the wife’s interactions with family (plus 95% confidence intervals (CI)) & spouse’s income

146

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Acknowledgements

Most of all, I would like to thank the men whose lives and stories I discuss in this book. Angola seemed a forbidding and bewildering country when I first arrived there, but despite the difficulties, the warmth and generosity of the men I worked with made the fieldwork a great pleasure. Their willingness to discuss their life histories with me, even when it meant revisiting experiences they would rather forget, and their patience in helping me to understand the ins and outs of their daily lives, Angolan politics, religion, family life and more, were invaluable to me and a service I am unable to repay. On a return visit to Huambo I found a city full of friends, and hope to return many more times in the future. I have not used their real names in the book, as it seemed to them and to me that it would be prudent to make the lives recounted here anonymous, given the sometimes frank criticism of the MPLA party-state expressed and the possibility of reprisals. A number of other people were vital to the success of my fieldwork. The difficult process of obtaining a study visa for Angola was made much easier by the advice of Jon Schubert and Claudia Gastrow, and the kind offer to write an invitation letter by Professor Manuel Alves da Rocha of the Centro de Estudos e Investigação Científica. My partner Maria’s adoptive Angolan cousins, Flávio Armando António and Zé Paulo Abranches, both provided practical support and a warm welcome at crucial moments. Carlos Figueiredo and Moises Festo of Development Workshop gave me excellent advice on doing research with veterans throughout my time in Huambo, and were very helpful in facilitating contacts with local government authorities and helping us to carry out the POEMA household survey there. Particular thanks must also go to my Umbundu teacher, João Kambo Abel, who was very generous with his time in helping me to understand some of the intricacies of the Umbundu language (still a work in progress for me), as well as of Umbundu institutions and Angola’s political history. The members of the Tukassikumossi group also provided various kinds of assistance in Huambo, not least moral support, companionship and fun. In Europe, many people took the time to discuss my project with me and advise me, both before and after the trip to Angola. Above all, I would like to thank Mark Leopold and Andrea Cornwall for sharing their knowledge and

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x

Acknowledgements

experience, and their constant enthusiasm and encouragement. I would also like to thank Ana Leão, Justin Pearce, Imogen Parsons, Iracema Dulley, Ariel Rolim, João Baptista, Franz-Wilhelm Heimer, Margarida Paredes and Alex Shankland, as well as the participants of various conferences, in particular the ‘Study of Angola’ conferences held in 2011 and 2014 at the University of Oxford, and the ‘Ex-combatant and Veteran Policies and Politics in SubSaharan Africa’ workshop held in 2018 at the University of St Andrews, and participants in seminars at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex and the School of International Development at the University of East Anglia. The project would never have got off the ground in the first place without the kind help, encouragement and collaboration of Patricia Justino and Tilman Brück, and I would particularly like to thank Wolfgang Stojetz for his generous collaboration in the field and afterwards. Equally, it would never have happened without the generous funding of the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia in Portugal and the United States Institute of Peace, through the project entitled ‘The Role of Angolan Ex-combatants in Society, Politics and the Economy’ (PTDC/AFR/114738/2009). I also appreciate the early financial assistance of my good friend James Wolf. Finally, the writing of the book would never have been possible without the help of my family. My parents’ frequent visits to look after our children have been invaluable, not to mention their encouragement and reassurance. My thanks go most of all to my partner, Maria, for her constant love, companionship, humour and advice, in good times and bad, from start to finish. Juggling writing up with childcare has not been easy, and Maria has often exhausted herself to give me the time for writing, in spite of the demands of her own work. It would truly have been impossible, and much less fun, without her.

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Abbreviations

ASCOFA Associação de Apoio aos Combatentes das ex-FAPLA – Association of Support for Former FAPLA combatants FAA Forças Armadas de Angola – Armed Forces of Angola FALA Forças Armadas para a Libertação de Angola – Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola FAPLA Forças Armadas Populares de Libertação de Angola – People’s Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola FNLA Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola – National Front for the Liberation of Angola IECA Igreja Evangélica Congregacional em Angola – the Evangelical Congregational Church in Angola IRSEM Instituto de Reintegração Sócioprofissional de Ex-militares – Institute for Socio-Professional Reintegration of Former Military Personnel MPLA Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola – People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola OPA Organização de Pioneiros de Angola – Organisation of Angolan Pioneers UNITA União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola – National Union for the Total Independence of Angola

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Glossary alambamento

proposal of marriage and payment of bride price

bairro

neighbourhood

cidade

city, or city centre when contrasted with bairro

confusão

confusion

evamba

circumcision ceremony

feitiço

witchcraft or sorcery

inveja

jealousy

kimbo

rural home village

kupapata

motorbike taxi driver

mais velho

male elder

mulherengo

womaniser

Ocimbundu (sing.) / Ovimbundu (pl.)

the ethnic group predominating in the Central Highlands of Angola and in the coastal strip to the west

ocinganji (sing.) / ovinganji (pl.)

masked dancers representing spirits or demons, associated with the evamba

ocipulũlũ

avarice

ondjango/jango

village men’s house

onganga

sorcerer

onyã

envious hatred

palhaço

clown

Planalto

Central Highlands region of Angola

soba

village headman

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Introduction – the moral economy of masculinity, soldiering & war

All around the world, the fighting of wars is a starkly gendered phenomenon. The large majority of frontline fighting is done by men, and even when women make up a significant proportion of fighting forces, how this is constructed and interpreted is quite distinct for men compared to women. During the Angolan civil war, almost entire generations of men were targeted for conscription into the army of the MPLA (the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) or of UNITA (the National Union of the Total Independence of Angola), their life courses abruptly, and for the most part involuntarily, rerouted through military institutions. Upon demobilisation, they returned to civilian lives in a context that was drastically changed by a hugely destructive civil war that was still ongoing. This book focuses on a group of men in the city of Huambo (see Map 1) who fought for the MPLA government from the mid-1970s until the early 1990s, in the Forças Armadas Populares de Libertação de Angola (FAPLA), looking specifically at how the experience of military service and the social transformations of war affected the models of manhood that they sought to live up to and their struggles in doing so throughout their lives and particularly in middle age. As such it is the first in-depth study of the lives of FAPLA veterans, and the first monograph on the masculinities of any group of men in Angola. While most of the literature on Angola and, arguably, on veterans in Africa more generally, has focused on issues associated with power and political economy, the veterans I worked with very often spoke of their experiences in terms of morality. While certainly preoccupied by politics, through war and peace, and by questions of economic accumulation and distribution, they viewed all of these aspects of social life principally through a moral lens. This was true in two main senses: first, in terms of how they narrated their experiences in the military and the vexed questions of moral responsibility while under the duress of military hierarchy and the stress of combat; and second, in how they sought to build civilian lives as respected senior men whilst

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Manhood, Morality & the Transformation of Angolan Society

Map 1 Map showing location of Huambo province in Angola (NordNordWest; Creative Commons licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ AttributionShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0))

navigating a series of social, political and economic changes brought on by the war that they judged negatively in moral terms. I therefore frame this study in terms of a moral economy of masculinity, using Didier Fassin’s definition of the concept as ‘the production, distribution, circulation, and use of moral sentiments, emotions and values, and norms and obligations in social space’. Like Fassin, I consider veterans’ moral economies jointly with the broader political economy in Angola during a particular period of history. Much of the commentary on post-war Angola has focused on the questions of economic inequality, the authoritarian nature of the party-state,

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Introduction

3

the ongoing dominance of the MPLA and the role of resource extraction in all of these. Indeed, much of the literature on veterans in Africa focuses predominantly on questions of economics and of power. Moral economy allows us to take seriously veterans’ own framing of these issues in terms of morality, whilst making the link between the perspectives of this important group of Angolan citizens and broader political, social and economic changes. It permits an understanding of how these changes are experienced, interpreted and acted upon by rank-and-file veterans, whilst situating these responses in their particular structural context. One of the principal ways that wars affect societies in the long-term has often been through the channel of military conscription. Military service has transformed the relation of large numbers of men to the state, their ideas of citizenship, their ideas and performances of masculinity and their prospects for social mobility. Yet very little has been written about the hundreds of thousands of veterans in Angola, and the effects of their military experience and subsequent return to civilian society. Indeed, the long arc of reintegration has often been neglected across Africa by policy makers and policy-focused research, which tends to focus on the perceived short-term threat of a return to violence by veterans, or their emergence as a special interest group.1 The result is a failure to appreciate either the social consequences of military service in a broader perspective that takes in more than just issues of politics and economics, or the long-term consequences of military service understood within veterans’ longer life courses. Masculinity is a particularly important aspect of these processes, and one that is particularly neglected. Indeed, this is only the third monograph-length treatment of the effects of military service on masculinities in a sub-Saharan African country.2 Such neglect is surprising given some of the consequences for analyses of military mobilisation, in particular the danger of analyses that are ‘naïve in their descriptions of power and camouflage men in the garb of ungendered actors’,3 taking for granted the association between the military and masculinity – and of analyses of the aftermath of military service. Studies from settings beyond Africa suggest that military service can have a range of important gendered consequences subsequently, including the development of privileged citizenship practices for men relative to women, and/or of some 1 J.

McMullin, Ex-Combatants and the Post-Conflict State: Challenges of Reintegration (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 2 The other two both deal with South Africa: Jacklyn Cock’s Colonels & Cadres: War & Gender in South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), and Daniel Conway’s Masculinities, Militarisation and the End Conscription Campaign: War Resistance in Apartheid South Africa (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). 3 Cynthia Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 104.

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groups of men relative to other men;4 the potential effects on rates of domestic violence;5 crises of social reproduction, especially related to young veterans’ difficulties in marrying and moving through the masculine life course;6 changing gendered work discourses and practices as women take on new roles while men are away;7 an enduring association between militarism and adult manhood;8 and the valorisation of masculine emotional control,9 to mention just a few. In this book I show how, given the nature of conscription and a set of perceived moral failures of the MPLA party-state, few FAPLA veterans invested primarily in a military identity after the war. Rather, they focused on trying to hold onto the moral values they had been brought up with, to avoid losing a sense of their pre-war masculine selves, and the lives they hoped to live









4

Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Ayse Gül Altinay, The Myth of the Military-Nation: Militarism, Gender, and Education in Turkey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Lesley Gill, ‘Creating Citizens, Making Men: The Military and Masculinity in Bolivia’, Cultural Anthropology 12, no. 4 (1997): 527–50; Insook Kwon, ‘A Feminist Exploration of Military Conscription: The Gendering of the Connections Between Nationalism, Militarism and Citizenship in South Korea’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 3, no. 1 (2000): 26–54. 5 Christopher Bradley, ‘Veteran Status and Marital Aggression: Does Military Service Make a Difference?’, Journal of Family Violence 22, no. 4 (2007): 197–209; Andra L. Teten et al., ‘Intimate Partner Aggression Perpetrated and Sustained by Male Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam Veterans With and Without Posttraumatic Stress Disorder’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence 25, no. 9 (2010): 1612–30; Amy D. Marshall, Jillian Panuzio and Casey T. Taft, ‘Intimate Partner Violence among Military Veterans and Active Duty Servicemen’, Clinical Psychology Review 25, no. 7 (2005): 862–76. 6 See, for example, Paul Richards, ‘Young Men and Gender in War and Postwar Reconstruction: Some Comparative Findings from Liberia and Sierra Leone’, in The Other Half of Gender: Men’s Issues in Development, ed. I. Bannon and M. Correia (Washington, DC: World Bank Group Publications, 2006); Guðrún Sif Friðriksdóttir, ‘Soldiering as an Obstacle to Manhood? Masculinities and Ex-Combatants in Burundi’, Critical Military Studies, 2018, 1–18; Marc Sommers and Peter Uvin, ‘Youth in Rwanda and Burundi: Contrasting Visions’, United States Institute of Peace, Special Report 293 (2011): 1–12; H. Vigh, Navigating Terrains of War: Youth and Soldiering in Guinea-Bissau (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006). 7 See, for example, studies of women’s changing roles during and after the First World War, such as Gail Braybon, Women Workers in the First World War (London: Routledge, 2012); Deborah Thom, ‘Gender and Work’, in Gender and the Great War, ed. Susan R. Grayzel and Tammy M. Proctor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 46–66. 8 Cock, Colonels & Cadres; Chris Dolan, ‘Militarized, Religious and Neo-Colonial: The Triplebind Confronting Men in Contemporary Uganda’, in Men and Development: Politicising Masculinities (London: Zed Books, 2011). 9 Eyal Ben-Ari, Mastering Soldiers: Conflict, Emotions, and the Enemy in an Israeli Military Unit (New York: Berghahn Books, 1998).

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Introduction

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upon demobilisation. After military service they hoped, and continue to hope, for the economic assistance from the party-state that they feel they are owed under an implicit military covenant. The state’s failure to provide this, coupled with a history of secrecy, deception, censorship and extreme and unpredictable political violence has led many veterans to look elsewhere for a set of values and institutions around which to orient their masculine life projects. While this often entailed political disengagement, I argue that this disengagement does not represent simply an absence where political activism ought to be, but rather assertive moral choices that demonstrate how the consequences of military service concatenate into areas of social life beyond the political. In particular, veterans were preoccupied with trying to build lives as respected senior men, often following models of masculinity that drew heavily on those presented to them by pre-war rural institutions such as circumcision ceremonies (evamba) and the men’s house (ondjango), and by the churches. This involved the moral contestation of values associated after the war with the vision of the ‘New Angola’10 promoted by the MPLA government around the importance of consumption and the display of monetary wealth, and the disparaging of rural and ‘African’ languages and identities. Rejecting the confusão caused by the war and the anti-social, individualistic greed seen to be caused by the rising importance of money and the example provided by the kleptocratic MPLA elite, these veterans sought to salvage the patriarchal moral values of their pre-war rural upbringings. They sought to promote the ‘organised’ values offered by the older gendered age hierarchies they idealised, by church organisations and their precepts, and by the values of assertive hard work in their occupations. This considerably complicates any simplistic dichotomy between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ that dominates both Angolan political culture and its analysis. Veterans drew on varied registers of values that interplayed in dynamic ways, drawing especially on combinations of ‘Umbundu traditional’ and Christian values to articulate alternative visions of modernity that spoke back to the dominant versions articulated by the MPLA party-state. Attempts to build masculine respect and authority publicly had to contend, however, with the often-competing aspirations of veterans’ wives and children, partly due to the increased entry of women into the cash economy during the war, and the very different environment in which children, who had no experience of pre-war society, had been brought up. These challenges were viewed by many veterans as violations of proper moral gendered power relations, and threats to their public respect as senior men occasioned by the social transformations of war. Veterans responded in diverse ways to these challenges, somewhere on the spectrum between turning to church life and its comforting

10 Jon

Schubert, Working the System: A Political Ethnography of the New Angola (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), 29.

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Manhood, Morality & the Transformation of Angolan Society

gendered division of labour and the alternative models of conjugality it offered; while others preferred to embrace the alternative moral economy offered by the New Angola, oriented more around the display of wealth, multiple sexual partners and particular leisure activities. This account of the long arc of reintegration of veterans makes a number of important contributions to accounts of Angola’s post-war transition. First, it gives a nuanced picture of the nature of the party-state’s presumed hegemony in Angola. Contrary to a picture of Angola that opposes ‘suffering masses’ to the party-state elite,11 it looks at some of the group-specific sets of values that veterans use to relate to power, and to distance themselves from it. These sets of values are quite specific to FAPLA veterans, to a particular generation of men in specific occupations, and to the Planalto,12 and are also, therefore, a remedy to over-hasty generalisations about the political subjectivities of ‘Angolans’, often deriving from research conducted in Luanda. It also demonstrates how and why many veterans have not entered the political arena as assertively as they have in many other southern African postcolonial states. Importantly, it situates these political responses both historically, and within the broad and long masculine life projects of veterans, and the different kinds of investments that diverse responses enable and foreclose. This enables an interpretation of these responses that takes account of the full complexity of Angolan identities as situated in everyday struggles for dignity and respect, rather than as connected only to a pre-conceptualised ‘political realm’. Crucially, this study also suggests that the challenges and dilemmas related to the performance of masculinity are central to how veterans experience reintegration, and determine which aspects of this experience they feel most keenly. Breaking down responses to post-war social change by gender and generation and looking at the diverging interests and perspectives seem to be crucial, and yet are hardly ever attempted in the literature on Angola. Indeed, the complexity of historical influences in post-war Angola is an important counter to the often over-stated influence of the party-state on post-war Angolan society,13 taking in the influence of the churches, the lingering influences of pre-war rural society (including the distinctiveness of a still-cherished ethno-regional identity), more recent political divisions promoted by the war and growing socio-economic stratification. 11 Ricardo

Soares de Oliveira, Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola since the Civil War (London: Hurst, 2015), 154. 12 The Planalto is sometimes referred to in English as the Central Highlands region of Angola, comprising the provinces of Huambo, Bie, Benguela and part of Huila. 13 Aharon de Grassi and Jesse Salah Ovadia, ‘Trajectories of Large-Scale Land Acquisition Dynamics in Angola: Diversity, Histories, and Implications for the Political Economy of Development in Africa’, Land Use Policy 67 (2017): 115–25.

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Beyond work on Angola, this book also seeks to move conversations about African veterans away from the predominant focus on economics and on power relations, to consider the moral economies of veteranhood and manhood that shape veterans’ war and post-war trajectories. A focus on morality allows us to take a step back from the political realm, and to understand how it is embedded in broader moral value judgements and normativities. These give us a broader and better contextualised understanding of both veterans’ political action and of their avoidance of politics, and of how the experience of war and military service can reverberate in spheres of life that are beyond the political, and yet not entirely divorced from the political nature of the military experience and political violence. The focus on moral economy also provides a deeper understanding of the fractured and uncertain nature of hierarchies of masculinities in a post-war context, where abrupt historical shifts in values and aspirations are still being digested and contested. Treating the performance of masculinity as a moral problematic allows us to get closer to the flexible ways in which men seek to navigate and reconcile the competing social legacies of war, and to reconcile their pre-war selves and aspirations with the challenges of surviving and building a life in much-changed post-war context.

Masculinity – a brief definition Masculinities, as any other identity in Angola, emerge out of this same mix of historical influences: they are a historical product just as much as, say, political or ethnic identity is. As Cynthia Enloe has argued,14 many writers fail to give a historicised and contextualised account of how gender identities emerge in war and post-war situations, taking associations between, say, men and a warrior identity as given rather than accounting for their historical production. In addition, our interlocutors in the field often talk about gender identities as if they are natural or inevitable – perhaps particularly so when talking about militaries and gender. It is, therefore, particularly easy to be taken in by stereotypes and particularly important to adopt a concept of masculinity that allows us to account as fully as possible for the emergence and evolution of masculinities over time and in the complexity of everyday contests around morality and power both at micro- and broader structural levels. As a starting point, I find Raewynn Connell’s abbreviated definition useful: ‘Masculinity, to the extent that the term can be briefly defined at all, is simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practices through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices in bodily experience, personality and culture’.15 This statement neatly emphasises

14 Enloe,

The Curious Feminist. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 71.

15 Raewynn

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the primacy of practice in constituting gendered identities and experiences (rather than being expressive of a pre-constituted identity), and hints at something of the processual nature of masculinities: that notions of masculinity are constantly created and transformed. The definition also expresses the important idea that masculinities are not located in men’s bodies and inevitably engaged only by men, but are rather something beyond individuals that may be engaged by both men and women. By ‘a place in gender relations’, however, and unlike Connell, I specifically mean a subject position within discourse(s). The concept of subject positions in post-structuralist theory16 is related to the decentring of the subject, where the subject is not considered the origin of social relations, since the experience of subjectivity is only made possible by specific discursive conditions. Thus, individuals become gendered subjects by taking up subject positions (such as ‘father’, ‘corporal’, ‘veteran’) within discourses, and this ‘taking up’ is always provisional and unstable. Indeed, the subject positions themselves are not closed and self-sufficient, because there is no ultimate grounds to which they refer. Rather, they are relational, taking on significance in relation to one other, in Laclau and Mouffe’s words ‘articulated’ with one another within discourses, ‘not like pieces of a clockwork mechanism, but because the presence of some in the others prevents any of their identities from being fixed’.17 Individuals take up multiple positions in different discourses and are thus multiply constituted – traversed and fragmented by social difference, rather than wholly coherent and belonging to one category or another. Thus, for example, the veterans I will be discussing in the following chapters are at different times primarily sons, fathers, brothers, husbands or brothers-in-arms; FAPLA veterans, Ovimdundu male elders, members of church congregations or market sellers, or combinations of more than one of these. All of these identities emerge in particular discourses (for example about the family, or religion) that are constantly shifting, and take on meaning in relation to other identities (such as wife, child, political leaders) that are also constantly shifting – particularly over a recent history as turbulent as Angola’s. Such a conception requires an account of the process by which subjects take up, or invest in, a subject position. I consider that subjects achieve this through embodied practice, and in particular use Judith Butler’s idea of gender as performance. In Butler’s18 view gender is an ‘effect’ produced through 16 Henrietta

L. Moore, A Passion for Difference: Essays in Anthropology and Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 17 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, second edition (London; New York: Verso, 2001), 104. 18 J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999).

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embodied performances, which though constant repetition create the illusion of an enduring gendered self, an illusion believed in both by the ‘performer’ and their audience. However, performing masculinities is not only about questions of signification and intelligibility. James Ferguson19 argues that Butler’s concept does not adequately explain why individuals perform some identities rather than others. Ferguson looks to the analysis of the micro-political economy of performances to attempt to explain why some performances are selected rather than others, through an examination of the economic prerequisites for certain performances and the networks and alliances they enable and foreclose. He uses the idea of ‘cultural style’ to refer to ensembles of practices that signify difference between different social categories, and refers to the fact that the successful performance of different styles is partly dependent on economic resources (some styles are more expensive to ‘pull off ’ than others), as well as on social networks and allegiances. Moreover, styles are a ‘performative competence’20 that require the investment of not just economic resources but also time and effort in order to successfully execute them. Styles are therefore not a simple matter of choice – they require the cultivation of internal capacities over time, and the building of allegiances that often have accompanying moral obligations and values – meaning that one cannot simply shift styles of masculinity at will. Thus, veterans had particular masculine styles that they aspired to perform, and that they had been labouring to achieve – often apparently maintaining broadly the same set of aspirations over time. Analysing the historical roots of cultural styles, the variation between different styles veterans perform and the points of tension between them can tell us much about the type of social transition that has been effected in Huambo by the civil war and its aftermath. In this connection, I frequently use the term ‘life project’ to refer to veterans’ labour over time to perform specific cultural styles of masculinity, and to refer to the visions of the future and aspirations for themselves that animate this labour. While I thus emphasise the intentionality of gendered social practice, I do not see veterans as self-authoring individuals, but consider the process of identity construction as relational and intersubjective, and as imbued with power relations. Since identities are relational, they always involve the taking up a position in relation to significant others, and requires those others to be performing identities that allow one’s own identity to make social sense. They also require that one fulfils certain moral obligations towards others, in order

19 James

Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 20 ibid., 96.

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to establish oneself as a particular type of person – such as a father providing for his children or a mother’s brother providing for his nephews and nieces.21 Finally, arguments about limits to the flexibility of cultural styles and the need for investments over time need to be held in tension with influential strands of writing in anthropology and history that emphasise the fluidity and diversity of masculine performances. Such arguments have often been made in reaction to Raewyn Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity.22 This model of masculinity is famously defined as ‘the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy’.23 It is considered by Connell to exist in a relation of hierarchy with other models of masculinity, which are either complicit with, subordinated or marginalised by it. In post-war situations, it has often been assumed that a hegemonic masculinity will be associated with violence and/ or militarism. While this concept established the important idea that masculinity is not monolithic and singular, but diverse and infused by relations of power, it has also been criticised by several authors, including several working in Africa. Lisa Lindsay and Stephan Miescher,24 for example, argue that it may not always be obvious which model of masculinity is dominant, and this may be something that is the subject of lively contestation, not least on ethical grounds. In addition, several authors have found that people often negotiate between different gender models in a fluid and improvisatory way, and that, given that styles are relationally constructed, there is a constant interaction and transformation between different styles,25 implying that there are usually points of commonality as well as tension between different styles. In a postwar setting such as that of Huambo, the question of effective power might have been settled through military victory, but the question of epistemic power, of which visions of society and status ought to prevail, is often more fraught and



21

Harri Englund, ‘Extreme Poverty and Existential Obligations: Beyond Morality in the Anthropology of Africa?’ Social Analysis 52, no. 3 (2008): 33–50; How I use the term is thus quite different from Nigel Rapport’s usage, which emphasises individuals who treat their lives as works of art, and pursue them with a determination that gives ‘their actions a certain robustness, power and independence such that they escape the influence of external forces and of other individuals who might have wished to have directed them in other ways’: Nigel Rapport, I Am Dynamite: An Alternative Anthropology of Power (London: Routledge, 2004), 5. 22 Connell, Masculinities. 23 ibid., 77. 24 Lisa A. Lindsay and Stephan F. Miescher, ‘Introduction: Men and Masculinities in Modern African History’, in Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa, ed. Lisa A. Lindsay and Stephan F. Miescher (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003). 25 See also Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne (eds) Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies (London: Routledge, 1994); Stephan F. Miescher, Making Men in Ghana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).

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uncertain than ever. Certainly, in Huambo in 2012, the upheavals of the war and the bewildering pace of social change after the war made it difficult for veterans themselves to know which styles of masculinity were or ought to be dominant. It was, therefore, a question of much discussion and contestation, often along moral lines.

Moral economies of reintegration & ethical survival When I first began this study, I approached it primarily in terms that have often dominated studies of masculinity and of gender more broadly, especially those of identity and power that I have just discussed. However, as my field research progressed it became clear that those terms were not adequate to help me to understand how veterans viewed the predicaments in which they found themselves in post-war Huambo, or indeed how they recounted their life histories. These were narrated to me, and everyday life constantly discussed, in terms of morality: the moral chaos threatened by the decline of deference towards elder men; the rise of money as the basis of social status and authority; the shame and immorality of a man’s wife earning more than him and disrespecting his authority; the deceptions, dangers and broken promises of formal politics. When they narrated their experiences of military service, these were often framed above all in terms of their desires to avoid transgressions that would take them beyond the pale of civilian society when they returned to it, or ruin their own sense of themselves as good moral actors. In short, as Michael Lambek puts it, the men I encountered were frequently ‘trying to do what they consider[ed] right or good, [were] being evaluated according to criteria of what is right and good, or [were] in some debate about what constitutes the human good’.26 They were disturbed by the increasing transgression of moral codes that they held dear, and preoccupied with how to lead ethical lives. Anthropologists of gender in Africa have, of course, often tackled moments of the moral problematisation of gender relations. There is a rich literature on instances when women have pushed the boundaries of ‘appropriate’ or ‘respectable’ behaviour, or questioned the legitimacy of authority. Such challenges have often been answered in moralising terms, with accusations that such women are ‘wicked’,27 attributions that are important social practices of power. Indeed, many of the important advances in feminist anthropology have been precisely 26 Michael

Lambek, ‘Introduction’, in Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action, ed. Michael Lambek (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 1. 27 The contributors to Dorothy L. Hodgson and Sheryl McCurdy (eds) ‘Wicked’ Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001) give a number of examples of such labelling.

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in taking the analysis of such moments out of potentially naturalising frames such as that of morality and ethics, and examining the complex interplay of power relations, discourse, practice and political economy in the negotiation of gender identities. As Suzette Heald28 has remarked, however, the privileging of power as the prime explanatory concept in gender studies has crowded out discussions of moralities, particularly in literature about masculinity. The morally respectable man has been seen as immoral by analysts because of the power he often wields over women and other categories of man. The concept of morality is therefore treated as suspect, as a disguise for immoral relations of domination. A result has been that some gender scholars make statements to the effect that moral crises around changes in gender relations ‘are really about shifting power relations’.29 A move to collapse the moral into the political, assuming that the former is ‘really’ all about the latter, risks failing to understand why and how discourses of masculinity come to have such emotive power for many men, and play such an important role in constituting their social reality. It also misses important aspects of the historically contextualised experience of gender relations, and particularly how large-scale political, economic and social processes are experienced and engaged with at the micro-level, and how subordinated groups of men make sense of their subordination. I argue that these processes are often interpreted through a moral lens, and that my task in understanding how veterans’ masculinities were affected by the large-scale processes of mass conscription and the social transformations of war, is both to ground these broader social processes in local, moral understandings, and to thoroughly historicise and contextualise moral understandings within these broader processes.30 A key concept I will be using in this book to help me to do this is that of moral economies. The concept was first proposed by E. P. Thompson to understand English food riots in the 18th century, and he defined it as: A consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of various parties within the community, which, taken together, can be said to constitute the moral economy of the poor.31



28 Suzette Heald, Manhood and Morality: Sex, Violence and Ritual in Gisu Society (London



29 Dorothy

and New York: Routledge, 1999). L. Hodgson and Sheryl McCurdy, ‘Introduction’, in ‘Wicked’ Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa, ed. Dorothy L. Hodgson and Sheryl McCurdy (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001), 7, emphasis added. 30 Jaime Palomera and Theodora Vetta, ‘Moral Economy: Rethinking a Radical Concept’, Anthropological Theory 16, no. 4 (2016): 413–32. 31 E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past & Present, no. 50 (1971): 79.

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Food riots could not be explained simply by material shortfalls in supply, or physical hunger, Thompson argued, but rather by actions in grain marketing and bread production that transgressed norms and obligations between producers and consumers, as understood by a particular class. The idea thus provided a link between broader socio-economic structures and the subjectivities of those inhabiting those structures, getting beyond simplistic assumptions about how people respond under certain structural conditions, and taking their values and subjectivities seriously. Importantly, it also located those values and subjectivities within particular classes, and so allied an analysis of morals with an analysis of economic accumulation, power and class stratification. Subsequently, the term ‘moral economy’ has been used in a wide variety of ways, some staying quite close to Thompson’s original concept, while in other cases it is wildly different. As mentioned above, I will be using Didier Fassin’s version of the concept as ‘the production, distribution, circulation, and use of moral sentiments, emotions and values, and norms and obligations in the social space’.32 There are several important features of this definition that are worth noticing. First, as Fassin remarks, the emphasis here is more on the ‘moral’ than on the ‘economy’: his is an interest in the dynamics of morals. ‘Economy’ is used in this older sense, as Lorraine Daston put it, an ‘organised system that displays certain regularities, which are explicable but not always predictable in their details’,33 but not necessarily as connected to questions of money, markets and so on. Second, ‘morals’ in this case takes in three main components: values (what is better or worse), sentiments (emotions) and norms (what should and should not be done), since clear distinctions between these components are much easier to establish theoretically than ethnographically. However, unlike Daston, Fassin is careful to emphasise that for the concept of moral economies to retain its particular usefulness, moral economies have to be located in their political and historical context, and as specific to certain groups who are positioned in particular ways in power relations in those contexts. He also considers that moral economies should be analysed jointly with political economy, looking at their particular links in particular historical periods, and how these shift. This partial decoupling of the moral from the economic is useful for the analysis of masculinities in the reintegration of FAPLA veterans, because while some of their moral concerns were oriented towards economic and political practices, others were not. In particular, they were concerned with changes in conjugal and intergenerational relations, with the proper way to behave as 32 Didier

Fassin, ‘Moral Economies Revisited’, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 64th Year, no. 6 (2009): 12. 33 Daston, 1995, cited in ibid., 28.

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a male elder, and with ethical behaviour under the duress of military discipline and combat. All of these concerns were linked to political economy, but not directly, circulating in ways related to longer histories of morality and gender relations, transformed in important ways by the civil war and therefore requiring careful historical and political contextualisation. This is important, as it allows me to analyse the experience of Angolan veterans in a way that does not overstate the influence of the party-state on veterans’ actions and identities, which in some accounts of Angola’s recent history can seem totalising, and which rarely address intimate settings of kinship and marriage and the dilemmas faced by individuals in navigating Angola’s turbulent recent history.34 This focus also allows an analysis of morals that is specific to certain groups, which are located firmly within power relations and economic relations, but without specifying these groups as economic classes – a category that has often been difficult to apply in African settings.35 The male veterans I will discuss in this book had a moral outlook that was firmly grounded in a patriarchal view of society and family, one that few readers of this book would probably judge to be entirely moral in a prescriptive sense, and neither would I. A further advantage of the moral economies framework is that it allows us to examine moral outlooks without ‘resorting to either condemnation or sympathy’,36 since moral economies are not contrasted with other kinds of economy that are not moral, rather ‘all economies are moral economies’.37 That is to say, they are all embedded in a set of principles that participants think of as moral, whether the observer agrees with them or not. Therefore, it would be just as possible to study the moral economy of the MPLA party-state elite as it is to study the moral economy of subordinated groups in Angola. The dynamic nature of Fassin’s conceptualisation is also useful for looking ethnographically at the complexity of identifications in a particular setting. Morals are produced, distributed and circulated. There is not only 34 Schubert,

Working the System, 17; de Grassi and Ovadia, ‘Trajectories of Large-Scale Land Acquisition Dynamics in Angola’. 35 Fassin has been criticised by Palomera and Vetta for putting too much emphasis on the moral at the expense of the economic, accusing him of culturalisation and depoliticization: Palomera and Vetta, ‘Moral Economy: Rethinking a Radical Concept’. However, Fassin’s insistence on locating groups in their political context and in analysing political economies belies this criticism. As I see it, a particular advantage of Fassin’s perspective is that it takes a broad approach to groups defined in a variety of ways and does not limit it to economic ‘classes’. This allows me to, for example, analyse the experience of male veterans relative to their wives, in spite of them being of the same class. On the difficulty of identifying well-defined classes in Angola, see Udelsmann Rodrigues, ‘From Family Solidarity to Social Classes: Urban Stratification in Angola (Luanda and Ondjiva)’, Journal of Southern African Studies 33 no. 2 (2007): 235–50. 36 Fassin, ‘Moral Economies Revisited’, 15. 37 Palomera and Vetta, ‘Moral Economy’, 419.

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‘juxtaposition’ and ‘discrepancy’ between the moral economies of different groups, but ‘sometimes also convergence’.38 Thus, for example, the veterans articulated a moral vision of how wealth ought to be earned and distributed that they thought the party-state elite had radically violated, and yet both these veterans and the President and his circle often appealed to the legitimacy of male eldership as a criterion for the exercise of authority. Such a vision allows us to take account of the complexity of power relations, neither making a neat distinction between a corrupt party-state elite and the pious masses – as Ricardo Soares de Oliveira and Jon Schubert point out,39 the MPLA’s vision of society is one that captures many Angolans’ aspirations – nor overemphasising the power of the MPLA’s vision, and the underlying moral contestations of that vision. This is particularly important for a study of communities in the Planalto region of Angola, which has a quite different history from the coastal areas of the country, and thus has interests and values that are more clearly antagonistic to those of the MPLA’s coastal vision. Fassin’s concept emphasises the conflicts between different moral economies and learning what we can about society from their confrontations. Veterans’ moral economies were, first, diverse and in conflict with each other along lines particularly of religiosity and non-religiosity, and between Christian denominations; and, second, partially in conflict with those of various non-veterans – their wives, children, those of the party-state elite and others. As such it is a concept that helps us to move away from the idea of a society with a culture, from easy dichotomies between elites and masses, to a vision of a society ‘as a confused amalgam of often contradictory principles, each implying different conceptions of the meaning of life’,40 as David Graeber puts it. As Graeber also argues, this is important in imagining different ways that societies could function in the future – and veterans’ moral economies were not merely backward looking, but also based on alternative ways of imagining Angolan society, to ‘revive ancient rights in order to establish new precedents’.41 This is important to take us away from the dangers of determinist thinking, an association between the ‘traditional’ and the past, and other social formations that present themselves as modern and of the future, a tendency that Didier Péclard argues has bedevilled the historiography of Angola.42

38 Fassin,

‘Moral Economies Revisited’, 15. de Oliveira, Magnificent and Beggar Land; Schubert, Working the System. 40 David Graeber, ‘On the Moral Grounds of Economic Relations: A Maussian Approach’, Journal of Classical Sociology 14, no. 1 (2014): 67. 41 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, cited in Marc Edelman, ‘E. P. Thompson and Moral Economies’, in A Companion to Moral Anthropology, ed. Didier Fassin (Chichester, UK: John Wiley, 2012), 33. 42 Didier Péclard, Les incertitudes de la nation en Angola: Aux racines sociales de l’Unita (Paris: Karthala, 2015). 39 Soares

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Methodology – interlocutors, positionality & ethics Upon my arrival in Huambo in early 2012, as I began to try to understand the impact that military service might have had on FAPLA veterans’ masculinities (and FAPLA veterans were almost uniquely men)43 I was faced with a particular conundrum: how can one observe masculinity in the first place? Given that, according to my argument above, any person’s performed gender identity is unlikely to be singular or necessarily coherent, but rather to be constituted differently according to the setting in which it is being performed, where should it be observed? This was perhaps a particularly difficult problem given the urban setting of the research, and the fact that most people’s lives were split between several social settings that were often geographically distant from one another. In addition, the political and ethical orientation of the book requires striking a difficult balance between a recounting of veterans’ experiences and providing an account of the power relations that constitute those experiences.44 This involves outlining the various moral perspectives and practices of those I study, locating them in a particular historical setting relative to other moral visions, and, importantly, within a global political economy.45 In so doing I hope to make clear the gendered politics of veterans’ everyday lives, both in terms of the gendered prerogatives they exercise over others on the one hand, and the often dominated and marginalised position they find themselves in, particularly in relation to the party-state elite in their own country, on the other. I decided to start off by observing and interacting with veterans in the spaces where most of them spent most of their time: their workplace. I focused on veterans working in informal commerce because early contacts with veterans I came across in the course of my daily life in Huambo city suggested that most veterans made their living in that sector. I initially began working with veterans in a city market in Huambo, working at first with a group of stallholders inside the market, and then also with a group of motorbike taxi drivers and moneychangers working outside the market. I began here for simple

43 The

brief involvement of women in the FAPLA was almost completely ended by the purges conducted after 27 May 1977. For a detailed study of these women, see Margarida Paredes, Combater Duas Vezes: Mulheres Na Luta Armada Em Angola (Aveleda: Verso da História, 2015). 44 Begoña Aretxaga, Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism, and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 45 Cf. Philippe Bourgois, ‘Confronting the Ethics of Ethnography: Lessons from Fieldwork in Central America’, ed. Faye V. Harrison, Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further Toward an Anthropology for Liberation (Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association, 1991), 111–26.

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reasons of convenience: I shopped in the market and had quickly struck up a rapport with some of the veteran sellers there. However, once it became clear that the classification of urban space was very significant for people’s identities and aspirations, I also began working with two groups of sellers in Alemanha market in a peripheral bairro (neighbourhood) on the outskirts of the city. In total I was working with around forty men in these settings. Market settings provided excellent spaces to observe veterans’ working lives, but also, since these were the settings where they spent most of their time, much of their social life more generally was conducted in markets. Further, since there were regular and often prolonged periods of the day without many clients, we would also chat about history, politics, religion, their family lives and personal life histories; play draughts, drink and eat, and more. I was readily welcomed into these settings from the outset, for a number of different reasons. As I explained my project to veterans they were, almost without exception, keen to complain about the government’s failure to provide them with any support in return for their military service. In this sense, especially at the beginning of my fieldwork, it seemed they saw me, a white foreigner, as some sort of official representative who had a voice that their government might listen to. Later, they realised that I was, perhaps unlike other foreigners they had encountered, going to maintain a regular presence in their workplaces and do quite an in-depth piece of research. They, accordingly, began to take the time to talk about their lives in more depth, and about their experiences during the war. There was a pervasive sense that the government was distorting history for their own political purposes, and that the real experiences of frontline soldiers, and of o povo (the people) in general, were not being represented. Several veterans told me that they were taking the time to speak to me so that they could help me to correct the public record about what happened during the war, and after it. It was not just the history of the war that they wanted to correct, but also stories of the everyday life of Ovimbundu46 living in the south-central highlands of Angola, or the Planalto. If I talked only to the people who worked in offices in the city centre and spoke only Portuguese, then I would learn little of the lives of ‘real’ Angolans, who lived and worked in the suburbs and spoke Umbundu. This was connected with the growing and stark economic inequalities of post-war Angola, but also with a perception that northerners and particularly people in Luanda connected Ovimbundu almost automatically



46 A

brief note on terms: usage is not consistent in the English language literature on Angola, but here I will be following Childs in using the term ‘Ovimbundu’ (singular: Ocimbundu) to refer to the people of this social group, and ‘Umbundu’ to refer to the language and as the descriptive adjective.

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with an allegiance to UNITA.47 They spoke of a consequent denigration of Umbundu as the lingua dos cães (language of dogs), and of people living in the rural hinterland of Angola more generally as matumbos (loosely, a country bumpkin). This was particularly resented by veterans who had fought for the MPLA, who took pride in explaining ‘Umbundu culture’48 to me and showing me their modern and morally progressive qualities. ‘Access’ to research participants was therefore not an immediate problem. On the other hand, there was still, as has often been noted by researchers on Angola, a reticence to discuss certain topics, particularly related to politics. This is certainly based on the political violence that Angola has experienced over the past half-century or so. On the coast this has mainly been related to the purge following the attempted coup of 27 May 1977 and the violence in Luanda following the failed elections in 1992.49 For the veterans I was working with in Huambo it was more related to the very violent experience of the civil war on the Planalto, with forced conscription even pitting siblings against each other on opposing sides of the war, and territories changing hands several times during the course of the war with the accompanying reprisals each time. There were also infiltrations of intelligence officers from each side of the war into the other’s territory, making the question of who one really was and what side one was on a perennial source of often deadly tension, constant checks by military authorities, and assassinations and disappearances. This association of politics with violence continued in 2012, with many believing that talking too loudly about politics could be punished by the government, or even by UNITA. A consequence of this, as João Faria50 has pointed out, is that doing social science research in Angola is an inherently political act, since one is asking people to speak the truth about their own lives. Faria conceptualises speaking the truth, following Foucault, as parrhesia, an explicitly ethical obligation that chimes well with how several of the veterans I met saw their decision to speak to me, emphasising the elements of risk and what they saw as their moral duty.

47 See also Vasco Martins, ‘Ovimbundu Identity Attributions in Post-War Angola’, Journal



48 When

of Southern African Studies 41, no. 4 (2015): 853–67. I use the terms ‘Umbundu culture’ and ‘Umbundu tradition’ I am using them as emic categories, referring to the aspects of social life that veterans themselves explicitly associated with what it meant to be an Ocimbundu and traditional. That is, I am not making any claims about the objective existence of an easily identifiable and cohesive Umbundu culture. In veterans’ usage, tradition was often counterposed to development, but it could also be bound up with alternative imaginations of what progress and development ought to look like, compared to Angola’s actual post-war trajectory under the MPLA, as we shall see. 49 Lara Pawson, In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014); Schubert, Working the System. 50 Paulo C. J. Faria, The Post-War Angola: Public Sphere, Political Regime and Democracy (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2013).

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This tension between fear and duty was accompanied by a genuine desire to put past divisions in the past, and not to dig too deeply into people’s political histories so as to avoid the rancour of the past, and a possible return to the confusão of intra-community violence. These tendencies led to a certain reticence on the part of some veterans. Where some would be confident and engaged in talking about politics, others, especially at first, would look uncomfortable and drift away to get on with their work. This reticence tended to subside as the months went by and people began to have more confidence in my discretion and lack of political agenda or links to powerful families. However, it is likely that for some of these veterans there were experiences and opinions that went unexpressed, and others seemed to resort to politically correct platitudes. From my starting points in the markets I also gradually began interacting with these veterans to a more limited extent in other settings. This helped me to gain insight into the contextual nature of masculine performances, and how performances in different settings related to one another. In particular, I accompanied some of them to church, and became involved with a neighbourhood football team – a Velha Guarda (Old Guard) team made up mainly of FAPLA veterans – becoming their team photographer at matches and socialising with them before and after games. I also visited some veterans in their homes, and some of them visited mine, and in 2015 I travelled with four of them to meet their extended families in the rural villages they had been brought up in before military service, and where they had plots of land where they raised crops to supplement their work in the city. Much of the analysis in this book is based on my observations of, and participation in, social life in these settings, though principally it is based on the conversations and observation in the markets. This included veterans’ accounts of other settings that I did not witness – accounts that I see as performances in themselves, as well as providing information on their experience of life in other settings. To attempt to understand how veterans’ masculinities had been formed in their early life and changed through the experience of military service and war, as well as how their pasts weighed on the present, I also carried out recorded life history interviews with a subset of the veterans from the observation settings – although everyday conversations in the markets often focused on recent history anyway. These interviews covered their lives from birth up until 2012, in order to situate the experience of military service within their broader life course, and within the broader historical complex of influences upon their masculinities in 2012. My interviews and everyday conversations with veterans were conducted in Portuguese, in which all of my interlocutors were fluent – even though they were also fluent in Umbundu and often used it in their everyday lives. Throughout my time in Huambo I had Umbundu lessons each morning from a UNITA veteran, with whom I would discuss key terms

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and ideas from my research. In turn, I would probe the use of key Umbundu terms with the veterans I was working with, and any nuances of meaning that were not quite captured in Portuguese. This improved my understanding of some key concepts, particularly those discussed in Chapter 3 on witchcraft and social mobility. Much of the material in this book is focused on FAPLA veterans’ perceptions of their own lives and their moral visions of Angolan society. However, in order to help locate their moral perspectives within economic and power relations in Angola, to see how veterans were viewed from other perspectives, and how their moral visions were contested, I undertook a number of interviews with other categories of people. This included UNITA veterans, younger veterans who had demobilised after the Bicesse peace accords in 1991,51 family members of FAPLA veterans, staff of the government organisation, the Institute for the Socio-economic Reinsertion of Ex-combatants (IRSEM); social workers in a veterans’ reintegration project (Aldeia Nova in Waku Kungo), non-governmental organisations; a disabled people’s solidarity movement that included many veterans; and lay and/or clergy of the Congregationalist (IECA – Igreja Evangélica Congregacional em Angola), Seventh-day Adventist, Catholic and Baptist churches. I also interviewed a number of other FAPLA veterans whom I didn’t meet through the market settings, in order to get a broader perspective from beyond the social networks centred on the markets: these included veterans I met through my friendships with other foreigners, through the disabled people’s organisation, through Aldeia Nova and in the course of my everyday life. I also make use of a household survey carried out in 2013 called POEMA, a survey of 760 veterans across Huambo province, including 241 who had only served in the FAPLA (and not in its successor after 1992, the Forças Armadas de Angola, or FAA). The survey was carried out by local Angolans who were part-time community workers with the NGO Development Workshop; the latter assisted the economists Wolfgang Stojetz and Tilman Brück in the coordination of the survey. The survey questionnaire covered a number of topics including pre-service background, experiences during military service, political attitudes, group membership and a range of economic data, and my ethnographic work fed into the design and wording of the questionnaire. Since so many men have served in the FAPLA and they are such a diverse group, these data allow me to situate the group of veterans that I worked with within the cohort of FAPLA veterans in Huambo province more broadly, in relation to a number of important criteria such as occupation, income and assets, place

51 These

peace accords were signed by Jonas Savimbi of UNITA and José Eduardo dos Santos on 31 May 1991. UNITA rejected the results of the first round of the presidential elections in 1992 and war recommenced soon after.

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of residence and more. Importantly, questionnaires were also carried out with veterans’ wives about division of labour with their husbands, childraising practices, control over household resources, disputes and domestic violence. When I refer to the results of this survey, I will mostly be discussing the sub-sample of veterans who had served only in the FAPLA, unless otherwise stated – since this is the sample whose experiences are closest to the majority of the veterans with whom I worked ethnographically. Given veterans’ fears of political reprisals for having spoken to me, particularly when criticising the MPLA and prominent families, I use pseudonyms for all of the people I spoke to who are quoted in this book, whether veteran or non-veteran.

Structure of the book As Stephen Lubkemann has argued,52 there is often a tendency to overstate the influence of violence in shaping people’s experience of, and actions during, wars. Rather, he argues, we need to insert wars within longer histories, and the ‘cultural scripts’ that influence how people react to the dangers and privations of war. These guide how people try to keep their life projects on track, and these lives ‘insist on being lived in their full complexity’,53 and not narrowed down simply to concerns with the struggle for material survival. As such, I consider the impact of military service and of war on veterans’ masculinities in a historically contextualised way that includes an account of the historical constitution of the moral economies that animate them. I also consider the broad impact of war and military service on the areas of life that veterans themselves found most important in the constitution of themselves as men. Accordingly, I begin in Chapter 1 by looking at veterans’ life histories and contextualising them within Angola’s longer history. I then move on to look at veterans’ lives and masculinities in 2012, looking at the themes of political disengagement and religion (Chapter 2), the moral economy of social mobility (Chapter 3), the relationship between love and money (Chapter 4), and two contrasting masculine styles that veterans adopted in response to the challenges of life in post-war Huambo (Chapter 5). In Chapter 6 I conclude by comparing the case of FAPLA veterans with veterans of other wars in Africa – both contemporary and historical. Following this overall structure, in Chapter 1 I investigate the biographies of three veterans who exemplify three typical trajectories that FAPLA veterans took from their births, through their upbringings, military service, 52 Stephen

Lubkemann, Culture in Chaos: An Anthropology of the Social Condition in War (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008). 53 ibid., 245.

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demobilisation, survival as civilians in the second half of the civil war, and the first ten years of their post-war lives. Their narratives demonstrate two important aspects of their experiences. First, the involuntary nature of their recruitment and their experiences of war led to a lack of identification with the masculinity of ‘soldier’. Rather, they narrate their experiences in terms of trying to maintain moral integrity whilst under the duress of military discipline and the demands of combat, according to their pre-service moral educations. This has important consequences for how they subsequently pursued their post-service lives. Second, it demonstrates how the moral economies that these men moved through, and their own moral aspirations, were heavily influenced, first, by what they viewed as their ‘traditional Umbundu’ upbringings, and particularly the gendered age hierarchies that they associated with them; and, second, by churches of different denominations that had maintained their moral credibility for many veterans – despite the meanings and status of both shifting significantly during the war. This contrasted markedly with the way that veterans perceived the MPLA party-state, despite some having had high hopes for it in the immediate post-independence period. Chapter 2 takes up this theme by examining many veterans’ ongoing political disengagement through the lens of moral economy and masculinity. All veterans that I spoke to thought that the party-state had violated an implicit military covenant they had with veterans to provide them with financial support, education or employment in recompense for their service. The contestations of the political realm more generally were associated with violence, deception and the accompanying confusão (confusion) produced by war, the distortion of historical truths, and the corrupt embezzling of the nation’s wealth, and led to most veterans avoiding public political engagement. In this chapter I examine the boundary work that veterans undertook to represent the sphere of Christianity as one that was radically distinct from ‘politics’, and how this was grounded in the masculine life projects that church life enabled. Churches provided social spaces in which elder men continued to be relatively dominant, occupying most of the official lay positions and being respected for their wisdom. Churches thus offered veterans a place where they could pursue masculine life projects as respected male elders, in ways that largely chimed with a set of moral values and obligations drawn both from ideals of Umbundu tradition and the ongoing moral authority of church teachings, even after the wartime decline of the institutions supporting the reproduction of the former. In Chapter 3, I examine the moral economy of social mobility and enrichment for veterans, locating their struggles within the broader political economy of Angola. Oil makes up 89 per cent of Angola’s exports;54 a significant propor

54 Organisation

of Petrol Exporting Countries, ‘OPEC: Angola’, accessed 11 October 2019 from https://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/about_us/147.htm.

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tion of this income is channelled through the state, whose employees make up a small and modestly remunerated middle class, and much has enriched a small number of very rich families allied to Angola’s former President, José Eduardo dos Santos. Most of the transnational capital associated with the oil industry, however, does not ‘flow’ through Angola, but ‘hops’55 between the most profitable points, leaving behind a surplus population, ‘not plausibly described as a labour reserve’.56 With very little state assistance, most of these people – making up the large majority of Angola’s population – work in informal commerce and/or agriculture and live in improvised housing with poor infrastructure. This was the population into which rank-and-file FAPLA veterans were ‘reintegrated’ – a familiar reintegration into poverty also witnessed in other African settings.57 The men I worked with often expressed a specifically masculine pride at being ‘organised’ and ‘having a plan’, managing to build small informal businesses in and around the marketplace, with very little assistance from anyone except kin. Nevertheless, these occupations were disappointing to them, as well as being precarious and unpredictable. They also felt that the values of the New Angola being promoted since the end of the war encouraged people to give respect to those with the most monetary wealth, to value monetary wealth above one’s fellow men, and to pursue it in dishonest ways that bypassed hard work and honest dealing. There was an atmosphere of unease and deep uncertainty in which these veterans were constantly probing the hidden causes of, and motives behind, others’ economic fortunes, and trading accusations. Were those who suffered misfortune the victims of their own laziness and lack of organisation, or of the dangerous envy (onyã) of others who were conspiring against them? Were those who prospered sharing as they ought to, or were they consumed by an anti-social lust for money (ocipulũlũ) that led them to value money more than people? I argue that this situation of moral uncertainty and the flexible diagnostics used to interpret it belie clear hierarchies of masculinity based on a single hegemonic model, particularly one that is based on a violent or military hegemonic masculinity. It also emphasises how the ‘sense of flux and moral uncertainty’ identified by Ricardo Soares de Oliveira58 is informed by a combination of historical referents including Umbundu concepts of witchcraft, church teachings on hard work and brotherly love, and the values of the New Angola. Most of all it emphasises the argument made 55 James

Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 379. 56 Tania Murray Li, ‘To Make Live or Let Die? Rural Dispossession and the Protection of Surplus Populations’, Antipode 41 (2010): 66. 57 McMullin, Ex-Combatants and the Post-Conflict State. 58 Soares de Oliveira, Magnificent and Beggar Land, 160.

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by Mats Utas, that remarginalisation is what awaits most veterans, and not reintegration.59 Chapter 4 extends this analysis into the moral economy of veterans’ households and specifically their marriages. Marriage is sometimes viewed as a key indicator of the acceptance of veterans into civilian society.60 On the other hand, many anthropologists do not view marriage as a once-and-for-all achievement, but prefer a processual view, looking at it as a relationship that is subject to ongoing negotiation and that is not necessarily stable at all. I examine how veterans’ masculine life projects relied centrally on a reputation as their household’s main breadwinner, upon which their authority within the household and their public reputation as an upstanding, wise male elder relied. However, this equation between breadwinning and masculine authority left them in a vulnerable position for several reasons: their wives could publicly shame them for failing to provide; their precarious businesses could simply suffer a slump in custom; or their wives could (and often did) out-earn them in informal commerce and challenge their patriarchal authority as heads of household. This was a relatively new possibility brought on by urbanisation and associated changes in the gender division of labour during the war, with more women entering the cash economy. Since being a breadwinner tied together several other aspects of their identity, the undermining of this archetype was one of the most important impacts of the war for their masculinities and self-perceptions as men, beyond the experience of violence or the socialisation undergone in the military. In Chapter 5 I examine two responses to the challenges to veterans’ masculine aspirations presented in chapters 3 and 4, by examining two contrasting styles of masculinity, which drew on contrasting sets of moral values and historical referents. One of these styles is that of the churchgoing, companionately married veteran. This was the masculinity performed by the most committed churchgoers amongst my research participants, and offered alternative routes to masculine respect through their participation in the gender hierarchies of church communities. This also gave them respect beyond these communities, and offered a model of marriage that offered a way to transcend some of the difficulties posed by the breadwinner model. These were marriages based on intimacy and cooperation, a closer and more affectionate idea of marriage, albeit one that was still plainly patriarchal. They constituted a particular vision of a developed and morally progressive modernity, one of cosmopolitanism in which the global nature of one’s church took a prominent place.

59 M.

Utas, ‘Building a Future? The Reintegration and Remarginalisation of Youth in Liberia’, in No Peace No War: An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts, ed. Paul Richards (Melton, Woodbridge: James Currey, 2005), 137–54. 60 J. Schafer, Soldiers at Peace: Veterans and Society after the Civil War in Mozambique (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

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A smaller set of FAPLA veterans I worked with rejected the model of a sober head of household, opting for a style that was antagonistic to the churchgoing veterans’ style. This was a more playful style, which entailed proud and public womanising, unofficial polygamy, recreational public drunkenness and a more demonstratively consumerist style of masculinity. In this style, sexual relationships with women emphasised fun and pleasure, and related the attractiveness and youth of a woman to particular demonstrations of monetary wealth. It continued to emphasise the authority and prestige of older men, but put a much greater emphasis on monetary wealth as a way of gaining respect, in a set of aspirations that chimed much more with the New Angola model than with older historical referents on the Planalto. It was grounded in a different vision of what a modern, cosmopolitan masculinity ought to look like, and gave moral weight to wealth, and an emphasis on the moral importance of solidarity between male friends and drinking buddies, rather than on conjugal, family or church communities. I argue that these two styles represented alternative reactions to the historical changes brought on by the war and still emerging in its wake, alternative moral economies through which veterans interpreted and lived through the large-scale and rapid economic, political and social transformations that Angola has experienced in the past half-century. In the concluding chapter I consider the findings of this study in comparative perspective, looking first at the direct effects of military service on veterans’ masculine life projects, and second at the longer-term effects of the social transformations of war. In considering the former, I contrast the case of FAPLA veterans in Huambo with the idea that there is a smooth or natural transhistorical connection between the military and masculinity. I consider various aspects that complicate and ultimately break that connection in the Angolan case, alongside other similar cases. In particular, I examine military covenants, the militarisation of inequalities, the diversity of moral outlooks in post-war societies, and the relation between the opportunities or disadvantages that veteranhood offers veterans in the execution of their masculine life projects. In considering the broader and longer-term effects of wars on masculinities I discuss the concept of social imaginaries in understanding the social innovations of wartime (following Stephen Lubkemann),61 and how they might come to seem socially sensible, or not. Finally, I return to the idea of hegemonic masculinities, discuss the complexity of overlaps and tensions to be found between different models, and suggest a move away from the language of ‘models’ of masculinity towards concepts that are better equipped to take account of uncertainty and conflict over masculinities.

61 Lubkemann,

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CHAPTER 1

‘My life is not a secure life’: Manhood, ethics & survival amidst the social transformations of war Introduction In this chapter, I will focus on the historical production of the inter-related moral economies of manhood and veteranhood that the men I worked with were affected by over their life courses. While the experiences of war and military service certainly constituted ruptures in veterans’ lifeworlds, they were also inserted into a longer history and were interpreted, experienced and navigated in terms of that history. Alongside this complex intermingling of change and continuity in veterans’ moral worlds, the socio-economic context in which they were trying to live moral lives was changing, in many cases throwing up new dilemmas as they tried to live up to older values. Moral concerns were paramount for veterans as they recounted their life histories, and these can be summarised briefly as follows: As the movements of a larger political history swept them up, they related to this history principally in the (varied) moral terms with which they had been raised. Military service was viewed as involuntary, and as a danger to be survived morally as well as physically, in which maintaining one’s moral integrity was of the utmost importance. The moral economy of veteranhood articulated by veterans was strongly shaped by an implicit bargain with the party-state that their sacrifice for the nation through military service ought to be compensated, in the form of pensions, education/training, employment or all three. The fact that this support had not been forthcoming accentuated the perception of military service as a damaging interruption to their life projects, within the context of an immoral and pointlessly destructive civil war. Veterans’ concerns upon demobilisation were to resume their interrupted life projects, which were shaped by the rights and responsibilities articulated by a particular moral economy of senior manhood. This moral economy was strongly shaped by intertwined and sometimes antagonistic ideas about Umbundu tradition and Christianity stemming from their childhoods in latecolonial Angola, for which ideals of breadwinner masculinity were central. This entailed marriage and the building of stable, upwardly mobile households of

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which they were the heads and providers, ambitions that were both limited and imperilled by the failure of the party-state to compensate them for their military service, and by the economic consequences of the war. Within this broader framing, the particular moral characters of individual veterans’ postservice life projects were shaped by a number of factors, some biographical, and some related to the social transformations of war: First, by the moral character of their upbringing before military service; second, by their particular postings and specialisms in the military and the moral and physical risks they posed; third, by when and how they exited the military; and fourth by how they adjusted their life projects in response to the new socio-economic environments in which they found themselves after military service, and how this related to the fragmented moral economy of senior manhood that predominated in the peri-urban neighbourhoods and informal economy of post-war Huambo. I will therefore proceed by tracking back and forth between, on the one hand, the broader social context producing, distributing, disrupting and transforming moral economies; and, on the other, the particular biographical experiences of three FAPLA veterans as they navigated them. I have chosen three veterans’ stories to recount in some depth in this chapter. This is because their trajectories are fairly representative of a ‘type’ of moral trajectory through military service and its aftermath that a subset of veterans had taken – thus suggesting something more general about the men I worked with. Conversely, addressing a small number of stories in depth allows me to provide a level of detail that transcends an easy typology, to offer a relatable level of human detail and enough information for the reader to judge my interpretation for themselves and to consider alternatives. The analysis that follows focuses largely on the recorded life history interviews carried out with the three men in the markets where they worked, in the final month of my fieldwork in 2012. However, these conversations were to some extent condensations and summaries of earlier conversations in the market, which had often turned to their personal histories. I will also consider these former conversations, and, where relevant, how the varying patterns of presence and absence of certain details of life history were affected by the context of different conversations, including the physically and notionally present audiences for each of them. Similar to what Jessica Schafer found1 in the case of Mozambican civil war veterans, as veterans recounted their life histories, they were attempting to reconcile their wartime selves with their peacetime selves, whilst making their accounts fit with the ‘reconstructive practices’2 of society more broadly. These latter include the negative post-war moral evaluation of particular violent acts during the war that might as a

1 Schafer,

Soldiers at Peace, 76. ‘Till the Soil’, cited in ibid.

2 Bertelsen,

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result be censored or selectively retold in life history interviews. Nevertheless, this attempt to construct masculine selves that were morally acceptable in the context of post-war Huambo in itself provides vital information on how FAPLA veterans conducted their life projects as civilians over the long term. In addition, since conversations about veterans’ life stories often took place with family members and friends in the conversation, and in the context of a year-long (and currently ongoing) engagement with their lives, the scope for blatant untruths was at least somewhat limited. This extended ethnographic engagement with veterans in their everyday lives sometimes led them to confide details to me that they said they would not have confided to others (often surrounding acts of violence or coercion, and, most of all, matters concerning personal experiences of feitiço – witchcraft or sorcery). As a result, I am quite confident that these life histories were recounted in good faith and with a reasonable degree of frankness. In the rest of the chapter I will proceed chronologically through the veterans’ life histories, from their birth until 2012, providing brief historical context where appropriate. In the concluding section I will outline what is particular about FAPLA veterans’ moral and political trajectories on the Planalto. I will end by discussing how the perspective of the moral economy might enrich the literature on the agency of soldiers in war in Africa.

Three veterans I was introduced to João on my first visit to the cidade market in Huambo’s city centre. João (b. 1969, aged 42 in 2012) was one of the first two veterans I met there. His pitch was half of a concrete bench, the other half taken by his nephew, and was covered with meticulously arranged stacks of produce. On being told the purpose of my visit, he spoke to me animatedly, restlessly shifting his weight from foot to foot, laughing and emphatically denouncing the government’s failure to support veterans. He was short and broad, with close cropped hair, dressed simply in a t-shirt and suit trousers. Speaking quickly through a broad smile, he traded jokes with another seller called Vicente, the two of them apparently the unofficial representatives of their market section. João, unusually amongst the men I worked with, had remained in the army for most of the war, from 1985 until 2002, and so had come to work in informal commerce later than the others. He eschewed an explicitly churchgoing lifestyle and self-presentation. His efforts to perform a respectable senior masculinity whilst pursuing a lifestyle that was deemed incompatible with Christianity in important respects, illustrate some of the tensions, exacerbated by wartime social change, between ideas of ‘traditional’ Umbundu masculine values, and the public morality of Christianity and associated ideas of urbanity and developed-ness.

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Vicente (b. 1965, aged 47 in 2012), the veteran that I was introduced to along with João, was taller and more elegantly dressed, often in a leather jacket or big coat, a rotating selection of hats, and a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. He had spent less time in the army, joining in 1980 and leaving in 1992. He was gregarious and tactile, and proud of being known and liked by most people in the market and beyond, and of treating them with respect and brotherly love in keeping with his lifelong Roman Catholic faith. His religious outlook strongly shaped his life narrative and how he confronted the challenges of war and its aftermath, and had remained a more or less constant moral grounding for him throughout his life. Faith played a similar role for several of the veterans I worked with of Catholic or Congregationalist denominations, who were usually born into those denominations and followed them throughout their lives. Vicente’s love of candour brought him into conflict with the more secretive João, whose frequent, unexplained disappearances from the market would anger Vicente, and whose flouting of Christian morality made him a disreputable figure in the gossip of his market colleagues. Most of my conversations with João and Vicente happened beside their stalls, seated in plastic picnic chairs, as a mixture of one-to-one conversations and conversations with groups of their colleagues. I became friends with both of them, coming to know members of their families, and visiting them in contexts outside the market, such as Vicente’s church and home, and João’s home village. I was introduced to the third veteran, Jamba (b. 1963, aged 49 in 2012), when I first went to Alemanha market on the outskirts of Huambo, looking for veterans to talk to. A short and slightly portly man, his completely bald head was usually covered with a cap, and he dressed in football shirts, jeans and trainers. He was a prominent figure in the market and in his neighbourhood, known jokingly by some as ‘the President’: he was an eloquent man given to impromptu, often declamatory speeches for usually appreciative audiences. He considered his ‘work’ to extend beyond the market to his engagement in his church and his work as a neighbourhood football coach and, during my time in Huambo, to helping me to understand the situation of civil war veterans in post-war Angolan society. He had demobilised earlier than most of the other men I worked with, having been recruited in 1977 and leaving in 1983 when he lost the lower part of one of his legs to a land mine. The conversations we had about his past life were sometimes conducted in an ad-hoc way at his market pitch, though several of our more in-depth conversations took place in a mostly deserted café shack behind his stall. Jamba was born into a nonreligious, ‘pagan’ family, as he put it, but when confronted with a confluence of moral crises shortly after his demobilisation, he made a radical conversion to Seventh-day Adventism. This meant that, as with many of the other converts amongst these veterans, his struggles to avoid moral collapse and pursue a senior masculinity were largely conducted through an ongoing and conscious

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project of self-re-making that constituted a break with the morality of his upbringing. To summarise, each of these men is intended to represent both some of the complexity of individuals’ paths through the challenges of war, military service and their aftermath, and a broader ‘type’ of masculine moral sensibility and navigation of the moral challenges of war. João represents the problems some veterans faced in trying to reconcile the demands of Umbundu ‘tradition’ with the moral demands of life in post-war Huambo, Vicente the path of the lifelong believer in one of the two main mission churches, and Jamba the path of the religious convert to one of the smaller denominations.

Pre-army life Most of the veterans that I worked with were born after the independence war had begun in 1961, and their earliest memories cover the late-colonial period and the early years of the civil war. The Portuguese had only managed to establish full control of the Planalto in 1904, but during that time there had been substantial social, political and economic transformations. The political power of royal lineages was ended. The basis of the economy moved rapidly from being a long-distance caravan trade based principally on rubber, to one based on agriculture for both subsistence and the market, partly in order to pay heavy colonial taxes, and under pressure from land seizures by Portuguese immigrants. Forced labour became very widespread, and was undertaken in harsh, and often dehumanising conditions, mainly on coffee plantations in the north of Angola.3 After the twin rebellions in Luanda and the north of Angola in 1961 marking the beginning of the independence war, there were important shifts in colonial policy. There were divisions in the colonial authorities between those who thought that the best response was to give Africans a greater stake in the colonial system, and those who thought that control and repression would be more effective.4 In practice, both strategies were pursued, but the system generally became less oppressive, as forced labour was much reduced, and no specific grievances were widely politicised on the Planalto during the independence war.5 As Justin Pearce argues, during the independence war there was no organised resistance in the region, and detailed knowledge of, 3 See

Linda Heywood, Contested Power in Angola, 1840s to the Present (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2000) for an analysis of this period. 4 Gerald J. Bender, Angola under the Portuguese: The Myth and the Reality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 5 Justin Pearce, Political Identity and Conflict in Central Angola, 1975–2002 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

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and identification with, the nationalist movements was limited to those elites who could afford a radio and those educated in the missions. When independence came in 1975, UNITA’s influence on the Planalto quickly grew as an organisation led by Ovimbundu, and it entered the province in force, along with refugees fleeing violence in Luanda directed against Ovimbundu. There were revenge attacks against MPLA supporters in the region, and many people became politicised in this period.6 UNITA’s forces were driven out of Huambo in February 1976 by FAPLA soldiers and Cuban forces, though UNITA attacks in rural areas continued. During the colonial period, one of the most important cultural and social shifts in the region was the rapid spread of Christianity. Missions had little influence until the end of the 19th century,7 but by the time independence arrived in 1975 the Planalto was the most Christianised region of Angola, and in the POEMA survey 90 per cent of veterans reported being members of either a Catholic (63 per cent) or Congregationalist church (28 per cent) before they were recruited by the FAPLA. The most important Protestant missions were operated in a partnership between the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and the Canadian Congregational Foreign Missionary Society, from 1885 onwards.8 These missions were based in rural areas, partly due to a desire to be away from centres of Portuguese colonial authority, which was often hostile to the influence of the Protestants. Yet it was also due to the missionaries’ belief that colonial cities were centres of moral degradation, particularly in terms of prostitution and alcohol consumption, and a consequent desire to build a new Jerusalem in the countryside.9 Catholic missions were also established in rural areas, but unlike the Protestants, a mission was also established in the city of Nova Lisboa (now called Huambo), in a neighbourhood populated by railway workers. Central to the ability of both sets of missions to gain the adherence of the majority of people on the Planalto was their provision of opportunities for black Angolans to achieve some measure of prestige associated with Europe, material prosperity and upward social mobility in a colonial system that considered them inferior, whilst also providing some autonomy from that system.10

6 ibid.

7 Maria

da Conceição Neto, ‘In Town and Out of Town: A Social History of Huambo (Angola) 1902–1961’ (University of London, 2012). 8 A small Seventh-day Adventist mission was established at Bongo, to the west of Nova Lisboa, in 1926 but seems to have had limited influence before the civil war. Lawrence W. Henderson, A Igreja Em Angola: Um Rio Com Várias Correntes, second edition (Lisbon: Além Mar, 2013). 9 Didier Péclard, ‘“Amanha Para Ser Homem”: Missions Chrétiennes et Formation Du Sujet Colonial En Angola Central Au XXe Siècle’, Politique Africaine 74 (1999): 113–29. 10 Heywood, Contested Power in Angola; Neto, ‘In Town and Out of Town’.

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The influence of the missions played into a broader social transformation in the region effected under the pressure of colonial domination. Gladwyn Childs11 wrote that in the 1930s there was a double descent system that was patrilocal, with political office organised through localised patrilineal kin, and commercial relations organised through dispersed matrilineal kin. The principal differences between people were ‘due to the two factors of age and sex’, he argued,12 and the basis of the kinship structure was the household. Adrian Edwards, describing village life13 in the 1950s, claimed that much of the system described by Childs had disappeared, with settlement now on a cognatic basis, with most villagers having some kinship relation to the senior man of the village, through either line. If anything, there was now a ‘neomatrilineal’14 pull in residence, and important friendships between women and their brothers, and between men and brothers-in-law. The German agronomist, Herman Pössinger15 described how, during the independence war, the intensification of cultivation on the Planalto necessitated cultivation on ever-larger plots of land, increasing dispersal of villages. Male labour migration increased in this period,16 as did conscription into the colonial army,17 half of which was made up of African troops,18 meaning that men were often absent, and an increasing number of female-headed households. In Nova Lisboa by 1974, many Ovimbundu had become involved in wage labour, in factories and farms, and as menial labourers.19 In spite of this turbulent context, all of the men I worked with remembered two key institutions of ‘Umbundu tradition’ and their formative influence on them. The first was the ondjango (usually jango for short), the men’s

11

Gladwyn Childs, Umbundu Kinship and Character: A Description of the Social Structure and Individual Development of the Umbundu of Angola (London: Oxford University Press, 1949). 12 ibid., 41. 13 Edwards carried out his research in a village called Epalanga, near Bimbe, in what he describes as the northwestern edge of Umbundu country. 14 Adrian Edwards, The Ovimbundu under Two Sovereignties: A Study of Social Control and Social Change among a People of Angola (Oxford: Published for the International African Institute by the Oxford University Press, 1962), 110. 15 Hermann Pössinger, ‘Interrelations between Economic and Social Change in Rural Africa: The Case of the Ovimbundu of Angola’, in Social Change in Angola (München: Weltforum Verlag, 1973). 16 Heywood, Contested Power in Angola. 17 João Paulo Borges-Coelho, ‘African Troops in the Portuguese Colonial Army, 1961– 1974: Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique’, Portuguese Studies Review 10, no. 1 (2002): 129–150. 18 Malyn Newitt, ‘Angola in Historical Context’, in Angola: The Weight of History, ed. Patrick Chabal and Nuno Vidal (London: Hurst, 2007). 19 Heywood, Contested Power in Angola.

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house. Described by Childs as, in the 1930s, ‘a dining room, living room, court, school, hotel, and club, all in one’,20 males would eat together there in the evenings, and youth were educated by proverb and example about proper behaviour and traditional history. All of the veterans I worked with remembered it as an important institution where elder men educated younger ones and food was shared out.21 The second was the circumcision ceremony, or evamba. This seems to have been gaining in importance in the 1930s.22 Wilfrid Hambly gave the most detailed account of the ceremony, the essential features of which were a period of seclusion away from the village for initiates; the rigorous exclusion of women and uninitiated men; hardship and harsh discipline imposed by older men; the teaching of dancing, making of masks and costumes, and ‘tribal customs’.23 The ceremony constituted a symbolic death, and re-entry to the village at the end of the ceremony was a reintroduction to village life as a man with a new name, who was allowed to marry, and who must not reveal the secrets of the initiation camp on pain of death.24 João was born in 1969, in a village in Huambo province far from the closest town. His uncle was the soba (traditional village headman) of the village, and his parents were both farmers (his father later also became a soba). His family was forced to flee to the nearest town ‘at the side of the road’, when UNITA attacks on his village began in 1978, since settlements near main roads were within the security perimeter of the FAPLA and therefore safer from attacks by UNITA. This is the main incident that he focused on in his relating of prearmy life, and the hardship and loss of identity that it entailed. In this part of his life he narrated as part of a collective ‘we’ – referring to his extended family, a major locus of his identity. He emphasised that ‘people called us “refugees” – there was no “who are you and who are you?” The phrase was

20 Childs,

Umbundu Kinship and Character, 26. speaks of the ‘disappearance of the men’s house’ (64), but Paul Robson and Sandra Roque, Here in the City There Is Nothing Left Over for Lending a Hand, vol. 2, Occasional Paper (Luanda: Development Workshop, 2001) also report that it remained important until mass displacement began to fragment village communities from the late 1970s onwards, which accords with my own findings. 22 Childs, Umbundu Kinship and Character. 23 Wilfrid D. Hambly, ‘Tribal Initiation of Boys in Angola’, American Anthropologist, New Series, 37, no. 1 (1935): 317. 24 Hambly, ‘Tribal Initiation of Boys in Angola’. Hambly, unlike Childs, also argued that the prevalence of initiation ceremonies was decreasing in the 1930s. I prefer Childs’ account, since he points out that none of the 19th-century sources mention circumcision, and also because Hambly spent less than a year in Angola, much of it outside the Planalto, and did not speak Umbundu. If anything, the prevalence of this ritual seemed to have increased by the time the veterans I worked with were children.

21 Edwards

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“you are refugees”’. However, after three or four years things improved, and João managed to complete some schooling. João often spoke at length on the subject of circumcision. He was circumcised traditionally, ‘in cold blood’ (without anaesthetic), when he was around six years old, and the experience was narrated as an ambivalent one, entailing considerable hardship but having an important and positive educative function. Circumcision seemed to have three main functions for João. One was an education in how to ‘live with others’, emphasising respect and obedience to elders, but also respect for fellow initiates and the proper treatment of noninitiates. He compared this education to other forms of education – religious education, military training and formal state schooling, calling it a ‘seminary’ and an ‘academy’, and saying that ‘you forget the things that you learned at school, but you never forget the things you learned in the bush’. Second, he described how it promoted solidarity between initiates, who could, he claimed, be killed if they betrayed the secret knowledge to non-initiates, and who had special terms of address for their age-mates, who would be considered intimate friends for the rest of their lives. Finally, he spoke of circumcision’s significance as part of the transition to (male) adult status: ‘Every person that passed through the bush changed their knowledge, changed their behaviour: that person is already a mature person.’ An important aspect of the evamba was the role of the ovinganji – the masked dancers who represented demons and spirits of the ancestors (often also referred to using the Portuguese word palhaços (clowns)). These had an important role in organising and enforcing the evamba in the late-colonial and early independence period. They were said by veterans to beat and even kill men who did not undergo the evamba, or would grab them and cut them by force. Palhaços were also known for their use of feitiço, which was said to produce boils on the skin, to punish non-initiates. They would seek to prevent non-initiated young men from socialising with young women by chasing them away, and women and other men were said to look down on men who were had not been circumcised ‘in cold blood’. Several veterans said that such men would be considered atrasado – backward. To give the impression that palhaços were ghosts, they would keep their costumes in a graveyard and change into them there, making sure always to emerge in costume only from there. Non-initiates were said to believe this fiction, and it was only during the evamba that boys would learn that they were not ghosts – and boys who could dance well could become a palhaço themselves. Many men spoke to me of the harshness of the palhaços in regulating and enforcing this form of transition to adult manhood, and those who had been circumcised in hospital spoke vividly of the ridicule and persecution that they had faced in their youth as a result. Others spoke of their value as entertainment in their youth, an appeal that had faded considerably by 2012, now that televisions were widespread.

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When speaking approvingly of traditional circumcision, João was aware that it was a ritual long disapproved of by churches, including during his youth. The ritual was not practised by any families I spoke to in 2012. This was largely said to be due to its association with the palhaços and their occult connotations. João still identified with his kimbo (home village) origins against the denigration of practices and identities associated with the rural and ‘traditional’ by many in Huambo in 2012, and his narrative thus presents some continuity between the values orienting his early life and those of his adult life up to 2012. Vicente was born in a peri-urban bairro (neighbourhood) of Huambo city in the mid-1960s. His father was a government functionary, his mother was a farmer, and his whole family are lifelong practising Roman Catholics. Like João, he also emphasised the hardship of his upbringing, however, it seems to have been a much more stable time than for João. He spent much less time speaking of his childhood than João did, describing his youth as austere, simple and hard-working, ‘just studying hard, sport, and going to church’. In this statement there seems to be an implicit contrast with the more comfortable and, according to Vicente, less hard-working lifestyles of his children in post-war Huambo, which had been the cause of conflict between him and his children. He was circumcised in hospital, since the Catholic Church forbade traditional circumcision, but he did attend the ondjango in his neighbourhood with his father and speaks approvingly of it: ‘you learnt how to conduct yourself in life, how to respect the elders’. Another form of education from the party-state, along with school education, was that of the MPLA children’s movement, the Organização de Pioneiros Angolanos (OPA), which each of these three men attended. Vicente described this organisation as existing to ‘sensibilise young people politically … how you should live’. Thus Vicente, like most of these veterans, underwent education in four different institutions in his youth: in state school, in the OPA, in church and in the ondjango. Vicente, like João, narrated the moral values orienting his upbringing as being largely continuous with those orienting his adulthood. For him this meant a focus on Catholic morality and an ethic of hard work, deference to male elders and respect for others. Of the four institutions providing his education outside the family, then, only the church and the ondjango had continued relevance for him in the narration of his life story in 2012. Jamba was born in 1963, also in a suburb of Huambo, one of seven siblings. When summarising his origins, he said he was from a ‘lower order’ of society, and that his father was a worker in a colonial state enterprise. He spoke of his childhood principally in terms of disappointment at wasted potential, and in particular of the recurring theme of his thwarted desire to become ‘a big man in society’:

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[O]ne thing [my father] didn’t do was to project me into school, or at least some profession. My father … had white friends and he was trusted. Maybe he could have found me a white godfather, and I could have lived in a white family and gone to a white school, where there wasn’t that disparity … Some of [my friends] were of the Protestant religion, their parents already had the vision, and the majority of them are big men in society. They are in the big institutions when I, my friend, it won’t do for me to show you my house because I don’t have that quality, I’m not worthy to put you up in my house. Why? Because, deep down, I’m ashamed.

This experience emphasised to Jamba the importance of being a ‘responsible father’. He said that his parents were ‘pagans’, who ‘didn’t have anything in their heads’, although he said that the ‘light of knowledge’ brought by Congregationalist and Adventist missionaries to the Planalto meant that each generation was gaining more knowledge than the last, from his grandparents to his own children. Thus, in Jamba’s narrative, social mobility, progress, knowledge and religious morality were all bound up together. Jamba had been traditionally circumcised and became an ocinganji, indicating the extent of his investment in Umbundu spiritual beliefs. He continued to see both the circumcision ritual (aside from its supernatural aspects) and the ondjango as positive moral influences. However, he was also moving in what he had come to see as the immoral ‘world of drinking, smoking and marijuana. And women, because those who drink need women.’ Unlike both João and Vicente, Jamba narrated his young life with an air of disapproval, emphasising from the outset his current state as an enlightened, modern and morally upstanding Adventist man. In the youth of all of these men, then, we can see the important impact of three important moral influences, though their impact varied for each man: the institutions of ‘traditional’ Umbundu life, the churches and the nascent MPLA party-state.

Army life Very little social science research has been published on life in the FAPLA. Two military histories have been published,25 but are principally concerned with issues of military strategy and organisation, rather than social dynamics within the military. After the end of the independence war and the defeat of UNITA and the FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola), the challenge facing the FAPLA was the conversion from a guerrilla army into a regular one. Reforms intended to support this were instituted in 1976, with conscription into the FAPLA being introduced for Angolan citizens by law

25 Stephen L. Weigert, Angola: A Modern Military History, 1961–2002 (New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2011); Miguel Junior, Popular Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola: First National Army and the War (Milton Keynes: AuthorHouse, 2015).

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2/76,26 updated in 1982 by law 12/82, the Lei General do Serviço Militar. It seems that in practice hardly any women were recruited after 1977.27 The FAPLA, then, was a male environment, which meant a mixing of men from all over Angola, thus constituting what David Birmingham calls one of the national institutions par excellence,28 in terms of creating bonds through a shared, arduous experience, and a sense of a national community. The FAPLA had grown to 120,000 troops by 1987,29 and several hundred thousand men had passed through its ranks by 1992.30 Christine Messiant noted that Umbundu soldiers formed the backbone of this army, and seem to have played an even more important role in it than they did in the colonial army,31 and in the same period Ovimbundu (men and some women)32 were becoming increasingly important in UNITA’s army (the FALA – Forças Armadas para a Libertação de Angola). This meant that the war often pitted people from the same families against each other, but despite the strong presence of Ovimbundu in the FAPLA, they were principally considered by northerners to be submissive to UNITA. Certain hierarchies developed in the FAPLA, with the higher ranks coming to be dominated by northerners. As fighting became fiercer, supplies often became scarcer, and even essential supplies diverted from the front line by corruption. Disillusionment consequently grew during the 1980s, and desertions increased.33 FAPLA soldiers often had an antagonistic relationship with civilians, over whom they were often able to wield considerable power. While relations between civilians and soldiers varied according to region, civilians were targeted by both armed movements in this period with many thousands being killed and, in particular, large numbers of women subjected to sexual violence by soldiers. MPLA and UNITA soldiers both took predatory attitudes to women in conquered areas in the 1980s, in a period when HIV/AIDS began to spread rapidly.34 Families are said to have responded to this threat by encouraging



26 Junior,

Popular Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola. Combater Duas Vezes. 28 David Birmingham, ‘Angola Revisited’, Journal of Southern African Studies 15, no. 1 (1988): 9. 29 Weigert, Angola: A Modern Military History. 30 Christine Messiant, L’Angola Postcolonial: Tome 1, Guerre et Paix sans Démocratisation (Paris: Karthala Editions, 2008). 31 ibid. 32 UNITA had both a women’s battalion, and used girls and young women as porters, cooks and servants, who were not classified as soldiers in UNITA’s guerrilla army, but who would be classified as such in a regular army: V. Stavrou, ‘Breaking the Silence: Girls Forcibly Involved in the Armed Struggle in Angola’ (CIDA and Christian Children’s Fund, 2004). 33 Messiant, L’Angola Postcolonial. 34 Birmingham, ‘Angola Revisited’. 27 Paredes,

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their daughters to marry younger and extending the breastfeeding period of their children in the hope of discouraging sexual assault by soldiers.35 João had spent longer in the FAPLA than most of the other men I worked with, only demobilising in 2002. João was recruited into the FAPLA at the age of 13, and describes his recruitment as ‘not voluntary’. Since both the government and UNITA would be trying to abduct adolescent boys, the only choice was which army to join. This was a common experience of FAPLA recruits: 63 per cent of FAPLA veterans from the POEMA survey said that they were recruited non-voluntarily, either in response to a compulsory call up, or simply being snatched off the streets by a FAPLA recruitment party. João’s age at recruitment was towards the lower end of the scale for veterans in the survey, although 27 per cent were recruited under the age of 18. After recruitment, João was eventually enrolled in training to be a paramedic. João emphasised some key topics when speaking of his time in the military, including the harsh discipline meted out by senior officers,36 the danger and fear experienced in combat, and the key tactics to surviving in battle. However, the major theme of his narration was that of the general immorality of soldiers’ conduct during the war, and his efforts to avoid committing certain moral transgressions that he considered particularly serious. In his account, these risked a moral disintegration from which he could not recover, and were also still the subject of particular moral censure in 2012. Part of the habitual immorality of soldiers’ conduct, he said, stemmed from the power they could exercise over civilians, which allowed them to steal with relative impunity. Food supplies in the FAPLA in the 1980s were quite adequate compared to civilian shortages, and many soldiers used this food as leverage over women, with whom it was exchanged for sex. João’s first child was born to a woman with whom he had a relationship on these terms when he was 19 years of age, a fact that he only recounted to me once we had known each other for almost a year. He also spoke of the killing of enemy soldiers – in spite of being a paramedic, he also sometimes participated in frontline fighting: You could have three or four friends, but after two or three battles, sometimes only you are left … So, when you go into combat, and you see them [the enemy]: ‘those are the ones that killed my friends’ … Anyone who says that he felt pity is a liar.

He considered these and other acts as morally dubious, but as being part and parcel of life as a soldier. However, João also struggled to avoid transgressions 35 K.

Pehrsson et al., ‘Towards Gender Equality in Angola: A Profile on Gender Relations’ (Stockholm: Sida, 2000). 36 As he suggests, military discipline in the FAPLA could be very harsh. In response to the question ‘What would happen to a member of your unit if they disobeyed?’ in the POEMA survey, 41% of FAPLA veterans reported that they would be tortured and 6% that they would be killed.

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that he thought would take him beyond the pale. He occasionally mentioned that one such transgression was violent rape, but another that he addressed in more detail was that of killing civilians. He spoke of one occasion when he was ordered to kill four civilians, but seeing that they were ‘just peasants’, and were ‘innocent’, he took them away from his unit, fired four shots into the ground, and told them to hide until his unit had left the area: You can not do it but … [t]here was no way to say ‘I’m not going to do that’, because if you say that, then it is you who will die. The others will be there waiting for you, to see how you did it … You have to show that you’re ready to do everything.

In this passage João speaks of exercising a similar kind of ‘tactical agency’ that Honwana reports in the case of UNITA child soldiers,37 tacitly resisting orders from superiors whilst giving the appearance of compliance, to avoid committing acts that he found inexcusable and that would change him irrevocably. Vicente, like João, was also concerned with the harshness of military discipline and the morality of killing, but his narrative was strikingly different. When he was 16 he was walking home from school, and was grabbed off the street by a FAPLA recruiting team and sent for military training. After basic training he was selected for the rank of sergeant major, a higher rank than most of the veterans I worked with and one that he took great pride in, and he was sent for extra training to work in logistics. Working in logistics was very complex. I passed into a very dangerous situation. [Soldiers] would eat and not be full, and they would come to me and say, ‘Sergeant Major, give me something at least’, and I would give it to them without monitoring how quickly things would finish. One day I did the balance and saw that the food was finishing and there were still a lot of days to go [before resupply]. Like this you have a serious problem in your life … I gave out of the feeling [for others] that a man, a person has … So, I had to grab my money and go and replace what was gone – otherwise they would put me in prison or even kill me. … Until today people see me and say, ‘he was a Sergeant Major but he was a very good, peaceful man’.

He repeatedly emphasised his uncommon achievement in managing the feat of being ‘very nice’ to his comrades, whilst respecting military discipline and pleasing his superiors. More importantly however, he expressed his relief at never having been sent to the front, fired a weapon or killed an enemy soldier. He was often nominated to go, but his ‘boss’ would never allow it: That’s why I can’t ever say that God was very distant. I really can’t. It’s better for me [now] to spend less time in the market and more time in church [a habit his colleagues had criticised him for].

37 Alcinda

Honwana, Child Soldiers in Africa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

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In Vicente’s narrative, then, he is concerned with the struggle to stay true to his moral code, but his story is a proud one, one of managing to successfully negotiate the pressures of military life through his own capacities and the ‘goodness’ he felt towards his comrades; and through the protection of God, who prevented him from being sent to the front. Jamba spoke less about his time in the army than the other two men, speaking of the war in general terms and only discussing his service when I asked specifically about it. He was the only one of the men I worked with who spoke of having been an active MPLA supporter in his youth (although in the POEMA survey 30 per cent of FAPLA veterans reported signing up for political reasons). He spoke of the story of Augusto Ngangula,38 mentioned by several veterans, a mythical figure whose biography was often cited in MPLA youth organisations in the late 1970s to encourage young men to sign up to the FAPLA. Ngangula was said to have been a young MPLA supporter during the colonial period who refused to disclose the location of an MPLA guerrilla base to the Portuguese and was murdered as a result. Jamba said that this had convinced him to ‘adhere to the military life’ – to sign up to the FAPLA as part of the motorised infantry: I swore loyalty to the flag. You had to swear to the flag when you were recruited. I swore for my fatherland, for the defence of my country and the integrity of Angolan territory, you had to swear … Even in that time, if you had fourth or fifth grade [of schooling]: driver; third or fourth grade: mechanic. And the others, who, with writing, can’t even sign their own name, go to the infantry … The others, in the artillery, are behind, the command is behind, the heavy weapons are behind. The tanks, they stay in a barrier with you, the infantry, it was called motorised infantry. You advance with the tanks. The first tanks of the enemy, it’s you who go against them first, so if they pass over, then it’s you that are passed over and who die first.

The low status of less educated recruits39 is borne out by the POEMA survey data: the mean years of schooling for infantry veterans was 3.5; for rear guard specialisms and tank crews it was 4.58. As he spoke of the danger of death he was laughing mirthlessly and grimacing at the memory: emphasising both the fear of battles and a sort of dour pride that higher status recruits had a much easier time of it, while those considered lower status by the military were the ones taking the most risks and doing the most fighting. After some time, he became accustomed to the demands of battle and began to orient new recruits in the same process. In spite of the patriotism and courage that he also highlighted, he also spoke of how he had sold marijuana to his fellow

38 The

figure of Ngangula is discussed in more detail in Chapter 2. is worth noting here that education levels in colonial times were low for most black Angolans – most did not have more than three or four years of schooling, aside from the minority who attended mission schools.

39 It

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soldiers, again emphasising the sinfulness of his life at that time. He was being considered for promotion when ‘this happened’, he said, rapping his knuckle on his prosthetic ankle.

Demobilisation & adjusting to civilian life after Bicesse As the civil war intensified during the 1980s the colonial economy collapsed, and living conditions worsened considerably. The war gradually intensified in the countryside, and more and more people either chose to migrate to the city or were ordered to by the FAPLA,40 with Huambo becoming a particular refuge for many, while others lived in rural areas controlled by UNITA. As Justin Pearce notes,41 the MPLA was uniquely an urban party on the Planalto, with UNITA having its bases solely in the countryside, aside from some undercover cells in cities. People from particular villages did not usually migrate en masse, but as individuals or nuclear families. New arrivals would move into their own rented houses as soon as they could, wherever it was cheapest to rent or build a new house, rather than settling near kin. This meant the fragmenting of village and kinship communities, and older rural institutions such as the evamba circumcision ritual and the ondjango faded away due to the former’s requirement for safe, secluded urban spaces to send boys, and the latter’s need for space and united village communities.42 Agriculture was decimated by the war and travel in the countryside became extremely dangerous, meaning that food had to be grown in areas such as old playgrounds and the central reservations of highways, and brought into the cities either by air43 or by armoured road convoys.44 The absence of many men for long periods through conscription, death and flight from military service meant that there were many families supported only by women. The war reached a stalemate after an intense battle at Cuito Cuanavale, and an agreement was signed agreeing the withdrawal of Cuban and South African troops from Angola in December 1988. The MPLA and UNITA reluctantly signed the Bicesse Accords under international pressure in 1991. At this point the formation of one national body of armed forces comprising 50,000 personnel, the FAA, was agreed, which implied the demobilisation of large numbers of troops on both sides. However, fighting resumed after elections in 1992. Much of the fighting in the 1990s also took place in cities on the Planalto, and claimed far more civilian lives than previously. UNITA captured Huambo

40 Pearce, 41 ibid.

Political Identity and Conflict in Central Angola.

42 Robson

and Roque, Here in the City. ‘Angola Revisited’. 44 Pearce, Political Identity and Conflict in Central Angola. 43 Birmingham,

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city from the MPLA government, after a brutal 55-day siege that caused many civilian casualties. UNITA remained in control of Huambo from 8 March 1993 to November 1994, and numerous FAPLA veterans and suspected MPLA supporters were imprisoned, tortured and executed. Agriculture, the import of goods and mobility between cities remained very difficult until the end of the war in 2002. João continued to serve in Huambo province until the Bicesse Accords were signed in 1991. In 1990 he married his first wife, an event that he does not spontaneously mention unless prompted, in spite of it being a key part of the transition to full adult male status. Unlike Vicente and Jamba, João talks about his relations with women without mentioning love or other emotions. He also did not seem to spend much time socialising with his first wife in 2012, having already taken a second wife and apparently having a girlfriend in the market. His wife was chosen for him by his family: When I was going from my unit to see my family, my family indicated that if I wanted to live with a woman, the woman is that one … She’s a cousin, [meaning] we’re from adjacent neighbourhoods … we know each other, I know her grandparents, she also knows my grandparents.

As with many of these men, knowing a spouse’s family, that they were of good, hard-working character and in particular did not have a tradition of feitiço, was important. He also had his first child shortly after getting married, because ‘us, as Africans … if you don’t have a child it means that marriage is no good’. Both his marriage and the birth of his first child with this wife were, therefore, framed in terms of customary institutions of marriage, obedience to elder kin and links between kin groups. It thus seems to constitute an almost default part of the adult masculinity he narrates, rather than a relationship invested with great emotional significance. When I asked him about his ‘demobilisation’, he spoke of state assistance, which he clearly considered inadequate: ‘They just gave you a pair of shoes, a shirt and a bag and that’s it, “go away”’. Fighting broke out again in Huambo province after the elections in 1992, and João was captured by UNITA in his home town as a government veteran. He was put to work in a medical post in his home town, and emphasised the hard, unremunerated work of this period. He argued that this experience meant that he knew what both UNITA and the MPLA were like: ‘no-one lies to me’, he said. This was a theme that ran throughout our conversations: the puncturing of hypocrisy and the pretence of moral uprightness to reveal often cynical, self-seeking behaviour that lay beneath. In this case, he spoke particularly of the diverting of civilian drugs to the military, continuing the theme of both military-political organisations as self-seeking and abusive of the civilian population on whose behalf they were supposedly fighting. When UNITA were forced to flee the area in 1994, he

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re-enlisted in the government’s army (just over half (52.27 per cent) of FAPLA soldiers in the POEMA survey also served in the FAA). After ten years away from his home province, in 1990 Vicente received a special dispensation to go and get married to a woman he had met before military service. Unlike João, he emphasised his own role in choosing his wife and the affection that he felt for her, in keeping with the more companionate idea of marriage that he and several other committed churchgoing men advocated (being opposed to a more distant and sometimes conflictive idea of marriage that less committed or non-churchgoing veterans spoke of). In 1992 Vicente demobilised as part of the Bicesse agreement and went to live with his wife in Huambo city: So, I demobilised. I was at home … In the end our brothers in UNITA retook the province of Huambo. We had quite some time with them here. But the situation started to get complicated. Especially concerning food. Only our wives could do business, us men couldn’t, they [UNITA] wouldn’t accept us [men] walking around. But after a while I saw that the situation was really terrible. Always waiting for your woman won’t do.

Perhaps considering a recorded an interview as more of a formal, quasipublic statement, he spoke of UNITA as ‘our brothers’ and refrained from criticising them, apparently respecting church policies of reconciliation, discretion and forgiveness for wartime sins. In less formal statements, in contrast, he was harshly critical of them. ‘Everyone had to be humiliated’, he said, and people were forced to walk without wearing shoes or even cleaning themselves – both of these habits suggesting a connection with the ‘urban’ world of the MPLA. Soldiers would cut ‘pockets’ in people’s lower abdomens as a punishment, many FAPLA veterans were executed and children were abducted. This was a common theme in the discussion of the morality of the war by FAPLA veterans: although abuses were carried out by both sides, in their view UNITA was much more brutal and abusive than the MPLA. Thus, although they represented the war as pointlessly destructive, they saw themselves as at least fighting for the better faction and preventing a sadistic UNITA from taking control. In spite of the mortal danger from UNITA, Vicente felt it was worth going out to earn money, since he found it intolerable to be relying on his wife for economic support – reflecting the centrality of breadwinning to senior male status in this context. As in the narration of his period in the military, the period of adjusting to civilian life in informal commerce is narrated in terms of God’s protection and guidance, and his own virtues and success: I asked God, and God gave me a path, how I should make my living. Then I went to sleep, and in the morning, I went to church. He had given me that heart …

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which was to help people. If they had something that they needed carrying, I would carry it.

After making some money as a porter, he bought some goods that he began selling in a square in Huambo city, eventually moving to the cidade (city centre) market where he was still selling in 2012. Jamba left the army earlier than the other two men, after stepping on a mine in 1983. Discharges for health reasons were the most common reason for exit reported by FAPLA veterans in the POEMA survey: 52 per cent, compared to 11 per cent who deserted, 32 per cent who were demobilised and 6 per cent who were discharged for other reasons. Jamba spent two years in a military hospital, and it was during his time there that he first heard the Seventh-day Adventist message: What really convinced me [was that] my brother that followed me died … then our youngest sibling died, my sister died. I even thought that I could die, because every year in the family there was a funeral. So, when [my brother-in-law] brought me this message of hope, and showed me Christ, and that to follow him you have to renounce or abandon certain vices that a person carries in their life, because these vices are prejudicial to health and to the spiritual life. It gave me hope that even though the family today is dying, if you have faith in Jesus and accept him as your Saviour, there will be a morning of resurrection, and in Heaven we will be together.

He thus cited a variety of motivations for converting: his fear of death, grief at the death of his relatives and a desire to see them again. Importantly, he also cites the deleterious physical and moral effects of his ‘vices’, which he saw as bound up together. This was a key turning point in his narrative and its moral tone: he stopped emphasising the sinfulness of his conduct and began speaking of himself in terms of his struggle to build a family, to conduct his life as a faithful Adventist, and to be someone with a positive influence on ‘society’. He also dwelt at length on how losing his leg had shattered his dreams of sporting success: I would have had a name in football because I could play with two feet … Football was a friend from birth, I almost started playing football in my mother’s belly … I’d score lots of goals! I had great vision!

After four years of strenuous physical work in construction, he said that he was in constant pain, and that ‘you have to learn to control yourself, because if you let the pain agitate you, you will end up stressed’. Jamba saw these problems as the result of an immoral war, fought because of the satanic lust of politicians for power and money. He bemoaned the failure of the MPLA government to compensate him for the losses he had suffered, likening their moral obligation to veterans to the duty of a father towards his son:

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I was ruined, I lost a leg. It’s true I didn’t have a good level of education, but I was born fine, with two legs … So, if I’m limited, who is it that brought me to these limitations? It’s the government, who demanded that I go into the army to defend the interests of the country, and I lost my leg. This government, as a father, should look after me.

In this period, he went to live in the coastal city of Benguela with his nephew, which was less subject to the disruptions of war than Huambo. In 1985 he married his first wife and they had their first child, a boy, who died shortly after being born, and a second, a girl, who also died. Finally, in 1992, they had a son, who was still alive in 2012.

Life in wartime after Bicesse up to the end of the war As mentioned above, when UNITA was driven out of Huambo in 1994, João enlisted in the FAA. The nature of warfare in the 1990s was markedly different to that in the 1980s, because more fighting happened in the cities, and the number of civilian casualties was much higher. João described the war as ‘hard’, and gave no credence to the official line of both factions that the war was fought in the interests of ‘the people’: ‘Any soldier who says that he was protecting the population is lying. The war didn’t protect anyone or bring anything good to the people.’ João described what he saw as the gradual moral breakdown of the waging of the war, especially in terms of the treatment of the civilian population: at first, in the early 1980s, the FAPLA would station troops in each commune to protect them from UNITA, he said. However, towards the end of that decade they stopped doing so – they would only protect economic interests: oil, diamonds, dams, municipal centres, and leave ‘the people’ unprotected. So, after this, ‘villages would be empty – there would just be flies there, loads of flies’. Then, towards the end of the war, from around 2000 onwards, the FAA pursued a scorched earth policy, with harsh consequences for many civilians, who were often forced into government-organised villages. It was clear that being a soldier during the war was preferable to being a civilian for João in the 1990s. Food was scarcer in the FAA than it had been under the FAPLA, but since many civilians were starving, it was better than the alternative. Food shortages in the FAA were one of many causes of tension between comrades in the army, and João spoke of the sometimes violent animosities that developed between soldiers. Life in the FAA was presented by João as a space of scarcity and conflict that led to moral degradation, through an absence of the ethics of communality and respect for one’s peers espoused in his home village and the brotherly love preached by churches. When the war finally came to an end in 2002, João was preoccupied with a sorcery attack that he suffered in that year. Two new colleagues had concocted

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a plan to steal the most expensive drugs from the dispensary and sell them in Luanda. Fearing that João might try to scupper their plan, he said, they put a ‘feitiço mine’ on his chair, which gave him a fever and caused his legs to burn, paralysing him. Fearing another feitiço attack, João fled to his sister’s house in Huambo city. One day, when he was lying down in the courtyard of his sister’s house, a crab crawled out from under his legs. He called his sister, who came outside and on seeing the crab, started shaking and told him he was going to die. He replied that he was not, and killed the crab. After a week he could walk again, and he deserted the army permanently to avoid further attacks. As he told me this, he rolled up his trouser legs to show that one of his legs was thinner than the other. João told me this story several times, with a pronounced sense of fear. It was implicit in these conversations that many people in his context would not normally tell a white foreigner such a story. A Baptist pastor had told me early in my fieldwork that many people would want to show their ‘modern’ side to me, a white foreigner, and not speak to me of subjects such as feitiço, in order not to appear superstitious or backward. In relating his experience of a feitiço attack, João was following through on his determination to avoid masking uncomfortable truths. His principal concern seemed to be the depravity and danger of sorcery, rather than a perceived ‘backwardness’ (although the two were linked in church condemnations of witchcraft). This depravity was related to the ruthless self-seeking of people under conditions of war that would lead soldiers to kill comrades and fail to serve civilians; and the dangerous malevolence that was both given expression through feitiço, and fuelled by its corrupting influence. Vicente’s account of this period was fairly short, and was one of steady, hard-working progress for himself and his family once the initial crisis of demobilisation and establishing a livelihood under UNITA occupation had been negotiated. Key landmarks in this period were the building of his own houses. At the end of 1993 he bought some land and had a house built, and then in 1994, after UNITA had left the city, he bought more land and built another, bigger house. The building of one’s own house was a key achievement in the stories of all of the veterans I worked with. Escaping rented housing was apparently a key achievement in the establishment of adult male independence and social progress for oneself and one’s family (and so perhaps could also be termed a key aspect of ‘re/integration’), and houses were a key indicator of status and wealth, depending on the location and material of construction. Vicente spoke of this period as one of hard work ‘with my wife’, emphasising the joint nature of their achievements in spite of the harsh conditions of wartime. Jamba had returned briefly to Huambo in 1993 when the city was still relatively peaceful, but went back to Benguela when the fighting restarted, along with his wife, son and his nephew, who was also a FAPLA veteran. He spent

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much of the 1990s trading between the coastal city of Lobito and Huambo, and was away from his wife for long periods. Implicit in his narrative is that during this time he was attempting, like Vicente, to build a life as a respected, Christian head of his family, meaning specifically one who successfully performed the triple role of a companionate husband, a good father and the family breadwinner. However, this project received a shock when he was away working in Lobito at the end of the war in 2002. Word came to him that his wife was having an affair with another man. The episode eventually led to divorce, when Jamba’s wife, despite his entreaties and offers of forgiveness, refused to return to him, preferring to stay with the other man. While he could understand that she could have a ‘biological’ need for another man when her husband was away for long periods, he could not understand why she would refuse his forgiveness and break up the family unit. Her motivation, he believed, was his failure to earn enough money to satisfy her expectations. This represented a serious blow to his efforts to attain respectability as a senior man: he was seen to fail in his responsibilities as a breadwinner, and thus as a husband, and his role as a father was also under threat. In addition, having a divorce was clearly frowned upon in the Adventist church, and Jamba describes the incident as having ‘destroyed’ his spiritual life, meaning that he lost respect in the church, and was unable to continue as a church elder. He spoke several times of his divorce, sometimes with bitter, gesticulating anger – anger at both his wife’s betrayal and shallow money motivation, but also at the enduring damage that it had done to his moral reputation and efforts to build a family. It also brought his role as a ‘good father’ under threat: Since my wife left me with the children, they could have ended up as street kids, but as I’m a responsible father they haven’t. I don’t manage to give them 100 per cent of what they need, but I manage to satisfy their needs. They might come to me with something that they need, and I don’t manage to get it for them straight away, but within two or three days I can.

Thus, we can see in both Vicente and Jamba’s accounts that, in spite of the danger and violence of wartime, their principal concerns in their narrations of this period were trying to hold their life projects together as senior, respected Christian men. Building such life projects and moral masculine selves was difficult not because of violence per se, but due to the difficulty of trading under conditions of war. Upon leaving the army, given the destruction of both the agricultural economy and most industry (outside the oil industry), both men had had to tackle the steep learning curve of becoming traders, a profession that neither they nor their parents had ever pursued. The inherent unpredictability and instability of informal trading made the achievement of being seen as a successful breadwinner difficult (even with their wives’ help). This was exacerbated by the restrictions on mobility that the war imposed, the

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difficulty of importing goods to the interior of the country, and the impossibility of using subsistence agriculture as a safety net in times of reduced profits.

Life after the war, 2002–2012 After the death of Jonas Savimbi in 2002, the civil war ended quickly. Some key facts of where Angola found itself in 2002 are well rehearsed: around four million people were displaced from their homes,45 and as many as a million and a half are estimated to have died as a result of the conflict.46 The country’s infrastructure had been extensively destroyed, and several towns virtually razed to the ground. The booming economy of the early 1970s, based quite broadly on agricultural products and manufacturing as well as oil and diamonds, was now almost completely reliant on the latter two. All goods needed to be imported, even food. Much remains to be understood about the post-war period, but the dominant trends, at least at a national level, are clear: first the extension and consolidation of the party-state’s domination of the government, civil service, judiciary, military and economy; and second, the very rapid economic growth, largely financed by the oil sector,47 which was accompanied by an extraordinary reconstruction of infrastructure, stark economic inequalities and widespread poverty. Both these trends have had important consequences for the living conditions, prospects for social advancement and social imaginaries of most Angolans – as well as posing important challenges to the moral aspirations of the veterans that I worked with. From the accounts gathered from the men I worked with, however, it is clear that Huambo has rapidly transformed since the end of the war. The road network had been largely renewed, and whereas the city was said to have had few civilian cars in 2002, by 2012 it had busy and relatively well-maintained tarmac roads, though these often became bumpy beaten-earth tracks in the suburbs. School buildings had been rehabilitated and new ones constructed; government buildings had been repaired and renovated, most bullet holes in residential buildings had been filled in and painted over. Much of the state’s work had been in rehabilitating old colonial infrastructure rather than constructing new facilities: the electricity network has been renewed, and the hydroelectric dam, built but unfinished in colonial times at Gove, has been 45 João

G. Porto, Chris Alden, and Imogen Parsons, From Soldiers to Citizens: Demilitarization of Conflict and Society (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007). 46 Bethany Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch, ‘Monitoring Trends in Global Combat: A New Dataset of Battle Deaths’, European Journal of Population/Revue Européenne de Démographie 21, no. 2 (2005): 145–66. 47 This growth is much reduced since the economic crisis caused by falling oil prices since 2014. However, since this book deals mainly with life up to and including 2012, I will not discuss the crisis here.

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repaired and began operation in late 2012. Even the Benguela railway had begun sporadic operations, having been renewed by Chinese contractors. The city was also easily accessible by road once again, and the commercial sector was growing quickly, with more and more formal businesses opening, and many more goods now available in the town’s markets. João struggled with life as a civilian at first. The challenge was perhaps greater than for Vicente and Jamba, since he had spent a greater proportion of his life in the army and left it when he was older. Life in the army was ‘easy’, because the army provided everything that soldiers needed, ‘even if it wasn’t much … but now life gives you problems because everything depends on your work’. Shortly after demobilisation, a friend who was selling in the cidade market invited him to go and sell in the section where he was still selling in 2012. He appreciated the autonomy of being a trader ‘on your own account’: ‘If I see that there is enough food and I don’t want to go to the market then I don’t go.’ He added: ‘I think it’s better, I’m already 43 years old’, apparently thinking it undignified for a man to still be taking orders at such an age. Like Vicente and Jamba, he saw this success as a moral achievement, and expressed pride in his ability to support his children and parents. Yet for João, there was an additional aspect to this pride, in that he saw individual veterans’ success in adapting to ‘social life’ (in this context meaning earning a living) as part of their duty to the nation to consolidate the peace: For you to live well with others, and to form a free country, a person has to start from zero and go to one. And so, it’s really hard, going from the military life to the civilian life, it’s really very, very hard.

He underlined the potential consequences of failure for those soldiers who did not manage to make this transition successfully: It’s really those elders who were soldiers who are now good for nothing. They lost their minds, because there it was easy, now in civilian life it’s difficult. They even failed their kids, abandoned their wives, they live in the streets.

He attributed this not just to the difficulty of the transition, but to the corrupting nature of the power soldiers had over civilians, and to the corrupting nature of feitiço: In the military life everything was easy because if you say I’m going to take that, you take it, as long as your superior doesn’t notice … Killing, robbing doing lots of bad things to others … Living the military life, those who sought feitiço, sought it only to do evil. And so, his heart today only thinks of evil, and so to conform [to civilian life], he doesn’t have the heart for this anymore. And so, this person doesn’t grow, [and] the consequences of the times of war are being paid in the times of peace.

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He linked his successful avoidance of serious moral corruption during his time in the army to his ability to handle the many ethical and practical challenges of adapting to civilian life. This transition, he suggests in the quote above, would have been impossible for him if he had not fought to stop his ‘heart thinking only of evil’ while in the military. Again, however, this success is not told with great pride, rather as a pitfall successfully avoided. He describes his life in peacetime as ‘a bit normal’, meaning a relatively stable life without the imminent dangers of war. He describes his main challenges for the future as trying to prevent his children ‘suffering like we’re suffering now’, considering, as all three of these men did, that his profession, housing and lifestyle placed him in a ‘lower order’ of society. Part of this meant paying for his children to go to school, so that they could find stable formal employment. ‘But for me, no, there’s no better future coming for me’, he said, with an air of resignation rather than bitterness. In João’s narration of this part of his life, there remained an important silence. I came to know, through João’s colleagues and a family member, that João had taken a second wife after the end of the war, with whom he had several children. João had never mentioned this to me, despite once telling me that he would like to take a second wife in the future if he could earn enough money. This meant that he was not welcome in any church congregation, since all denominations in Huambo condemn polygamy. He would often accuse the churches of hypocrisy, claiming in particular that they were motivated by money, and expected payment from even the poorest of their congregants, who they ‘humiliated’ by refusing gifts of maize, demanding contributions in cash. While it is, of course, difficult to interpret silences, it seems likely that part of João’s anger at church institutions was due to his exclusion from them and the consequences this had for the respect people had for him. João was accused of excessive secrecy about his family life by some of his colleagues and criticised for the ‘sin’ he committed through having two wives. It seems clear that his desire for another wife, however motivated, came into conflict with his desires for respectability and the avoidance of moral transgressions that would take him beyond the pale of public morality. He apparently continued to find this contradiction uncomfortable in 2012 and tried to resolve it through the search for the moral high ground, conducted through individual Bible study. This seemed to constitute both a form of Christian religious practice from which church institutions could not exclude him, and gave him scriptural ammunition to discredit those institutions as moral arbiters – particularly as he continued to contest the denigration of practices, knowledge and gendered age hierarchies associated with ‘Umbundu tradition’. The moral codes espoused by the churches had come to dominate the definition of public morality in the spaces where I worked, and incompatible aspects of Umbundu traditions,

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such as polygamy, were a particular source of shame, condemnation and amusement. Peace, for Vicente, was ‘something modernised, something good’, and meant an end to the backward confusão of wartime, making possible the progress of Angolan society. For him personally, the main advantage was that in peacetime it was harder for political movements or soldiers to simply steal one’s property, bringing greater stability to his efforts to prosper and to live the life of a good, hard-working Catholic: ‘So my wife and I carried on working, half here, half there, but always, never forgetting God, always praying, always in a Church, in a church always.’ He spoke of his situation in 2012 principally in terms of achievements, summarising: ‘I’m married, I’m 49 years old, I have nine children and four grandchildren and that’s it, for the moment.’ However, he also spoke of the continuing uncertainty of life even in peacetime, given the lack of salaried employment and the threat that this posed to his family: We all have our own business, which is very difficult because it’s not like when you have a salary and you always know how much you’re going to get … [O]ur children’s work never stops and our work never stops, but we still have a lot of difficulty, up to today.

In 2012 he was working hard seven days a week, both in the market and in his duties as a Catechist in his church. He saw this work as a natural reaction to the protection God gave him during the war. He was also proud that both occupations meant that ‘everyone knows me around here’ – in and around the market, and around his neighbourhood. The first subject Vicente ever mentioned to me was that the government had not provided the compensation he thought veterans were owed for their service. This was seen by all of the veterans I worked with as a factor negatively affecting their life projects. The hope that the government might one day provide this compensation gave Vicente what he saw as his only ‘prospect’ for a better future: If God gives good thinking to the government, in which they recognise the effort of those who were soldiers, my prospect is to have something … I really don’t have anything else.

Jamba does not dwell on the advantages of peace when speaking of his life after 2002, instead returning to the topic of wasted potential. By 2012 he should have been planning for his old age, he said, and thinking about how he could ‘die in peace, without suffering’. Instead he would have to keep working – whereas if he had managed to get an education this would not have been necessary. His own wasted potential was mirrored in his view of the consequences of the civil war. The war was driven by politicians’ satanically

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inspired desire for riches, and those who fought in it had been duped. In spite of ‘development’ since the end of the war, new things were not being built – the government had not even managed to restore all of the old colonial infrastructure that was destroyed during the war, particularly the factories. A botched decolonisation and a pointless and evil war, for Jamba, explained much of the predicament of veterans like him. This was exacerbated by the government’s failure to provide pensions or employment to veterans, and in his case a good quality, durable prosthesis. Unlike João, however, his reaction was not one of relative resignation. Rather, he continued his efforts to ‘be a big man in society’ by organising football teams. Jamba saw football training not just as a way to prove his football expertise in spite of not being able to play, but also of doing morally beneficial work in his neighbourhood. One team he managed, called the Velha Guarda,48 was intended for players over 35 years of age. In Jamba’s view, the purpose of this team was to convince older men (mainly veterans) that they should not cease valuing their bodies as they aged, and ruin themselves spiritually and physically through drinking and smoking. Instead, they should keep training and prove their physical prowess by beating teams of, often hungover, younger men. He also organised a team of younger men in the MPLA-organised Girabairro tournament, an effort that was partly intended to encourage ‘social and political development’ of the neighbourhood, and to ‘encourage’ young people so that they would not fall into drug use. He was effusive about the positive moral potential of football: If the church was like football, Christ would already have returned because football unites people. It helped me to get to know people and for people to know me. The world of football is different.

Football, for Jamba, was an antidote to the confusão of destructive conflict (epitomised by the war but seen as a more diffuse moral threat to society), a way of contending with one another but avoiding confrontation. It had also helped him develop relationships with relatively powerful people in local party-state structures that often sponsored football tournaments, as well as being widely known in his neighbourhood. This mingling of upright moral values with desired upward social mobility was common in churchgoing veterans’ narratives.49

48 This was a genre of team from the colonial period, which at the time were comprised of

older employees of colonial enterprises. The name does not refer specifically to the fact that most players were veterans. 49 See also Didier Péclard, ‘UNITA and the Moral Economy of Exclusion in Angola, 1966– 1977’, in Sure Road? Nationalisms in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique, ed. Éric Morier-Genoud (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 149–76; Neto, ‘In Town and Out of Town’.

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Discussion: military service & moral economies of veteranhood & manhood To understand how military service affected FAPLA veterans’ masculinities in the long run, I argue that we need to understand, in turn, military service as a moral experience for soldiers, the consequences of this experience for an ongoing moral economy of veteranhood, the broader historical moral economy of senior manhood that this played into, and how this latter was both shaped and constrained by the social and economic consequences of the war and its aftermath. Moral tensions and dilemmas faced by soldiers are fairly conventional subject material for studies of veterans. Many studies look at the tension between civilian identities and military identities, not least because most militaries work hard to cultivate identities in their recruits that are quite distinct from their civilian ones. Yet a tension between the two is usually unavoidable, and under the ethically fraught conditions of combat this can be particularly challenging. The philosopher Nancy Sherman50 argues that most militaries have a Stoic ethos, in which ‘training is a rehearsal in detaching from emotions that can make a soldier vulnerable’,51 and she likens this to Michel de Montaigne’s argument that one’s professional morals ought to be insulated from other areas of one’s life. Our professional qualities are ‘adopted qualities’, rather than ‘attributes of our self ’.52 Relatedly, many social science studies of militaries mention the centrality to military masculinities of emotional detachment,53 where this detachment is often contrasted with a stigmatised feminine or queer emotionality. The emotions that need to be neutralised often have a moral content – around the moral difficulty of killing, and the need to either demonise or objectify the enemy in order to be able to efficiently obey orders to kill.54 However,



50 Nancy

Sherman, The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of Our Soldiers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011). 51 ibid., 29. 52 Montaigne, cited in ibid., 21. She contrasts this approach with what she terms an Aristotelian approach, which sees toughening as a process of ‘emotional suffering and an honest acknowledgement of friendship, love and loss’, 30. 53 For example, F. J. Barrett, ‘The Organizational Construction of Hegemonic Masculinity: The Case of the US Navy’, Gender, Work & Organization 3, no. 3 (1996): 129–42; Ben-Ari, Mastering Soldiers; Máximo Badaró, ‘“One of the Guys”: Military Women, Paradoxical Individuality, and the Transformations of the Argentine Army’, American Anthropologist 117, no. 1 (2014): 86–99; Diana Gibson, ‘Constructions of Masculinity, Mental Toughness and the Inexpressibility of Distress among a Selected Group of South African Veterans of the “Bush War” in Namibia’, Journal of Psychology in Africa 20, no. 4 (2010): 613–21. 54 See, for example the discussion in Ben-Ari, Mastering Soldiers, 82–88.

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most such studies deal either with professional armies, which recruits join more or less voluntarily, or situations of compulsory national service in which the majority of conscripts identify with a military that has widespread moral legitimacy.55 For the FAPLA veterans I worked with, their identification with the military was more ambiguous. Most of them viewed their service as a patriotic duty to defeat UNITA, whom they saw as having been particularly sadistic in their punishments and executions of civilians – ‘the people’ they were claiming to serve – who included the home communities of the veterans in bloodily contested areas of the Planalto. On the other hand, the fact that most of them either did not have a strong identification with the MPLA when they were recruited, or lost that identification after experiencing life in the military, meant that compartmentalisation of their civilian and military moral selves was more difficult. They were preoccupied with how to maintain their overall moral integrity while under the pressures of military discipline – how to remain the men they had been brought up to be, so that they could take up their lives again after military service. As Suzette Heald argues,56 the question of agency is linked to that of moral responsibility, implying that people ought to be held responsible for their actions only in as far as they had autonomy to avoid them. This certainly seems to be Honwana’s57 contention when she uses the concept of tactical agency to replace facile distinctions such as that between victim and perpetrator when discussing young soldiers in Angola and Mozambique forced to fight and kill against their will. The issue of moral responsibility and reduced scope for autonomous moral action certainly preoccupied João and Vicente in their accounts of their actions during certain parts of the war. Under the pressures of military discipline, the corrupting influence of the military environment and the power it gave him over civilians, João’s narrative was one of moral compromise and cynicism. In his account, the best he could do was to avoid complete moral breakdown that would undo him as a person worthy of moral respect, and that would corrupt him to the point that he would be unable to stop doing evil or to survive without it, becoming a ‘useless elder’ in peacetime. He narrates this as being vital for his capacity to become an elder man who could earn a living, support his family and raise his children well. Moreover, as Suzette Heald suggests, the key concept in morality is not necessarily always that of agency and moral responsibility, but may be that of danger.58 For João, the two concepts were linked, with the

55 Altinay, The Myth of the Military-Nation; Ben-Ari, Mastering Soldiers; S. Helman, ‘Mili-

tarism and the Construction of Community’, Journal of Political and Military Sociology 25, no. 2 (1997): 305–32; Gill, ‘Creating Citizens, Making Men’. 56 Heald, Manhood and Morality, 6. 57 Honwana, Child Soldiers in Africa. 58 Heald, Manhood and Morality, 6.

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need to avoid transgression linked not simply to guilt, but also to the dangers of corrupting his ability to adopt a moral elder masculine style in peacetime, and the consequences for his ability to support himself, the question of moral survival thus being linked to that of physical survival. Vicente’s narrative also emphasised the issue of moral responsibility under military discipline, which reduced his autonomy, but because of his particular specialism he was able to represent his time in the army as a moral triumph. He was never sent to the front and forced to kill enemy soldiers, and through his resourcefulness was able to live up to his ideal of brotherly love towards his comrades – an ideal he clearly links to his Catholic faith. Both veterans, however, seemed to be morally alienated from the military, and drew on other sets of values as they navigated their time in it, and as they constructed a sense of their masculine selves and the future selves that they wanted to construct. For Jamba, his narration of the military was marked by what he saw as the translation of the inequalities of broader society into the military, where the lives of less educated recruits were put into great danger and seemed to be considered less valuable. It might be that he considered this a violation of the egalitarian or meritocratic ethos that he thought militaries ought to have. Or perhaps he saw it simply as a violation of a deeper ethics of the sanctity of human life in itself, rather than as attached differentially to different social categories, as it seemed to him that it was in the FAPLA. In any case, this translation of the inequalities of colonial society into the military seems to have fostered resentment of the military for many. Other veterans complained about the potential advantages that northerners had over southerners in promotion, and of mestiços and whites over black recruits.59 The moral alienation that many veterans reported experiencing during military service had several sources, then, and was exacerbated in retrospect due to their treatment by the state after military service. As mentioned above, all of the veterans I spoke to complained of the lack of compensation for what they saw as an enforced interruption of their life projects that for them constituted a covenant with the state, which ought to compensate and help them after their discharge. Rather than viewing service as something that gave them increased respect in society, or might have given them skills or status that could enhance their social mobility, it was viewed universally as having had a negative impact through interrupting education and work lives, and their plans for marriage. The lack of training, employment or pensions enhanced veterans’ view of military service almost as a form of victimisation, in spite, paradoxically, of their also seeing it as courageous and patriotic. This added a

59 See also Christine Messiant, ‘Angola, Les Voies de l’ethnisation et de La Decomposition.

De La Guerre à La Paix (1975–1991): Le Conflit Armé, Les Interventions Internationales et Le Peuple Angolais’, Lusotopie, 1994, 155–210.

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particular inflection for veterans to the commonly heard complaint in Angola, that in ‘such a rich country’, so many people are still so poor. The war seemed only to have benefited those who had not risked their lives for the duration, whereas those who put their bodies on the line to secure victory were left to languish. All of this had important consequences for the moral economy of senior manhood that veterans were navigating in 2012, and that I will discuss in more detail in the following chapters. The untrustworthiness of the party-state, the immoral nature of the military and the involuntary nature of military service meant that military service was an encounter with the state that alienated these veterans from the sphere of formal politics and citizenship – unlike in many other settings where it has had the opposite effect.60 The state and formal politics therefore lacked much moral authority for veterans in terms of their aspirations and the values orienting their everyday lives after military service, and other influences from their childhoods took on added importance. The lifelong, intertwined influences of the churches and ‘Umbundu tradition’ from their childhoods onwards had much more enduring weight than the partystate, even though these were also sometimes in conflict with each other and presented tensions that some struggled to resolve, as in João’s case discussed above. The churches provided for many veterans, including Vicente, a consistent moral reference throughout their lives. Alternatively, for the many converts I encountered, like Jamba, churches became a trusted and authoritative moral guide at a time of personal crisis and the crumbling of old certainties occasioned by the uprooting and dispersal of village communities, the death of many significant others and the unpredictability of war. For converts this meant a project of conscious self-remaking, and the disavowal of much of their past life. Churchgoing veterans attended churches of diverse denominations with a variety of competing claims to the moral and scriptural high ground. Yet there were important commonalities to what veterans found in their faith and their church communities: protection from danger, a sense of existential security for their futures, and an explanation for why they survived when so many they knew did not; as well as a modern and cosmopolitan identity as part of global churches, which was an alternative to the New Angola model

60 See

E. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1976) on 19th century France; J. Lunn, Memoirs of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of the First World War (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999) on Senegalese veterans of the First World War; and studies of more recent historical cases Altinay, The Myth of the Military-Nation; Gill, ‘Creating Citizens, Making Men’; N. J. Kriger, Guerrilla Veterans in Post-War Zimbabwe: Symbolic and Violent Politics, 1980–1987 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) to name but a few.

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of modern Angolan-ness. Even for veterans who did not regularly attend churches, as we saw in the case of João, Christian morality had authority in terms of moral censure for particular lifestyles, and the Bible was a source for moral arbitrage. This impinged particularly on attitudes to alcohol, smoking and drugs, truthfulness, brotherly love and sexual and conjugal relations. The values attributed to ‘Umbundu tradition’ by veterans overlapped in many ways with those attributed to Christianity. The idea that one accrued respect over the course of one’s life, related to the wisdom that one also accrued, was commonly expressed by veterans, and led logically, at least for these men, to the idea that elder men ought to be respected and deferred to by junior men and by women. This gendered age (and life course) hierarchy was often given support in implicit and explicit ways in church spaces. It was often also related by veterans to the pre-war institutions of the men’s house and the circumcision ritual. In practice, what tied many of these aspects of the moral economy of senior masculinity together was a breadwinner ideal of masculinity. The prerogatives of senior men over their kin were conditional on being seen to be the main material provider for their households (even though the reality may in practice have been much more complex), and sometimes also for their parents. Being a ‘drunk’ was seen as being immoral because it was incompatible with self-controlled execution of these responsibilities; being ‘organised’ was essential for earning enough money to be a breadwinner; publicly failing to support one’s wife and children was seen as marking one out clearly as a ‘useless elder’, and so on. The long-term consequences of military service, and of the war more broadly, were interpreted in terms of the effects that they had on veterans’ ability to build life projects that corresponded to this moral economy of senior masculinity.

Conclusion The twin lenses of moral economy and masculinity, then, allow us to locate the experience of military service within a broader constellation of values, sentiments and norms, and to insert it into a longer history of those values to understand why it takes up the place that it does in veterans’ lives. Veterans’ experiences during wartime in Africa have, of course, been theorised in a number of different ways, some of which are complementary to the perspective I am developing here. Michel de Certeau’s61 idea of ‘tactical agency’ has been influential,62 and is useful, as noted above, for thinking through the issue of 61 M.

De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 62 Honwana, Child Soldiers in Africa; M. Utas, ‘Victimcy, Girlfriending, Soldiering’, Anthropological Quarterly 78 (2005): 403–30.

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the moral responsibility of those committing violence under extreme duress. Tactical agency is contrasted with strategic agency, the latter being exercised by those who have a secure social space to act from and to define social ‘rules’. Tactical agency is more improvisational, where one is forced to operate in the spaces created by others, taking advantage of contingent opportunities as they present themselves – often using disguised or hidden actions. Henrik Vigh’s related idea of ‘social navigation’ and dubriagem63 is similar, although it puts emphasis on a more extended time frame: for example, on how young men might be able to leverage participation in an armed movement to obtain the wherewithal to leave the ‘social moratorium’64 of youth by marrying and establishing their own households after the war. There is an emphasis on how the agent navigates the immediate exigencies of survival, not just in the ‘near’ future, but also on the ‘far’ future65 and how the fluid social landscape of wartime might shift in the meantime. Nevertheless, Stephen Lubkemann criticises both of these framings for tending to focus principally on the near future, and the desperate improvisations of moments of extreme danger.66 He emphasises that the relations that people seek to maintain in wartime are those that they would prioritise under ‘normal’ circumstances anyway, and that we therefore need to attend to longstanding cultural scripts guiding these choices, as well as the social transformations of wartime, if we want to understand social action during war. All three of these perspectives are useful for interpreting how FAPLA veterans acted at different times during the civil war and its aftermath, but the lens of moral economy foregrounds some important issues motivating veterans that are otherwise underplayed. The type of agency that these FAPLA veterans exercised differed over time according to the amount of duress that they were under – sometimes looking much like tactical agency, and sometimes more fully oriented by longstanding cultural scripts and longer-term life projects. Yet the question of what they were trying to protect as they resisted coercion, and of what they sought to build in the long term, is incomplete if we do not consider the moral perspective. When veterans were navigating even under extreme duress, they commonly reported moral concerns. The avoidance of transgression, in terms of violence or sexual violence, in terms of killing, or in terms of the treatment of comrades, was commonly raised. Veterans wanted to avoid transgressions that they would have to live with long after service had ended. They valued their good moral characters highly and were willing to undertake great risks in defending them. To understand their

63 Vigh,

Navigating Terrains of War, 117. 89. 65 ibid., 131. 66 Lubkemann, Culture in Chaos, 219. 64 ibid.,

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actions in wartime, we need to understand the moral coordinates that shaped this agency. In an important sense, narratives of the avoidance of transgression were narratives about capacities of the self – once transgressions were committed, veterans seemed to fear, it might not be possible to stop oneself committing more, of getting used to it. They were alive to how military experiences might transform them, and were determined to leave as someone who still had the capacity to act morally, and to build a life they could be proud of – and be respected for in the civilian contexts that they remembered and longed to return to. As was made plain in Vicente’s actions in Huambo during wartime occupation, these moral struggles had a strongly gendered dimension to them. Vicente was willing to risk capture and perhaps execution in order to fulfil his duty as a breadwinner. He partly phrased this in terms of a desire to avoid dependency, but it was also about the dignity to be gained from fulfilling one’s duties to support one’s household, and to ensure the best standard of living and social status that one could – and the prerogatives to be gained from doing so: there was a moral economy to being a senior man that veterans wanted to participate in. Finally, in order to understand in a thoroughly contextualised way whether and how veterans engage in politics after their military service, it is necessary to approach the question in a way that does not start from the normativity of politics, as conventionally framed. This is especially true when veterans eschew involvement in politics because of politicians’ and the state’s transgressions according to broader moral understandings and normativities within which the political is judged – a question to which I now turn.

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CHAPTER 2

The moral economy of veterans’ political disengagement

Introduction When I was young, I was interested in politics and I supported the MPLA against the other parties, but in the end, I changed my allegiance to religion. Now I am of Christ, and you can only serve one master. (Jamba, FAPLA veteran, 48)

Since the end of the colonial period in Southern Africa, much has been written about the relationship between war veterans and governments, particularly those governments with liberation credentials.1 Veterans’ political engagement has been interesting to scholars because veterans have proved a volatile and important political force, both constraining and enabling different kinds of political agency by governing parties, and playing a central role in transforming statehood and practices of citizenship. Much of the literature on veterans in Southern Africa has therefore, and understandably, been about veterans’ relations with the state. Yet political engagement is not the only outcome of military service for veterans, and many veterans do not engage politically with the state. What I suggest in this chapter is that this disengagement is not simply the absence of engagement, but a socially meaningful practice in its own right, and one that can potentially teach us much about the multifaceted consequences of military service. During the course of my fieldwork, many government war veterans I spoke to would tell me of their determination to avoid any sort of involvement in

1 Kriger,

Guerrilla Veterans in Post-War Zimbabwe; JoAnn McGregor, ‘The Politics of Disruption: War Veterans and the Local State in Zimbabwe’, African Affairs 101, no. 402 (2002): 9–37; Jocelyn Alexander, ‘Militarisation and State Institutions: “Professionals” and “Soldiers” inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service’, Journal of Southern African Studies 39, no. 4 (2013): 807–28; Schafer, Soldiers at Peace; Nikkie Wiegink, ‘“It Will Be Our Time to Eat”: Former Renamo Combatants and Big-Man Dynamics in Central Mozambique’, Journal of Southern African Studies 41, no. 4 (2015): 869–85; L. Metsola, ‘The Struggle Continues? The Spectre of Liberation, Memory Politics and “War Veterans” in Namibia’, Development and Change 41, no. 4 (2010): 589–613.

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politics. This was often couched in terms similar to those in the quote above, juxtaposing political involvement directly with their Christian faith. This moral-religious outlook shaped much of their narration of their experience of military service, and their reaction to attempts to draw them into political engagement in its aftermath. It might be tempting to ignore such a disengagement, treating it as an uninteresting part of the ‘data’ that my research generated, or evidence of the lack of long-term impact of military service. However, as several anthropologists have recently emphasised,2 the apparent absence of explicit or even hidden resistance is usually not an absence at all, but often rewards closer attention. In particular, the boundaries of what is considered ‘political’ and how and why these are constructed and policed can be central to the understanding of how different forms of social agency are constructed and enabled. As I will argue below, how different social spheres are constructed and contested is central to allowing veterans to pursue particular, historically located life projects. In turn, these constructions have an important role in how the social consequences of military service play out in everyday life, and how they concatenate within and often far beyond the realm of the conventionally political. Significantly, this argument means moving away from the predominant framing of much work on war veterans in terms of political economy, towards one more oriented to moral economy. Much work on southern African veterans is shaped by concerns about economic capital, political capital, their respective accumulation and the relation of this to institutionalised political power. In this chapter, I shift the discussion to the question of how the actions of the MPLA party-state were interpreted in terms of the moral visions and normative expectations of veterans – whose historically constituted concerns encompass the conduct of political institutions, but who embed this within a broader range of preoccupations that are simultaneously practical and value-oriented. Recent work on the anthropology of ethics has argued that the ethical is a pervasive dimension of the everyday in all social settings.3 The sort of impact that military service has in the everyday life of veterans therefore needs to be understood in light of how it is ethically evaluated – as well as in light of questions of power and interest. This is perhaps particularly true for veterans, 2 Saba

Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Matei Candea et al., ‘“Our Division of the Universe”: Making a Space for the Non-Political in the Anthropology of Politics’, Current Anthropology 52, no. 3 (2011): 309–34; Harri Englund, ed., Christianity and Public Culture in Africa (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2011). 3 See, for example Michael Lambek, ed., Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010).

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who have been called on to carry out acts of violence that are not sanctioned in non-military, non-war settings, and with whose moral consequences and justifications they have to subsequently grapple in their civilian lives. Military service, maybe more acutely in the Global South, constitutes an abrupt, often involuntary encounter with state power, in settings in which the state has mostly been absent, and has not necessarily been a primary arbiter of social reality – unlike settings in the Global North. This radical upsetting by the state of social and moral universes changes them, but is also interpreted in their light as veterans pick up the pieces of their old lives and seek to live the best lives they can in the wake of war. In this chapter I will therefore examine veterans’ political disengagement, and the moral economy of political power that informed it. In the next section I will briefly discuss some ways of considering different kinds of boundary work concerned with keeping spheres separate from one another, to enable certain kinds of political action and to avoid the pollution of some spheres by others. I will then sketch the outlines of veterans’ politics in Angola in the lead-up to their protests before the 2012 elections, before considering the roots of the aversion that all of the veterans I worked with expressed to involvement in the protests, or any other kind of political activism. I will then counterpose this to veterans’ construction of (usually) their preferred moral sphere of action, centred around church teachings and the values associated with ‘Umbundu tradition’, and how this sphere enabled veterans to pursue the masculine life projects that they aspired to after military service.

‘Religion’ & boundaries Since the turn of the new century there has been a surge of new anthropological and other social science writing on Christianity.4 A key argument of this work, following Talal Asad’s pioneering work,5 has been that the idea that religion is separate from other spheres of the social is a particularly Euro-American one that should not be assumed in other settings. Asad argues that the conception that anthropologists have had of the role of religion, as largely being a matter of private belief, providing symbols that help people to come to terms with the pain of the human condition, is a product of the space that Christianity has been confined to in post-Enlightenment European society. More recently,



4 Joel

Robbins, ‘The Anthropology of Christianity: Unity, Diversity, New Directions: An Introduction to Supplement 10’, Current Anthropology 55, no. S10 (2014): S157–71. 5 Talal Asad, ‘The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category’, in Reader in the Anthropology of Religion, ed. Michael Lambek, 1993, 27–54.

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Harri Englund6 has related the idea of religion’s separateness to the influence of the secularisation thesis of Durkheimian sociology, which predicted that as society became more functionally differentiated and more rational, religion would recede as a public force – a prediction that could be said to have failed as much in Europe and North America as it has in other settings. Derek Peterson and Darren Walhof argue that the idea that religion is sui generis7 has often been part of power plays and contestations linked to the political realm, with modernising elites seeking to standardise social practices as a strategy of control. Peterson,8 for example, examines how Presbyterian missionaries in Kenya in the early 20th century tried to redefine Gikuyu social thought as religion, by which they meant systematic and organised authority. This was refused by Gikuyus, who also refused to see Christianity as a set of abstract, disembodied beliefs, but rather dwelt on the practices and techniques of missionary evangelism. Englund, similarly, points out that African Christians have actively constructed barriers, for example, between religions, or between religion and secular life. These divisions should not, therefore, be assumed in advance, but should be the object of empirical investigation.9 Asad conceptualises this project particularly in relation to power, urging us to pay attention to the authorising processes that create the conditions for the experience of religious truth.10 Taking up the issues of power, politics and religion from a different direction, anthropologists of the ‘ethical turn’ take social scientists in general to task for their preoccupation with autonomy and with forms of agency that challenge social norms, rather than those that seek to conform to and support norms.11 This conception has led to a neglect of the study of many religious practices as somehow uninteresting, or not worthy of attention. Agency does not, however, necessarily have anything to do with either resistance or oppression, but may in some settings be related to attempts to ‘inhabit’ norms.12 Such agency, Mahmood points out, constitutes ‘ways of living meaningfully and

6 Harri

Englund, ‘Rethinking African Christianities’, in Christianity and Public Culture, ed. Harri Englund (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2011), 1–24. 7 Derek Peterson and Darren R. Walhof, ‘Rethinking Religion’, in The Invention of Religion: Rethinking Belief in Politics and History, ed. Derek Peterson and Darren R. Walhof (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 1. 8 Derek Peterson, ‘Gambling with God: Rethinking Religion in Colonial Central Kenya’, in The Invention of Religion, 37–58. 9 Englund, Christianity and Public Culture in Africa. 10 Asad, ‘The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category’. 11 Mahmood, Politics of Piety; James Laidlaw, The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Jarrett Zigon, Morality: An Anthropological Perspective (Oxford: Berg, 2008). 12 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 15.

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richly in the world’,13 just as much as the progressive secularism animating many Euro-American academics. Boundary work is not confined to the religious sphere, however, but social labour is often also carried out to delimit the sphere of the political. Anthropologists have frequently treated constructions of the non-political with suspicion in the past few decades. James Ferguson’s idea of ‘anti-politics’14 has been particularly influential, in which claims to be non-political are considered as political in themselves, as a sort of ruse to disguise a political agenda and preempt and defuse potential political objections to a political project. While recognising the important contributions of these approaches, more recently some anthropologists have begun to question their dominance, which can help us to understand the question of political disengagement. They have emphasised the insights that other lenses can bring into issues of the delimitation of the political and its relation with other social spheres. Matei Candea15 has argued that anthropologists have lately been too quick to dismiss delimitations of the political as ruses. He suggests that this has blunted ethnographic curiosity, and argues that when people set limits to what is considered the political, they are doing something: it is a performative project, in which the political and non-political may enable each other. In Candea’s illustration, he examines how French schoolteachers in Corsica view their classroom role as non-political, in a way that allows them to preserve their authority as educational experts within the educational system, while also allowing them to be politically engaged outside the system as citizens. So, a question I pose in this chapter is, what are veterans doing when they assertively disengage from politics? What sort of performative projects are enabled by this disengagement? In summary, my argument is that political disengagement was the result of the danger and moral transgressions veterans experienced during and after the war, caused by the party-state, particularly the violation of an implicit military covenant. Disengagement was part of the construction of masculine life projects oriented to the performance of a model of masculinity that these men had cherished since their youth (albeit in the transformed context of post-war Huambo), and was oriented around Christianity and ‘Umbundu tradition’, and associated claims to modernity, which had maintained their moral authority in a way that the political had not.



13 ibid.,



15 Candea

xii.

14 James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization and Bureau-

cratic Power in Lesotho (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). et al., ‘“Our Division of the Universe”’.

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Veterans’ politics in Angola since 1992 At the end of their service, the government provided little assistance to most FAPLA veterans. Disabled veterans received a pension of around AKZ10,000 (kwanzas) per month (around US$100 at the time), but most complained, justifiably, that this was completely insufficient in a country with living costs as high as Angola’s. An MPLA-linked organisation called ASCOFA (Associação de Apoio aos Combatentes das ex-FAPLA) had been set up to organise the payment of pensions, and had charged FAPLA veterans members’ fees and required them to open bank accounts. However, the promised payments never arrived, and all veterans I spoke to about this assumed that the membership fees had been embezzled. The right of veterans to pensions is enshrined in decree 16/94 of the Council of Ministers. This outlines who should be the beneficiaries of the system of social security of the Angolan Armed Forces (FAA, the successor of the FAPLA after 1992), saying that it should include ‘citizens that were, within the national territory, integrated into military organisations that, because of the Angolan Peace Accords, are registered in the personnel organs of the Angolan Armed Forces’.16 There were two state bodies set up to deal with veterans’ issues. One is a ministry called the Ministério dos Antigos Combatentes e Veteranos da Pátria, which is principally responsible for the payment of pensions, for both civil war veterans and independence war veterans. The second is an institute called Instituto de Reintegração Sócioprofissional dos Ex-Militares (IRSEM), which is responsible for running programmes and projects aiming to give veterans the skills and materials they need to make a living, but with no overall responsibility to provide a safety net for all veterans. These were both set up during the war, and deal with the legacies of three waves of demobilisation, from three different peace agreements: the Bicesse Accords of 1991, the Lusaka Protocol of 1994, and the Luena Accords of 2002. Most of the veterans that I worked with had very limited contact with any of these organisations, however, with the exception of the disabled veterans, and a retired, white officer who was in receipt of a generous pension (as many officer veterans are, in contrast to the situation for rank-and-file soldiers). In the POEMA survey, 12 per cent of FAPLA veterans reported receiving modest pensions, and only 1 per cent had ever received any training. The failure of the government to provide employment, training or pensions for veterans was usually the first thing veterans would mention to me when I introduced myself and my research project. In spite of this obvious discontent, however, none

16 Rafael

Marques de Morais, ‘Mais Um Preso Entre o Movimento dos Militares’, 2012, accessed 4 December 2019 from https://www.makaangola.org/2012/06/mais-um-presoentre-o-movimento-dos-militares/.

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of these veterans was involved in political activism, and indeed, compared to some other southern African countries, veterans’ activism has been rather muted in post-war Angola. The closest veterans have come to sustained and successful political pressure came in the lead-up to the national elections in August of 2012. There were several demonstrations in Luanda and across the country by veterans demanding pensions, demonstrations that often turned violent. There were several deaths during these demonstrations, the imprisonment of veterans (in one incident of 51 veterans),17 and the much-publicised disappearance of two veterans, Álvaro Kamulingue and Isaias Sebstião Kassule, for whose kidnap and murder six members of the intelligence services were later sentenced to jail.18 Two organisations were prominent in these protests. One was called the Movimento Revolucionário Unido (United Revolutionary Movement), a combined movement of veterans of UNITA, FNLA and MPLA government forces; the other was called the Comissão de Reclamação de Sargentos e Soldados não-Desmobilizados das ex-FAPLA (Commission of Complaint of the non-Demobilised Sergeants and Soldiers of the ex-FAPLA), to which Kamulingue and Kassule both belonged. These protests received considerable media attention and came at a sensitive time for the MPLA government in the run-up to only the second elections of the peacetime era, when the party was presenting itself as the architect of peace and national liberation. The veterans’ movements themselves seemed to be aware of the increased leverage they had during this period. As a letter sent by the Commission of Complaint organisation put it, In an Angola that is so rich [in which] even the armies and police forces of neighbouring countries are helped by the Angolan government and we are always waiting with IOUs, could it be that we fought for the wrong side?19

Apparently as a result, the government, despite the violence at the protests themselves, took a more conciliatory tone in its public pronouncements. In addition, a one-off payment was hastily arranged for veterans, of both the MPLA and UNITA forces, of AKZ550,000 (approximately US$550 at the time), with a promise that, in the near future, systems would be set up to make this a regular monthly payment. When I visited Huambo again in 2015, these

17 Rafael

Marques de Morais, ‘Polícia Militar Detém 51 Veteranos de Guerra’, 2012, accessed 4 December 2019 from https://www.makaangola.org/2012/06/policia-militardetem-51-veteranos-de-guerra/. 18 Coque Mukuta, ‘Assassinos de Cassule e Kamulingue condenados a pesadas penas de prisão (Actualizado)’, Voz de América, 2015, accessed 4 December 2019 from https:// www.voaportugues.com/a/assassinos-de-cassule-e-kamulingue-condenados-a-pesadas-penas-de-prisao/2695644.html. 19 Morais, ‘Mais Um Preso Entre o Movimento dos Militares’, my translation.

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regular payments were yet to begin. Since 2012, the issue of veterans’ pensions has not disappeared, with scattered protests around the country, but it has never again reached the high point of political influence that was achieved in 2012.

Patterns of political engagement amongst FAPLA veterans in the POEMA study The POEMA survey results on political engagement show a range of ways that FAPLA veterans engaged in formal politics in the public sphere (see Figure 1). Voting rates were very high, with over 98 per cent of FAPLA veterans reporting having voted in 2012, and around a third (33.2 per cent) rating themselves as having a strong interest in politics. In terms of more assertive participation, 21 per cent of these veterans reported being a member of a political party. Given the relative size of the MPLA compared to other political parties, it is likely that most of these veterans were MPLA members, although this question was considered too sensitive to pose in the questionnaire. Ricardo Soares de Oliveira estimates that around a quarter of the population as a whole are members of the MPLA, so if he is correct, the rate of membership amongst these veterans may be around average or slightly lower than for the general population. However, it is important to point out that there were several reasons a to be a member of the MPLA, such as being able to access a bank

Figure 1  Political engagement & group membership amongst FAPLA veterans in Huambo province (Source: Wolfgang Stojetz)

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loan, job, hospital bed and more.20 It does not therefore necessarily suggest substantial political engagement, but may be more pragmatic, a way of getting by. But 10.8 per cent said that they took part in the veterans’ protests in the previous year. While this is quite a significant proportion of veterans, it leaves many more who decided not to get involved, and I turn now to examine the reasons for many veterans’ disengagement from public political action.

‘I say “thanks be to God”, & I carry on’: avoiding the deceit & danger of politics One day in August 2012, in the run-up to Angola’s second national elections, I went into the usually tranquil city market to find a television crew from the state broadcaster Televisão Pública de Angola (TPA) interviewing some women sellers in the vegetable section. Most of these women were wearing new MPLA caps and t-shirts, which had obviously just been distributed to great excitement, and there was a large campaigning banner hung on one of the walls showing a giant picture of the President’s face. Vicente and João, two of the FAPLA veterans I got to know best, were talking to each other agitatedly, and, unusually, greeted me only peremptorily and continued their conversation. It was in this period that veterans’ protests over unpaid pensions were breaking out across the country, and a one-off payment to FAPLA veterans was being organised. These developments, combined with the very visible presence of party politics in the market, seemed to have spooked Vicente and João, and they were stony-faced and obviously worried. They discussed rumours that political parties were trying to make political capital out of the veterans’ protests, trying to provoke veterans into causing trouble so that the police would kill some of them – thus stoking discontent against the MPLA government. Political parties were recruiting foreigners, João said, because foreigners would have no qualms in starting a new war, since foreigners did not care about Angolan lives. ‘Violence is not the way’, Vicente kept saying. The prospect of elections obviously still raised the spectre of renewed fighting for many, given the very intense fighting that broke out, particularly on the Planalto, after the failed elections in 1992. Vicente turned aside from his conversation with João to say to me, unprompted, ‘I like the MPLA’, as if someone had suggested the opposite. A few minutes later he ended his conversation with João, and turned to me and muttered: ‘they should just hurry up and have the elections and stop this agitation. If the government stays I say,



20 Soares

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“thanks be to God”, and I carry on; if the government changes, I say, “thanks be to God”, and I carry on’. The refusal to engage in politics, and to see the religious and the political as separate and morally incompatible spheres, was caused by a number of perceived moral failures of the party-state and the sphere of formal politics more broadly. These engaged some of the key moral categories that structured the moral economies of masculinity and veteranhood, which will recur in this book. The state’s moral failures included, most obviously, (1) the extreme political violence that these veterans had lived through, as well as (2)  the broader social consequences of violent contention and confusão; (3) the broken promises of the government to veterans and how it affected their views of the party-state’s legitimacy; (4) the more general perception of constant lies and distortions by the party-state; and (5) the massive enrichment of the partystate elite. I will briefly address each of these factors in turn. First, the idea that political involvement could be lethally dangerous was widespread amongst veterans, as it is for many in Angola more generally.21 The independence movements seemed, to many in the mid-1970s, to herald a new and more hopeful era of Angolan history,22 but as the civil war began to intensify and become more destructive, the violence of political divides reached into communities and families through forced conscription that often pitted family members against one another, and through violence and repression targeting civilians. Accounts of political subjectivities from Luanda and other coastal cities in Angola emphasise the traumatic experiences of the 27 May 1977 alleged coup and counter-coup violence and the urban violence following the 1992 elections.23 For the veterans I spoke to in Huambo, however, memories of political violence were more diffuse, due to the more intense and prolonged violence experienced in the Planalto region. Most of the veterans I worked with lived through UNITA’s violent occupation of Huambo, and the brutal ensuing siege. Particularly during the 1990s, the violent elimination of presumed political enemies during the civil war was widespread. As several men mentioned, during the war both sides sent secret agents into their rivals’ communities to gain intelligence for preparing attacks. An atmosphere of suspicion was said to have reigned, in which not having your ID card with you would result in arrest or worse, and the question of who people ‘really’ were and whose side they were on became vexed. The potential for political violence and government surveillance was assumed to endure by many of the veterans I knew and was spoken of with palpable fear. João was fond of saying, with a grisly relish, that the government

21 Schubert,

Working the System; Pawson, In the Name of the People. ‘Angola, Les Voies de l’ethnisation et de La Decomposition’. 23 Schubert, Working the System; Pawson, In the Name of the People. 22 Messiant,

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would ‘tear off the heads’ of people who spoke out. Another veteran said, in a more serious tone, that there was no point in getting involved in Angola’s confrontational party politics, asking, ‘Is it worth getting killed for a cap and a t-shirt? People should leave politics to politicians’ – meaning those who are placed high enough to be able to gain significant benefits from it. ‘I’m happy to just go from my home, to the market, to the church, and not to get involved with parties.’ Veterans’ fear of speaking the ‘truth’ about their experiences at the hands of the state also affected my research, with even some of the veterans I had become closest to refusing to be interviewed by me, the word ‘interview’ apparently conjuring up media appearances for many and reprisals from the segurança (state security services), despite my insistence that the interviews would be anonymous and not broadcast. Second, there was a strong association of violence with a lack of development and progress. This was often seen through the paired concepts of organização and confusão, a key pair of concepts used for judging the ethical character of social phenomena, including their progressive or regressive potential. Various sources of confusão troubled the veterans I worked with: the consumption of alcohol and increasing economic inequalities were prominent ones. Politics and the reckless ambition and greed it implied were seen as other principal causes. Confusão was a term used broadly to mean many things – as Ryszard Kapuściński put it, it is ‘a synthesis word, an everything word. In Angola it has its own specific sense and is literally untranslatable’.24 At its most basic, it means just what it seems to mean: confusion and disorder, something that is difficult to understand and difficult to control. It had a broad range of application, however, from fairly benign, everyday mix-ups, to a grim understatement used to summarise all of the suffering caused by the civil war. It often had a particular association with destructive discord and conflict between people, especially where this resulted in malevolent acts. Thus, part of the darkness and confusão of the past was based on the hidden forces unleashed by envious hatred (onyã), seen to be exacerbated by post-war economic inequalities. It was also associated with what some referred to as ‘tribal’ hatreds or ‘tribalism’, which many felt could not be erased, and certainly not without God’s help. The danger of politics was seen to be the confusão it had brought to Angola through the civil war (even though the concepts of confusão and organização were themselves instrumentalised politically by the warring parties).25 Jamba,



24 Ryszard

Kapuściński, Another Day of Life (London: Vintage, 2001), 118. Soares de Oliveira, for example, points out that the MPLA and UNITA have both had obsessions with order, and the MPLA has mocked UNITA as a party of confusão since the end of the war, Soares de Oliveira, Magnificent and Beggar Land.

25 Ricardo

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a 49-year-old veteran, commented on the sometimes violent rivalry between two football clubs: Sport is all about contention, but it’s also a way for people to be friends with each other – it’s actually precisely about not fighting – that’s the whole point, it’s peaceful, it’s a game. But some people only think about the contention and it is this that brings the confusão – and anything that brings confusão is not from God.

Third, the long history of broken government promises to FAPLA veterans, detailed above, bred a deep distaste amongst them for politics in general. The breaking of an implicit military covenant through a failure to compensate them for their losses, or to look after them after their sacrifice for the nation, was a source of continuing outrage, and always the first thing a veteran would mention to me when they heard I was doing research on veterans. Whether the costs were a physical disability or simply lost time and missed opportunities, the idea that the MPLA party-state owed them a decent life upon mobilisation was universal. Justin Pearce26 has detailed how both the MPLA and UNITA promoted narratives of their competing state-projects as protectors and providers for the population, and that perceptions of their political legitimacy on the Planalto depended on how narratives were supported in practice. He details how UNITA lost much legitimacy after their brutal occupation of Huambo from 1993–1994 was at odds with the idea of the UNITA state that people had invested in. FAPLA veterans seemed to view the military covenant in similar terms. To them, this was a contract that represented, as in John Lonsdale’s analysis of the moral economy of Mau-Mau, ‘a vital contrast between reciprocal duty and one-sided oppression’,27 and breaking this contract made politics seem like the latter of the two, and therefore illegitimate. The covenant was often framed in the moral terms of kinship and family writ large, in particular those of the balance of responsibilities and entitlements between fathers and sons. The image of a father as a loving provider, providing help in times of crisis, discipline and order, and a moral compass,28 strikingly similar to the ‘Father in Chief ’ matrix delineated by Michael Schatzberg in his seminal analysis of idioms of political legitimacy in ‘middle Africa’,29 was 26 Justin

Pearce, ‘Control, Politics and Identity in the Angolan Civil War’, African Affairs 111, no. 444 (2012): 442–65. 27 Lonsdale, Moral Economy of Mau Mau, cited in Edelman, ‘E. P. Thompson and Moral Economies’, 60. 28 This idealised image of the pater familias is also strikingly similar to the breadwinner masculinity that tied together several aspects of these men’s masculine identities – a point I discuss more in Chapter 4. 29 Michael G. Schatzberg, Political Legitimacy in Middle Africa: Father, Family, Food (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 145–73.

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central to perceptions of how the party-state ought to act towards FAPLA veterans as a privileged category of ‘son’. In return the ‘father’s’ ‘sons’ ought to give him respect, deference and tributes to repay the debt that they owe him. As Jon Schubert has noted,30 the idiom of kinship is used more broadly to critique the party-state’s neglect of the Angolan population, even though the MPLA has been at pains to eschew this imagery in its own pronouncements. For veterans, however, the father–son image was particularly important, military service being seen as a particularly onerous tribute to have given and one that demanded recompense that never arrived.31 Fourth, another aspect of confusão was its association with a lack of transparency, and of disguised actions and deception: politicians duping ‘brothers’ into fighting each other in a war of ambition that seemed only to have served politicians’ personal ambitions; the corruption of state bodies; and the camouflaged attacks of sorcery, amongst others. This included the multiple broken promises over veterans’ pensions mentioned above, but was seen to be a pattern stretching back to their youth and childhood. A prime example of this was said by veterans to be that of Augusto Ngangula, used in government propaganda to encourage the enlistment of young men into the FAPLA in the 1970s. Ngangula was said to have been a young boy who gave his life rather than give up the position of an MPLA camp to the Portuguese, saving thousands of lives in the process. Adolescent Angolan males were exhorted at school to follow this example of self-sacrifice in defence of their fatherland, by enlisting in the JMPLA (the youth wing of the MPLA) and, when they were older, the FAPLA. Although most of the veterans I worked with had not enlisted voluntarily, this story clearly had a particular resonance for many of them. For some, this was because they had sincerely believed in their youth that the story was true, whilst for others it was simply due to its prominence in the MPLA’s propaganda about enlistment. However, after some years serving in the army as a driver, Vicente’s cousin Alexandre (44) began to doubt this story: I came to the conclusion that he was a political term [i.e. he only existed in political rhetoric]. They say that he died in Moxico. Moxico is where I was doing my army service, and I got to see the very gravestone of Hoji-ya-Henda [a renowned MPLA independence fighter]. And I did some research on Augusto Ngangula, I asked around, and no-one had heard of him. It’s just politics … it’s propaganda.

30 Schubert,

Working the System, 128–33. moral idioms have been used to understand parties’ obligations to veterans in other Southern African settings, in particular in Mozambique Schafer, Soldiers at Peace; Nikkie Wiegink, ‘The Forgotten Sons of the State: The Social and Political Positions of Former Government Soldiers in Post-War Mozambique’, Colombia Internacional, no. 77 (2013): 43–72; and in Namibia Metsola, ‘The Struggle Continues?’

31 Similar

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Such cynicism about Ngangula was widespread amongst these veterans:32 official versions of Angolan history were seen by most to be largely distorted according to the party-state’s evolving interests.33 This was seen to prevent Angolans from understanding their own history, and setting the record straight was often cited by veterans as a prime motivation for them to help me with my research. More broadly, when combined with a recent history of extreme political violence, these constant distortions made politics seem to many veterans like an unreadable realm of unpredictable threats, and one that helped create an atmosphere of pervasive uncertainty and mistrust. Fifth, these deceptions and broken promises to veterans were understood against the backdrop of the massive enrichment of the party-state elite since the end of the war. After the one-party era came to an end in the early 1990s and liberalisation of the economy began, the elite enriched itself through a mixture of war-profiteering, exchange rate manipulation and the privatisation of state assets.34 The accumulation continued apace in the peacetime era, as oil rents continued to be controlled by the President through the state oil company, Sonangol, and businesses were created and partnerships established with foreign firms without transparency, as a way of allocating benefits to the clique around the President.35 This made billionaires of several of the Eduardo dos Santos clique, and millionaires of many more, whilst most of the population, including the veterans I worked with, struggled to make a living in the informal economy, while living in improvised housing on the outskirts of the old colonial town centres.36 Whilst there was an expectation amongst veterans that the country’s leaders would have a good life, and sometimes a surprising tolerance for their excesses, there were seen to be limitations on how much the country’s father-leaders ought to ‘eat’ while their ‘children’ were hungry that were being



32

It has also been noted by Pearce, Political Identity and Conflict in Central Angola; and Pawson, In the Name of the People. 33 Christine Messiant, ‘Chez Nous, Même Le Passé Est Imprévisible: L’expérience d’une Recherche Sur Le Nationalisme Angolais, et Particulièrement Le MPLA: Sources, Critique, Besoins Actuels de La Recherche’, Lusotopie, 1998, 157–197; see also Justin Pearce, ‘Contesting the Past in Angolan Politics’, Journal of Southern African Studies 41, no. 1 (2015): 103–19; Jon Schubert, ‘2002, Year Zero: History as Anti-Politics in the “New Angola”’, Journal of Southern African Studies 41, no. 4 (2015): 835–52. 34 Soares de Oliveira, Magnificent and Beggar Land. 35 Christine Messiant, ‘The Mutation of Hegemonic Domination’, in Angola: The Weight of History, ed. Patrick Chabal and Nuno Vidal (Hurst, London 2006). 36 ‘Inequality in Angola is high with a Gini index of 0.55. The 20% of the population with the highest incomes receive 59% of all incomes, whilst the poorest 20% receive only 3%’ (https://www.cmi.no/projects/1907-inequality-in-angola). The extent of poverty is also very high, with at least 30% of the population living on under $2 per day (http:// povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/country/AGO, both accessed 6 December 2019).

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clearly exceeded. This breaking of reciprocal obligations between the country’s leaders and the Angolan people was thought by most of the veterans I worked with to be spreading a dangerous avarice through society. This was seen as posing a pervasive threat to relationships of obligation that maintained what they saw as a proper form of gendered social order, both structuring their life course aspirations and idealising relations between the generations. The political realm was constructed by all of these veterans, then, as a dangerous and treacherous space, one that spread violent, regressive and socially destructive confusão in the interests of a greedy and self-interested elite whose avarice was spreading through society; and in which the military covenant had been blatantly broken. Following Candea,37 I will now consider this construction of the political sphere to be paired with a contrasting construction of a non-political sphere, in this case specifically that of the churches. Whilst all of the veterans I worked with wanted to avoid politics, not all of them went to church. In the POEMA survey 43.6 per cent of FAPLA veterans said they were a member of a church, against 56.4 per cent who were not. Nevertheless, the churches had a moral authority that extended beyond their immediate congregations, and, for many, marked a contrast with the sphere of ‘politics’. Vicente, like many of the churchgoing veterans I worked with, often spoke of the sphere of the political and the sphere of the churches as ideally distinct, and almost mutually exclusive of each other. This has certainly not been the case in terms of how church institutions have related to state power and political movements in Angolan history, with different churches siding with or resisting the colonial and postcolonial states or different political parties in different historical periods.38 However, at the level of congregation members, many of these veterans saw loyalty to churches and loyalty to a political movement as incompatible, as Jamba expressed in the quote at the beginning of this chapter. Such sentiments were expressed by veterans of all denominations, often using the Bible verse, ‘render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, render unto God what is God’s’, which they took to mean a refusal to challenge the dominance of the party-state, and a primary allegiance to God and their church. This refusal of politics involved discourses with clearly political elements to them, if we take a standard social science definition of politics as contests over the exercise of power. They also advocated particular sets of power relations, particularly a patriarchal vision of veterans’ households and communities, which is, clearly, in some sense a political move. However, what I am interested in here

37 Candea

et al., ‘“Our Division of the Universe”’. Schubert, A Guerra e as Igrejas: Angola, 1961–1991 (Basel: P. Schlettwein,

38 Benedict

2000).

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is the ethical boundary work that went into constructing ‘politics’ as an emic category, as an immoral sphere that was counterposed to Christianity. This boundary work played an important role in constructing and enabling of a particular moral economy of senior manhood, and mediated the impact of the military experience on many veterans’ lives and political subjectivities.

‘So you still have your tail!’ Christian knowledge, modernity & personhood Each of the men I worked with, of course, had their own religious biography, and expressed their own motivations for their religious practices. In particular there were marked differences between those who had converted from the denomination they were brought up in (usually Catholicism or Congregationalism) to another denomination, and those who had remained in the same church all their lives. However, there were some motivations cited that were common to almost all of the churchgoing men I knew, and the idea that Christianity was developed, civilised and educated was prominent for all of them. Jon Schubert39 argues that, for Luandans, the MPLA government’s victory over UNITA in the civil war represented a victory of the coast, associated with ‘creole cosmopolitanism’ and Portuguese speaking, over the hinterland, associated with national languages and ‘African-ness’ (rather than Angolan-ness, an important distinction pointed out by Ricardo Soares de Oliveira),40 which were seen as being backward. The veterans I worked with were acutely aware of how they were perceived by ‘northerners’, and particularly in Luanda. This was not just a question of being viewed as ‘backward’, but also had political import. One veteran recounted being told to ‘stop talking that shit’ when they were overheard speaking Umbundu in Luanda, and another was told it was the ‘language of dogs’, reflecting an elision between an ethnic Umbundu identity, and a presumed political identity as a UNITA supporter (despite much of the FAPLA having been made up of Ovimbundu).41 Conversely, churchgoing was seen by most of the men I worked with to be a prerequisite for being a truly civilised person, and even for being fully human, and one that rejected the values of the MPLA’s vision of Angolan, cosmopolitan, consumerist modernity. Nevertheless, the churches’ ‘civilisation’ was partly defined by these men in contrast to particular denigrated aspects of what was considered as ‘Umbundu tradition’, whilst embracing other aspects of that tradition.



39 Schubert,

Working the System. de Oliveira, Magnificent and Beggar Land. 41 See also Martins, ‘Ovimbundu Identity Attributions in Post-War Angola’. 40 Soares

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One day in the municipal market I was chatting with Vicente, João’s nephew Eduardo and a non-veteran market seller in his twenties called Nuno. Discussing what he had been doing at the weekend, Nuno mentioned that he had been to church on Sunday. At this Vicente said, with a quizzically teasing expression, ‘ah! So, you finally did something for a change!’ Nuno laughed, and I asked him which church he had been to. He proceeded to explain that his father had been a Congregationalist and so when he was younger they all attended that church, but that since his father died they had been attending the Catholic church, which his mother attended before her marriage – a pattern of denominational adherence in families that was common. ‘I haven’t been baptised, though’, he added. Vicente and Eduardo looked surprised and said so, and Nuno, fond of drinking and getting into scrapes, said in an affectedly casual way, ‘yeah, I prefer to do whatever I want’. Vicente and Eduardo, both devout Catholics, replied in unison, ‘Ah! So, you still have your tail!’ All three laughed uproariously, and Nuno turned around and lifted up the back of his t-shirt to prove that he did not. The jibe was half-ironically couched in the racist language of Portuguese colonisers, and associated Nuno’s irreligiosity with a past considered by these veterans as not only uncivilised, but almost animal or inhuman.42 The religious aspect of this idea is indicated in the perception of the un-baptised Angolan as non-human or animal, evident in the vision of Congregationalists on the Planalto before independence. IECA members interviewed by Didier Péclard in the 1990s claimed that parents sent children to mission schools in the colonial period ‘with the aim of their becoming men’,43 ‘men’ in this context standing for ‘human’. The civilising, modernising force of churches was seen to operate to a great extent through the knowledge and moral education they brought. Such narratives seem partially to have their roots in the strikingly similar evolutionist representations of dark Umbundu tradition and the light brought by Christianity, which were propagated by Congregationalist missions on the Planalto during the colonial period. As Jeremy Ball reports, these missions portrayed Umbundu traditions as backward and equated Christianity with education, modernity and progress – to such an extent that the Umbundu word meaning ‘I am from the school’ – ndukuasikola – came to mean ‘I am a Christian’.44 Such

42 This insult was also politicised, with more venom, and levelled at UNITA veterans – as-



43 Péclard,

sociating UNITA’s bush society with a rural backwardness. ‘“Amanha Para Ser Homem”’, 114. 44 Jeremy Ball, ‘The Three Crosses of Mission Work: Fifty Years of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in Angola, 1880–1930’, Journal of Religion in Africa 40, no. 3 (2010): 349; see also Neto, ‘In Town and Out of Town’, 195–206, for an account of the role of Catholic mission schools in Huambo.

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constructions were bound up with social status in the colonial system, with a mission education allowing access to ‘assimilated’ status, whether official or unofficial,45 and often, given the lack of avenues to political power, providing a rare avenue to influence at the village level.46 In 2012, these men’s narratives depicted religious knowledge as promoting a way of life that is morally upright and beneficent: it leads people away from acts that are both morally evil and that bring destructive consequences, to behaviour that is both morally good and brings positive consequences.47 For some, religious knowledge was also closely associated with ‘scientific’ knowledge taught through formal education, in that it brought people out of an ignorant and dark past into an enlightened, modern present and future. As Paulo, a Catholic, put it: Religion is for educating man. Without science, man is always in darkness … When a man is in religion, he is educated, and everything he does is positive. It’s difficult that he sometimes follows a bad path.

On the other hand, discourses of science that were used to reject religion were rejected by these men. They would sometimes comment on the socialist period, and ‘that science’ the state promoted, which claimed that man was not created by God, but ‘came from the monkey’. Such forms of science were seen as backward compared to the knowledge brought by the churches: in Paulo’s words, the theory of evolution is ‘a backward theory, an old theory that has been superseded’. This theory was associated with the socialist ‘system and beliefs’, considered by some as Russian and not Angolan. Thus, the knowledge that the churches have brought to the Planalto was seen to have led Christians to an educated state of religious modernity, away from a recent period of oneparty socialist government and its attendant foreign beliefs;48 and away from an ignorant, benighted ‘African’ past.

45 Heywood,

Contested Power in Angola. The Ovimbundu under Two Sovereignties. 47 In the narratives of several Catholics this was a simple matter of education: since evil acts can only bring negative consequences to all concerned, people only need to receive this knowledge to change their needlessly destructive behaviour. Conversely, those from more evangelical denominations, as with Francisco in the introduction to this chapter, emphasised the importance of each individual’s choice once they have received knowledge of the gospel – though for them too, the appropriate response to hearing the gospel seemed to be obvious. 48 I did not find that veterans ever referred nostalgically to the socialist period as one of solidarity and common feeling as Jon Schubert found in Luanda, Schubert, Working the System, in large part because of its association with atheism. Rather, nostalgia for an idealised and more moral past was constructed in terms of tradition.

46 Edwards,

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Organisation in the face of confusion The contrary concept paired with confusão was that of organização. Churches were seen as particularly organised and constructive communities, proactively doing God’s work together. All the churches I went to emphasised the importance of punctuality each week; all of them would have a structured set of groups to carry out the churches’ work – whether this meant constructing a new church building, evangelisation or bringing communion to those in need. Social events would be arranged in a well-drilled fashion, funds would be raised for evangelisation drives or for new buildings. A great emphasis was put on working together constructively, and on the organised, transnational structures of church authorities – something churchgoing men clearly took pride in. These principles of organisation were said by some to apply to one’s personal life outside church contexts, too. As Isaias told me, when he converted to Adventism, his life became more ‘organised’, because he stopped engaging in the ‘liberties’ that the Catholic Church allows, such as drinking and smoking. Veterans often spoke of the need to ‘organise’ one’s life in order to be successful in commerce and make a steady income to support one’s family. Churches therefore seemed to offer a path to becoming a modern and enlightened man: living a constructive, positive, organised life guided by Christian knowledge entailing both moral behaviour and educated enlightenment, which was considered appropriate for a developed society and person.

‘Live with the certainty that everything will end well’ In addition, in contrast to the uncertainty and threat represented by political involvement, church teachings offered reassurances about the future. Towards the end of my year in Huambo, the Seventh-day Adventist church was pursuing a global campaign of evangelisation, based on the distribution of a pamphlet written by the Adventist prophet Ellen White, entitled ‘A Grande Esperança – the Great Hope’. The subtitle for this pamphlet was, ‘Vive com a certeza que tudo vai acabar bem’ – ‘live with the certainty that everything will end well’. Jamba’s nephew Flávio gave me a copy of the pamphlet, and I saw it accompanying Bibles in several people’s hands in subsequent weeks, even in those of other denominations such as IECA and Baptists. When religious men made a contrast between faith in God and the use of sorcery or involvement in politics, the message for people of all denominations was the same: God is the only thing you can rely on. José’s cousin recounted his FAPLA military service to me, including that he deserted rather than go to fight at Cuito Cuanavale, the largest and bloodiest battle of the 1980s. I suggested that it was not worth dying for the MPLA, and he replied, ‘exactly, that’s why we rely on God. He’s the only thing that matters’.

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This faithfulness was seen to apply also to the promise of eternal life for the faithful. Vicente’s cousin Alexandre, when speaking of the difficulty of dealing with people’s reactions to the facial injury he suffered during the war, explained one of the reasons why he no longer worried about discrimination, ‘When a man dies he isn’t disabled, he’s resuscitated whole, right? This is the doctrine of the church.’ For Adventists, the certainties their faith gave them were particularly related to prophecies of Christ’s return and the positive meaning they could give to tribulations that announced this return. Jamba often cited recent historical events that proved that the return of Christ was near, such as conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, the AIDS epidemic, global warming, and ‘wars between brothers’, which he claimed were happening in every part of the world.

Biblical knowledge & longings for clarity Given the uncertainty and sense of insecurity promoted by the party-state’s untruthful (and UNITA’s wartime) pronouncements and constructions of Angolan history, Biblical fidelity seemed to take on a particular importance. The Bible was therefore important to religious veterans of all denominations, as an antidote to the moral uncertainty that many Angolans seemed to experience. Vicente, when speaking of how he kept his faith going during his time in the army, called the Bible ‘the weapon of God’.49 However, the emphasis put on Bible study by Adventists was stronger, and to some extent was seen by converts as marking Adventism out as distinct, and as more authentically Christian than Roman Catholicism. Part of the appeal of Adventism for several of the converts I spoke to was not just greater Biblical fidelity in itself, but that church members could read the Bible for themselves and assess against a source of absolute truth whether church teachings were ‘true’ or not, rather than simply having the meaning handed down to them by a priest without consulting the passage for themselves (in spite of Biblical interpretations being



49 Mirrored

by a motto in the FAPLA encouraging people to put their religious beliefs aside: ‘Deus é arma’ – God is your weapon – meaning that a gun is what gives you power and will save you. Vicente’s motto also suggests the appeal of Biblical texts in the struggle for interpretive power at an uncertain moment when meanings and moral values seemed to be in flux. As Crapanzano points out, discovering the original divine meaning of scripture allows believers to reject the influence of changing historical circumstances on the interpretation of truth, instead viewing historical circumstances through the prism of God’s unchanging word – Vincent Crapanzano, Serving the Word: Literalism in America from the Pulpit to the Bench (New York: New Press, 2001).

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oriented at a global level for Adventists by the Trimestral – a three-monthly publication of daily Bible studies).50 The idea of the Biblical truth as a rare source of clarity did not seem to be limited to churchgoing men, however. Even two men I knew who were not regular churchgoers and were considered quite disreputable by many regularly studied the Bible: João, and another market seller in a city market in his thirties, called Ernesto. Ernesto looked doubtful about the prospect of regularly attending church, but would sit at his stall reading his tattered Umbundu copy of the Bible, and told me, ‘the main thing is, you need to read scripture to know what it says, then you don’t need to have any uncertainties’ – meaning that, for him, Bible study made attending a church rather superfluous since what was important was the acquisition of Biblical knowledge. João would discreetly disappear to a nearby park each lunchtime to read the Bible. He seemed to want to keep this fact a secret from me, but when his nephew Eduardo told me about this, I asked João why he, an arch sceptic of most of Angola’s establishments and sacred cows, would spend time on such a pursuit. He replied, ‘I read it to know what is truth and what is lies, and every day at midday I go to the park to read the Bible, and then again when I get home’. He made this statement during a conversation about religious hypocrisy, and for João, the Bible seemed to be a source of reliable truth by which he could judge the conduct of the people and institutions that presented themselves as righteous. Of course, the truth of the Bible is open to many different interpretations, and Biblical truth was often the terrain upon which the struggle for the moral high ground took place between men of different denominations. Yet this foundation was crucially missing in the area of politics, in which the unreliability of even basic information contributed to what has been termed by Jon Schubert, following Didier Fassin, the ‘paranoid disposition’ of Angolan political culture.51



50 Eva Keller argues that the joy of Bible study itself is what appealed to Malagasy Advent-

ists about their religious practice, and that even if this intellectual activity took place within a predetermined paradigm, discovering how to get to the final result of ‘clarity’ by oneself provided purpose and excitement: Eva Keller, The Road to Clarity: SeventhDay Adventism in Madagascar (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). This process may have had intrinsic excitement for veterans in Huambo, but also seemed to be particularly exciting because they saw their faith partly in contrast to Catholicism. 51 Jon Schubert, ‘“Unknown Evil-Doers Perturbing the Peace”: Mass Fainting and the Reproduction of Hegemony in Luanda, Angola’, Allegra (blog), 2015, http://allegralaboratory.net/unknown-evil-doers-perturbing-the-peace-mass-fainting-and-the-reproduction-of-hegemony-in-luanda-angola-anthrostate/.

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‘It’s really good sharing with brothers, without any distinction of race’ Angola’s civil war brought many painful divisions to Angolan society, and the churches were certainly not immune to them. From colonial times, Catholics and Protestant denominations had a mutual antipathy due to the colonial power’s support of the former, and suspicion of the latter.52 After independence the support of part of the Baptist church for the FNLA, the periodic support of IECA for UNITA, and the support of Methodist leaders for the MPLA’s socialist project, created divisions between and within these churches.53 This situation did not improve during the 1990s when the MPLA began to co-opt some churches and church factions through political inclusion and material support, whilst distancing itself from others, intentionally sowing division between them in a successful attempt to prevent them from uniting in opposition to the party-state.54 Attempts to co-opt influential churches have continued in the post-war period.55 In spite of these divisions, however, the idea that churches are spaces where the painful divisions of the past ought not to apply was strong for many. When I asked the men I worked with whether the presence of both ‘city’ people (who had lived and sometimes fought for the MPLA government during the war), and ‘bush’ people (who were associated with UNITA) caused problems in congregations, most of them denied it. This denial accorded with the official teachings of each of their churches, most of whom had preached peace and the healing of divisions during the war, and continue to preach reconciliation after the war. A senior Adventist pastor’s comments were typical of the stance of most denominations: It’s based in the principle of love – which has a basis in God’s love. Based on this principle it’s been easy. First of all, people need to understand, ‘What has God done for me?’ This has made it easy to reconcile people … It’s all a family, even though divided, it’s all the family of Angola.

The claim that ‘it’s been easy’ seems hard to believe. Certainly, from time to time, even the most committed churchgoers would slip out of the political correctness of their churches’ official position, and criticise people who had been with UNITA during the war. A Baptist pastor I interviewed was more open about how politics could divide churches, recounting the story of a

52 Schubert, 53 ibid.

A Guerra e as Igrejas.

54 Messiant,

L’Angola Postcolonial, 2008. de Oliveira, Magnificent and Beggar Land, 247–48; Didier Péclard, ‘The “Depoliticizing Machine”: Church and State in Angola since Independence’, in Religion and Politics in a Global Society: Comparative Perspectives from the Portuguese-Speaking World (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012).

55 Soares

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female congregation member of an IECA church who came to his church instead because of prejudice against her as a proveniente – a pejorative term for those who came to the city from the bush at the end of the war. Such divisions and exclusions were seen as incompatible with the mission of churches, though, and several of the men I worked with seemed to believe in the sincerity of the official policies of churches not to discriminate on political or other grounds. When I mentioned to Domingos, a Catholic, non-veteran seller in the municipal market in his fifties, that two of the market’s stevedores were UNITA veterans, he replied: It’s possible they were, I don’t know. It’s best not to ask these things, because unity is important, and if you start discussing which party people were in, these divisions will open up again … it will take a long time for these divisions to fade.

Such an attitude was approvingly cited by some men who felt discriminated against in other areas of their lives. Alexandre, when speaking of why he no longer worried about whether people discriminated against him or not because of his facial injury, explained, ‘Why? Because I belong to a church. I don’t pay any attention. It could happen, but I don’t pay any attention. Because everyone in church is the same, right?’ A UNITA veteran I interviewed, called Domingos, complained bitterly about the prejudice and insults he had suffered when he first came to Huambo at the end of the war. When he spoke of his conversion to Congregationalism, however, he said of the church’s influence on veterans of both factions: [T]hey played a very preponderant role. In the city we had a militaristic role, all the men that come from the army have a negative soul. They raised our consciousness, that’s to say that everything that’s bad can stay behind, and everything that’s good can stay in front … it’s really good sharing with brothers, without any distinction of race …56 the church itself is really educative, very constructive, associative, it helps, and this does me a lot of good.

Church elders, gendered age hierarchies & Umbundu eldership The social and moral vision provided by the churches, then, notwithstanding the diversity and tensions between veterans of different denominations, offered

56 The

word raça was not always used by these men to speak about ‘race’ as understood in English. It could also refer to someone’s family lineage, or to someone’s regional or ethnic identity. The latter was sometimes conflated with sulanos – ‘southerners’ – standing for ‘Umbundu’ (Martins, ‘Ovimbundu Identity Attributions in Post-War Angola’). In this case it seems that Domingos was referring to this regional ethnic identity, one that was often presumed by ‘northerners’ to be an indicator of support for UNITA.

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several advantages for these men relative to the political, and certain repudiated parts of ‘Umbundu tradition’. However, part of the churches’ attraction for veterans was that they also bolstered cherished aspects of Umbundu tradition, and had allowed their influence to survive the upheavals of war. As we saw in the previous chapter, veterans viewed the decline of the institutions of the ondjango (men’s house) and evamba (circumcision ceremony) with some regret. This was related to the moral economy of masculinity that they helped to maintain, in particular through inculcating respect for male elders. It was seen to be based on the ‘disparate possession of certain values’,57 in this case, wisdom. Their idealised male life course was based on the gradual accumulation of wisdom over time, allowing for the wise stewardship of, and provision for, a stable and prosperous household. As I will discuss in more detail in the following chapters, this model was seen to be threatened by the rising value of money as a marker of status and the greater entry of women into the cash economy, amongst other things. The churches had acted to bolster Umbundu ethnic identity in previous periods, too. As Didier Péclard58 details, for example, Protestant missions specifically set out to protect the sense of honour of Umbundu societies after the conquest by colonial forces. In the missions they provided spaces where the Umbundu language and some aspects of Umbundu tradition were respected, but in the ‘modern’ context of a Christian mission. The missionaries’ codification of the Umbundu language and the facilitation of mobility between previously disparate and competing kingdoms, even aided in the creation of the idea of a unified ‘Umbundu’ ethnicity in the colonial period. Ideas of ‘Umbundu tradition’ and Christianity had therefore been intertwined for quite some time,59 with the latter helping the former to survive in a largely recognisable form through the upheavals of colonialism. For the veterans I worked with, the churches were still providing similar protection for them in post-war Huambo. The moral economy underpinning their masculine life projects and aspirations was clearly under threat, causing 57 Lila

Abu-Lughod, ‘The Moral Basis of Hierarchy’, in Moral Anthropology: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Routledge, 2014), 275. 58 Péclard, ‘UNITA and the Moral Economy of Exclusion in Angola’. 59 There were certainly tensions between Umbundu institutions and Christian missions as detailed above in the section on the repudiated aspects of Umbundu tradition. The evamba was also condemned by most churches, due to its association with the ovinganji, the masked dancers representing demonic spirits and the ancestors. Churches were already campaigning against involvement in the evamba before the civil war, but according to the men I was working with, this was being energetically contested. They recounted that some young men were grabbed and forcibly circumcised, and men of that generation who had not been circumcised reported being persecuted for it at the time.

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them acute anxiety. The signification of local traditions and local ‘African’ languages as backward was intensified after the war by the MPLA’s nowdominant vision of the nation (and was a notion that the MPLA had pushed at least since independence),60 implying that they now belonged to the past and would soon disappear. This could be viewed as what Pierre Bourdieu termed a ‘symbolic manipulation of the future’,61 which threatened to demoralise male Ovimbundu by making such a future seem inevitable, resulting in a ‘rout’62 that would fulfil the prophecy of the MPLA’s vision. However, the churches provided an alternative vision of modernity and an idealised future which valorised Umbundu identity, allowing veterans not to see themselves through the lens of the dominant vision of the future, but providing the ‘symbolic instruments’ that provided an alternative vision – as Protestant missions in particular had during colonial times.63 In a more practical sense, the gendered hierarchies of churches and the existence of official posts for lay people provided valued avenues for gaining masculine respect on similar terms to those proposed by the ondjango and evamba. Official positions in the churches I attended were occupied exclusively by men, with the exception of work in the área feminina, or work with children. These positions were a source of great pride for those who filled them. José spoke proudly of how he had managed not only to get elected deacon for a two-year term, but then to be re-elected, something he said that was only achievable by those who do ‘well or very well’. He was subsequently elected as a church elder, and asked me to come to his church on the Saturday he was presented, to take photographs of him. When I showed him the pictures he stared at them in silence for a long time, grinning with pride. While the men who held such positions complained about the extra work it involved, they also spoke proudly about how many people knew who they were because of their positions. Vicente talked of how his position as a Catechist

60 The

ruling party had set out to eradicate ‘tribalism’ and obscurantism shortly after independence, which entailed the devaluing of African languages. This was strikingly similar to the Portuguese colonial regime’s efforts at assimilation into the Portuguese empire, which also meant efforts to suppress national languages. See Schubert, Working the System, Chapter 3; and Péclard, Les incertitudes de la nation en Angola. 61 P. Bourdieu, The Bachelors’ Ball: The Crisis of Peasant Society in Bearn (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 188. 62 ibid., 189. 63 Protestant churches on the Planalto had had a crucial role in colonial times in promoting an alternative vision of modernity which valorised Umbundu languages and institutions through what Didier Péclard has termed a vision of ‘culturalist modernisation’. In this vision the ‘true nature’ of Angola was to be found in its black ‘African’ roots, and not in coastal mestiço, urban society: D. Péclard, ‘The Moral Economy of Exclusion in Angola, 1966–1977’, in Sure Road? Nationalisms in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique (Leiden: Brill 2012), 152.

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meant that he knew everyone in the Catholic church in Huambo. After mass when my partner and I visited him at his church on Palm Sunday, we walked through his neighbourhood to his house, and almost everyone we passed greeted him by name. He was well known in contexts beyond his church and neighbourhood, too, including amongst the traders on the streets around the market, as ‘catequista Vicente’. These positions, therefore, yielded respect that gave them valuable networks in both church and non-church settings. In this sense, then, part of the appeal of being part of church congregations seems to be that their hierarchies and organisation were dominated by older men. The relative exclusion of women from more public roles seems to have a longer history within IECA, where missions sought to domesticate women’s roles so that they would become the ‘soul’ of their homes, where order and cleanliness were seen to be the mirror of the spiritual transformation of the homes’ occupants.64 While there are no studies of the history of the Seventhday Adventist church in Angola, in the global Adventist church in general women have been largely excluded from positions of authority, in contrast to its early years when Ellen White was a dominant figure and women were able to occupy senior positions.65 In the Catholic Church, of course, only men can be priests, and in the churches I visited, all the lay people involved in running the services were also men. These churches therefore seemed to offer some respite from the perceived lack of respect for elder men that veterans felt had arisen during and after the war.66 Lay positions denoted an upstanding moral character, but also a superior knowledge of scripture and church doctrine, with elder men often employed as counsellors or instructors of one kind or another. There was

64

Péclard, ‘“Amanha Para Ser Homem”’, 120. Stefan Höschele, Christian Remnant – African Folk Church: Seventh-Day Adventism in Tanzania, 1903–1980 (Leiden: Brill, 2007); Laura Lee Vance, Seventh-Day Adventism in Crisis: Gender and Sectarian Change in an Emerging Religion (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 66 Harris makes a similar argument about the appeal of religion for men in Kaduna, Nigeria: Colette Harris. ‘Masculinities, New Forms of Religion and the Production of Social Order in Kaduna City, Nigeria’, Journal of Religion in Africa 46, nos 2–3 (2016); conversely Peterson details conversion to the East African Revival as a way that men and women contested elders’ strategies for dealing with the gendered effects of socioeconomic change: Derek Peterson, ‘Wordy Women: Gender Trouble and the Oral Politics of the East African Revival in Northern Gikuyuland’. Journal of African History 42, no. 3 (2001): 469–89. Jeater examines how the masculinities promoted by Pentecostal churches in Zimbabwe changed as the economic situation transformed over the 20th century: Diana Jeater, ‘Masculinity, Marriage and the Bible; New Pentecostalist Masculinities in Zimbabwe’, in Masculinities under Neoliberalism, edited by Andrea Cornwall, Nancy Lindisfarne and Frank Karioris (London: Zed Books, 2016). 65

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thus an assumption that these men possessed valued knowledge and wisdom, and part of their authority stemmed from this knowledge – a similar ethical justification for gendered hierarchy that these men had grown up with in the pre-war period. It also meant a similar embodied style: a sober one, emphasising the possession of interior qualities rather than any sort of flamboyance that could denote a more ‘superficial’ outlook. It should be noted, too, that lay positions had other important resonances for these men: they were formal public positions that had been denied them in their informal economic occupations, where they considered themselves ‘unemployed’ and left to desenrascar (scrape a living). They were also, in many Protestant churches, elected positions. Some spoke proudly of the democracy of their church institutions, which made a sharp contrast with the common complaints about the party-state’s subterfuge, which was said to undermine national elections and block access to employment in the state sector and other forms of advancement to non-party members.

Power & the limits of Christian exceptionalism Veterans’ stance towards formal politics, then, was double-edged. The recognition of the party-state and other political organisations as deceitful, selfseeking and dangerous led them to advocate a complete withdrawal from any kind of involvement in the formal political sphere. Yet for many, and especially for churchgoing veterans, this withdrawal was not simply apathy or passivity, but an explicit and self-conscious moral choice to reject the corruption, violence and false promises of the political sphere in favour of God’s faithfulness and protection now and in the future, and participation in communities founded on the ethics of brotherly love, non-discrimination, the transparent and universally available truths of the Bible – and in some cases democracy. Thus, Didier Péclard is right in one sense to call the churches in Angola the ‘depoliticizing machine’,67 in that church institutions failed to advocate successfully for peace during the war, and have rarely openly criticised the party-state in peacetime (with some exceptions, particularly around the Pope’s visit in 2009).68 However, for individual veteran believers, opting out of politics was both a political disengagement and an assertive choice to live by different moral values and not to involve themselves in a contention that they considered immoral, deceptive and socially destructive. On the other hand, it seems clear that the strong moral condemnation that churchgoing men expressed about the political sphere in Angola was not

67 Péclard,

‘The “Depoliticizing Machine”: Church and State in Angola since Independence’, 139. 68 Faria, The Post-War Angola.

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assertively articulated politically because it was considered too dangerous – particularly given the political violence that most of these veterans had witnessed, been the victim of, or perpetrated, or all three. Indeed, a radical disengagement from politics during the war would have posed a potent challenge to the politically powerful, since both sides depended on large numbers of young men to fight in their armies. Yet none of the religious veterans I worked with thought that fighting in the army was a moral failing on their part, despite their common view that the war was a pointless and immoral war amongst brothers. This is best illustrated by the fact that almost all of these veterans viewed military refusers negatively. Two FAPLA veterans I knew who had been involved in forced recruitment mentioned what they referred to as the ‘courage’ of Jehovah’s Witnesses that they had tried to recruit. They had refused to put on a military uniform, preferring to remain naked, and refused to touch any weapon with their hands. These men were often beaten, tortured or killed, and yet they would not consent to fight, to the point that FAPLA recruiters in Huambo were said to have given up and let the surviving ones go home. Criticisms of such men were various: that it was foolish not to fight, since ‘the other side’ (UNITA) would not spare them and would have killed all of them for refusing to fight rather than letting them go. Another was that Jehovah’s Witnesses would refuse to take the risky journey in armed columns to the coast to bring food back to the city, but were happy to eat the food when it arrived. These criticisms claim that the situation of violent political contention made fighting and other involvement with state military organisations a matter of basic individual and collective survival, both in terms of community defence and keeping the city supplied with basic goods. Jonas, a veteran and motorbike taxi driver in his fifties, gave a Biblical justification for military involvement, saying: What about the Jews? God sent the Jews to fight wars, why can’t Christians fight now? If you don’t have an army, the others will invade and enslave you, so you need an army as a deterrent. It says in the Bible that you shouldn’t kill, but it also says that you ought to be free.

An Adventist pastor whom I interviewed gave an alternative explanation, suggesting the need for flexibility when trying to match the demands of scripture with the dilemmas presented in difficult situations: It all depends from individual to individual, and religion is much more of a factor of conscience, particularly in the most difficult moments. Each person knows what his conscience says, according to what he has been taught, and in each circumstance the person will know how to act.

This point of view, in fact, reflects the official position of the global Seventhday Adventist church, which was arrived at in 1972 to settle divisions at the

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highest levels of the church in the US about conscientious objection to the Vietnam War. It also reflected the long trajectory of Seventh-day Adventism in the US from a radical and marginal sect that espoused pacifism to a larger and more mainstream denomination that increasingly required to come to accommodations with state authorities.69 An alternative Biblical argument could have cited verses forbidding killing or exhorting believers to ‘turn the other cheek’, and argued that military service was un-Christian. The fact that those who did conscientiously object were disapproved of and considered beyond the pale seems to indicate how Angola’s situation of violent political division set limits to what was believable and practicable for most Christians in relation to the political sphere, and to the sorts of Biblical interpretations that were considered legitimate and authoritative by most believers. This seems to underline Talal Asad’s argument70 that religious meanings cannot be understood independently of non-religious meanings and the authorising processes of power. Thus, despite Christians’ deliberate efforts to avoid the political sphere on moral and religious grounds and seek a purer space in the churches, the power of churches to provide an alternative ethical space could not, for most people, extend to open defiance of the party-state’s demands. Rather than such political pressures acting simply as a threat that tested one’s resolve, they seemed to shape Biblical interpretations and Christian moral norms, with those who encouraged such defiance considered illegitimate.71 These arguments also, of course, had the effect of justifying and excusing veterans’ past actions – very often taken due to state coercion rather than conviction – and aiding the construction of senior masculinities that were considered respectable and righteous despite complicity in the past practice of violence.

69

Höschele, Christian Remnant – African Folk Church. Asad, ‘The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category’. 71 The dangers of such defiance were tragically illustrated in early 2015, when police attempted to arrest Júlio Kalupeteca, leader of a breakaway sect from the Seventh-Day Adventist church, called the ‘Church of Seventh-Day Adventists, Light of the World’. Thousands of members of the sect were gathered on Mount Sumi, to the south of Huambo city. Although the exact sequence of events is not clear, sect members apparently killed eight of the police officers who had attempted the arrest. Armed police were sent to the area, and several hundred unarmed civilians seem to have been killed. The area was declared a military zone and no independent investigations were permitted. See www.cmi.no/news/?1549-massacre (accessed 6 December 2019). While the rumoured massacres were deplored by some of the men I worked with when I visited them in 2015, most of them focused on the police officers killed by the sect followers, and the sect’s foolishness in disobeying the government. The following critical comment was typical: ‘No church is more powerful than the government, the government is father. Churches are for religious matters, when people take the wrong path and get involved in politics, that isn’t real faith.’ 70

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Believers withdrawing from the political sphere, whilst also refraining from radical disengagement from politics, have a corollary in how church institutions have withdrawn from political engagement to concentrate on the spiritual life of, and material assistance for, their congregations. As Péclard72 outlines, the first truly ecumenical political campaign by churches was a campaign for peace begun shortly after the resumption of fighting in 1999 after a period of ‘no war no peace’, during which a co-optation strategy pursued by the MPLA had been effective in heading off dissent from the churches. In the new offensive the MPLA pursued a policy of securing peace through a military victory,73 the urgency of which was increased by the churches’ potentially potent peace campaign, which had emerged shortly after the military campaign began. The success of this campaign would have meant the MPLA losing control over the transition to peace, and perhaps having to share power with UNITA. The military strategy succeeded when UNITA was defeated in 2002, allowing the MPLA party-state virtually unchallenged control over the transition to peace, and enabling them to largely set the political agenda in peacetime (despite an uptick in overt political protests since the ‘Arab Spring’). Meanwhile, churches have once again withdrawn from political action to concentrate on spiritual and humanitarian issues, except where church leaders express support for the MPLA. The party-state’s attempt to limit the activities of churches to ministering to their congregations has therefore mostly been successful, but while this was generally mirrored in these veterans’ lives, the appeal of religion and their religious practice can only be fully understood in terms of the moral stance it entailed towards the corruptions of the political sphere. Churches provided these men spaces and ways of coming together that gave respite and some autonomy from the party-state’s suffocating influence on social life in Angola; on the other hand, these were also spaces that were limited to addressing private belief, limited social work amongst the congregation, and the moral conduct of one’s day-to-day life, rather than a locus for resistance to the political status quo.

Conclusion: moral economies & the nature of veterans’ political disengagement We can see from this account, then, that the party-state and the sphere of formal politics as constructed by veterans were seen to have serious moral

72 Péclard,

‘The “Depoliticizing Machine”: Church and State in Angola since Independence’. 73 See also Christine Messiant, L’Angola Postcolonial: Tome 2, Sociologie Politique d’une Oléocratie (Karthala, 2009).

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failures that drove veterans away from them. The fact that the MPLA state had so blatantly failed to live up to the perceived military covenant that it ought to be bound by was a central problem for veterans. More broadly, beyond expectations of the state as a provider and carer, it was also expected to provide order, organisation and development. These hopes had also been disappointed by the conduct of a massively destructive war, and the elite’s self-seeking enrichment at the expense of the Angolan people after the war. The identity that being a veteran gave to these men therefore was not central to their identities over the long run. It did not give them the privileged identity relative to the state and nation that they thought it ought to, failing them in both symbolic and material terms. Veterans’ withdrawal from politics was based, therefore, on a historically constituted moral economy, in whose terms the political was largely judged. This moral economy clearly had political elements to it in a broad sense, but not ones that made it into the realm of organised political action. In E. P. Thompson’s terms: [they c]annot be described as ‘political’ in any advanced sense, nevertheless [they] cannot be described as unpolitical either, since [they] supposed definite, and passionately held, notions of the common weal – notions which, indeed, found some support in the paternalist tradition of the authorities.74

The value of considering veterans’ experiences through the lens of moral economy is therefore pronounced in understanding the reasons behind veterans’ disengagement from politics and the particular form that it takes, because it directs our attention to the broader set of values, norms and practices within which politics is judged and made sense of. Veterans turned to other spheres of social life in order to be able to pursue masculine life projects that were still significantly informed by the moral economies of masculinity and making a living that they had been socialised into in their youth. They largely judged the impact of military service and of the war more broadly in terms of its impact on these life projects, and whether it increased or decreased their chances of fulfilling these projects. In the next chapters I am going to examine the broader socio-economic changes brought on by the war, the ways in which they affected the moral economy of senior manhood for veterans, both inside and outside the household, and the strategies that veterans adopted in the face of them. First, I turn to the question of social mobility.



74 Thompson,

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‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, 79.

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CHAPTER 3

‘These things are going to ruin the country’: The moral economy of social mobility & enrichment Introduction At Jamba’s stall in Alemanha market, the male sellers often played draughts to pass the time, with a home-made board and beer bottle tops for pieces. At a certain point the board was repainted by some of the younger men at the stall, who signed their names on it, and wrote the motto, ‘Win with Merit, Lose with Dignity’. In the same period, the elder men in Jamba’s neighbourhood were setting up the football team for the national Girabairro tournament: a tournament for amateur neighbourhood teams sponsored by the Movimento Nacional Espontâneo.1 I was asked to attend the planning meetings, as the team’s photographer. The early meetings were optimistic, speaking of the need for ‘social and political development’ in the neighbourhood, and a need to ‘encourage’ the young people and to give them a constructive activity to do, so that they would not fall into drug and alcohol abuse. However, tensions were also obvious from the start. ‘We all know’, the chair of the first meeting said in his opening statement, ‘that there are traitors and treacherous people in our neighbourhood’,2 who had gone to play for other neighbourhoods because they were being paid. These tensions grew, as some players and members of the club failed to make their regular donations to the team’s running costs. They were denounced as selfish, and as endangering the collective effort to create something positive in the neighbourhood, forcing the coaches to put up their own money to compensate. At the sidelines of one of the games, I heard some young players making a loud counter-accusation to the older men running the team: coaches

1 A state-funded ‘civil society’ organisation linked to, and highly supportive of, the Presi-



2 The

dency. term ‘traitor’ clearly has an important political resonance in Angola given the atmosphere of paranoia and an official political rhetoric that often plays on the idea of traitors of the nation. However, in this case there seemed to be no direct political implication, the link being made rather to the idea of the corrupting power of money.

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would pick players on the basis of the money they were able to contribute, and not solely on ability. They said that it was tough to ask people to contribute money every week, because sometimes you might fall on hard times and not be able to pay. The potentially corrupting influence that money could have on social relations was a frequent theme of conversation amongst the men I worked with. The disturbing idea that the love of money threatened communal values and common enterprises, that people could not be counted on for their loyalty and that bonds of solidarity were therefore weakening, was common. Equally, the notion was widespread that a growing love of money had increased corruption and deception, so that you might not ‘win with merit’ but by secretly exploiting others’ love of money to get an unfair advantage. The tensions around the organisation of the Girabairro team seemed to illustrate some of these tensions, as well as the feelings of uncertainty that they produced: had people really been selected because of their ability or because of money? Were other neighbourhood teams winning because the young men in the neighbourhood were skilful players, or had they covertly bought in players from other neighbourhoods? This chapter examines veterans’ post-war masculinities in relation to broader socio-economic stratifications, looking at the consequences of the war and, to a lesser extent, military service, for veterans’ masculine statuses in the public economic sphere, and how they constructed and navigated masculine hierarchies. While a football tournament is obviously not a perfect analogy for economic life more broadly, the tensions I have just described illustrate some central aspects of how (masculine) economic performance was morally interpreted and contested. While veterans could articulate quite clear notional economic hierarchies of masculine status, one’s achievements had moral entailments: they demonstrated something about one’s moral character and capacities. Correspondingly, the wider economic structures of Angolan society, and different patterns and methods of accumulation and distribution, were also judged according to these moral criteria. Understanding how veterans considered their own and other men’s status and achievements in the economic sphere therefore has to keep moral visions of economic status central to the analysis of hierarchies of masculine status, as well as more obvious questions of economics and power – all three are indispensable for understanding attributions of masculine status. It follows that veterans’ moral visions therefore also constituted a central part of veterans’ commentaries on the socio-economic consequences of the war, since they were used to judge the gendered socio-economic stratifications that it had produced, and the moral economies underpinning them. However, there are two further points suggested by the conflicts around the football tournament. First, apparent successes and status claims were

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potentially ambiguous and treated with suspicion – particularly of hidden and corrupt conspiring. Second, and relatedly, some of the key concepts used to discuss these issues were double-edged and allowed for accusation and counter-accusation on the same moral terrain: whereas for the elder men managing the team, some players were selfishly keeping money for themselves and endangering the team’s future, for the young men they were being unfairly excluded on the grounds of poverty, in a way that suggested discrimination on the grounds of wealth. The motto ‘win with merit and lose with dignity’ was striking because it seemed to express a longing for a situation of clarity where those who prospered did so because they deserved to, and those who did less well had done so due to their inferior abilities, and accepted this calmly – and, crucially, without hidden conspiring and corruption. This made for a distinct contrast with the often deep unease with which most of the veterans I worked with viewed the world of money and people’s differential socio-economic fortunes, and complicates the idea of clear hierarchies of masculinity. In the analysis of veterans’ economic lives and related subjectivities, I will, in this chapter, be coming closest to the classic accounts of moral economy (especially those influenced by E. P. Thompson and James Scott).3 These consider inequalities and modes of accumulation at the macro level, but investigate the moral subjectivities through which particular groups (in particular, classes) relate to the broader economy and their position within it.4 It reveals how observable hierarchies are viewed differently depending on where one is located in the hierarchy. Socio-economic hierarchies are often seen as somehow being immoral – not simply because they are unequal, since inequality is often tolerated – but because certain norms, expectations and values are being undermined or violated by economic practices.5 While influential scholars such as Thompson and Scott have considered how this might explain patterns of collective action such as riots or rebellions, in this chapter I will consider how this might help us to explain hierarchies of masculinities in a more nuanced way, and the influences of different masculinities upon one another. Using this approach, I seek to move away from the influential idea of a hegemonic masculinity structuring a well-understood hierarchy of masculinities, to thinking about how the hierarchy itself, and the terms upon



3 Thompson,

‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’; James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). 4 Marc Edelman, ‘Bringing the Moral Economy Back in … to the Study of 21st-Century Transnational Peasant Movements’, American Anthropologist 107, no. 3 (2005): 331–45; Fassin, ‘Moral Economies Revisited’. 5 Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant.

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which it is constructed, are contested – with the contestation often centring upon questions of moral legitimacy and the moral health of society at large. Importantly, the moral economy approach can also help untangle the historical specificities of moral contests, and to identify what is at stake in moral contestations6 at a particular historical moment as the direction and rationale of socio-economic change are contested between different visions. It therefore allows us to locate conflicts over the moral valuation of differential economic status specifically in the post-war moment. In the context of post-war Angola, and in post-war contexts more generally, the question of which masculinities are dominant or hegemonic is often far from clear or settled. While the questions of military dominance of a country might have been settled through war, the question of which cultural visions of society ought to be influential is often much more complicated, and divisions may have been deepened by the social consequences of war. These divisions often do not simply correspond to the lines contested by politico-military organisations, but relate to how cultural forms and processes of long standing continue to play central roles in people’s motivations and practices, yet have also changed during the war and face new ‘conditions of sociation’,7 as the consequences of war sever some social relations, reinforce others and allow new connections to be made, changing both the possibilities and consequences of interactions. Understanding which styles of masculinity become influential for whom in post-war settings, I will argue, has much to do with the perceived moral legitimacy of different styles, and the broader moral vision of society and the masculine life course that they imply. In the rest of the chapter I will proceed as follows. In the next section I will briefly outline the practicalities of the different income-earning activities of the men I worked with in the informal sector. I will then look at veterans’ views of their place in broader socio-economic strata in terms of these occupations, and the different moral values they attached to their achievement and to the proper conduct of commerce, and to those men above and below them in these hierarchies. The fourth section will discuss a pair of concepts that veterans used to assess the moral import of others’ social mobility and of the changing social value of money and consumption in post-war Huambo: those of avarice (ocipulũlũ) and envious hatred (onyã). I argue that these operated as a ‘moral diagnostics’ of social mobility: part of a flexible conceptual apparatus that ethically problematised people’s differential social trajectories, and reactions to these. I will argue that, rather than respect for senior men depending simply on material considerations of success, moral interpretations were vital both in assessing others’ successes and in guiding how one pursued one’s own success. In addition, the concepts used to interpret others’ social fortunes

6 Fassin,

‘Moral Economies Revisited’. Culture in Chaos, 216.

7 Lubkemann,

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were adapted to the situation of uncertainty and vulnerability in which these veterans found themselves, in a way that questions the utility of the idea of hierarchies of ‘models’ in explaining the dynamics of masculine performance. In the final section I will consider how this approach may help us to conceptualise hierarchies of masculinities in post-war settings.

Making a living in the praça8 My research involved four different groups of veterans in the city of Huambo, pursuing different occupations in informal commerce, along with some subsistence agriculture and occasional odd jobs. The indoor market in the cidade (city centre) was the first setting I started working in. João and Vicente both worked in this market, a squat concrete building with a corrugated iron roof, at the side of a busy road. Most of the sellers were women, and all sections were staffed uniquely by either men or women – as with all of the settings I worked in. João and Vicente worked in a section selling non-food goods,9 along with 11 other men and one woman (including six veterans in total). They got their products from three main sources: shops in the city centre, Alemanha market, or shops and warehouses in Luanda, and the goods were almost all manufactured in China. This section was increasingly in competition with larger shops in the city centre, able to sell at a lower price, and more and more of these shops had opened since the end of the war, so there had been a long-term reduction in the number of clients for this section. The market was privately owned, and the proprietors were politically wellconnected. It was well-organised, and sold a wide range of food and non-food goods. Despite the reduction in clients it was generally well-used by locals and passers-by. The stallholders paid a daily fee of AKZ50 to use their pitches, the fee being collected by uniformed market staff. When I first arrived in the market, the men complained to me about the influence of the economic police, who prohibited the sale of certain of their goods, and one of the stallholders had spent a night in prison because of this. However, throughout my time there I never saw the police enter the market, except when chasing some drug dealers who had fled there. There were various routes into this section. Vicente was one of the ‘pioneers’ of the school materials trade in Huambo, and came to sell in the city market in 1994 having been moved on from an outdoor location by the UNITA authorities. His cousin, Alexandre, followed him soon after. Other sellers in

8 Praça

means ‘square’, often used as a shorthand for ‘market square’.

9 I will not be more specific about the goods they sold, since it would make the group too

easily identifiable.

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the section were family of one of the other ‘pioneers’ of this trade, and others had come in due to friendship links with other sellers. Many of the sellers found the income insufficient, and especially the younger members had other occupations at the same time, variously as a security guard in a shop, a bank teller and a motorbike taxi driver, and one worked simultaneously as a seller in another market while colleagues minded his pitch for him. Two younger members in their early twenties, including João’s nephew Eduardo, were using the trade to help pay for their high school studies, hoping to move on to more stable salaried employment in the future. Several sellers had left the section in recent years due to declining profits – one found a job as a security guard and supplemented this with money changing, and another went to sell a variety of products in Alemanha market in the suburbs. Outside the market, I worked with a group of motorbike taxi drivers. There were also boys shining shoes and adults begging, moneychangers, sellers of car seats and of marijuana, as well as passing street hawkers. Motorbike taxi drivers are often referred to as kupapatas, which means ‘hold me close’,10 referring to the passenger in theory having to hold on to the driver as they travel, although most passengers seemed to travel with their arms nonchalantly crossed. All kupapatas in Huambo seemed to be men. There were various kinship and friendship links between these taxi drivers and a group of moneychangers who occupied a nearby patch. Customers were people passing or coming out of the market, or people who hailed the drivers as they were driving back to their patch from dropping off another passenger. Although the work of kupapatas was legal, they sometimes had trouble with the police. It was compulsory for both passengers and drivers to wear helmets, but this law was enforced through periodic clampdowns rather than consistently. These men also feared the rumoured imminent enactment of a law obliging all motorbike drivers to have driving licences, which only one of these men had. Five of the kupapatas with whom I worked were middle-aged FAPLA veterans. However, I found that most kupapatas that I took as I travelled around the city were younger, and veterans often complained that many younger men were choosing to become kupapatas as they came onto the labour market, making the profession less profitable than in the past. All of the kupapatas I worked with had taken up the trade during the war by buying one of the scarce bikes manufactured in the city from a friend or relative when one became available second-hand, usually using money saved from informal trading.11 All had bought new, Indian-manufactured bikes since the end of the war. One

10 Carlos M. Lopes, Candongueiros & kupapatas: acumulação, risco e sobrevivência na eco-



11 For

nomia informal em Angola (Cascais: Princípia, 2011). more information on this trade, see ibid.

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of these men supplemented his income with work as a security guard at the airport. In terms of ‘routes out’ of this profession, two had died, one in a traffic accident, and one of an illness while I was there. One was spending time at a mechanic’s workshop in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to start a new business of his own; when I visited in 2015, he had bought a second-hand car and was struggling to find work as a taxi driver. Alemanha market, where Jamba worked, is a large outdoor market occupying around 2.5 square kilometres in the suburbs of Huambo city. It is a busy workplace for many thousands of sellers. At first glance it seemed rather chaotic, with each stall made by its owner out of tree branches, corrugated iron and wooden boards, stretching in meandering rows for hundreds of metres. A huge variety of goods are sold there, including all the goods that the city market sells, along with motorbikes and motorbike parts, car parts, furniture, cloth, livestock, electrical equipment, pharmaceuticals and agricultural equipment, to name but a few. Like the city market, Alemanha was privately owned and had a system of daily fees collected by uniformed staff, cleaners, and a system of porters bringing goods to and from warehouses. The police were even more absent in this market than the city market, seemingly only ever present to direct traffic during the frequent snarl-ups at the market entrance. Perhaps as a consequence, products such as pirated DVDs and CDs were openly sold here, unlike in the city. Jamba ran a stall with his 40-year-old nephew, Flávio, who is also a FAPLA veteran. They began selling there in the early 2000s after Jamba was forced to abandon construction work for health reasons. Flávio’s younger brother, in his mid-twenties, also worked with them, along with a number of school-age male relatives who contributed from time to time. The stall was positioned between two other stalls selling the same kind of goods, one of which was staffed by around ten men with whom Jamba had kinship and/or friendship links, including three more FAPLA veterans. The other was staffed by men who were ‘with UNITA’ during the war. Jamba sourced his goods from suppliers in Luanda, Lobito and nearby Caála through contacts he had built up over several years. I also worked with sellers at another stall around the corner from Jamba, headed by a 49-year-old veteran called José, who was, like Jamba, a Seventhday Adventist. José had a distant kinship link with Jamba through marriage. He ran the stall with his wife, two of his teenage sons and a nephew in his thirties, though José was clearly in charge and the others his assistants. They sold mechanical goods in a crowded section with many competitors, though José specialised in new goods, unlike most of his competitors who sold secondhand goods. He ordered his goods from importers in Luanda who bought the products from Europe. José seemed to have a reputation as an expert in his field, with his many clients greeting him by name. He started his trade in the

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1990s, with a loan from a relative working in the civil service. Later, after the war finished, he managed to get a series of loans from a government-backed loan scheme to build up his business. Despite the differences between these occupations, all of these men also relied on the contributions of other household members, particularly their wives, all of whom also worked in informal commerce; and also on income from older children and other adults living in their household, usually also working in informal commerce and/or agriculture – a strategy common to many urban settings in Angola.12 Several of these traders also supplemented their income with subsistence agriculture in plots in their home villages or in the peri-urban areas of Huambo, and sometimes on odd jobs as they arose. This combination of livelihood activities was usually sufficient to feed and clothe household members and educate children, and the diverse set of incomes provided some protection against fluctuations in profits, and some flexibility in adapting to unforeseen problems. This mix of activities is also broadly representative of the average for FAPLA veterans interviewed in the POEMA household survey, with the primary source of monetary income being non-agricultural business income (an average of AKZ9,746 per month, just short of US$100 at the time), followed by agricultural income (AKZ3,970 per month (around US$40), with 43.6 per cent of veterans selling some of their produce). Of FAPLA veterans, 82.6 per cent worked on their own plots for some of their time, and 80.5 per cent were engaged in non-farm work, also for some of the time. However, on average, the veterans from the survey spent more time engaged in agriculture than those I worked with in the markets. Veterans had a mix of sources of cash income besides what they earned from selling agricultural produce. For 26.6 per cent of them, part of that mix included doing odd jobs, for 22.8 per cent it included working on others’ plots, and 10.8 per cent engaged in some form of informal commerce. All of the men I worked with complained about the unreliability of income, due to their inability to predict reliably how many customers they would have in even the near future. The POEMA survey results suggest that dissatisfaction with one’s occupation was common for FAPLA veterans throughout Huambo province, with respondents scoring their satisfaction with their work situation at an average of just 2.15 on a scale of 0–10. When describing their professions and their struggles to make a living, the men I spoke to used words such as ‘suffering’, ‘struggling’, ‘fighting’, and described trading as their ‘last resort’, all suggesting desperation and a sense of the precarity of their economic position. Not only could they not guarantee that there would be clients in the future, but

12 Cristina Udelsmann Rodrigues, ‘From Family Solidarity to Social Classes: Urban Strat-

ification in Angola (Luanda and Ondjiva)’, Journal of Southern African Studies 33, no. 2 (2007): 235–50.

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a crisis could endanger their ability to meet even basic needs. Another word that these traders used to describe how they lived was the verb desenrascar. Alcinda Honwana notes that her young Mozambican interviewees use desenrascar a vida in a way that translates as ‘eke out a living’ in English,13 and these veterans used it in a similar way. For them, it represented a way of making a living that was unstable, where they were left to depend on their own wits and to improvise as best they could to survive in the short term. Such improvising could involve resorting to acts that were less than legal. As Nando, a 38-yearold kupapata put it: ‘a thief robs to fill his pockets, but the one who robs to desenrascar is doing it to fill his stomach’. This was not a metaphor: 37 per cent of ex-FAPLA respondents to the POEMA survey reported food being insufficient for their household over the past year, on an average of 3.6 occasions; 20 per cent reported someone in their household having gone to bed hungry in the past four weeks, on an average of 3.7 occasions.

Organisation, education, evolution: socio-economic stratification & its (gendered) meanings Occupation was a key aspect of men’s identity, and the subject of much discussion. The men I worked with had a keen sense of who was better and who was worse off than they were. When speaking of the fates of veterans upon leaving the army, sorrow was often expressed for those who had failed to establish a stable household and occupation, men who had to resort to begging and scavenging in rubbish and were often said to be alcoholics. A less drastic instance of failure, but a failure nevertheless, were those who had not managed to make a stable living in the city, and so had returned to their home village. This preference was borne out in the POEMA survey results on living standards, with FAPLA veterans living in peri-urban and urban areas reporting earning more cash on average per month than veterans in rural areas (AKZ12,487.68 and AKZ16,600.53 respectively compared to, AKZ5,829.09 in rural areas) owning larger houses on average (3.64 rooms and 3.27 rooms respectively, compared to 2.53 rooms in rural areas), and owning more assets that were associated with developed-ness by veterans (for example, only 12 per cent of rural veterans’ households had a television, compared to 51 per cent of periurban and 57 per cent of urban veterans’ households). It is worth mentioning that of course there were a range of incomes in both settings. Those who were scraping meagre existences through professions said to yield less income than market trading, such as the porters and cleaners working in the market and

13 Alcinda Honwana, ‘“Desenrascar a Vida”: Youth Employment and Transitions to Adult-

hood’, in Mozambique: Acumulação e Tranformação Em Contexto de Crise Internacional (Third Conference of IESE, Maputo, 2012), 3.

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sellers who hawked their products rather than having their own stall, were viewed with pity: ‘those ex-combatants who work as porters, their lives are really a drama. They don’t have anything in their life’, said one veteran. Stallholders took pride in their achievements in establishing their own businesses and avoiding these less preferable occupations. For most of these men, the story of how they established their stalls was a key point in their life histories, and a point of pride. It emphasised a number of virtues they possessed: they contrasted their achievements with those who did not manage to ‘organise’ themselves, and those who ‘do not have a plan’. The term organização was used in many senses, but generally represented a cluster of values applicable to both people and society, designating a ‘developed’ and ‘evolved’ person, and a society that was not ridden by confusão. Confusion was opposed to organisation and generally designated socially destructive conflict, disorganisation and material shortages, and it was also considered contrary to the principles of a Christian society. The concept was also mobilised politically to stigmatise opponents.14 Organização was also generally associated with urban living and development, and contrasted with the confusion and ‘backwardness’ of rural living. The importance of ‘having a plan’ was related to the idea that these men were both organised and hard-working. As João’s nephew Eduardo put it: I was always taught that a man shouldn’t limit himself in the area of work. A man should never be ashamed. What he can do, he should do. He can’t say, ‘I don’t like doing this’.

Relatedly, the quality of ‘dynamism’ was sometimes mentioned as an important one, contrasted with ‘apathy’. This message was reinforced in the churches I attended: In a Congregationalist service, my willingness to go to Angola to carry out a ‘mission’ was held up by a preacher as an example of the ‘proactiveness’ that young people ought to exhibit.15 Idleness was spoken of as something that could corrupt one’s morals and lead one astray. One of the benefits of going to church, Nando, a kupapata in his late thirties told me, was that It keeps you occupied [on a Sunday, most people’s only day off] – you have something in the morning at church, and then a church activity in the afternoon. It stops you from going to the picnic and doing something stupid.

14 Justin

Pearce, An Outbreak of Peace: Angola’s Situation of Confusion (Claremont, South Africa: D. Philip, 2005); Schubert, ‘2002, Year Zero’. 15 Indeed, the ethic of hard work had been promoted by the Congregationalist church on the Planalto for many decades: Péclard, ‘“Amanha Para Ser Homem”’.

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Laziness was said by these veterans to be a quality of backward people without the ‘capacity’ to rise up, who could easily spread confusão in the form of conflicts or feitiço due to their sense of entitlement to a living without working. This was something particularly attributed to those who lived with UNITA during the war, by those who had lived in the city and spent most time in areas under MPLA government control. Hard work was connected to self-sufficiency, which was essential to a successful masculinity: Vicente, for example, was willing to risk his life to avoid relying on his wife, by going out to work during UNITA’s occupation of Huambo in the 1990s. The quality of self-sufficiency was related to the importance for a man to be seen as the main breadwinner for his household, and not a dependent but a person characterised by personal autonomy. Thus, stallholders saw their occupations as marking them out as possessing a number of desirable masculine qualities related to developed-ness, urbanity, moral integrity and respectability. Importantly, the manner in which these men thought their occupations ought to be conducted was not only about prospering for oneself or one’s family but emphasised the importance of mutual assistance between colleagues. In the cidade market for example, they spoke of the ‘market family’, and of the importance of helping one another out: Looking after others’ pitches if they could not attend the market on a particular day, telling each other where they were going if they left, contributing to funeral costs of colleagues’ family members. Those deemed to be acting selfishly or deceptively were the subjects of disapproving gossip – often a fine line to walk since vendors were in competition with each other for clients. The qualities they proudly associated with their achievements are important indicators of the contours of the moral underpinnings that they thought economic success ought to have, and that ought to guide economic conduct more broadly: organisation leading to developed-ness, hard work and dynamism justly rewarded, dynamism and autonomy, transparency and openness with one’s colleagues, and the profit-making urge moderated by concern for the wellbeing of one’s fellows. As mentioned above, however, none of these men were satisfied with their occupation. There was a common perception amongst them that the unpredictability of their income meant that life was relatively ‘not organised’, despite their achievements in establishing a business. As Nando put it, ‘each one lives within his own somersault’, in a sometimes-chaotic struggle together with his family to make ends meet. The lack of dignity this implied was often mentioned, as was the associated need for people to overcome their pride to engage in market trading. All of these veterans had left the army with the expectation that the state would provide a better profession than the one they were currently in: ‘After being in the army our hope wouldn’t have been this: selling here. After we finished a military career, we were hoping we’d have

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a job, or at least good houses’, said Geraldo, a 49-year-old veteran selling in the city market. When asked to rank their households compared to others in Huambo city, 78 per cent of FAPLA veterans in the POEMA survey ranked their households at 4 or lower on a scale of 0–10. Stallholders’ common self-description as ‘unemployed’ implicitly and unfavourably compared their occupations with formal, salaried employment. Other options were sometimes mentioned, including the idea of developing their businesses to open a shop. Indeed, varying degrees of success and income were available through informal commerce, with one veteran moneychanger in Alemanha market, called Abel, making enough money to be able to buy a brand new, expensive pickup truck (demonstrating that there was more to stratification than just occupation, as we will see). However, the most commonly expressed aspiration of the stallholders I worked with was to salaried work.16 One veteran I interviewed, called Lionel, had formerly worked in the cidade market, but had left as profits declined after the end of the war, and as formal shops began to be (re-)opened. In 2012 he was working as a security guard. His complaints about his work were typical of those who had found some private sector employment: For the slightest thing a security guard can be fired – they forget all the good things you’ve done, and just think about the one time that you got confused, and they fire you. It’s not like in the public sector, where you have a guaranteed job, in the private sector they can fire you whenever they feel like it.

When these men spoke of their frustrated aspirations for employment, then, it was usually for state employment, which was considered more stable (although this sector was also known to be less than punctual in paying salaries) and thus to provide a life that was more stable and organizada.17 It was also seen as indicating a greater degree of urban integration, education and developed-ness than informal commerce, as well as a connection to the power and prestige of the state. Entering public sector employment was, however, now impossible for most Bicesse veterans, who were too old to enter the annual public sector recruitment round, and who had not, in any case, completed secondary education, which was necessary to stand any chance of success. Military service was often mentioned by veterans as an interruption to their education, whereas those who did not have to fight were able to finish

16 See

also Udelsmann Rodrigues on salaried work in Luanda, where she found that such work was said to ‘dignify’ a man: Cristina Udelsmann Rodrigues, O Trabalho Dignifica o Homem: Estratégias de Sobrevivência Em Luanda (Lisbon: Ediçoes Colibri, 2006). 17 Cf. Cristina Udelsmann Rodrigues, ‘Survival and Social Reproduction Strategies in Angolan Cities’, Africa Today 54, no. 1 (2007): 90–105, who also suggests that a stable salary may be reinvested in informal commerce by other family members to double or treble the income.

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their education and establish careers while conscripts were still in the military. As one veteran put it, ‘it strangulated my life and my plans for the future, it destroyed my education, it destroyed my time, it destroyed my future’. It was common as they recounted their life stories to hear them reflect on what might have been had they not been recruited, and stable public sector employment was a prominent frustrated aspiration. Beyond these comparisons that veterans would make with the occupations of those men they might encounter in their everyday life, was the broader comparison with those who were benefiting from the serious networks of enrichment centred on the party-state elite. While veterans sometimes expressed an ambivalent longing to belong to the super-rich party-state elite, more commonly the elite was considered to have deceived soldiers during the war, and of having waged a ‘war of ambition’ for their own enrichment at the expense of soldiers and the mass of the Angolan population, whom they abandoned to their own fate. The masculinities seen to be embodied in such outlandish success were seen as being distant and inaccessible to veterans, irrelevant to veterans’ everyday realities, and generally not seen as exemplifying moral values that were to be emulated. One’s occupation was not, however, considered to determine one’s status, since the quality of one’s house, where the house was located, and the assets one possessed were also important factors. For these veterans, moving out of the rented accommodation that most them found after arriving in Huambo and having a house built was a vital step in demonstrating autonomy and economic stability and success, as well as bringing security and comfort to themselves and their families (87 per cent of FAPLA veterans from the POEMA survey owned their own house, with 48 per cent having built it, 24 per cent having bought it, and 25 per cent having inherited it). José took particular pride in a house he was building from concrete breeze blocks, and spoke of it at the end of his life story interview as a summation of his and his family’s successful work (only 5 per cent of FAPLA veterans we surveyed had such a house, but most veterans seemed to aspire to own one; 92 per cent lived in houses made of adobe). The bairros, where all of these veterans’ houses were located, were considered in contrast to the centre of Huambo, the cidade. This division of urban space was loaded with meanings and whether one lived in the bairro or the cidade said a lot about the sort of person one was. Although, as Sandra Roque notes,18 urban space in Angola is much more diverse than this binary classification suggests, such ideas powerfully shape conceptions of urban space. Huambo was constructed along lines of racial segregation, considered an exemplar

18 Sandra

Roque, ‘Cidade and Bairro: Classification, Constitution and Experience of Urban Space in Angola’, Social Dynamics 37, no. 3 (2011): 332–48.

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of a European city by colonial authorities, with black people confined to the peripheral neighbourhoods of the city:19 the cidade has long been considered a signifier of social status, of developed-ness and as the location of political power. The bairro on the other hand had a much more rural air about it in terms of its physical characteristics: there were small agricultural plots, goats and chickens and a lack of amenities and paved roads. It was seen as representing a lack of development and modernity, and an incomplete transition from the rural to the urban.20 Modes of transport and other portable commodities were also used and read as demonstrations of one’s developed-ness, and one’s familiarity with cosmopolitan references: mobile phones, tablets, computers, watches, clothing and sunglasses could all play a role. Of course, it is important to note that it was not simply the possession of commodities that indicated one’s status: it was also about how objects were employed,21 a subject I will discuss in more depth in Chapter 5.

The moral diagnostics of social mobility – ocipulũlũ: the love of money I will now move on from this fairly static picture of social stratification, to discuss some of the main concepts that veterans used to discuss the dynamics of social mobility. They often spoke of their life projects in progressive terms: of their efforts to achieve ‘social evolution’, to ‘rise up’, to ‘develop’, to ‘organise’ lives, and to ‘be someone’; and, conversely, to avoid lives that were ‘confused’, ‘go nowhere’, or that ‘head downwards’. Such efforts were broadly conceived according to the criteria of social stratification described above. Although most of these men spoke of their own social progress in the past tense and did not expect any drastic changes, they did expect further incremental progress for their families through the gradual accumulation of wealth from their businesses. Such wealth could be used to build a new house, invest in one’s children’s education and professional future, or purchase commodities. Cristina Udelsman Rodrigues22 argues that in the early independence period in Angola there was a ‘bipolar’ society, with membership of the politicomilitary elite largely determining opportunities for accumulation and social

19 Neto,

‘In Town and Out of Town’. is worth noting, however, that the pejorative representations of the bairro and the rural were both accepted and contested, often by the same people. Nando, for example, considered the life of the bairros to be the ‘real’ life of Ovimbundu, something that those ‘working in offices in the cidade’ could never understand. 21 Daniel Miller, ‘Consumption’, in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Chris Tilley et al. (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2006). 22 Udelsmann Rodrigues, ‘From Family Solidarity to Social Classes’. 20 It

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status. Since the emergence of the parallel informal market during the oneparty period and the shift to market economics in the 1990s, opportunities for accumulation are less restricted, and although political and racial criteria are still important: ‘agora o dinheiro é que está a mandar’ (now, money rules).23 Similar phrases were also used by the veterans I worked with: ‘money speaks loudest’, and ‘money has most weight’ were others. They also, often approvingly, spoke of the end of the one-party period and its economic restrictions as having made earning money easier. This, combined with the end of the war in 2002, had since then made rapid ‘development’ possible in Huambo, yet this development and the central role of money within it were viewed with pronounced ambivalence and anxiety. Various explanations were given by these men for money’s rising importance in people’s motivations and aspirations. Since the end of the war in Huambo, there has been a rapid rehabilitation of basic infrastructure and growing business activity, as it has become much easier to import goods into Angola’s hinterland. Inequalities have consequently become much more visible in everyday life than they were during wartime, through the differential possession of commodities. According to these veterans, this has helped to produce a dangerous avarice in many people in the city, and in Angola more generally, and particularly in rural migrants arriving in the city. Seeing extreme wealth was also made possible by the explosion of satellite TV in Huambo since the end of the war: people were witnessing opulent fantasy lifestyles in other parts of the world on television, and their desire for money and dissatisfaction with their own situation was said to be further stoked. Another narrative of the rise of money’s social importance was related to the state, as one veteran outlined: People just want to make money. This is partly to do with corruption: if you get accused of a crime and you are innocent, you will still be found guilty unless you pay – whereas the guilty man will get off because he pays. So, people realised that you need money to do everything.

Beyond encounters with justice institutions, state ‘corruption’ was said to also extend to more commonplace functions of the state, with ubiquitous demands for a gasosa (literally a carbonated drink but also a common euphemism for a bribe) by civil servants. Needing money ‘to do everything’ also had a more everyday sense, due to the decline of agriculture during the war and rapid urbanisation discussed in the previous chapter. This change was particularly striking for those veterans who had grown up in rural areas in families working in agriculture. Even though subsistence agriculture in many of these men’s home villages had

23 ibid.,

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become possible again since the end of the war, most of their income came from commerce, a fact which was still striking for them. As Nando said: It’s not like in the countryside. Funje (maize meal) is in your pocket, water is in your pocket, your telephone [credit] is in your pocket.

Last but not least, a spiritual explanation was given for the growing importance of money, and the decline of ‘brotherly love’: people’s lust for money was motivated by the devil. This argument was particularly emphasised by the Adventist men I worked with, such as Jamba: Soldiers who were fighting were tricked – it was a war between brothers, pushed by people with a great ambition to be rich … the Devil brings this ambition for money and power that the leaders strive for, and they tricked people into fighting and make them suffer because of it.

This argument was not only made by Adventists, however, and the more general idea that the civil war had been a ‘war of ambition’ was widespread. The continuing and growing inequality between the party-state elite and the mass of the Angolan people, along with the oil-funded party-state’s abrogation of its responsibilities to provide veterans with better lives were also attributed to an evil greed for money and power. Veterans described the growing love of money, sometimes referred to in Umbundu as ocipulũlũ,24 with deep unease, and a sense that money had become more important to people than their fellow humans. As José commented, when one day I commented that Angola had developed quickly since the end of the war, ‘yes, but there is no brotherly love here, people care about getting rich, but they don’t care about others’. A particularly visceral example of people’s lust for money was explained to me when the son of António, a 54-year-old veteran and kupapata, fell from his motorbike and required a blood transfusion. The city hospital was said to be paying blood donors just $60 per litre for donations, but then charging desperate patients $200 a litre for a transfusion. Other threatening, embodied manifestations of ocipulũlũ suggested the sense of the existential threat that it posed to persons and bodies through changing food production practices. Jamba often complained that farmers had forgotten that their vocation was primarily to feed their fellow men, and not to make a profit. This led them to use crops treated with chemicals to double their yields, even if the resulting food gave people ‘stomach pains’ and made children’s intestines ‘burst open’. As a result, he said, he would only eat ‘natural’

24 Childs,

Umbundu Kinship and Character as ‘covetousness’; Bell, ‘Umbundu Tales, Angola, Southwest Africa’ defined it as ‘greed’ in his translations of ‘Umbundu tales’, in which the greedy often experience misfortune: these were cautionary tales warning against selfish avarice (Journal of American Folklore 35, no. 136 (1922): 116–50).

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food produced in the kimbo, and this meant rejecting imported tinned food and frozen chickens. His concerns were partly related to his Seventh-day Adventist faith, where a strong link is made between bodily and spiritual health: Adventists follow similar dietary restrictions to practising Jews, and the Adventist prophet Ellen White’s book, ‘A Ciência do Bom Viver’25 was a big seller in Huambo, focusing on the ‘science of God’ and living ‘in harmony with nature’. However, the food one ate was also related to one’s ethnic and regional identity. As one veteran told me when discussing ‘tribalism’ during the war: you could tell that someone is not your ‘brother’, he said, if they looked at your food but did not join you in and eating it. ‘If they join in and eat with you, then they would not be asked for their identification, because you already knew that they are your brother.’26 Each region has its different food, he said, the Ovimbundu eat funje de milho (maize meal) and the Kimbundu eat funje de bombo (cassava porridge). Thus, the undermining of diet by a desire for profit did not seem to pose just threats to social order and peace, but also bodily threats through contaminated, ‘unnatural food’, and threats to the consumption of particular dishes27 underpinning identities and solidarities. If greed seemed to threaten to undermine the consumption of food considered traditionally Umbundu, it could also manifest itself through a practice associated with the negative side of tradition: feitiço. Feitiço might be used, for instance, to steal money from someone without them noticing, or to murder a rival. Both instances were considered morally repugnant, lamentably backward and ultimately futile. As several veterans told me, feitiço’s effects last only a limited amount of time, and would ultimately end in ruin: it was much better to rely on the feitiço do trabalho – the sorcery of work – if you want to prosper, he said. A particular cause of worry amongst these men was the undermining of respect for elder men. All of these veterans were raised to believe that elder men were owed deference and respect, and in their own life projects strove 25 Ellen

White, A Ciência Do Bom Viver (‘The Science of the Good Life’), (Tatuí: Casa Publicadora Brasileira, 1977). 26 Similarly, a UNITA veteran who had worked in intelligence spoke of preparing men to infiltrate MPLA areas, partly by showing them which foods they should eat. 27 Commensality was an important aspect of the ondjango: food from all households would be shared between all of the men attending, so that even orphaned boys could be fed. Sharing food, and providing food were often cited as important moral obligations, and the failure to provide sufficient food, especially by the two warring parties, was seen as a serious moral failure. Food in the pre-war period was not remembered by veterans as being without its risks of contamination, however: there was a risk that wives would put paus (sticks or twigs) in their husband’s food to try to bewitch them. One of the advantages of pooling food was said to be that such practices were easier to detect by comparing foods from different women (I discuss the practice of adding paus to food in more detail in the next chapter).

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to achieve the status of respected elder men. This was related not simply to physical age, but it was a social achievement involving getting married, establishing a household with several children, and being seen as the main breadwinner and authoritative head of this household. Beyond these achievements, this idealised gendered age hierarchy was legitimised by ‘the disparate possession of certain virtues’,28 in this case that of wisdom. Age was said to bestow ‘judgement’ (juízo) and ‘wisdom’ (sabedoria) on men, which characterised elders and helped to morally justify their dominance of women and younger men. The twin institutions of the ondjango (men’s house) and the evamba (circumcision ceremony) had the transmission of this knowledge from older to younger men as one of their central purposes. Yet despite their generally successful struggles to perform this gender identity, many of these veterans felt that they were not being given the respect they deserved. As Lionel, a veteran and moneychanger, said: Now, young people don’t respect the elders. When an elder comes, they don’t offer them a chair to sit on, and some even beat them. These things are going to ruin the country.

João linked this disrespect partly to the rising love of money: J: People just want to make money … it wasn’t like that when I was a kid, but it’s like that now. JS: Do you think there’s any hope for the future, for your children’s generation? J: No, because the elders [powerful men in both warring parties] fell into error during the war [in becoming corrupt and stealing money], and they won’t be able to get out again now. The younger generation won’t be able to change because they learn from their brothers.

Rather than waiting for age to give them status and respect, or applying themselves to their studies, young people were ‘in a hurry’ to gain the symbols of status and respect, he said, and might turn to ‘delinquency’ for that reason: J: [U]s, as Africans, not all children like studying. Because they don’t see what they gain … [A teenager] thinks that this life of studying, this won’t give me a better life … ‘maybe I won’t manage to get that thing that I want, this is ruining my life’. Because they are in a hurry to have everything and they are in a hurry to do everything. JS: Why do you think their generation is in a hurry and yours wasn’t?



28 Abu-Lughod,

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J: My generation, we grew up in a world where there wasn’t what we’re seeing now. JS: Wealth? J: Wealth, principally wealth. Since the peace there are many things, and so it’s just money [that they want], but the father, the mother and the family aren’t capable [of providing it]. I’d say it like this: I’m from a generation that never had cars, now all children29 want a car, they think, ‘how am I going to manage to get this car?’

Thus, although these veterans were certainly influenced by the concepts of socio-economic stratification mentioned above when thinking of their own social progress, they also wanted the ideal gendered age hierarchies they learned about in their youth to operate: they wanted to be respected because they were married elder men with relatively stable households. There was not, of course, a simple bifurcation between religious young people and delinquent young people, and many young people seemed to successfully combine being actualizado (up to date) in the eyes of their peers with carrying out their filial role to the satisfaction of their parents. However, the problem of ‘delinquency’ and insubordinate children was often cited by these men as something that disturbed them. In post-war Huambo it seemed to them increasingly that ‘money rules’, and respect was aspired to by many according to the criteria of monetary wealth and the commodities and lifestyle that it could purchase. This seemed to veterans to threaten what they viewed as a moral social order, to ‘ruin the country’, and to go against the discipline and deference that these men saw as vital to masculine personhood. Many of these men harked back to the days of the ondjango, where respect for elders was taught, elders’ wisdom transmitted to the younger generation, and food communally shared so that no one went hungry; and to the rigid and violent discipline of the evamba. They saw the disappearance of these institutions as having had a role to play in the disrespect shown by young people in the postwar period. Keith Hart has argued that the idea that money is corrosive of the integrity of cultures is a myth particular to anthropologists.30 Certainly, a case such as the Tiv, analysed by the Bohannons,31 of the disruptive effects of money on a

29 Not

all young people were considered problematic for their parents. Many – including, for example, João’s nephew Eduardo – were more invested in church life and the cultivation of a faithful Christian self, which often meant being more deferential to elders, and working hard at one’s studies in order to achieve a steady job in the future. 30 Keith Hart, ‘Money: One Anthropologist’s View’, in A Handbook of Economic Anthropology, ed. James G. Carrier (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2005). 31 Paul Bohannan, ‘The Impact of Money on an African Subsistence Economy’, Journal of Economic History 19, no. 4 (1959): 491–503.

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relatively insulated ‘traditional’ culture with no ‘general purpose’ money is not much use here. Money had been present in Huambo long before the civil war began. At the same time, the idea that the social impact of money on social reproduction was limited by a division of economic life into short-term and long-term exchanges32 does not really help here, either, since these men were specifically worried that their sons were becoming quite different kinds of men than their fathers. Jane Guyer and Kabiru Salami, in their analysis of the role of indebtedness in the male life course in Igbo-Ora,33 argue that the life course is fundamentally embedded in relations of dependence. In veterans’ upbringings they were dependent on their fathers and other elder males for the progression of their masculine life courses, since these men were both gatekeepers in terms of being in charge of the jango and the evamba, as well as being sources of privileged male knowledge to be imparted to their sons. However, by 2012, given that money and its display through the consumption of certain commodities had taken on such importance in Huambo, veterans’ sons were no longer dependent on them for gaining masculine prestige. In their fathers’ view, the sons did not feel that they had to wait patiently to gain respect, but could gain it more quickly through access to money, which their fathers both lacked, and also lacked the expertise to give their sons useful advice on the subject. This desire for money to emulate the MPLA elite was not seen by veterans as an influential vision of modernity that shaped their aspirations, but as a dangerous and regressive development that needed to be corrected. Ricardo Soares de Oliveira has argued: [o]ne cannot begin to understand the societal impact of Angola’s oil-fuelled capitalism if one insists on framing it as a morality tale of evil elites and suffering masses. In fact the ethos of easy oil money and its separation of wealth from productive endeavour has come to suffuse Angolan society.34

Similarly, Jon Schubert argues that ‘a desire for money and quick success pervades all social strata’.35 Whilst the suffusion of the ethos of easy money has clearly gained huge influence in Angola, it also clearly has its limits, as the moral outlooks of these veterans suggest. In addition, as is clear from their accounts, their alternative account is not simply ‘nostalgia’ for tradition,36

32 Jonathan

Parry and Maurice Bloch (eds) Money and the Morality of Exchange (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 33 Jane I. Guyer and Kabiru K. Salami, ‘Life Courses of Indebtedness in Rural Nigeria’, in Transitions and Transformations: Cultural Perspectives on Aging and the Life Course, ed. Caitrin Lynch and Danely Jason, vol. 1 (London: Berghahn Books, 2013). 34 Soares de Oliveira, Magnificent and Beggar Land, 154. 35 Schubert, Working the System, 138. 36 ibid., 145.

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rather, as E. P. Thompson argues in the case of the English working class, moral economies based on ‘traditional’ values can also be forward looking, seeking ‘to revive ancient rights in order to establish new precedents’.37 Importantly, for the discussion of masculine status hierarchies, ideas about the love of money were central to how masculine status was attributed. If a man’s status was seen to have been achieved through hard work and organisation whilst being open and taking care of one’s colleagues, then these veterans, according to this schema, would give him respect. However, if he was judged to have profited from a lust for money that led him to seek quick riches using nefarious means without heeding the needs of those around him, then this respect would not be forthcoming. This judgement was, of course, open to interpretation, and the difference was partly in the eye of the beholder, a topic I will return to below. In the next section I will outline the second main cluster of concepts that made up the social diagnostics of social mobility: the condemnation of those who would illegitimately seek to sabotage others’ legitimate social progress.

Onyã: envious hatred One evening, after watching one of Jamba’s teams play in a football match in the local championship in their home bairro, I was chatting to two of the players when a disturbance erupted at one edge of the neighbourhood square. We walked over to the crowd of people that had gathered to watch two men, still yelling at each other, being dragged apart, and we asked one of the spectators what had happened. He explained to us that one man had threatened to smash the windows of his neighbour’s father’s Hiace, the Toyota model of minibus that provides much of Angola’s public transport, and marks a step up in earning capacity from a market trader or kupapata. The man complained that the Hiace was causing confusão in the neighbourhood. On hearing this story, my companions looked at each other and both said, ‘inveja’, meaning ‘jealousy’ or ‘envy’ in Portuguese. When I related this story to veterans in the markets, who were always keen for some neighbourhood gossip, most of them interrupted me before I could finish, shaking their heads and starting to complain about inveja. People would often pair the word inveja with the word ódio, meaning hatred, seemingly because when using the word inveja they were translating the Umbundu word onyã, which signifies a hatred for someone that one envies and a desire to destroy them, but not necessarily to take possession of what is theirs, as the Portuguese term inveja might suggest. As outlined above, these

37 Thompson,

The Making of the English Working Class, 551, cited in Edelman, ‘E. P. Thompson and Moral Economies’, 57.

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veterans considered that the social progress they had achieved was down to their virtues of hard work, productiveness and organisation, and that others who had not made as much progress did not possess these qualities. Frustration and an unjustified sense of entitlement was said to lead such people to feel onyã towards those doing better than them. As Vicente put it: There’s always inveja, if you’re in a good place, and the other feels like he’s not in a good place, then he feels inveja towards you, because he’d like to be in your place, even though he doesn’t have the capacity for it.

Such people were spoken of darkly, as being lazy, disorganised and apathetic, and of harbouring a dangerous malevolence that could express itself in ‘intrigue’, malicious gossip and the sabotaging of one’s social progress. A milder, everyday form of onyã was described by Eduardo, João’s 24-year-old nephew and fellow (non-veteran) market seller: There are lots of people with inveja, even in the family. They don’t manage to see someone rising up. Some families want a person to always be begging for a little potato … The elders here [in the market], they say, ‘this guy’s single, he doesn’t need the money, it’s just for his girlfriends’ but it’s not. I’m young and I don’t have a wife yet, but I need to organise my life while it’s still early. Sometimes these elders, their words don’t please me. Sometimes people will come and ask if we have something, and they’ll say ‘no, we don’t have it’, even though I have it. It’s because of inveja, they don’t want the person to evolve, to rise up, it’s really difficult.

However, onyã could take other, more dangerous forms. It might involve violence, as in the Hiace incident above, or worse, feitiço. As Nando told me: At times the inveja that is more frightening, is that which kills you, or disgraces you. The one who just speaks, you discover that he has hatred but doesn’t do anything to you, it’s normal. Above all the person who doesn’t like to see the other evolve. That one always has hatred. JS: So, the more frightening one practises feitiço? Nando: Yes, because that one disgraces you. You get a disgrace that sets back your social evolution.

Such attacks, always anonymous, did not necessarily target individuals, but could target a family group. Nando explained about a feitiço attack he suffered, which resulted in a ‘lack of blood’, weakness and weight loss. It left him unable to work for over a year, wiping out his savings, requiring him to sell his motorbike, and only coming to an end when he consulted a diviner (kimbandeiro). Particularly because his mother was a widow, he believed, others resented that she might rise above them:

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They didn’t like to see me evolving, above all because if I evolve then my mother would also be doing well, she would be saved.

Attacks like this were not often discussed openly, and those who did mention them to me were clear that they were only doing so because we had become friends. Nevertheless, the extent of the threat of feitiço was clear from the statements they made to me; indeed in the POEMA household survey of veterans, 10.6 per cent of FAPLA veterans living in Huambo city reported that someone in their household had been subject of a sorcery attack in the past year, and 11 per cent reported that someone in their household had been the subject of a sorcery accusation. The concept of onyã has a longer history on the Planalto, and sorcery and sorcery accusations have often been linked with jealousy and envy by social scientists working in the region. Gladwyn Childs38 noted four different terms associated with envy, two specifically for sexual jealousy: esepa, a woman’s jealousy; and ukuelume, jealousy on the part of a man.39 Onyã he defined as jealousy and envy. While he did not link ‘sorcery’ accusations specifically with onyã, he mentions that accusations of sorcery (rather than sorcery attacks, as in these men’s accounts) were often made against wealthier members of the community, and that there was a consequent fear of success. In the past, increases in social worries around ‘sorcery’ on the Planalto had been seen to express tensions associated with rapid social change in former periods – Adrian Edwards argued that Childs’ findings about the problem of problem of envy and witchcraft was a phase associated with the tensions around the disintegration of old kinship groups.40 Hermann Pössinger41 noted that in agricultural clubs established on the Planalto in the late 1960s and early 1970s, accusations of witchcraft were made against more successful farmers by old chiefs and clan leaders disgruntled by their success.42 It has been common in the anthropology of Africa to find that it is associated with envy and hatred, a hidden force operating from within one’s community.43 Similar to Edwards’ argument, anxieties about witchcraft have often been argued to be particularly prevalent at times of both economic and moral uncertainty,44 and earlier ideas that it could be a phenomenon that might disappear with modernisation have 38 Childs,

Umbundu Kinship and Character. D. Hambly, ‘The Ovimbundu of Angola’, Fieldiana 21, no. 2 (1934): 86–362. 40 Edwards, The Ovimbundu under Two Sovereignties. 41 Pössinger, ‘Interrelations between Economic and Social Change in Rural Africa’. 42 Heywood, Contested Power in Angola. 43 Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Magic and Oracles among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937). 44 Max Gluckman, ‘Moral Crises: Magical and Secular Solutions’, in The Allocation of Responsibility, ed. Max Gluckman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), 1–50.



39 Wilfrid

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been disappointed.45 Indeed, witchcraft has often been associated with problems of (neoliberal) modernity in Africa, and seen as a way of allocating moral responsibility to those seen as responsible for modernity’s unwanted aspects, and of commenting on the moral character of such people.46 In Huambo in 2012, such sorcery was said to be becoming more common and the onyã that motivated it was said to be inspired by the very rapid economic change in post-war Angola and the fears of the lazy and backward of the potential for growing inequalities of status and power.47 The results of the POEMA survey suggest that this tendency might be quite widespread amongst FAPLA veterans across the province. There was a striking and robust correlation in the data between veterans reporting that their lives had improved since their demobilisation, and reporting that they had been the victims of a feitiço attack (see Figure 2), lending some support to the idea that attacks are motivated by envy and fear of growing inequality. In Figure 2, the first indicator, improvement in economic status, shows a significant positive correlation, while the other three are negatively correlated. The positive correlation between improvements in economic status and sorcery attacks is very robust to accounting for other factors in a linear regression framework. That is, the magnitude and statistical significance of the correlation is robust to accounting for (1)  the absolute level of economic status (as proxied by earned income, number of rooms and assets), (2) other socio-demographic factors including age, marital status, education and household size, and (3) village-level factors. The negatively correlated variables become statistically insignificant as soon as other factors are accounted for. Those who practised feitiço were considered irredeemably backward by everyone who spoke of them and as always reprehensible, no matter the type of feitiço employed – unlike, for example, on the Mueda plateau in Mozambique, where some sorcery was considered ‘constructive’,48 or in the 45 Peter

Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa, trans. Janet Roitman (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997). 46 Astrid Bochow, Thomas G. Kirsch, and Rijk van Dijk, ‘Introduction: New Ethical Fields and the Implicitness/Explicitness of Ethics in Africa’, Africa 87, no. 3 (2017): 447–61; Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders (eds) Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (London: Routledge, 2001); Jason Hickel, ‘“Xenophobia” in South Africa: Order, Chaos, and the Moral Economy of Witchcraft’, Cultural Anthropology 29, no. 1 (2014): 103–27. 47 An anxiety also observed by Ruy Blanes in his analysis of ndoki (a particular concept and practice of sorcery amongst Bakongo people) in Luanda: Ruy Blanes, ‘The Ndoki Index: Sorcery, Economy, and Invisible Operations in the Angolan Urban Sphere’, in Pentecostalism and Witchcraft: Spiritual Warfare in Africa and Melanesia, ed. Knut Rio, Michelle MacCarthy, and Ruy Blanes (New York: Springer, 2017), 93–114. 48 Harry West, ‘Sorcery of Construction and Socialist Modernization: Ways of Understanding Power in Postcolonial Mozambique’, American Ethnologist 28, no. 1 (2001): 119–150.

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Figure 2  Correlations between economic variables & the likelihood of feitiço (sorcery) attacks (Source: Wolfgang Stojetz)

case of ndoki in Luanda.49 This perception of sorcery seems to have much to do with how it has been engaged by churches on the Planalto. The pernicious actions of ‘witchdoctors’ were strongly associated with a benighted and ignorant past by influential Congregational missions50 in the colonial period, and contrasted with the cleanliness and order of modern medicine. In church services of several denominations that I attended in Huambo, there were regular statements and sermons warning of the sinfulness and futility of feitiço. The dangers of arousing people’s onyã meant that some veterans were nervous about others finding out how much money they had. Conversely, many of these men also had an intense curiosity about how rich others were and how they might have come by their wealth. On my return visit to Huambo in 2015, I met up with Jamba’s brother, Flávio, who picked me up in a second-hand four-wheel drive car that he had bought shortly after I left in 2013. He told me that it had cost $14,500. Surprised that he could have afforded such a car in that period, I indiscreetly speculated to him that his business must be going well. He looked uncomfortable and smiled tightly: ‘No, Johnny! I’m still dragging myself along’. I raised the case with the men in cidade market to see if they could help me with the puzzle: how can a man with two wives in two different houses,

49 Blanes,

‘The Ndoki Index’.

50 Ball, ‘The Three Crosses of Mission Work’; Munro Scott, African Manhunt: A Layman’s-

Eye View of the Umbundu People of Angola (Portuguese West Africa) (Toronto: American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, United Church of Christ, 1959).

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with two sets of children, afford an expensive car when he runs a market stall for a living and complains constantly that he is barely surviving? João and his nephew Eduardo were initially helpless with laughter, so there was a delay in their response. João’s brother Mário replied first: ‘just because he’s only got a market stall, doesn’t mean that he can’t be an impresario’. ‘Yes’, I replied, ‘but why is he always saying how poor he is?’ João had recovered, ‘maybe he’s a thief ’, he joked, ‘or maybe he’s an onganga’. He went on: It’s like magic. African men get this money, and no-one knows where it comes from. It’s not like in Europe, where you get a salary and you can see where the money comes from. They have money and no-one knows where they got it from … People don’t want others to know they’ve got money, because then they’ll start wondering how they got it. They might also start asking them for things.

Their response seems to be telling: first of all, the possible role of contributions from other family members to Flávio’s respective households is disregarded in advance – an issue I will discuss in the next chapter. Second, and more importantly here, Flávio seems to be caught in a tension between investing in a very public indicator of his wealth and success, and the need to deflect unwanted speculations about the extent of his wealth, and where he might have got it from. The threat of onyã made conspicuous consumption dangerous, and required walking a difficult line between showing off one’s wealth and not inviting disaster.

Moral economies, masculinity & the moral diagnostics of social mobility In a sense, it is quite easy to identify a moral economy of masculinity that most FAPLA veterans associated with the economic realm. It was based on values of hard work, organisation, openness and common feeling for one’s fellows, and a life course based on the gradual earning of respect based on one’s gradually accumulated wisdom, and the successful management of the household. This is clearly influenced by values that veterans associated with the ‘Umbundu traditions’ of their upbringings, which were intertwined with and bolstered by the churches’ values, both before and after the war, as we saw in the previous chapter. Hierarchies of masculinities were judged in these terms by FAPLA veterans in Huambo, since those with the most instrumental power and the most wealth in post-war Angola were judged to have gained it through deception and without regard to the welfare of the Angolan people to whom they had a duty of care. Thus the New Angola model of aspiration based on the fast accumulation of money identified by Jon Schubert51 was not

51 Schubert,

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generally dominant in the way these veterans viewed masculinity, even though their children seem to have had very different ideas about how the hierarchy of masculinities ought to look – emphasising the role of moral economies in the contestation of masculine hierarchies in this context. Schubert and Soares de Oliveira52 are not wrong when they speak of the great influence that this model had in Angolan society more broadly, and this influence created a great deal of uncertainty in the judgement of economic life and attributions of status. The moral insecurity it created meant that the judgement of claims to status were difficult to make and often contested, and the main concepts used to do this in everyday life reflect this uncertainty. The two concepts of ocipulũlũ and onyã, the former used to express the legitimate resentment of illegitimate and destructive lust for money and the latter designating the illegitimate resentment of legitimate and constructive social mobility, made up a central part of the conceptual apparatus these veterans used for interpreting people’s differential social trajectories in an uncertain moral context. In this sense, these concepts operated in a similar way to what Harry West describes as a ‘social diagnostics of power’,53 but acting in this case as a moral diagnostics of social mobility, a flexible idiom for probing the import of one’s own and others’ social fortunes, and whether they constituted socially constructive prosperity, or selfish and destructive prosperity that was likely to bring ruin and divisiveness. Feitiço played a role in these diagnostics, and similarly to Todd Sanders’54 case in Tanzania, discussions of feitiço were about the morality of economic life: the anti-social extremes to which some were willing to go to get rich, undermining solidarities and what these veterans considered ‘proper’ hierarchies; and the dangerous hatreds that inequalities might provoke.55 As noted by both Sanders and West, the power of sorcery as a conceptual schema is its ambiguity and flexibility. When people spoke about feitiço, they were partly speculating on the hidden causes of others’ prosperity, and the moral implications of these causes: did they suggest a malevolent antisocial hunger for money and status, or the result of honest hard work and ‘capacity’? Was the precipitous drop in a family’s economic fortunes the result of laziness and a lack of capacity to manoeuvre in the city, or of the envious 52 ibid.;

Soares de Oliveira, Magnificent and Beggar Land. ‘Sorcery of Construction and Socialist Modernization’, 123. 54 Todd Sanders, ‘Save Our Skins: Structural Adjustment, Morality and the Occult in Tanzania’, in Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft, and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa, ed. Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders (Hove: Psychology Press, 2001). 55 David Graeber, in ‘Love Magic and Political Morality in Central Madagascar, 1875– 1990’, Gender & History 8, no. 3 (1996): 416–39, makes a similar argument about love magic and interpretations of the morality of the exercise of power in Imerina, Madagascar.

53 West,

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hatred of a lazy, backward person? In addition, in a context where the morality of social mobility was both hotly contested and in which the terms of this morality seemed to veterans to be under threat, these concepts were adapted to be used not only to interpret others’ actions, but also to defend one’s own. Thus, an accusation of being selfish and only motivated by money could be countered with an accusation of onyã against one’s accuser, or vice versa. Lisa Lindsay and Stefan Miescher56 have questioned the applicability of Raewynn Connell’s57 concept of a singular hegemonic masculinity in Africa. They argue that it has often not been obvious which model of masculinity is dominant, and that we ought to be sceptical of attempts to put masculinities in clear hierarchies of importance. Rather, men often seem to negotiate between different models in a more fluid way than Connell suggests.58 Whilst the identification of ‘models’ or ‘styles’ is useful and revealing, and indeed was undertaken by veterans themselves, it is an aspect of the negotiation of gendered life that seems particularly suited to the classifying bent of academic observers. It leaves out the dynamic practice through which such attributions are made to particular people in the course of everyday life – what I have called, in this case, the moral diagnostics of social mobility, in an attempt to capture some of the fluidity that Lindsay and Miescher allude to. It might be argued that the men I was working with were facing a situation of particular uncertainty that seems to be typical of post-war situations. Cherished moral criteria for judging economic behaviour and masculine status were under threat and seemed to be dying out, leading to a particularly anxious contestation of the morality of economic life and the unknowable motivations of one’s peers. This uncertainty was compounded by an older culture of secrecy and the occult around inequalities of wealth and status, which made desired displays of wealth dangerous, and people’s life trajectories difficult to interpret. Nevertheless, I would argue that for any context, the language of hierarchies of masculinity privileges an aspect of gendered life that is suited to an observer’s perspective, and tends to neglect the inherent uncertainties of social life as it unfolds, and the concepts that participants use to negotiate it. Therefore, perhaps we need to move away from the identification of clearly ‘hegemonic’ masculinities in post-war situations, to think in more dynamic terms about masculinity as a moral problematic, informed by different moral economies according to where one is positioned in the post-war social

56 Lindsay

and Miescher, ‘Introduction’; Miescher, Making Men in Ghana. Masculinities. 58 Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne, ‘Dislocating Masculinity: Gender, Power and Anthropology’, in Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, ed. Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne (London: Routledge, 1994), make a similar argument, although not limiting it to Africa. 57 Connell,

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structure. Such an approach emphasises not the identification of rigid codes, but the tracing of the contours of moral thought around a subject: how particular practices become ‘the object of worry, an element for reflection, material for stylisation’,59 and under what historical circumstances. Again, this is a perspective more suited to reflecting on the ambiguities and fluidity of social life as it is practised by people differentially located in structures of power, and the concepts that men (and people in general) use to navigate these ambiguities. Having discussed in this chapter the morally troubling role of money and how it impinged on veterans’ efforts to perform senior masculinity, I will now move on in the next chapter to discuss the ethical problematisation of a related domain of practice: how money’s changing valuation affected veterans’ marriages and the role of masculinity within them.



59 Michel

Foucault, Histoire de La Sexualité, vol. III: Le Souci de Soi (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 35.

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CHAPTER 4

‘At the bottom of everything, it was a lack of economic means’: Love, money & masculine dignity Introduction Late one morning in the middle of July 2012, I was sitting with João in the cidade market. I had just arrived, and we were both sitting on plastic garden chairs next to Eduardo, who was slumped in his seat, his head hanging back, uncomfortably asleep. As we were catching up on each other’s news, a woman trader in the row next to us started laughing, and beckoned João over to tell him something. She was pointing out a woman going from stall to stall in the women’s sections, offering them small bundles of sticks. João smiled and turned to me, asking whether we had paus (sticks or twigs) in England too. I asked him what he meant, and he explained that the woman was selling twigs from a particular plant, to be crushed up by women and put in their husbands’ food, to make them more obedient to their wives. The woman was causing a minor scandal in the usually tranquil market, with more and more heads turning towards her with shocked laughter. Perhaps noticing that she was becoming the centre of attention, the woman moved swiftly from stall to stall to make her offer, before leaving through the market’s rear exit. Raising this incident with other men, in that market and others, opened a rich seam of discussion around the lamentable backwardness and immorality of this type of feitiço. It was mostly greeted with the same mixture of disapproval and amusement that greeted the woman seller in the city market, and feitiço was pronounced by all of the men I worked with to be ‘backward’ (atrasado), and to belong properly in a primitive past. It was called ‘shameful’, and ‘the mark of the African’, with ‘African’ used here in a pejorative sense to denote a supposedly primitive and savage past, tied up with one’s fundamental ‘African-ness’, and thus perhaps ineradicable. One man described it as ‘the accumulated rubbish of history’ – belonging in the past, but built up over time, piling up in the present and undermining attempts to ‘develop’, and to leave an unwanted past where it belonged. Such feitiço was used, veterans said, because Angolan women were ‘backward’ and had a ‘very low culture’. The women who did this were not Christians,

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and had ‘manias’; this was the opposite of love. Some said that such women wanted to have affairs with lots of men and get away with it, that a man could never be sure who his children really were. Others said that these women were afraid that their husbands would abandon them, leaving them children that they would be unable to support. Or perhaps the husbands kept beating their wives, or were having affairs. In any case, instead of being ‘nice’ to their husbands to improve the situation, they resorted to feitiço. Veterans spoke with frustration and some fear about the side-effects that these twigs could have: a man would become stupid, soporific and good for nothing, they said. It would ruin his mind and his body, he would become thin, with a large protruding belly. And he would become humiliatingly pliable to his wife’s demands: ‘he would even wash underwear!’ one man exclaimed, aghast. The type of feitiço associated with onyã that I discussed in the previous chapter was not clearly gendered, perhaps because the perpetrators always acted anonymously. The type of love magic described here, though, was only used by women, specifically within marriage, and was spoken of as being used only to combat men’s supposed dominance within marriages. The generic form of this use of feitiço and men’s reactions to it were suggestive of views of how the conduct of marital relations was seen by veterans as potentially problematic. They had a normative expectation that men were or ought to be dominant, as well as the fact that this dominance was often abused by husbands and contested by wives. The implied sense of insecurity felt by both husbands and wives was pronounced, as well as the venom that husbands directed towards wives that threatened their dominance. The accusations men made expressed several ideas about women, and about marriage: the idea that women of their generation were more likely to be ‘backward’ than men, particularly those who would seek to use hidden powers deviously to undermine men’s power and the integrity of marriage. They lacked love for their husbands and acted from other motives, in a way that was incompatible with Christianity (which was certainly not backward). As so often, then, accusations of being ‘backward’ were also accusations of being morally deficient – in Christian terms, but also in terms of older views of the malevolent use of hidden powers. Most of all, though, all these accusations, and the passion with which they were often made, point to one thing: that men, in spite, or because of their supposed dominance in the household were actually acutely vulnerable to the actions of their wives, who could disobey and publicly shame them. The vision of a man washing underwear, or of a stupid, passive, good-for-nothing man, contrasted markedly with their idea of an authoritative, autonomous senior man and what they thought a loss of authority in the household could do to his dignity. And what was implicit in these conversations was that the way a man was most likely to lose authority was through a failure to earn enough

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to provide for his family. Like Bourgois’ crack dealers in New York,1 there was a powerful inherited idea of a potent pater familias, whose public dignity is defined around the respect given him by his wife and children. This was in turn linked to his ability to provide economically for them, in precarious contemporary conditions where the difficulty of earning a stable income made his dignity correspondingly insecure. This chapter takes on from the last one and examines relations between public economic performance and the broader dynamics of social mobility discussed in the last chapter, and veterans’ intra-family relations. The successful public performance of a breadwinner masculinity was central to veterans’ efforts to be respected as senior men, and consequently a key aspect of the influence of military service and the war more broadly on their masculinities centred on the moral economy of conjugal relations. In this sense, the breadwinner identity was a crucial relay linking intra-household and extrahousehold relations, with the successful earning of income outside the household related to successful provision for the household and thus the exercise of authority within it, and within broader kin relations. These were not simple economic relations, however, but were also subject to a moral economy of the household: ‘the cultural codes, ethical imperatives, and sense of obligation’2 that underpin the relations of interdependence within the household. From veterans’ point of view, the wisdom and judgement that male elders were supposed to possess was most clearly demonstrated in marriage and the subsequent successful management of a household and raising of appropriately socialised and successful children, in which economic provision and the wise stewardship of resources was central. In return for successfully executing these responsibilities, they expected the deference and obedience of their wife and children. The moral categories used by men as they discussed their marriages, however, were not only those of obligations and prerogatives, but were also oriented to the public, reputational aspect of their provider identity, and concepts of dignity and shame. In these moral categories morality and power relations were tightly intertwined. Anita Jacobson-Widding follows Piers and Singer in defining shame ‘as arising out of a tension between the ego and the ego-ideal’, as distinct from guilt, which they define as ‘a tension between the ego

1 Philippe

Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, Second (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 2 Pamela Kea, ‘“The Complexity of an Enduring Relationship”: Gender, Generation, and the Moral Economy of the Gambian Mandinka Household’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19, no. 1 (2013): 108.

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and the super-ego’.3 Jacobson-Widding takes this to mean that guilt is related to conscience, an inner state of a person constructed as an ethically autonomous individual; whilst dignity and shame are related to one’s success or failure in living up to the expectations of one’s social position.4 As Allan Young5 further specifies, the audience for success or failure is a moral community, and the ability to feel shame is one of the conditions for being part of this community. Shame does not remove one from that community – it is shamelessness that would do that. However, one might feel degraded before that community, and in light of the person that one had hoped to be, or ought to be. The masculinities that veterans hoped to successfully perform were clearly inserted in a patriarchal vision of intra-household relations. In Henrietta Moore’s terms they had ‘fantasies of identity’,6 of the type of person they would like to be, and to be perceived as being, with the term ‘fantasy’ denoting the subconscious and affective dimensions that lead people to invest – practically and in terms of cathexis – in certain gender identities. These fantasies of identity might have moral underpinnings, but are also fantasies of power, for two main reasons. First, because taking up particular gendered cultural styles is not simply about self-identity, but also about intersubjectivity: subject positions are understood in relation to one another. Therefore, successfully occupying a particular subject position may rely on other people taking up complementary subject positions who may, by changing their subject position, imperil one’s own identity and reputation. Second, because taking up a particular gendered subject position may offer one social advantages that come with gaining a particular reputation. Thus, for the men I worked with, maintaining their masculine dignity meant successfully securing the cooperation of their wives in upholding their reputation as heads of their household. In turn, failures in this respect could mean both feelings of shame, as well as concrete losses of respect and deference in their everyday lives.7

3 Piers

and Singer, Shame and Guilt, cited in Anita Jacobson-Widding, ‘I Lied, I Farted, I Stole: Dignity and Morality in African Discourses on Personhood’, in The Ethnography of Moralities, ed. Signe Howell (London: Routledge, 1997), 50. 4 See Michael Herzfeld, ‘Honour and Shame: Problems in the Comparative Analysis of Moral Systems’, Man, 1980, 339–51, for a similar argument. 5 A. Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 6 Moore, A Passion for Difference, 63. 7 My conceptualisation of dignity is thus different from Steffen Jensen’s (2008). Jensen sees dignity as something that only becomes an issue when ‘domination produces humiliation’ (p.10) – and not something of which one is conscious in the everyday. For the men I worked with, dignity was not only related to domination by powerful others, but also to progression through an idealised gendered life course, and thus a constant work in progress.

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Some accounts have seen marriage as a key signal and practice of the ‘reintegration’ of African veterans into civilian communities, since it implies acceptance not just by a spouse, but by lineage, family and the broader local community.8 What is masked by the short, post-war time frames of many studies of African veterans, however, is that marriage is not a once-and-forall achievement, but a site of ongoing struggle, requiring ‘constant maintenance work’9 for men to maintain a dominant position over other household members – at least in contexts where men generally have this expectation of marriage. While getting married was certainly a primary objective for unmarried FAPLA vets upon leaving the army, the long-term effects of the war were most keenly felt in terms of how they changed the terms of the ongoing struggles for pre-eminence in the household. The factors transforming this struggle brought together the changing moral economy of the household with broader gendered economic changes in the labour market, and, again, changing ideas about the social valuation of money. As such, the economics of intra-household relations were ‘influenced and structured by moral dispositions and norms, [but] in turn those norms may be compromised, overridden or reinforced by economic pressures’.10 In this context I will look at the problems encountered, or at least feared, by most of the men I worked with in this regard (the following chapter will consider the adoption of different cultural styles of masculinity in reaction to these problems). In the next section I will tackle some methodological and conceptual problems with analysing conjugal relations. I will then briefly outline the various ways marriage was defined in Huambo, how men choose partners, the stages of the marriage process, and the process of divorce. I will then outline the main features of the ‘vernacular’ of marriage that was shared by all of the men I worked with despite the diversity amongst them, before discussing the various potential sources of failure to maintain the role of husband-provider in an uncertain and unequal economy, including the moral consequences and accusations stemming from such a failure. I will then look at the particular challenge posed by the common issue of a veteran being outearned by their spouse. Finally, I will discuss the problem of domestic violence in veterans’ households, and its possible relation to both economic struggles in the household, and veterans’ experience of violence during the war, before concluding.



8 See,

for example, Schafer, Soldiers at Peace. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), 127. 10 Andrew Sayer, ‘Moral Economy’ (Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, 2004), 2. 9 P.

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‘Everybody knows’: methodological problems in studying marriage In Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain, the narrator takes to task a Judith Butler-touting literature professor, Delphine Roux, who has sent an anonymous note to a disgraced professor, claiming that ‘everyone knows’ that his relationship with a much younger, illiterate university cleaner is grossly exploitative. The narrator responds as follows: [W]e don’t know, do we? Everyone knows … How what happens the way it does? What underlies the anarchy of the train of events, the uncertainties, the mishaps, the disunity, the shocking irregularities that define human affairs? Nobody knows, Professor Roux. ‘Everyone knows’ is the invocation of the cliché and the beginning of the banalisation of experience.11

This passage struck me as I was attempting to interpret the data in my fieldnotes and interviews about veterans’ marriages, and as I recalled my attempts in the field to get as rounded a picture of marital relationships as I could. This was partly because, as a Judith Butler-touting academic myself, I found Roth’s attack on gender studies and identity politics a bogus defence of powerful older white men’s privilege. At the same time, however, it encapsulated the difficulty I was having in writing about marriage. In any context there are scenes that an anthropologist can observe, and others that remain hidden and inaccessible. This is perhaps a particular problem with the analysis of marriage and sexual relations despite variations in what is kept hidden and what is made public, and the emotional charge and import of sexual relations. In many contexts they involve, as Hunter puts it, ‘moments of deep intimacy and pleasure, as well as at times the pain of physical violence’,12 (Hunter 2009), moments that are key to understanding conjugal relations, and that happen ‘off-stage’. In the past twenty years or so, a large and rich literature has emerged on the theme of love and money in Africa,13 but not much of it refers to the fiendish difficulty of making claims to knowledge about how informants’ sexual rela11 Philip

Roth, The Human Stain (London: Vintage, 2001), 209. Hunter, ‘Providing Love: Sex and Exchange in Twentieth-Century South Africa’, in Love in Africa, ed. Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 152. 13 Christian Groes-Green, ‘Journeys of Patronage: Moral Economies of Transactional Sex, Kinship, and Female Migration from Mozambique to Europe’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20, no. 2 (2014): 237–55; Francis Nyamnjoh, ‘Fishing in Troubled Waters: Disquettes and Thiofs in Dakar’, Africa 75, no. 3 (2005): 295–324; Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas, Love in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Andrea Cornwall, ‘Spending Power: Love, Money, and the Reconfiguration of Gender Relations in Ado-Odo, Southwestern Nigeria’, American Ethnologist 29, no. 4 (2002): 963–80; David Mills and Richard Ssewakiryanga, ‘No Romance without Finance:



12 Mark

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tionships are actually conducted. One set of difficulties involves the setting in which narratives about sexual relations are related, and how the anthropologist is perceived as an interlocutor. Much of the material I am relating in this chapter was related to me in market settings in conversations between men, either in the course of the day-to-day interactions I had with them, or in more formal life history interviews – usually also carried out in markets. How I was perceived, of course, clearly shaped the accounts I was given by veterans. Many assumed that, being white and married, I was religious and respectable, as well as a representative of a more ‘equal’ and ‘organised’ European society – where housework, income generation and household expenditure are more equally distributed. This seemed to lead some of the men I worked with, especially in the early stages of my fieldwork, to give me politically correct versions of their relations with their spouses – focusing on presenting a respectable vision of themselves, seemingly oriented by church teachings – based on what they thought my expectations were of them. Some others were more forthright, having a similar vision of me as respectable, but happy to contradict what they thought were my expectations, thinking European sexual mores and apparent aspirations for gender equality to be ridiculous. Still others projected a different vision of a European male on to me: I must be there to make money, and I must be keen to take advantage of the assumption of wealth that went along with whiteness in order to sleep with lots of Angolan women. They would therefore proudly and loudly relate stories of their sexual adventures and misadventures, apparently hoping to shock and impress me. It is common practice in anthropology to say that such expectations of the anthropologist, which shift over the course of periods of fieldwork, provide interesting insights into informants’ views of (in this case) white people and the world ‘out there’,14 as well as their visions of respectability. However, this also makes the interpretation of narratives difficult, if the objective is to discuss men’s actually practised relationships with their wives and lovers. While in one sense they are statements about their wives and lovers, in another sense they are oral performances of masculinity related between men, and often to an audience of several men in the case of my fieldwork. As in the case of a US American man who, in the act of having sex with a woman, could think only of telling his male friends about the experience15 such narratives often tell Commodities, Masculinities & Relationships amongst Kampalan Students’, in Readings in Gender in Africa, ed. Andrea Cornwall (London: James Currey, 2005), 90–94. 14 Adeline Masquelier, ‘Lessons from Rubí: Love, Poverty, and the Educational Value of Televised Dramas in Niger’, in Love in Africa, ed. Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 15 Michael Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men, cited in F. Karioris, ‘Towards an Intersectional Approach to Patriarchy: Male Homosociality in an American Context’, IDS Bulletin, 2014, 107.

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us as much or more about social connections between men as they do about heterosexual relations. This is further complicated by the fact that in the conduct of sexual relations themselves, the strategic use of secrecy and display, discretion and indiscretion were crucial to veterans’ conduct of their relationships, and the uncertainty and ignorance that conditioned how they navigated them. The inability to know what their wives were doing behind their backs or who the biological fathers of their children might be, and their efforts to keep affairs secret or make sure they were seen, were for these men all part of trying to successfully ‘bring off ’ their performances of particular identities16 in order to maintain their dignity and authority as senior men, and thus were also part of power struggles between lovers. Uncertainty and disguise can be vital, as Julie Soleil Archambault argues, to navigate the often contradictory demands of intimacy, and ‘the entanglement of obligations, necessities, suspicions, fears, desires, pains, and pleasure’ that constitute it17 – for example between the desire to live an enjoyable life whilst not being seen to breach the moral expectations of kin, which would imperil good family relations. Participants’ accounts might also, as Harriet Lyons suggests, be readable in terms of how experience is shaped by culture.18 However, since reputation and dignity were so important to the men I worked with, close attention is needed to the immediate context in which statements were made and the ongoing social relationships between interlocutors that they fed into. With this in mind, in this chapter I will analyse the narratives that men recounted in various settings about their relationships with their wives and other women, and it should be borne in mind that the perspective offered here is predominantly a male-centric one. Nevertheless, I will contextualise such narratives in a number of ways. First, I will frame them in the situations in which they were recounted as well as in the flow of ongoing relationships they formed a part of, with me and other interlocutors. I will also contextualise them in the broader styles of masculinity that individual veterans performed, in order to demonstrate how they articulated with their overall self-presentation in the settings in which I socialised with them. Second, I will use the data from the POEMA survey of veterans, drawing both on the responses of 241 FAPLA veterans, and also on the questionnaires conducted with 182 wives of veterans. These were conducted with female enumerators and in private, covering intra-household relations, decision making, management of resources and domestic violence. 16 Ferguson,

Expectations of Modernity. Soleil Archambault, Mobile Secrets: Youth, Intimacy, and the Politics of Pretense in Mozambique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 9. 18 Harriet D. Lyons, ‘“I’ll Have What She’s Having!” Problems in Interpreting the Sexual Experience of Others’, Social Anthropology 22, no. 1 (2014): 22–24.

17 Julie

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‘Marriage’ & ‘living maritally’ – how marriage is achieved in Huambo On one of my early visits to see José it was my thirty-third birthday, and he mentioned, as many people did, that this was the ‘age of Christ’ and also mentioned that it was at this age that he had got married. I asked him how old he was, and he said he would be 50 that year. When I complimented him by saying that he looked younger, he went to get a laminated copy of his ID card out of his jacket to prove it. On the card, his date of birth was as he said, but his marital status was marked as ‘single’. He laughed when I questioned this, and said that even men of 80 had ‘single’ printed on their ID cards, because no one could afford the fee required to have their marriage registered with the state. This was true of all of the men I worked with, meaning that in practice, neither getting married nor getting divorced had much to do with the state, although state legislation on inheritance and child maintenance payments was considered relevant, as I will discuss below. Economic barriers also prevented many veterans from getting married in church, mainly because of the cost of the party they would need to pay for after the ceremony. José, Vicente and a few of the other more religious men had been married in church. Most of the men I worked with had not married their current spouses in church, though some had this as a vague future objective. A wedding ceremony and the following celebration was considered the final stage of a three-stage process. The first stage was the apresentação – the presentation – where the man would present himself and his family to his prospective bride’s family. Most of the men I worked with had married either someone from a nearby village or neighbourhood, or a distant relative or cousin, with their parents having had an important influence on their choice (though many now spoke of ‘cousin’ marriage as outdated and especially unsuited to city life). Cousin marriage was generally explained as a way of ensuring that the bride was not from a bad family (especially a family of bruxas – witches – a tendency said to run in families), and to make the restitution of property easier in the case of divorce. The second stage was the alambamento, which was the proposal of marriage, in which the groom’s family would have to bring a number of gifts and cash to the bride’s family, in fulfilment of a list of requests from the latter. This was said by the men I worked with to include items such as a suit and pair of shoes for the father, cloth, alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks and cash. Many also mentioned with unease that the demands that people made for the alambamento had grown in recent years, and worried about the commoditisation of the institution.19

19 For

an earlier critique of the alambamento from a Catholic point of view, see Francisco Valente, A Problemática Do Matrimónio Tribal (Lisbon: Instituto de Investigacão Científica Tropical, 1985).

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Nevertheless, this was the stage of the marriage ‘process’ that most of the men I worked with had reached, regardless of how religious they were. Whilst they considered the process to be in some sense incomplete, they still considered themselves to be definitively married, though some would term this arrangement as a viver maritalmente – ‘living maritally’ (95 per cent of FAPLA veterans in the POEMA survey considered themselves either formally or informally married). In spite of this slight equivocation, such an arrangement was taken to imply cohabitation, the raising of children and sexual fidelity, with the marriage agreement witnessed by the two families involved, without direct intervention or registration by an outside authority. Polygamy was practised by few veterans (16 per cent of wives reported that their husbands had other wives), but it was often stigmatised, condemned by all churches and sometimes concealed by men.20 Several of the men I worked with lamented the perceived high rates of divorce in Angola, and the extent of marital discord in general. A sure sign that a marriage was in trouble was taken to be when a wife left the marital home to go and stay with her matrilineal kin for a while. In such cases it was often considered that a meeting of the broader family should be held for each spouse to give their version of events, and the elders of the family to seek to provide a solution. In addition, many churches had nominated members who provided counselling to couples who were considering divorce, to try to resolve disagreements and promote forgiveness and reconciliation between spouses. Failing this, couples could separate, and the number of divorces seemed to most of the men I worked with to be increasing. One of the principal questions to be resolved upon divorce was custody of children, and the most common outcome was said to be that children would remain with their mother.

Marriage & the achievement of senior manhood Despite the diversity of attitudes and practices related to marriage amongst the veterans I worked with, there were several ideas about marriage that were common to almost all of them. Perhaps the most prominent idea was that being married was an essential achievement for all of them, and also essential to being considered a respected adult male. This is, of course, an idea with a long history on the Planalto,21 and an idea that is common to many African settings, whether amongst veterans or not. Much writing on soldiers and veterans in Africa has taken up the subject of marriage; and in some areas barriers to marriage, and thus to adult manhood, have been important moti

20 It

had also been outlawed by the colonial authorities: Neto, ‘In Town and Out of Town’. Umbundu Kinship and Character; Edwards, The Ovimbundu under Two Sovereignties.

21 Childs,

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vators for young men to join armed groups in the first place22 and in some armed movements wives have been ‘offered’ to fighters as a form of patronage by commanders, whilst wives have also used marriage with commanders as a tactic to gain relative protection.23 In other settings there is a sense amongst veterans that their lives have been put on hold by military service24 and marriage is a key challenge for them to establish a civilian life as a respected adult man – with veterans struggling to raise the money to pay bride price and to support a household by themselves, as Schafer describes in Mozambique25 and as has been found in several other post-war contexts amongst veterans and non-veterans.26 Similarly, in the case of the veterans I worked with in Huambo, most of them had marriage as a key priority when they left the army, and some had managed to get special dispensation to visit home and get married before the end of their service. The extent of contact that soldiers had with civilian women varied by area of service and the period in which they were serving, but many FAPLA soldiers were isolated from civilians in the 1980s since much of the fighting happened in the countryside, away from large population centres. This was an experience some found very difficult, with António (a 54-year-old kupapata and FAPLA veteran), for example, describing not seeing any women as a ‘crisis’, and the major reason he did not return to the army after treatment on an injured knee. In contrast to many other war and post-war contexts, none of these veterans reported any difficulties in finding a spouse. This may have been because, as mentioned above, passing through the alambamento stage was considered enough to be definitively married. Also, as António told me, people were willing to lower demands for the alambamento during wartime, with his first wife’s family accepting just two large bottles of home-made banana wine as bride price. In the POEMA survey, only 64 per cent of wives reported their family having received bride price for them. This





22 Vigh,

Navigating Terrains of War; Richards, ‘Young Men and Gender in War and Postwar Reconstruction’; Macartan Humphreys and Jeremy M. Weinstein, ‘Demobilization and Reintegration’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 51, no. 4 (2007): 531–67. 23 In the case of UNITA in Angola, see Stavrou, ‘Breaking the Silence: Girls Forcibly Involved in the Armed Struggle in Angola’; in the case of Uganda, see J. Annan et al., ‘Civil War, Reintegration, and Gender in Northern Uganda’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 55, no. 6 (2010): 877–908. 24 For example, Gregory Mann, ‘Old Soldiers, Young Men: Masculinity, Islam and Military Veterans in Late 1950s Soudan Français (Mali)’, in Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa, ed. Lisa A. Lindsay and Stephan F. Miescher, Social History of Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003). 25 Schafer, Soldiers at Peace. 26 Sommers and Uvin, ‘Youth in Rwanda and Burundi: Contrasting Visions’; Alcinda Manuel Honwana, The Time of Youth: Work, Social Change, and Politics in Africa (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2012).

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seems to be a central factor in the ease of reintegration of veterans after wars, and was important in Huambo, too. In the comparison that Peter Uvin and Marc Sommers27 make between post-war Burundi and Rwanda, standards in Burundi for young men’s transition to adulthood through marriage were more flexible and readier to take account of the effects of poverty and war. As a result, men there were much more optimistic about their future prospects. In addition, many veterans in Huambo noted that there was a relative scarcity of men in their generation compared to women, since so many were killed in the war.28 The status of being a husband implied also being a father. A marriage that did not produce children was not considered a valid one and could be annulled. A husband was expected, by all the men I spoke to, to be the head of his immediate family and to be obeyed by his wife and children. Failures of children and wives to obey their husbands were, accordingly, frequently deplored. As a man aged, they expected also to become an authority figure in the broader family, especially if they were the oldest male sibling. As Jamba put it: My mother depends on me – she’s not living in an old people’s home, she’s living in the house I built for her. And I have brothers and sisters who see me as a father – even my older sister. When they have problems, it’s me that has to deal with them. That’s why I’m the government in the bosom of my family.

This authority, however, was seen to be crucially tied up with a man’s ability to be seen as the main provider for his family.29 Any suggestion that he was failing to provide adequately or that he was depending on his wife was seen to imperil this authority, and his dignity as a senior man. This is similar, of course, to many other African contexts,30 as well as further afield,31 where the idea of the male breadwinner is strong, even though men’s ability to live up

27

Sommers and Uvin, ‘Youth in Rwanda and Burundi: Contrasting Visions’. nationwide well-being study conducted in 2010 found that in the 50–54 age group in urban areas across Angola there were eighty men for every hundred women: Instituto Nacional de Estatística, ‘Inquérito Integrado Sobre o Bem-Estar Da População’ (Governo de Angola, 2010). 29 There is little literature on the evolution of the breadwinner archetype in Angola, but a domestic role for women was promoted by both Catholic and Protestant missions on the Planalto during the colonial period (Péclard, ‘“Amanha Para Ser Homem”’; Neto, ‘In Town and Out of Town’) with husbands being associated with work outside the home; see Nancy Rose Hunt, ‘Domesticity and Colonialism in Belgian Africa: Usumbura’s Foyer Social, 1946–1960’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 15, no. 3 (1990): 447–74, for a similar case in Belgian Africa. 30 Mills and Ssewakiryanga, ‘No Romance without Finance’; Hunter, ‘Providing Love’; Masquelier, ‘Lessons from Rubí’. 31 See N. Hossain and A. Kelbert, ‘Poor Man’s Patriarchy’, IDS Bulletin 45, no. 1 (2014): 20–28, for a study covering a range of developing countries. 28 A

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to it is often increasingly eroded by the vicissitudes of under- and unemployment and insecure employment.32 As has been noted by other researchers in Africa33 while a breadwinner model of masculinity gives men the potential to dominate their wives, it also makes them vulnerable and gives their wives significant bargaining power. Some veterans had to struggle to catch up with their wives after they left the army, since women had already managed to learn the skills of commerce in the wartime urban setting to which they had often been forced to migrate by violence in the countryside, and had taken over roles as head of the household in men’s absence.34 Beyond this head-start that women had gained over veterans, it also established many more women in the cash economy compared with before the war, when many more worked principally in the subsistence sector. In the POEMA household survey, veterans’ wives were asked what their mother’s main occupation was before the war.

32

Indeed, much of the ethnographic literature looking at the effects of economic liberalisation on masculinities around the world has focused on the increasing difficulties men find in performing a breadwinning masculinity. This has focused, for example, on ‘stuck’ life transitions: Marc Sommers, Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2012); ‘waithood’: Honwana, The Time of Youth; ‘timepass’: Craig Jeffrey, ‘Timepass: Youth, Class, and Time among Unemployed Young Men in India’, American Ethnologist 37, no. 3 (2010): 465–81; and other forms of waiting: Daniel Mains, ‘Neoliberal Times: Progress, Boredom, and Shame among Young Men in Urban Ethiopia’, American Ethnologist 34, no. 4 (2007): 659–73; Adeline Masquelier, ‘Teatime: Boredom and the Temporalities of Young Men in Niger’, Africa 83, no. 3 (2013): 470–91. Other authors explore how masculinities shift to take account of the increased difficulty of fulfilling a breadwinner masculinity, for example through new religious modalities: Diana Jeater, ‘Masculinity, Marriage and the Bible; New Pentecostalist Masculinities in Zimbabwe’, in Masculinities Under Neoliberalism, ed. Andrea Cornwall, Nancy Lindisfarne, and Frank Karioris (London: Zed Books, 2016); James Pfeiffer, Kenneth Gimbel-Sherr, and Orvalho Joaquim Augusto, ‘The Holy Spirit in the Household: Pentecostalism, Gender, and Neoliberalism in Mozambique’, American Anthropologist 109, no. 4 (2007): 688–700; or a focus on body sculpting and sexual prowess: Christian Groes-Green, ‘Hegemonic and Subordinated Masculinities: Class, Violence and Sexual Performance among Young Mozambican Men’, Nordic Journal of African Studies 18, no. 4 (2009): 286–304; Lori Leonard, ‘Pharmaceutically-Made Men: Masculinities in Chad’s Emergent Oil Economy’, Qualitative Sociology 39, no. 4 (2016): 421–37. 33 Andrea Cornwall, ‘To Be a Man Is More than a Day’s Work: Shifting Ideals of Masculinity in Ado-Odo, Southwestern Nigeria’, in Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa, ed. Lisa A. Lindsay and Stephan F. Miescher (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003); Lisa A. Lindsay, ‘Working with Gender: The Emergence of the “Male Breadwinner” in Colonial Southwestern Nigeria’, in Africa after Gender?, ed. Catherine Cole, Takyiwaa Manuh, and Stephan F. Miescher (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007), 241–52. 34 Maria do Carmo Fonseca et al., ‘Gender and Family in Angola in a Situation of National War’, in XIV General Population Conference (International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, Salvador, 2001).

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Seventy-nine per cent reported that their mothers worked in the subsistence sector,35 a much higher rate than for women in Huambo city in 2012. This seemed to have put much more pressure on veterans in their struggles to be breadwinners since, notwithstanding the normative ideas about men as the principal breadwinners, 49 per cent of women in the POEMA survey reported earning more than their husbands (this figure was calculated by comparing how much wives said they earned to how much husbands said they earned; the interviews were undertaken separately and in private). This suggests that the force of the male breadwinner archetype was more aspirational than actually dominant in practice, but the pressure that the archetype created was compelling nevertheless.36 It also suggests that managing public perceptions may have been just as important as practice in establishing breadwinner reputations. The need to be a provider was not merely about public dignity, though, in another sense it also seemed to be a moral duty that a husband ought to carry out – and one that partly demonstrated some of the qualities alluded to in the previous chapter, of hard work, organisation and an ability to survive in the city – but also concerned the qualities of wisdom and good judgement that were considered essential for mais velhos (male elders). Performing the role of an authoritative husband, then, had three crucial components: living maritally with a woman, producing children with her, and being seen as the main provider for the household. As Andrea Cornwall notes,37 it is important in the analysis of marriage to examine the elisions and dissonances between ‘man’ and ‘husband’, and ‘woman’ and ‘wife’ in order to examine how gender discourses may, for example, associate women overwhelmingly with marriage and sexual relations, thus masking other aspects of their identities. In this case, there was an elision between the identities of adult man, husband, father and provider, each implying the others, and all being indispensable to being respected as a male elder. All of these men’s wives also earned money, however, and most of them also worked in markets. Most veterans I spoke to reported a degree of economic cooperation between husbands and wives that seemed to work well – they might lend each other money to help with business investments, seen by some as a rare way to borrow money from someone without having to pay a high

35 Pössinger,

in ‘Interrelations between Economic and Social Change in Rural Africa’, reports that with the introduction of cash cropping, women worked in subsistence agriculture, and men in commercial agriculture. With the introduction of the ox-plough, he claims that wives’ status was diminished further as they became unpaid labourers for their husbands. 36 As has been found in other cases, such as that analysed by Helen Safa in the Caribbean: H. I. Safa, The Myth of the Male Breadwinner: Women and Industrialization in the Caribbean (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995). 37 Cornwall, ‘Spending Power’.

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rate of interest – a service that market colleagues, for example, were unwilling to grant each other. In the POEMA survey FAPLA veterans were asked about who took decisions on spending on various common categories of goods, and in all categories the most popular answer was that veterans and their wives took the decisions together (an average of 65 per cent across the spending categories). However, men were reported as taking decisions by an average of 14 per cent of respondents across the categories, compared to 9 per cent for wives. Categories of decisions over which women exerted most influence were food, clothing and their own work choices; veterans had most influence over loans and their own work. Veterans most commonly reported that household income was either all pooled (41 per cent) or that some of it was pooled, depending on who had earned it (44 per cent). Finally, although the extent to which these men emphasised ‘love’ as a primary aspect of marriage varied, all of them thought that a couple ought to get married out of sentiment, rather than out of a desire for money. Unlike in many other contexts in Africa, where money is seen to varying extents and in various ways to be expressive of love,38 the veterans I spoke to were wary of such an idea in their narratives about marriage, except as regarded household provisioning. These veterans considered it common for women to marry partly for money, and for money to be involved in sexual exchanges with women outside marriage, without these women being stigmatised with labels such as ‘prostitute’.39 However, having money as a primary motivation in marriage and affairs was seen by veterans as improper, and a moral defect in the women who were so motivated: marriage was not considered by these men as a morally legitimate way of accessing wealth, and wives ought to have affection for their husbands and be open with them.

Precarious providers & backward wives: the implications of failure to provide The men I spoke to generally gave me the impression that their marriages were working satisfactorily for them and claimed that their wives were also happy with them. Certainly, levels of hostility and discord did not seem to be as pronounced as has been reported in some other African contexts.40 FAPLA

38 Hunter, ‘Providing Love’; Masquelier, ‘Lessons from Rubí’; Cornwall, ‘Spending Power’;



39 Meghan

Hart, ‘Money: One Anthropologist’s View’. Vaughan, ‘The History of Romantic Love in Sub-Saharan Africa’ (British Academy, 2009). 40 For example, M. Silberschmidt, ‘Women Forget That Men Are the Masters’: Gender Antagonism and Socio-Economic Change in Kisii District, Kenya (Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute, 1999); Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity.

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veterans in the POEMA survey did not express great happiness or unhappiness with their family life, scoring their satisfaction in this regard at an average of 5.4 on a scale of 0–10. All the same, when conversation turned to the management of money in the household, many expressed worry and frustration about struggles with their wives around money, and the potential damage to their reputation as senior men that could result from failing to successfully manage their household finances. When I first asked Jamba about spending patterns in his household, it was the end of the day in the market, and he and his nephew Flávio had packed up their stall and were waiting for the stevedore to come and pick up their goods to take back to the warehouse. Jamba at first looked bored and tired, and gave me a calm and diplomatic answer, staring off into the middle distance. He painted a picture of organised and peaceful arrangements between spouses, even claiming that a wife earning more than her husband is not necessarily a problem, perhaps mindful that gender relations are more ‘equal’ in Europe (as many of these men presumed), and not wanting to offend my sensibilities. However, after he had finished his explanation, I told him that I had heard some people say that a wife will sometimes spend money on ‘her’ family – which was generally intended to mean her matrilineal relatives, especially her brothers and uncles. The tone of the conversation suddenly shifted, and Jamba began to raise his voice, looking me in the eye, animated and angry. He asked how the household (‘a casa’) is supposed to get to the end of the month if the wife is spending money outside the house, on ‘her’ relatives. He quickly got onto the topic of his ex-wife, saying that he would give her money for her to hold onto until they needed it, for some specific household purchase, or for investment in business for example. ‘But when you give your wife money, they think “oh, my husband’s given me money” and they go and spend it on something pretty!’ The family would suffer privations as a result, and his wife would then go around telling the neighbours that her husband was ‘no good’. ‘Now’, he said, ‘if a woman goes around saying that a man is no good because he doesn’t look after his family, and you see his family without food, won’t you believe her?’ Later, he said, she might go off with another man, ‘who she thinks is richer’. Jamba’s account distils many of the fears and frustrations that other men expressed: women’s irresponsibility with household income that could put the welfare of the household in jeopardy; the public shame of being seen to fail to provide; and the danger that struggles over money could lead their wife to leave them for a richer man. In some of these men’s eyes, such dangers gave wives a certain leverage over their husbands. Other veterans claimed that women of their generation would spend their own income outside the home, on their brothers and uncles. They claimed that this was because they still had the expectation from their pre-war childhood that it was the husband’s responsibility to earn money to support the household, whereas women’s role

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was to work in the fields, grind maize, look after the children and clean the house – and so they would not spend their income from trading on household upkeep. This would leave their husbands to struggle alone to provide for the household, since the blame would fall on them if the household was seen to be struggling: ‘the tendency is to enslave the man’, one veteran said. Men ‘live in the fire’, and ‘have a rope around their throats’. While not all veterans gave such a conflictive account of their own marriages, it suggests something of the pressure that men felt of being expected to be the principal breadwinner – and how precarious their position would be if they were left without their wives’ help or cooperation. Since the latter was clearly very important in keeping the household economically afloat, veterans were also dependent on their wives to be discreet about any economic problems that the household was facing, and to not publicise the fact if at some point they out-earned their husbands. Some men mentioned times when their wives had been the principal earner, but an effort had been made to present their husband as the main breadwinner, in order to present the couple as a normatively successful one.41 Jamba, on the other hand, gave an example of what he saw as his ex-wife unfairly telling his neighbours that he was falling short as a breadwinner, but I heard other veterans complaining about women’s more everyday indiscretions, and its effects on husbands’ reputations. The starkest demonstration of a man’s failure as a provider was perhaps when their wife left them for a richer man, their shame being amplified by the explicit, unfavourable comparison with another man – and here the case of Jamba’s divorce that I detailed in Chapter 1 is instructive. Much of Jamba’s anger at the divorce seemed to stem from the fact that his wife had left him at a time of economic scarcity for a richer man without, in Jamba’s view, regard for the consequences for their children, and with great damage to his reputation. It was obviously difficult for Jamba to speak to me about the separation, and he spoke unusually quietly with his chin on his chest. He was perhaps worried that his market colleagues would hear the details of how he had publicly lost out to another man, being shown, fairly or not, to have failed to satisfy his wife’s economic expectations. She might have partly had a ‘biological’ motivation, ‘but at the bottom, really at the bottom of everything was a lack of economic means’, he said – suggesting something worse than simple lust: a desire for money that trumped her duties to, and affection for, her husband and children. Such a betrayal meant more than just loss of the role as a father and public shaming, it also endangered the man’s role as a father (given that there was a

41 See a similar example in Emil Dauncey, ‘Getting Married and the Making of Manhoods

in a Ghanaian Zongo’ (PhD Thesis, University of East Anglia, 2016), Chapter 8.

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tendency for children to live with their mother after a divorce, and eventually to consider their father as merely a ‘pai biológico’, rather than a father in more substantive relational terms), and, as we saw in Jamba’s case in Chapter 1, his reputation as an upstanding Christian and church elder. The breakdown of the moral economy of the household suggested an interlinked set of failures by the husband, both in terms of organisation and capacity to survive in the city, to fulfil their caring obligations for their families, and a specific failure as an upstanding Christian man. As far as veterans were concerned, however, such failures also suggested moral failures on the part of wives. Three main explanations were given for what veterans saw as some women’s unacceptable and immoral behaviour related to money in marriage. One was that it was due to women’s lack of education and backwardness: Jamba said that although many women have been able to educate themselves since the end of the war, his generation of men married illiterate women who ‘really didn’t have anything’, and that this led to all kinds of problems – including an inability to manage money, or to plan ahead in business. Men often accused women of being less educated, less developed and more ‘rural’ than themselves – seemingly a way of expressing ideas about gendered hierarchies using the concepts of the broader social hierarchies analysed in the previous chapter (it is also true that wives had completed fewer years of schooling on average than their husbands, with an average of 2.2 years and 3.7 years respectively, with 36 per cent of wives never having been to school at all, compared to 14 per cent of husbands). Jamba thought his first wife had left him out of a desire for more money, and this was a second common explanation for women’s behaviour, even if he also said that she ‘thought’ the other man had more money, suggesting that she was naively mistaken in that belief. Others were more sympathetic, saying that life was difficult in the city, that women got tired of suffering and wanted someone who could give them a good life. Nevertheless, the claim was still essentially that many women were motivated by money more than by sentiment or loyalty to their husbands. This was, for veterans, another instance of the perceived immoral and growing love of money in post-war Angola, here infecting the most intimate spaces of the performance of masculinities, and the one with which they most strongly identified. The third explanation related specifically to women spending money on their brothers and uncles rather than ‘in the house’. Some women were said to have divided loyalties, and to consider that their primary allegiance was, improperly, to their matrilineal relatives. This is in part related to the criticism of women as ‘uneducated’, since loyalty to matrilineal relatives was often spoken of as being a particularly ‘African’ form of backwardness and as a sign of lack of development and sinfulness. Matrilineal inheritance is condemned by the churches, who have long preached against the sinfulness of broader kin

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loyalties that trump the conjugal one and the nuclear family,42 and inheritance law legislates against inheritance from one’s maternal uncle. In spite of some men criticising the divided loyalties of their wives, in other circumstances they were happy to take advantage of matrilineal loyalties. Some veterans told me that even if a woman earns more, the husband’s income ‘has more weight in the house’, because women are more likely to spend it on ‘their’ family, on their brothers and uncles. ‘That’s why African men are so poor’, one veteran said in disgust. Since this was clearly contradictory – if wives are spending the money on brothers and uncles then men are receiving the money anyway – I asked him whether his sister bought him anything. ‘Ah yes’, he replied, ‘if she marries a rich man then I’m saved!’ This situation demonstrates the importance, mentioned above, of not eliding categories such as ‘husband’ and ‘man’, since men will be differently positioned relative to different gendered categories of person.43 Marilyn Strathern makes a similar argument,44 but focusing specifically on morality: that it is not enough to speak of double moral standards for men and women, since moral reasoning might differ depending on whether someone is acting in, for example, same-sex rather than cross-sex relations. For the men I was working with, the relation between money, authority and masculine dignity mainly became vexed within the conjugal context, and wealthy women relatives who were not their wives did not pose such a threat to them. An additional point that this underlines is how partial the image of the husband as a breadwinner was compared to the actual practice of household provisioning. While it was central for men’s authority, reputation and self-identity, wives, as we saw, seem to have out-earned men, at least in cash terms, almost half the time. Moreover, men could also partly depend on contributions from matrilineal kin, and both husbands and wives depended on the labour contributions of children, an important feature of the household moral economy that is obscured if we focus only on the dynamics of the married couple.45

Authority, earning power & class There was, then, a strong degree of interdependence in veterans’ households that was masked by the breadwinner archetype, which was therefore at least

42 For

a discussion of Congregationalist missions see Péclard, ‘“Amanha Para Ser Homem”’; and see Francisco Valente, A Problemática Do Matrimónio Tribal (Lisbon: Instituto de Investigacão Científica Tropical, 1985), for the case of Catholic missions; matrilineal inheritance was also condemned by Adventists I spoke to. 43 Cornwall, ‘Spending Power’. 44 Marilyn Strathern, ‘Double Standards’, in The Ethnography of Moralities, ed. Signe Howell (London: Routledge, 1996). 45 Kea, ‘“The Complexity of an Enduring Relationship”’.

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partly about keeping up appearances. The issue of wives out-earning their husbands was generally masked in veterans’ accounts of their own marriages, but most agreed that when the provider role was clearly usurped, it was very difficult for men to also sustain their authority as the head of the family. However, the possibility of a wife substantially out-earning their husband presented a different kind of moral threat to their status as providers and elders – partly because it was more difficult to mask, but more importantly because the wife’s social mobility seemed to move her into a different social category. As Nando told me, when a woman is much richer than her husband: If she’s got a nice big car, and her husband, the poor little thing [coitadinho], only has a motorbike, and he sees her go past in the car on the way home with a couple of men inside, then the husband will start to get jealous. Now, these men might just be her colleagues, but he doesn’t know that, and he’ll start to worry.

The term coitadinho suggests something about the hopelessness of a man’s trying to maintain dignity in such a situation, and the nature of the problem was indicated by men’s discussions of marrying up. Such marriages were seen, by several veterans with whom I spoke, to bring together people who were quite comprehensively incompatible. In a conversation I had with three of the kupapatas, Nando put it like this, as his colleagues nodded in agreement: A teacher won’t marry someone like me, who works in the market square. A woman from the cidade won’t marry someone from the bairro and go and live with them … a woman from the cidade, from the asphalt, won’t go and live in the bairro where you have dust all the time [mimes beating dust off his feet], in the market square you have dust all the time … After all, what will someone like me talk to her about? They’ll want to talk about books, but I don’t know anything about books, so how can that work? Us, here, me, Isaias, Jonas – we all see each other every day, we do the same work, so our children could marry each other, because they’re from the same background.

In this account, the discrepancy covers some of the key markers of social stratification: the physical, embodied conditions of everyday existence, the levels of education, the habits and professions of everyday life, and the family background. In addition, a primary marker of social stratification in Huambo is invoked: the difference between the cidade and the bairro, and it is represented in a visceral way that strongly suggests embodied and dispositional aspects of class identity, and that people from different positions in social strata are very different sorts of people, and therefore incompatible marriage partners. This incompatibility, however, did not seem to rule out the idea that people might move from one position to another, and such mobility could lead one spouse to become increasingly out of kilter with the other as they ‘develop’ economically, and particularly as they become more educated. Vicente told me, when talking about the ‘problem’ of women earning more than their

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husbands, that this was a particular problem when the ‘academic level’ was also different. José, when talking about his work as a marriage counsellor in his Seventh-day Adventist church, spoke of a common problem in marriages that led to divorce as being when the husband began to ‘develop economically’. He starts becoming more educated, and thinks that his wife ‘is not worthy of him’, and wants to get someone ‘better … perhaps he meets them at school’. Indeed, Susana, the only female seller in João and Vicente’s section of the municipal market, had had a child with a man who had subsequently left her for another woman, she thought, because the other woman was more educated than her. Struggles over money in the household were not simply gendered struggles between men and women, then, but also intersected with socio-economic stratification, so that women’s increased earning power struck at men’s self-perception, not only because earning power gave women ascendancy within the house and the family but also because it gave them ascendancy in broader society. The tone adopted when discussing such situations had lost much of the moralising tone used in other complaints, perhaps because many of the moral accusations made about women – that they were backward, uneducated, dishonest and less able to manoeuvre in the city – had been so clearly disproved in such cases. I would also speculate that when women were out-earning their husbands but remained in similar professions, they risked usurping the subject position of the husband-father-provider, a move that men reacted to with vitriol and bitter moral accusations.46 However, if wives were to earn enough, to become more educated, buy a car or work in salaried employment, they would take up the subject position of a woman from a social stratum that these men considered superior, and become a distinctly different and incompatible kind of person, demonstrating superior personal capacities. Whilst this would be humiliating for the husbands concerned, it would not usurp a position that they thought ought morally to be reserved to men and that made up part of the gendered moral economy of the household that they defended so fiercely.

Domestic violence, breadwinner anxieties & control One very striking feature of gendered intra-household relations that emerged in the results of the POEMA survey carried out with FAPLA veterans’ wives is the high rate of domestic violence reported. Forty-eight per cent of wives reported having been physically abused by their husbands in the course of the past year, and 17 per cent reported having been sexually abused by them. Fiftysix per cent reported being afraid of their husbands at least some of the time, and 25 per cent reported being afraid of their husbands often. Thirty-four

46 Cornwall,

‘Spending Power’, makes a similar argument for men in an analogous situation in Nigeria.

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per cent of wives reported having arguments with their husbands at least sometimes, with the principal cause of disputes being the use of alcohol (49 per cent), followed by lack of dialogue (14 per cent), economic support from husbands for children (12 per cent) and accusations of infidelity (11 per cent; 13 per cent reported ‘other’ causes). It is difficult to interpret from this data what the causes of this domestic violence were, and given that FAPLA veterans are so numerous, the causes may be heterogeneous. However, it seems likely that struggles over breadwinning masculinities and authority in the household played a significant role. Henrietta Moore47 theorises that when someone’s fantasy of identity is ‘thwarted’, they might resort to violence as a strategy to make their significant others go back to playing the relevant supporting role – say, the obedient wife to the wage-earning patriarch. The interpretation I have made above of veterans’ accounts of their marriages supports Moore’s interpretation of the link between identity and power. The graphs below (Figures 3–6) show the differing outcomes for wives who did not earn more than their husbands (left-hand side), and wives who did earn more (right-hand side). The y axis represents the mean outcomes experienced by those wives (plus 95 per cent confidence intervals) for physical or sexual violence, heated disputes, husband trying to control interactions with female friends, and husband trying to control interactions with wife’s family members. These graphs suggest that the woman earning more is associated with more physical/sexual violence and heated discussions, but not with more ‘domineering’, i.e. trying to control social interactions. This supports the idea that higher wives’ incomes might raise tensions in the household, eroding the husband’s moral authority in the terms of the moral economy of the household, and leading him to use violence to control his wife. Such an interpretation is supported by Tatiana Moura and colleagues’ report on violence against women in Lusophone Africa, which also associated high rates of domestic violence in Angola with veterans ‘channelling’ their frustration at the lack of gainful employment for veterans in Angola and women’s ‘economic leadership’.48 It is difficult to say whether some veterans considered this a morally defensible way of trying to control their wives – if they did, they never expressed such an opinion to me. An indication of how normal it seemed to veterans was given to me when both Vicente and José announced to me with beaming smiles and apparently great pride that they had never beaten their wives, ‘not even a little spanking’, as José put it – clearly thinking

47 Moore,

A Passion for Difference. Moura et al., ‘Invisibilidades Da Guerra e Da Paz: Violências Contra as Mulheres Na Guiné-Bissau, Em Moçambique e Em Angola’, Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, no. 86 (2009): 116.

48 Tatiana

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Figure 3  The correlation between intimate partner violence (IPV) experienced by the wife (plus 95% confidence intervals (CI)) & spouse’s income (Source: Wolfgang Stojetz)

Figure 4  The correlation between heated disputes experienced by the wife (plus 95% confidence intervals (CI)) & spouse’s income (Source: Wolfgang Stojetz)

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Figure 5  The correlation between the husband controlling the wife’s interactions with friends (plus 95% confidence intervals (CI)) & spouse’s income (Source: Wolfgang Stojetz)

Figure 6  The correlation between the husband controlling the wife’s interactions with family (plus 95% confidence intervals (CI)) & spouse’s income (Source: Wolfgang Stojetz)

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that this was exceptional. However, while this indicates that many men might not have seen such violence as morally problematic, it also indicates that such violence was morally contested by some. Both Vicente and José had provided marriage counselling through their churches to couples in which the husband was beating his wife, and it was sometimes mentioned in passing as a social ill in church sermons that I heard. This may be associated with the companionate style of marriage promoted by some of the churches, and which some of the veterans I worked with saw as the best solution for conflicts around money and power in the household.49 While it seems plausible that high rates of domestic violence might be partially related to struggles related to breadwinner aspirations, it seems also to be related to veterans’ experiences during the war. Tilman Brück and Wolfgang Stojetz,50 analysing the full POEMA sample of all cohorts of veterans, found a causal link between exposure to sexual violence during wartime, and intimate partner violence in 2012. They argue that the underlying mechanism is psychological, manifested in a reduction in self-control resulting from wartime experiences. This seems to support the idea that there might be a continuum of gendered violence between wartime and peacetime, as Cynthia Cockburn argues,51 but in the quite specific sense that exposure to high levels of sexual violence during the war might lead to higher levels of intimate partner violence after the war rather than in Cockburn’s rather broad sense.52

Conclusion As I have tried to show in this chapter, the successful performance of a breadwinner masculinity was central to veterans’ life projects and aspirations to be

49

Other factors also probably played into the high rates of domestic violence, in particular alcohol problems and veterans’ experience of sexual violence during the war. Moura et al. claimed that alcoholism as well as wives’ earning power were implicated, and as noted in the POEMA results reported above, alcohol use was the most common cause of disputes between FAPLA veterans and their spouses in Huambo. Wives of non-teetotal veterans reported higher average rates of both physical violence, 56%, and sexual violence, 23%, compared with 39% and 10% respectively for the wives of teetotal veterans. 50 Wolfgang Stojetz and Tilman Brück, ‘The War in Your Head: On the Individual-level Origins of Domestic Violence’, Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference, Antwerp, 17 January (2017). 51 Cynthia Cockburn, ‘The Continuum of Violence: A Gender Perspective on War and Peace’, in Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones, ed. Wenona Giles and Jennifer Hyndman (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004). 52 See Elisabeth Jean Wood, ‘Conflict-Related Sexual Violence and the Policy Implications of Recent Research’, International Review of the Red Cross 96, no. 894 (2014): 457–78, for an evidence-based critique and refinement of the continuum of violence thesis.

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senior men. It tied together several important aspects of a male elder’s identity: being a husband, a father and provider and a successful Christian man. A public failure in one’s moral duty to provide for one’s family could endanger all of these: one risked becoming, in João’s words, a ‘useless elder’. As a result, one of the principal ways that the war had affected veterans’ masculinities in the long run was in its impact on their potential for successfully performing a breadwinner masculinity. While veterans could get married quite easily after demobilisation, given the relaxing of demands for bridewealth, this did not appear to veterans as a once-and-for-all fix for the problem of how to fulfil their basic aspirations as men, contrary to what we might expect from some of the literature on the reintegration of veterans. The husband’s role in the moral economy of the household was complicated by the lack of employment opportunities after their service, the lack of military pensions paid by the government, and the interruption of their education. This was complicated by women’s increased labour in the cash economy, associated with the rapid urbanisation caused by wartime violence in the countryside and the concurrent decline of subsistence agriculture. Indeed, women had gained a head-start in informal commerce while their (future) husbands were in the army. The fact that many women out-earned their husbands in this context posed clear threats to their aspiration to be, and to be seen as, the pre-eminent providers for the household, and thus to gain the prerogative to wield most authority within it. This seems principally to have been a story of changing economic conditions interacting with the gendered moral economy of the household, and changing the balance of moral responsibilities and prerogatives of men and women within it. I have focused in the past two chapters on problems that were common to the majority of the men I worked with, but in the next chapter I will shift focus to look at some of the diversity of different masculine cultural styles that these men took up in response to the shifting post-war social context and the ethical problems it threw up. I will particularly focus on two influential styles that were emblematic of some of the main points of moral tension between veterans, and the specific kinds of response they constituted to the gendered consequences of the social transformations of war.

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CHAPTER 5

Two cultural styles of masculinity

Introduction One afternoon in Alemanha market, I was leaning on the edge of Jamba and Flávio’s stall chatting to some of the younger male sellers as they played draughts. Wilson, a roguish young UNITA veteran in his late twenties, was boasting about his relationships with women. He had two women at once living in his house, he claimed, and was not married to either, an arrangement he said he had no reservations about, playing to the gallery as ever. This brought disbelieving laughter from his two interlocutors, who, despite being active Christians, found this open defiance of respectability funny. They repeated what Wilson had said, looking to me for a reaction. I was not sure what to say, so I just grinned. Wilson turned the subject to religion, ‘I don’t want to go to church’, he said, ‘because I don’t want to be tied down’. At this the conversation turned more serious: Flávio’s younger brother said that Christians ought not to be fanatics, that they did not understand church doctrine if they were, and that different denominations ought to get on with each other, a statement with which everyone agreed. The third young man, Pedro, said that religion wasn’t about being tied down, but rather that he saw all the church as his family. At this point a young man walked past in low-slung trousers that showed his underpants, and Wilson shouted over to him, ‘How are you doing, Pastor?’ ‘I’m fine thanks, Papa’, he replied. Not immediately getting the joke, I asked a stupid question: ‘Is he really a pastor?’ Everyone collapsed in laughter: ‘Yeah right, a pastor with an ear-ring!’ Such conversations were regular occurrences amongst the men I worked with, touching on different views of what it meant to be a good Christian man, and the contrast between these styles and those that defied Christian propriety. The key differences included how sexual relationships were conducted and the consumption (or not) of alcohol, and also took in aspects of embodied style and particular ways of employing commodities in these styles. In the previous two chapters I have outlined two key and related areas of the moral economy of senior masculinities: social mobility and the rising social value of money,

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and the role of money and breadwinning masculinities in household moral economies. However, up to this point the picture of FAPLA veterans in Huambo has been fairly uniform. Critical writing on veterans in Africa has emphasised the need to address the heterogeneity of veterans both within countries1 and across countries,2 to avoid othering them and seeing them uniquely in terms of, say, threats to peace. In this chapter I will analyse some of the diversity of cultural styles of masculinity performed by the veterans I worked with, their different moral underpinnings, and the different sorts of responses they constituted to the social transformations of war. Rather than trying to capture the full diversity of styles, I will focus on two distinctive styles: the companionately married churchgoing man, and the self-professed mulherengo (womaniser) and drinker. Several of my informants fitted one or the other of these archetypes quite closely, and all were influenced to varying degrees by elements of one or both of them – and, indeed, some elements of masculinity were shared by both of these styles. So, by distinguishing these two styles I do not mean to suggest that they had nothing in common, nor that all the men I worked with adopted one style or the other. For example, those men influenced more by Umbundu tradition than by either the churches or the mulherengo style encountered a different set of challenges to either of the styles discussed here. João’s life history, discussed in chapter 1, gives some indication of these challenges. However, I make this distinction because these two styles were emblematic of the main poles used to interpret different styles and the different points of tension between them. These focused principally on the extent to which they adhered to, or deviated from, the standards of public decency thought of as Christian, although, as we have seen, these were also intermingled with normative ideas of Umbundu male eldership. In particular, the two styles represented quite different responses to the vexed questions of the proper role of money and consumption in masculine style (which I began to discuss in Chapter 3), and of how to deal with the problems that economic transformations had posed for relationships with women (discussed in the previous chapter). In this chapter I will turn particularly to the concept of cultural styles as formulated by James Ferguson,3 to discuss the different ways that performances of masculinities were patterned and came to signify differences between recognisably distinct categories of man, with distinct moral commitments. Ferguson

1 Johanna

Söderström, Peacebuilding and Ex-Combatants: Political Reintegration in Liberia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014). 2 McMullin, Ex-Combatants and the Post-Conflict State. 3 Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity.

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sees cultural styles as ‘performative competences’4 that require an investment of time and money in order to successfully execute them. He cautions against seeing them only in terms of inculcation, emphasising that they are also actively cultivated and give room for improvisation. In these styles, objects are not simply possessed, but actively used to make sense as part of particular styles, which need to be understood in particular ‘political economic context[s]’.5 By this Ferguson does not mean that the choice of different styles can be indexed to levels of income or status, rather that the men he was working with on the Zambian Copperbelt adopted certain styles in order to break or maintain certain social connections – especially with rural kin, who could aid them in their retirements. Rural kin also subjected urban male workers to pressures that compelled them to share wealth and demonstrate deference and respect to them, according to the terms of rural morality. He describes two main styles: the localist men, who maintain similar embodied and linguistic styles to their rural kin in the hope of maintaining allegiances with them for their retirement, and cosmopolitan men, who self-consciously adopt other styles, in a way explicitly designed to break away from a style and social pressures associated with rurality. In analysing cultural styles of masculinity I am particularly interested in how war changed what Stephen Lubkemann calls the ‘conditions of sociation’:6 probing which social connections have been weakened or strengthened by the social transformations of war, and what the sources were of the ‘social problematics’7 that help people plot out their everyday existence – whether these come from war itself or from social processes that predate it. The emphasis of my analysis will diverge slightly from Ferguson and Lubkemann’s, however, since I am primarily interested in the diverging moral economies underpinning different styles, rather than political economy. In fact, it seems to me that what Ferguson describes as a ‘political economic’ relation with rural kin would be better captured by the term moral economy, given that what is at stake is the moral duty to provide gifts to rural kin members as a sign of respect – respect that is not just about provision of gifts, but about abiding by ethics that emphasise humility and respect for kin, which are manifested in certain acquired comportments and ways of speaking. Certainly, this sounds like more than a simple question of performance – rather, in Ferguson’s case, there are well-understood moral opinions and a deeply felt moral sense that is liable to be offended by city-based kin who have not cultivated appropriate styles of deference. In this chapter I am interested, then, in both the performances and

4 ibid.,

96. 102. 6 Lubkemann, Culture in Chaos, 217. 7 ibid. 5 ibid.,

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the moral outlooks that inform them – including the historicity of these moral outlooks. In the rest of this chapter I will describe the two cultural styles of masculinity amongst veterans in post-war Huambo, starting with the committed churchgoing style, before comparing that style with the mulherengos. I will especially focus on the different ways these men spoke about and conducted their sexual relationships with women, and their stances on the consumption of alcohol. I will argue that the two styles constituted quite distinct responses to the results of the social transformations of war, responses that were not directly linked to either military service or the violence of wartime, but to the moral problematics and lines of tension that the social transformations of war had produced. One of these styles sought to maintain continuity with the ethical values of an idealised masculine life course that many veterans had been brought up with; the other treated their post-war situation as an opportunity to claim new kinds of masculine status based on the display of wealth through commodities and a self-conscious break with the sober masculine styles valorised by churchgoing men, favouring a style more in line with the MPLA’s vision of a New Angola.8

Committed churchgoing men About half of the men that I worked with in Huambo regularly went to church, which roughly conforms to the proportions in the POEMA household survey, in which 43.6 per cent of FAPLA veterans reported being members of a church. Most others could name a church that they nominally belonged to, even if they did not themselves attend. Of those who did attend, there were nine men whom I will refer to here as committed churchgoing men. By this I mean that they not only attended church, but all worked hard for churches in their spare time, and most held official lay positions in churches. These men tended to speak often about their faith, or to give religious views on various topics at length, and Christianity played a central role in the narration of their life histories. These men were of various denominations: Roman Catholic, Congregationalist (IECA), Seventh-day Adventist, Apostolic and Igreja Evangélica Sinodal de Angola (the Synodal Evangelical Church of Angola). They made up less than a quarter of the men that I worked with, yet they seemed to be particularly respected by their peers and were often the unofficial spokesmen for their market section or group. Their styles of masculinity appeared to be representative of standards of Christian propriety in public conduct, and to be a style, if not to aspire to for all, at least one that embodied a truly Christian way of life that was relatively free of compromise or transgression.

8 Schubert,

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It is important to note, though, that in choosing to focus on this group of men, I am not discussing other churchgoing men who would, for example, drink in moderation, or who might have clandestine affairs. Moreover, there were important inter-denominational dynamics, with many men looking down on congregants of other churches as somehow not authentically Christian, or as making too many worldly compromises. However, to understand the broader dynamics of different cultural styles of masculinity amongst the men I worked with, the most important distinction to understand was that between those who were churchgoers and those who were not. Of the former group, committed religious men were the most eloquent example in terms of the moral qualities that Christianity was said to comprise, and most churchgoers considered them a standard of public morality to measure others’ performances by. As we shall see below, masculine styles were often distinguished from one another according to whether or not they transgressed certain aspects of morality, and the most prominent of these were monogamy and teetotalism. Thus, committed religious styles of masculinity were defined partly in terms of what they did not include – such as having affairs or being polygamous – but they also included distinctive ways of, for instance, conducting conjugal relations, just as not drinking implied certain masculine qualities. I will turn first to the conduct of conjugal relations.

Companionate marriage A central pillar of a committed religious man’s style that was related to masculinity was what I will term ‘companionate marriage’. This was a style of marriage that was explicitly contrasted with the more conflictual representations of marriage that many veterans articulated (discussed in the previous chapter), as well as with those who had affairs or were polygamous. The most enthusiastic advocates of this type of marriage were Vicente and José, although others also spoke of their adherence to it. This concept of marriage owed a lot to church teachings on marriage,9 and emphasised love and affection between spouses, sexual fidelity and trust, economic pooling of resources and the husband as an authoritative senior partner. Advocates of this model presented it to me as an

9 It

is interesting to note that although polygamy was tolerated amongst non-Christians on the Planalto in the 20th century, adultery was not. Edwards noted that spouses had ‘mystically sanctioned obligations to one another’: The Ovimbundu under Two Sovereignties, 126, and that adultery was subject to ‘mystical sanctions’, 122; and even though it was not uncommon it was often the cause of conflicts between men. Thus, an antipathy to infidelity and marital breakdown might not have roots only in the churches’ teachings.

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antidote to the perceived dysfunction of many marriages in Huambo, as well as a moral standard against which sexual relations between adults were judged. Nyamnjoh notes that in Senegal some young people, rather than embracing consumerism, have instead adopted what he calls ‘fundamental religious identities’10 that emphasise moral uprightness in sexuality and have an ambivalent attitude to ostentatious consumption. In the case of my informants who advocated the companionate model of marriage, they also seemed to be responding to what they saw as the confusion, immorality and improper motives of sexual relations that were not guided by Christian principles – and where the display of wealth and the role of money were foregrounded. Yet this was not a retreat from modernity, ‘development’ or global values – rather, it laid claim to a particular cosmopolitan modern status. As Hirsch and Wardlow point out,11 companionate marriage, despite its many variations across different settings, is often a way of laying claim to a ‘modern’ identity. Adeline Masquelier notes,12 following Brad Weiss, that companionate marriage can be a way of tying together the limitations of local lives in straitened circumstances with the possibilities associated with a modernity that was viewed as somehow global. In the case of these veterans, companionate marriage was a sign of education, civilisation and Christian propriety, and characterised part of a global community of believers envisioned as numerous, powerful, organised and righteous. When speaking of such marriages, committed churchgoing veterans were making an implicit contrast with those men who did not spend much time associating with their wives: this was a way of conducting marriage that had long been associated with Umbundu ‘tradition’, at least by observers. Adrian Edwards, who did fieldwork on the Planalto in the 1950s, noted that husbands and wives had come to enjoy ‘mutual affection and close companionship’,13 which he claimed was ‘unquestionably a modern development’,14 and not typical of the ‘traditional pattern of social life’.15 He associated this with the ‘part-peasant part-proletarian condition of the Ovimbundu’,16 in that the nuclear family was becoming more important, though matrilineal relations still had some weight. This posited association between particular forms of marriage being necessarily associated with particular stages of development,



10 Nyamnjoh,

‘Fishing in Troubled Waters’, 304. S. Hirsch and Holly Wardlow, Modern Loves: The Anthropology of Romantic Courtship and Companionate Marriage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006). 12 Masquelier, ‘Lessons from Rubí’. 13 Edwards, The Ovimbundu under Two Sovereignties, 120. 14 ibid., 119. 15 ibid., 120. 16 ibid., 127. 11 Jennifer

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and subject to disappearance as countries ‘developed’ is not, of course, peculiar to Angola.17 In discussions about the role of money in marriage, José and Vicente both had striking and passionately expressed ideas about how a couple ought to manage their money. When I was conducting a life history in my flat with Vicente, my partner came in and asked me for some cash for a motorbike taxi, so I handed her my wallet. Vicente commented: I, for example, am not like other people, in distrusting my wife a lot. My wife, she knows where my money is, she’s my wife! Like you did, when Maria needs something you give her your wallet, I’m like that too. I can’t really distrust my wife!

José expressed a similar idea one day when I and my partner were talking to him in the market, as he lamented that many couples thought it was too complicated to have a shared ‘wallet’, but that couples ought to pool resources. ‘There is a special Biblical arithmetic to marriage’, he said, ‘which says that 1 + 1 = 1’. In other settings in Africa, relationships emphasising love also aim at managing the difficult relationship between exchange and intimacy. Jennifer Cole18 examines the case of young women’s relationships in Tamatave, Madagascar, and how they pursued relationships with older foreign men for money, keeping them isolated from their ‘love’ relationships with a Malagasy man of their own age. Mark Hunter19 charts the changing and often fraught dynamics of material exchange and support in marriages in 20th-century South Africa, and their constantly transforming nature, in which the figure of the male breadwinner both waxed and waned. In Huambo in 2012, the force of the breadwinner archetype endured, and could potentially lead to conflicts and even the breakdown of marriage in the uncertain context of poverty and informal commerce. Careful cooperation, the recasting of marriage in terms of a loving, generous and transparent relationship seemed, to those men who embraced this model of marriage, to attenuate the suspicions and mutual moral accusations that could arise around money within a more distant model of marriage. This idea of spouses being united as one was reflected in the importance Vicente and José both put on harmony in marriage. As we saw in the previous chapter, they were both proud of never having hit their wives, and both

17 See,

for example, the account of Manchester School anthropologies of urbanisation on the Zambian copperbelt in Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity, which predicted that companionate marriage would inevitably follow urbanisation; see also Hunter, ‘Providing Love’. 18 Jennifer Cole, ‘Love, Money, and Economies of Intimacy in Tamatave, Madagascar’, in Love in Africa, ed. Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 19 Hunter, ‘Providing Love’.

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disapproved of people who did. José claimed that he had never had an argument with his wife that was serious enough for her to leave the house and go and stay with her natal kin for a while – a common occurrence in his view. Of course, they sometimes got angry with each other, he said, but they always made up after a few minutes. Part of this more harmonious model emphasised being trusting and open with one’s spouse, whom one ought to trust not to commit adultery. Eduardo, a young, devout and practising Catholic, when speaking of his plans for marriage, made a comment that summed up a common attitude of those embracing the companionate idea of marriage: There has to be absolute trust. Like if you go to the WC and you tell Maria not to answer the phone if it rings, then there’s already suspicion – maybe it’s because you have another girlfriend. There are men who, even when they go to the bathroom, don’t leave their mobile phones. This demeans him, this brings lots of problems.20

The idea of trust and openness seemed to be particularly important for committed churchgoing men, and some of the more negative sentiments of other men towards women was based on the idea that they cannot be trusted. As we have seen, the most common explanation for the (apparently now marginal) tradition of matrilineal inheritance (from one’s mother’s brother) was that women could not be trusted, and a husband could never be sure whether his wife’s children were ‘really’ his or not. For José this seemed to represent one of the main attractions of Seventh-day Adventism. When speaking of his reasons for conversion he explained his extreme aversion to the perceived untrustworthy sexual behaviour of women: And because when I looked at others, I saw that they were leading a really bad life. It was a life of drinking, they smoked, they committed adultery, they would go out with each other casually. When they took lovers, some girls wouldn’t get married. That’s when I concluded that no … I, really, would do stupid things a lot and not consider it a sin, but this life of going out with people, really wasn’t for me, women weren’t for me, I really hated women, I didn’t like them at all.

As he went on to explain, through Seventh-day Adventism he had found a different, safer, more caring and affectionate model of marriage based on trust, and a wife who could provide and care for him in the absence of his natal family, many of whom had been killed and the rest scattered across the country during the war:



20 As

in Julie Soleil Archambault’s findings in Mozambique, mobile phones seemed to have both brought the added possibilities of easier communication, and to have made discretion easier in the pursuit of illicit relationships. As a result, mobile phones could feed suspicion. Archambault, Mobile Secrets.

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It was then that I saw that the Bible says that it is not good for man to live alone. As I was living alone, this, too, was a risk. It was a risk how? Me, every time I was alone, I shut myself in the house. What if I wasn’t feeling good? And the neighbours said, ‘this guy’s gone out, he must be travelling’, but actually I’m not travelling, I’m there, ill? I can’t manage to open the door, this could victimise me. If I have a partner, she can help me. If I’m sick she can take me to hospital. If I’m worried and I’m feeling hungry, she can give me food.

While his wife performed such care work for him, he would speak proudly of how he tried to make his wife’s life easier. During my time in Huambo he spent a long time digging a well in their compound, so that she would no longer have to walk long distances, and navigate a dangerous ravine on the outskirts of Huambo, to fetch water. Such assistance in helping one’s wife fulfil her wifely tasks was fundamental for José: when a wife did not know how to do something, her husband ought to ‘educate’ her. If there are any disagreements, then the husband should discuss them with her, with ‘affection’. This idea of marriage as an affectionate cooperation based on trust was, then, plainly hierarchical, with the man cast as benevolent patriarch. Whilst, as Tiago, a devout Adventist, put it, a man ought not to ‘enslave’ his wife, ‘a man loves his wife, and the wife loves her man and obeys him’. The veterans I got to know in 2012 rarely spoke of their spouses at all, and not in terms of affection, and nor did they introduce me to their wives – with the exception of those who espoused the companionate model of marriage. These accounts of companionate marriage did, of course, have a noticeably performative aspect – they partly acted as statements that these men were making about themselves and their families, about their Christian values and their modernity, and about how they thought sexual relations between adults ought to be conducted. However, they also seemed to address many of the ethical worries that others of my informants expressed about their potential loss of provider status and authority in the home, and associated loss of dignity and respect outside the home. It was based on a cultivation of openness, trust and affection with one another, and working together to solve any economic challenges the household might face. This emphasis was a conscious counter to, for example, money motivations in choosing and remaining with partners, and conflicts between more distant spouses that resulted in the break-up of households and a public loss of dignity and moral respectability for both husband and wife. It was, in a sense then, a ‘voluntary and reflected-upon practice’21 through which men responded, along with their wives, to the ethical problems that had emerged



21 M.

Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 18.

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around marriage and its relation to money and masculine dignity in the wake of the social transformations of war. Clearly, this sounds too neat to be a picture of how marriages actually worked – the existence of church marriage counsellors, the admission that many couples in church congregations had problems, and that many separated, are testament to this.22 Yet it constituted a distinct and well-understood model of marriage, advocated by churches and representing a broader standard of public moral respectability, civilisation and modernity. As such, those men who appeared to be bringing off such a performance seemed to take particular pride and satisfaction from it.

‘Those who don’t have religion, drink’ Another key part of the committed religious cultural style of masculinity was abstention from drinking alcohol. A common phrase I heard when asking about alcohol consumption was, ‘those who don’t have religion, drink’, or that, ‘those who drink don’t have religion’. In practice, this was not true: in the POEMA survey, we found that only 56 per cent of churchgoers were teetotal (compared to 36 per cent of non-churchgoers). Several of the churchgoing men I knew drank alcohol – all but one of these men being Catholics. However, the Catholics were often criticised for this by men of other denominations, and the committed Catholics did not drink, considering alcohol to be incompatible with a truly Christian life. The consumption and production of alcoholic drinks has long been a vexed topic amongst both Angola observers and within the public realm in Angola. Gladwyn Childs, a missionary anthropologist who wrote a seminal ethnography of the Ovimbundu,23 claimed that the trading of slaves for Brazilian rum ‘did much to corrupt the Ovimbundu’24 during the 19th century. Although home-made beer (ocimbombo) had important social functions on the Planalto – as a reward for assistance in agricultural labour in the 1950s,25 and as libations to bless hunting implements and the embalmed heads of chiefs in the early decades of the 20th century26 – rum was viewed differently, at least by



22 The

POEMA results on domestic violence and disputes seem to support this: while wives’ reports of disputes were less common for churchgoing veterans (36% saying that they had disputes with their husbands at least on occasion, compared to 50% of nonchurchgoers) and levels of domestic violence were also slightly lower (46% for churchgoers compared to 50% for non-churchgoers), these rates are still high. Unfortunately, there is no way to disaggregate the sample into more and less committed churchgoers. 23 Childs, Umbundu Kinship and Character. 24 ibid., 206. 25 Edwards, The Ovimbundu under Two Sovereignties. 26 Hambly, ‘The Ovimbundu of Angola’.

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Childs. He asserted that in the period of his fieldwork (in the 1930s), ‘[i]t is the widespread use of [rum], with its concomitant evils, which is to-day the greatest enemy of the social life’27 of the Ovimbundu. Missions shared this view of the moral dangers of alcohol consumption: Didier Péclard notes that Congregationalist missionaries sought to establish missions far away from urban centres, since they wanted to establish a ‘New Jerusalem’ in Africa, free from the corruptions of urban society, including alcohol consumption.28 In the decades after the establishment of Nova Lisboa (today’s Huambo city), Catholic missionaries reported the material and spiritual dangers of alcohol consumption, sought to use football and other sports to divert people from it, and noted the problem of young priests being tempted into its use when leaving the seminary.29 Alcohol consumption has thus long been the object of moral censure by churches on the Planalto as a spiritual and physical threat, and also, for anthropologists, strong alcohol posed a threat to the ‘purity’ of Umbundu culture.30 Some of the intensity of debates about alcohol in 2012 seemed to stem from the recent changes in its availability. During the war, according to the men I worked with, when imports were generally difficult to come by, commercially produced alcohol was also difficult to find.31 Home-brewing of beer, rum and 27

Childs, Umbundu Kinship and Character, 33. Péclard, Les incertitudes de la nation en Angola. 29 Neto, ‘In Town and Out of Town’. 30 The prohibition of alcohol consumption in the colonial period also had an underpinning in political economy. After the Portuguese conquest of the Planalto was completed in 1904, alcohol production and trade were seen by the colonial authorities to be preventing a transition to a capitalist economy in Angola. Cotton production was abandoned in some areas at the height of the alcohol trade, and it also functioned as currency, delaying the transition to a monetary economy, and rum production was thus banned in 1911. One of the first large colonial companies subsequently established in Huambo city was responsible for the production of sugar and alcohol on a plantation basis: Neto, ‘In Town and Out of Town’. Adrian Edwards reported that, in the 1950s, laws prohibiting beer- and rum-brewing were not enforced, because the government headmen (sekulus) were themselves often involved in brewing, and also lacked the power to enforce the regulations, and because the authorities preferred to levy fines than suppress such activities. Nevertheless, accusations of illegal brewing were made in disputes in the village where Edwards carried out his fieldwork, and on one occasion such brewing caused a violent confrontation: Edwards, The Ovimbundu under Two Sovereignties. 31 Steven van Wolputte and Mattia Fumanti note that such was the scarcity that young Angolan herders in the south of the country kept a lucrative trade through smuggling crates of beer over the Namibian border: ‘“I Like My Windhoek Lager”: Beer and the Making of Boundaries: An introduction’, in Beer in Africa: Drinking States and Selves (ed. Steven van Wolputte and Mattia Fumanti, Munich: LIT Verlag, 2010). Gregor Dobler describes how the alcohol trade contributed to turning some border settlements into boom towns in the late 1990s: ‘Licence to Drink: Between Liberation and Inebriation in Northern Namibia’, in Beer in Africa.

28

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banana wine was thus the main way that many could consume alcohol, and even then, it was said not to be consumed in very large quantities. Since the end of the war, however, both nationally and internationally produced alcohol had become available at low prices across Angola. Many of the men I worked with bemoaned this development: people were now drinking ‘stupidly’, they said, and alcohol was too cheap – the government did not care about the problem, many said, and ought to do something to increase the price. Alcohol was said to be a ‘problem’ in Angola, and particularly incompatible with religion. When religious men were explaining why they did not drink, they generally stated that drink led to a loss of self-control. One devout veteran explained that he had tried alcohol once when he was young, but that he lost his consciência when he drank: consciência can mean both ‘consciousness’ and ‘conscience’ in English, and the implication was clear: he was not in control of himself when he drank, and this might lead him to do something sinful and shameful. When Nando was explaining that he only drank sometimes, at parties, he said: I drink in social gatherings, but you have to remember your responsibilities, and what you have to do tomorrow. If you don’t do that you might lose consciousness of who your wife is, who your children are and so on, you have to know your limit. Even if it’s free you have to drink according to your mental capacity.

When Jamba found out that I had drunk beer with Flávio, his irritated response to Flávio was, ‘next you’ll be finding him a woman, and he’ll forget that other one in England’, referring to my partner. Indeed, in Jamba’s view, alcohol drinking brought with it many dissolute habits. When speaking of the contrasting ‘worlds’ of his pre-army life, he spoke of the world of the Portuguese household where he was a servant; the world of palhaços, of which he was one; and the world of drinking, smoking and liamba (marijuana). This last world, he said, was also the world of women, since men who drink, ‘need’ women, and they also gamble. Linked to the concern for self-control was the idea that drinking and the behaviour it led to was incompatible with the wisdom that respected older men were supposed to possess. This wisdom was particularly important for the eldest man in the extended family, who might have to call family meetings, adjudicate in quarrels and help to solve problems. However, if this man was ‘a drunk’ who drank alcohol as soon as he got out of bed in the morning, he could not possibly fulfil the role of the head of the family. Alcohol was also widely thought of by churchgoing men not just as causing a lack of control while drunk, but also as how addiction could undo one’s moral capacities. I often heard veterans say that Angolans had particular problems drinking in moderation, and easily became addicted. Hence, complete abstention was a common response. This supposed inability of Angolans to drink in moderation was sometimes said to be because of a ‘lack of development’ – a

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link being made, again, between modernity and moral uprightness – adding to the disgrace of one who lost self-control and became addicted to alcohol. This danger was said to be particularly high for war veterans. A UNITA veteran that I interviewed, called Domingos, had lived through a period of heavy alcohol use of the sort often described as a danger for veterans by the FAPLA veterans I worked with. Domingos demobilised from UNITA in 2002: many of the challenges that UNITA veterans faced in attempting to build a civilian life after military service were different and often more difficult than those of FAPLA veterans – particularly in terms of the multifaceted stigma of having been with UNITA during the war.32 Nevertheless, he considered the predicament of veterans of both factions to be similar in important respects: On the politico-military question, the hardest thing is the helplessness. Because certain veterans, whether from the FAPLA or the FALA, in the past we fought for the liberation of Angola and the wellbeing of society, and while we were fighting a war between brothers, those left here were enriching themselves, benefiting from the sacrifice of others, and today they are the people they are. [W]hen we arrived in the city and were suffering, and you saw the other going in a car or a motorbike, and you’re always going everywhere on foot. That situation arises, you don’t have, the other has, even your wife will fall in love with the one who has, [even though] you were walking with her in suffering; all of this suffering fills up your head, and so we touched on alcoholism.

Domingos, then, saw various sources of suffering that drove veterans to drink, which have been mentioned in previous chapters: the injustice of having fought for one’s country and yet receiving no reward, while some who did not fight enriched themselves; the unbearable lack of dignity he experienced when faced with socio-economic inequalities, and particularly when his wife left him for a richer man; and the hardship of daily struggles for survival. Yet in the end, he realised that alcohol posed several dangers to his capacity to overcome this suffering: I came to understand alcoholism. When you haven’t got any money, you’ve got nothing to give the kids. To forget: there, drink, fall over there, forget everything that’s happening. But, I came to the conclusion that this really doesn’t do anything, it just makes the children suffer, they become even more helpless, they go running around the streets begging, stealing, and this is no good … I realised that it [alcoholism], also, destroys, it destroys because, I began to see that my metabolic system doesn’t correspond with alcohol, I get really weak, I lose the thread of work, I have little ability to work. All of these actions of alcohol made me realise that it’s not worth drinking, it’s worth leaving alcohol behind …

32 As

discussed by Justin Pearce, ‘L’Unita à La Recherche de “son” People: Carnets d’une Non-Campagne Sur Le Planalto’, Politique Africaine 110 (2008): 47–64; Martins, ‘Ovimbundu Identity Attributions in Post-War Angola’.

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So, there in the churches we started to read the Bible, to understand how God is good, to understand that with God anything is possible, and from there it became really difficult to leave this career.

The ‘problem’ of alcohol consumption was thought of by churchgoing veterans as a particularly male problem (rather than being seen as a universally desirable masculine, if contested, practice as in some other southern African contexts)33 and one that, like marital disharmony, churches could help them to solve. Not drinking was a public choice, viewed almost as a statement of allegiance. It was a key signal of one’s religiosity and moral outlook on the world, and so was a badge of pride for those men who were teetotal. It demonstrated key elder masculine virtues that were seen as the contrary qualities to those of a ‘drunk’. Self-control was particularly important, and a counterpart to the autonomy and lack of dependence that men showed in being seen as their household’s breadwinners. Not drinking also demonstrated commitment to a certain dignified reserve, and un-demonstrativeness, associated by several of these men with the internal quality of wisdom that a mais velho ought to demonstrate. This style made a particular claim on developed-ness, civilisation and cosmopolitanism from a different direction: teetotallers were not giving in to the imputed backwards tendency of Angolans to become addicted to alcohol and were making sure that alcohol was not allowed to disorganise their lives and send them into confusion. There were two sides to this aspect of the committed churchgoing style: an attention to certain ethical capacities needed to live an upright life as a Christian mais velho, and the element of style: the public choice not to drink, which demonstrated a commitment to certain moral values, and ought to be understood in the conscious contrast it struck with other styles. This, of course, all gives a very one-sided view of those who did drink alcohol and who were proud of themselves as womanisers. I will now move on to discuss what such a style consisted in, and how such men viewed their own styles of masculinity.

Mulherengos Amongst the men I worked with, there was a tight-knit group of male friends of which Flávio was a member, whose masculine styles explicitly went against some of the central tenets of what was considered respectable in this context.

33 See

David N. Suggs, ‘“These Young Chaps Think They Are Just Men, Too”: Redistributing Masculinity in Kgatleng Bars’, Social Science & Medicine 53, no. 2 (2001): 241–50. on Botswana; and Mattia Fumanti, ‘“I like My Windhoek Lager”: Beer Consumption and the Making of Men in Namibia’, in Beer in Africa: Drinking States and Selves, ed. Steven Van Wolputte and Mattia Fumanti (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2010) on Namibia.

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There were two veterans in this group of seven men, and two veterans who were still serving soldiers in the reserve. The veterans of the group were in their early forties, though the group also included three younger, non-veteran men in their late twenties and thirties. They all worked in Alemanha market and lived in the same neighbourhood; two of them were more successful sellers who had several employees, the others generally sold from stalls of which they were the owners in partnership with another man. I socialised with these men occasionally in the market, but most often saw them all together at football games in their neighbourhood once or twice a week. They made up a minority of the men I worked with, and a smaller minority of men who were 40 and over. Nevertheless, what I am aiming to show in this section is the relevance of this style in the ‘full house’34 of masculine cultural styles for men of this generation, and its particular nature as a response to the transformations brought on during the war and in its wake. Their styles were often understood in contrast to the committed religious men I have just discussed, and particularly in the two areas of their sexual relationships with women, and their consumption of alcohol.

Money & affairs My partner was with me for most of my time in Huambo, but after eight months she went back to the UK for a few months. João was sure that I would find an Angolan woman, or rather, that an Angolan woman would find me. ‘You don’t go and choose an Angolan woman’, he said, ‘they choose you, they are the ones looking for men.’ When my partner came back from the UK, João asked me if I had ‘had’ an Angolan woman in the meantime – I told him I had not. ‘Wow!’ He exclaimed, ‘You must be really religious!’ He had been convinced that I was going to leave ‘little brown babies’ in Angola, since ‘Angolan women’ would be keen to get pregnant so that I would have to keep sending money to support the child after I went back home – as well as their supposed perception that a mestiço child would be given more chance to prosper. Most of my informants rarely spoke about having extra-marital affairs, but as time went on it became clear to me that affairs were not uncommon, though they were usually discreetly pursued. Alongside the expectation that men would have affairs unless they were ‘really religious’ was a disapproval of women having affairs, and an idea that they did so for illegitimate motives: principally motivated by money, rather than love or desire. Active churchgoers would publicly express disapproval for affairs and were less expected to engage in them. Jamba, while discussing Flávio’s extra-marital

34 Ferguson,

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affairs, commented that it was dangerous because he might ‘die in that state’ meaning that Flávio, a lapsed Seventh-day Adventist, ought to repent or face damnation. This association of religion with monogamy complicated my efforts to find out about extra-marital relationships. Many of my informants seemed to associate my whiteness with being ‘developed’, ‘advanced’ and religiously respectable – religion being seen by many as more developed than atheism or a lack of faith, which they often associated with a now defunct socialist ideology considered as ‘backward’. This was just one way of classifying white people, since white men also had a reputation of having affairs with Angolan women, but it seemed that my frequent questions about religion, my willingness to attend veterans’ churches and my married state marked me out as a religious white person. My efforts to dispel this impression were partially successful over time, for example by talking non-judgementally about people I knew in England who were involved in avowedly non-religious activities, or by drinking alcohol with the men I worked with or letting them know that I did so, an activity seen by many as incompatible with strict religious observance. Nevertheless, there was a division amongst less committed churchgoers in how they spoke to me about affairs, with some being more discreet, and others openly embracing a womanising identity. Some men who either attended church or at least claimed some religious standing but were having affairs, did not speak of their affairs to me directly but since they were conducted in or near the markets where they worked, they could not keep them secret from their market colleagues or, eventually, from me. João, for example, spoke bleakly of women who find lovers in the markets where they work while keeping their husbands, usually working in other locations, in the dark. Yet at the same time it was an open secret that he was having an affair with a woman in the neighbouring section: ‘if you’re looking for one of them’, Eduardo said to me with a knowing smile, ‘call the other one and you’ll find them’. The group of mulherengos, however, were much more open about their affairs. The most notorious mulherengo of the group was a successful trader working in Alemanha market, a veteran and soldier in the FAA reserves, whose name was Benjamin and who was 40 and married. When I had first started going to Alemanha and to football matches in Jamba’s bairro, I was clearly identified primarily as Jamba’s friend, and people seemed to associate me with him and his devout religious principles. However, when I started to drink beer with Jamba’s brother, Flávio, and his friends at football matches, this perception shifted – Jamba seemed slightly shocked, and became more distant for a period, whereas Flávio and his friends took me under their wing and insisted I sit with them during football matches. One day Benjamin came over to talk to Flávio and me in Alemanha, and at a certain point he saw a woman behind the stall, and said that she was ‘really good’. There are lots of really good women around here, he said, and I ought to get myself a girlfriend

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while I was there. But not a woman who is asking for money all the time, saying things like, ‘Oh! Give me fifty thousand [kwanzas, around US$500]!’ ‘Fifty thousand!’ I exclaimed, and Flávio laughed. I should get a nice woman, Benjamin said, but a cheap one. I ought to be careful though, because ‘there is a lot of illness’, including AIDS. Being with a woman can be really expensive, he said. They keep asking for money. Once he spent AKZ100,000 on a woman in one night. They stayed in a luxury hotel that cost $300 for one night. Then they went to an expensive boutique and picked up a piece of clothing. ‘You don’t know how much it costs, but you take it to the checkout, and what can you do? Can you say no?’ he asked, and waited for me to confirm that you cannot. ‘And then they want their nails done, they want to drink champagne.’ He says he woke up the next morning after all the drinking and looked in his wallet, and there was nothing there; he theatrically slapped his hand to his forehead and screwed his eyes shut to show how he had reacted, ‘aieee!’ He asked me whether I had ‘been on the rounds’ with Flávio and his friends, and I said no. He meant going on rounds in a car at night to pick up women, and said that Flávio and his friends ‘really go on the rounds’. He said that I should go with them, ‘especially with your skin …’ In the case of both the mulherengos and the more discreet men, there was an emphasis put on the fact that women are ‘expensive’, that affairs generally involve some kind of economic transaction. There were varying views of this, but most men speaking of this aspect perceived women as somehow exploitative and deceitful in their dealings with men, an attitude that has been reported in much of the literature on love and money in Africa.35 There was a joke that people liked to tell about Angolan women having three different boyfriends: one for money, one they liked to have sex with, and one that they were really in love with.36 My informants spoke about such women with varying degrees of severity. Benjamin, however, seemed to take it more philosophically as all part of the fun of looking for sex – and even seemed perversely proud of the expense. The amount that a man seemed to need to spend on a woman he was having an affair with would depend on her desirability. I heard Jamba commenting to a friend on a woman, who lived in his neighbourhood:

35 For

example, Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas, ‘Introduction: Thinking through Love in Africa’, in Love in Africa, ed. Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Cornwall, ‘Spending Power’; Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity. 36 Similar ideas about women’s multiple boyfriends are noted elsewhere in Africa, such as the ‘three ministers’ in South Africa: Hunter, ‘Providing Love’; and the ‘three Cs’ in Francophone Africa: Nyamnjoh ‘Fishing in troubled waters’, amongst others.

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She must be one of the prettiest women in Huambo. She’s short, strong, and veeeery pretty. She only goes out with the bosses from the cidade.

Desirability seemed to depend greatly on their age, with younger women plainly seen as more desirable. As Eduardo told me: I used to have a neighbour who lived nearby. The mother and father had separated some time ago, and the mother died. And that first daughter, the eldest daughter looked after all those children … Today she’ll go out with me, tomorrow she’ll go out with you, the day after tomorrow she’ll go out with that other guy, and when you leave her house you leave some money there, and she says ‘let’s go and buy some food’. But now she’s older and men don’t pay attention to her, they just make fun of her.

Race was also an important factor. When I asked veterans why I often saw white men with Angolan girlfriends, but never saw Angolan men with white girlfriends, they tended to reply that an Angolan man could not ‘afford’ a white woman – the assumption being that such women would ‘cost’ more – both due to their perceived desirability and the fact that they were assumed to be richer themselves. The same seemed to be true for mestiço women. Beyond desirability, sexual relationships with such women were seen by many as a demonstration of wealth and status by rich and powerful men through their sexuality. So, whilst there were some complaints about the ‘expense’ of women, being seen with a more expensive woman was also a way of demonstrating wealth and status, with women of different ages, appearances and races in one sense almost ‘indexing’ different levels of a certain style of masculine success. Hence Benjamin’s pained boasting about how much money he had spent on a particular woman: pain at the expense, and pride at the conquest and what it demonstrated about him – both commercial success and sexual potency expense (what Jon Schubert calls a ‘typical mixture of lament and boasting’).37 In this process, of course, women were not passive. It certainly seemed that beyond men seeking women for affairs, some women also sought out men they perceived as rich for relationships. As Abel, a successful moneychanger in his forties, was giving me a lift home from a football match in his expensive four-wheel drive car, he pointed out a group of young adolescent girls, and said, ‘they came looking for my money, but they aren’t even mature, the filhas da puta’ (literally ‘daughters of whores’). In contrast to the churchgoing men discussed above then, there was not much of a dilemma between intimacy and interest here. The fraught discussions of domestic life were less present in these men’s public self-presentations, or in their discussions of sexual relationships with women. Rather, they embraced the idea that sex and money might be intertwined, embracing

37 Schubert,

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women’s alleged money motivations to rack up sexual conquests. These were associated with fun, pleasure and the public demonstration of both economic and sexual potency – rather than principally with love, commitment and responsibility. While this may not have solved the problem of providing for one’s household, which remained important for these men – in fact it diverted even more money outside the household – it did seem to take much of the angst out of conjugal relations. There was a certain humorous glee for these men in going against prevailing ideas of respectable masculinity in these contexts. It put them beyond the pale of public decency for many. Affairs in general, although seen as widespread, were seen as disreputable, and known mulherengos were therefore potentially dangerous for women’s reputation. On one occasion in Alemanha market, Benjamin started talking to a woman seller called Betty nearby. He asked her whether she had missed him, and she replied, ‘I only miss my husband’. ‘What, only your husband?’ he said, ‘Don’t you have children, brothers, cousins? You only miss your husband?’ Betty did not end the conversation, but responded by walking over to him, and he repeated the same line. At this point two other women sellers came and took Betty by either arm and led her away, to Benjamin’s annoyance. Indeed, it was not just women who would seek to ‘protect’ other women from mulherengos, I saw men doing the same thing. In a sense, these men were seeking to capitalise on precisely the features of the social transformations of war that most of the other men I worked with tended to deplore: the love of money trumping sentiment, masculine status being measured through spending power rather than wisdom, and an apparent erosion of the institution of monogamous marriage. While the price they seemed to pay for this was a certain disreputability, this also seemed to be part of the attraction. This last point is particularly well illustrated by these men’s attitude to the consumption of alcohol, which I will now discuss.

Irreligious views of alcohol: cosmopolitanism & freedom Apart from womanising, one of the main aspects that marked these veterans out as irreligious was their drinking of alcohol to the point of being obviously drunk. This seems to have been a minority practice amongst FAPLA veterans across the province, with only 6 per cent of respondents to the POEMA survey reporting drinking until significantly drunk. While drinking, for the committed churchgoing veterans, was viewed principally in terms of pathology and its potentially morally destructive nature (as it has done in the past for many social analysts discussing its relation to anomie),38 for the mulherengos,

38 Mary

Douglas, ‘A Distinctive Anthropological Perspective’, in Constructive Drinking: Perspectives on Drink from Anthropology, ed. Mary Douglas (Oxon: Routledge, 2003).

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it clearly had a constructive role. It was a key practice through which they publicly negotiated masculinities that were intersected by various axes of difference,39 particularly their relation to Christian respectability, generation and distinction in terms of socio-economic stratification and cosmopolitan developed-ness. The boundary that alcohol represented between religious and irreligious styles was important for mulherengos and informed how they understood and performed their masculine styles, but there was more to drinking for these men than morality. There were different ways of drinking, different ways of behaving when drunk and many different drinks that could be consumed, all of which suggested different things about the drinker or group of drinkers. This group of men had ideas about masculine prestige that differed markedly from those of more religious men. Part of the performance of this style in market spaces was the narrating of stories about recent drunken exploits for the entertainment of others (including me). The first time I asked Flávio whether he was an Adventist like his uncle, Jamba, he said ‘Yes, but I chupo [drink, literally ‘suck’]’. He went on to tell me that he had spent the last weekend at a party on the shore of Cuando lake near Huambo city, thrown by someone who had just graduated from university. The party had lasted through Saturday and Sunday, and, ‘a lot of drinking and dancing was done’, he said with a sly chuckle. I told him that I’d been to a party too that weekend, and he asked if there had been drinking. I said that there had been a fair bit, and we both chuckled together. Such moments of complicity and humour were common amongst drinkers, and stories of drunken misadventures were particularly popular: falling off motorbikes or getting picked up by the police for public drunkenness provoked much laughter. Witnessed (as well as narrated) drunken behaviour could be received, similarly, in a humorously indulgent way. One day in Alemanha market, Wilson was playing draughts on a home-made board with a young university law student. A group of men were gathered around to watch the match. Wilson, who had little education and no pretensions to intellectual prowess, was winning, and kept taunting his rival, delivering each move with a flourish and calling him cabrito (little goat), much to the student’s annoyance. ‘Although you find me in a state of inebriation’, Wilson said with mock formality, ‘I’m still going to beat you’. The group of men guffawed, and repeated the phrase to each other, another anecdote about Wilson to add to a long list. While most of the FAPLA veterans I worked with, who were all at least ten years older than Wilson, were never publicly drunk at work, Flávio and his friends would get drunk in non-work settings, including at Velha Guarda football matches. Their antics, such as playing for the team while drunk, or

39 Fumanti,

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while wearing a woman’s wig, or tearing around the pitch on a quad bike, would draw laughter from many younger men, and head-shaking delight at how ‘crazy’ they were. To fellow drinkers participating in these conversations or witnessing these acts, alcohol was not seen as a dangerous social ill, or as prone to drive people to addiction and acts of woeful depravity that would end in damnation. It was a way of cutting loose and having fun, of not behaving as one ought to. It seemed clear to those participating that such behaviour was, for many observers, disreputable, immoral and dangerous, but this seemed to add to its attraction. Some younger men who drank would also talk about their desire for freedom from moral constraints: Nuno, a seller in the city market told me that he had not been baptised because he wanted to be able to ‘do what he wanted’; Wilson would often say that he would not go to church (or get married) because he wanted to be ‘free’. While FAPLA veterans, who were older, did not use such explicit language, such ‘freedom’ seemed nevertheless to be part of the attraction for them – hence their celebration of the ‘craziness’ of their colleagues. There was a generational aspect to this. When talking about younger drinkers, even some religious men seemed to appreciate the comic and transgressive aspect of these men’s misadventures, despite their simultaneous disapproval of them. This humorous indulgence was not accorded to Flávio by Jamba. Flávio, being in his early forties, was markedly older, and Jamba seemed to have different expectations of him, and this held for his friends, too.40 Flávio and his friends seemed happy to defy such expectations in terms of drinking, but would fulfil other expectations of them as older men. They would contribute financially and practically to joint neighbourhood ventures such as organising football teams, where many failed; they were responsible and sober in their work; they would avoid getting involved in fighting and confusão, and they were all married with children and seemed to be supporting them economically. There were, therefore, clear boundaries to the ‘freedom’ that they sought to lay claim to, and clear overlaps with this style and the committed churchgoing style. To maintain some public respect as senior men, they needed to show that their drinking did not prevent them from holding together their livelihoods and households, even if they were happy to adopt a more playful style of masculinity when drinking, and to defy the prevailing standards of sexual morality. This made for a contrast with a younger man like Wilson, who seemed to be happy to defy all sorts of conventions around adult manhood, including providing for children or getting married, and who was



40 Mattia

Fumanti discusses a similar case in Namibia, with massive consumption of beer seen as inappropriate for older, but not for younger, men: Fumanti, ‘“I Like My Windhoek Lager”’.

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therefore seen as unreliable in his work and even as a ‘traitor’ by some, and so lacked the respect and authority accorded to men like Flávio. Drinking alcohol partly seemed to be a practice of solidarity and membership for this group of friends, vis-à-vis those outside the group. I discussed above how my drinking and not drinking marked me out as being closer or more distant from different groups of Velha Guarda men at different times. Drinking seemed to mark quite clear divisions in social groups within the broader group of men involved in the Velha Guarda team. Early on in my friendship with Jamba and Flávio, Jamba invited me to a ‘wedding’ party that he was throwing with his second wife, where socialisation patterns very clearly illustrated this. The party took place in the courtyard of Jamba’s uncle’s house, and food and drinks were provided by the hosts. Since Jamba and his wife were both devout and practising Adventists, none of these drinks were alcoholic, and drinking alcohol was obviously frowned upon at the event. As a result, those men and women who drank all sat on, in and around cars parked outside the courtyard, drinking beer and whisky, while teetotal religious people remained within the courtyard. Groups of drinkers were formed around a particular moral economy of their own. This involved large expenditures on alcohol for the group, and the building up of debts and obligations between one another to return the favour. So, the practice of drinking was not just a boundary practice, but also a way of creating and maintaining bonds within the group. This is similar to the case analysed by Sasha Newell in Abidjan,41 where money was used to navigate a particular moral economy of status, in which large expenditures were used to create the illusion of modernity and wealth (modernity being, Newell argues, an illusion everywhere it appears). Within the group, the particular types and brands of alcohol consumed were also important and seemed to express an aspirational style of masculinity that was modern and cosmopolitan, and in which conspicuous consumption played an important role. Some men mentioned to me that they had once tried the most common Angolan beer, Cuca, but that it had made them ‘ill for a week’, or that it was too ‘weak’. They claimed that imported beers did not have this effect on them, or were stronger, and Flávio and his friends always drank either Super Bock or Sagres – imported Portuguese beers. Choice of alcohol seemed to be intended as a deliberate statement of personal style, group belonging and aspiration. There would often be conversations amongst drinkers about each man’s drink of choice, and in such discussions these men would often assume that, since I was European, I must drink a lot of wine. Scotch whiskey was seen as particularly desirable, and a ‘Passport’ – a bottle of Passport brand scotch

41 Sasha

Newell, The Modernity Bluff: Crime, Consumption, and Citizenship in Côte D’Ivoire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

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– was often said to be a default requirement as part of bridewealth payments, and thus a gift denoting both respect and uncommon luxury. ‘Champagne’ – usually meaning a sweet, cheap sparkling white wine – was also considered sophisticated.42 Paradoxically, although these drinks were mass-produced through fairly anonymous industrial processes, in their consumption they allowed each man to develop his own style.43 Unlike the home-made alcohol of wartime, they did not express the common subsistence labour of the household, but individualised economic success in commerce, and as such, were a way of asserting one’s own masculine success in a way, and in a context, that did not call to mind the interdependencies of kinship.44 Rather, they were aspirational statements of desires for upward social mobility,45 but according to terms that were more based on the accumulation of monetary wealth than on the wisdom and responsibility of an Umbundu elder.

Conclusion: masculine styles as a response to the social transformations of war These contrasting ways of conducting sexual relationships with women and different conceptions and practices related to alcohol constitute quite distinct stances on standards of Christian propriety, and more broadly on the model of the wise, sober male elder. But how do these different styles relate to the consequences of the social transformations of war?

42

The conspicuous consumption of alcohol seemed to be popular in other settings, too – in the living rooms of the houses of middle-class state employees that I would sometimes visit, there would often be bottles of expensive alcohol prominently displayed. 43 Cf. Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 44 See also Suggs, ‘“These Young Chaps Think They Are Just Men, Too”’, analysing a similar case in Kgatleng, Botswana, on the changing relationship between masculine prestige and alcohol consumption as waged employment became more common among younger men, and communally produced traditional beer diminished in popularity. Homemade alcohol in post-war Huambo certainly did not have the associations it has had in some other African contexts of making one strong, whereas foreign beer made one weak (see for example Jill Brown, James Sorrell, and Marcela Raffaelli. ‘An Exploratory Study of Constructions of Masculinity, Sexuality and HIV/AIDS in Namibia, Southern Africa’. Culture, Health & Sexuality 7, no. 6 (2005): 585–598), particularly because it was associated with the privations and confusion of the war. 45 By no means was all drinking was aspirational, however. Some types of alcohol seemed to be particularly associated with lower incomes and downward mobility, and tainted by associations with alcoholism. On sale in many convenience stores and in markets were plastic pouches of what purported to be scotch whisky, for only AKZ50 (about 50 US cents at the time), whose foul taste was legendary. These pouches were particularly associated with alcoholism because of their low price and high alcohol content, but also because they were easy to conceal, and once they were opened, they could not be closed again and so needed to be finished in one go.

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Central to answering this question is an analysis of the different consumption patterns of the two groups of men, rather than the demands of making a living. The mulherengos made quite different uses of commodities compared to the committed religious men. They put more of an emphasis on buying and displaying consumer goods: they all tended to dress in sportswear and trainers, and often spent money on new clothes; most of them had touchscreen smartphones (either Chinese-manufactured copies of major brands, or ‘originals’ – an important distinction). Most of them also had cars (albeit in various states of repair), which were significant and sought-after markers of status and success. Despite this consumerist preference of the mulherengos, differences between the two styles of masculinity cannot be explained by differences in income or occupation, but seemed rather to reflect expenditure priorities. The fact that Flávio and Jamba were equal business partners but pursued contrasting styles illustrates this, and the mulherengos all had comparable professions to the committed religious men. By the time I visited them in 2015, Flávio had spent US$14,500 on a four-wheel drive car, whereas Jamba had bought a plot of land near the airport, and was preparing to build a ‘definitive’ house there from concrete blocks, with a large courtyard. It seemed that such different spending priorities reflected materialisations of masculine life projects based on different sets of moral commitments to significant others. José, who had nearly completed his ‘definitive’ house in 2012, spoke proudly of the comfort he was providing for his family, and most of all of the well, which meant his wife and daughters no longer had to walk to collect water. The house was thus a public statement of his commitment to his family and to a companionate style of marriage, as well as a tool in realising that commitment. It was a key part of his performance of a senior masculinity, one which showed that he was a responsible husband-father-provider, and one who pursued this responsibility in a particularly Christian way. This meant reinforcing relations of caring, authority and interdependence with the kin in his household, his wife and his children, and it relied on the moral approval of the community around him – both his church community and his kin and neighbours. Conversely, the mulherengos prioritised spending on cars. These allowed them to ‘go on the rounds’ to try to pick up women, and thus combined being a symbol of individual economic wealth and success with one that was mobile and well-suited to compounding that status with sexual conquests. Christine Jeske46 suggests following the line from investments in wealth goods as a way of charting changes in moral economies. She notes in her study of South African Zulu communities that cars were often bound up with ideas of women and sex,

46 Christine

Jeske, ‘Are Cars the New Cows? Changing Wealth Goods and Moral Economies in South Africa’, American Anthropologist 118, no. 3 (2016): 483–94.

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and also served to attenuate networks of reciprocity, since kin had no claim on them – unlike cattle, which men used to invest in and which needed to be shared. Similarly, in Huambo, mulherengos were weakening their links with their household and wives as they invested in cars, orienting both social and economic investments towards their male friends (and cousins) and women who were not their wives.47 They were pursuing a form of masculine status that was less dependent on community approval and more on their individual abilities to earn cash, while making investments in goods that were not easy for their kin to claim a share in. These two contrasting cultural styles of masculinity therefore imply loosening some social connections and strengthening others, and were grounded in quite different moral economies of masculinity. They also spoke to competing aspirations on a broader level, with the mulherengos buying into the values of the ‘New Angola’ modelled by the MPLA oligarchs’ and their networks, who were able to tap into the country’s oil wealth, and whose pre-eminence was confirmed during the war and especially in its aftermath. As Ricardo Soares de Oliveira argues,48 many in the country have come to crave the same signifiers of wealth and status that have become clearly visible across the country through advertising, television and the very visible consumption of the lucky, connected few. This is allied to the beliefs that visible expenditure is essential to maintaining one’s status, and that ‘overnight success and a piece of the pie for all’ might be within reach.49 The committed churchgoing men remained broadly attached to the moral economy of masculinity with which they had been brought up, despite the huge economic, cultural and political changes wrought by the war, based around the churches and ideals of ‘Umbundu tradition’, and despite the denigration of their preferred moral outlooks and cultural-regional identity. This meant that the intermingling of certain ideas of Umbundu tradition and gendered hierarchies had tipped in favour of the churches, which had broadly maintained their moral authority during the war, whereas the institutions underpinning Umbundu masculine socialisation – in particular the circumcision ritual (evamba) and the men’s house (jango) – had mostly disappeared. This seems to have meant that aspects of tradition that the churches disapproved of had declined – such as polygamy, the ovinganji, and the evamba; and as described

47 The

POEMA survey data also suggest that patterns of socialising amongst FAPLA veterans who drank and those of teetotal veterans were rather different, with drinkers spending markedly less time with their families. 84% of teetotal veterans reported spending most of their time with their families, 12% by themselves, and 4% with friends. This compares to only 65% of drinkers who said they spent most of their time with their families, 22% by themselves and 10% with friends. 48 Soares de Oliveira, Magnificent and Beggar Land. 49 Schubert, Working the System, 157.

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in this chapter, a vision of companionate marriage that took greater account of the transformed gendered division of labour during and after the war seemed to be gaining in influence. Despite the adaptations, these men still felt under threat from the great influence of the New Angola and more consumerist vision of masculine status, and the mulherengos seemed to embody the competing ideas that threatened to undo the moral economy that guided their lives and aspirations. The major preoccupations of these veterans related to the legacy of the war in 2012, then, were the moral and cultural threats to their life projects and the values underpinning them that were posed by the social transformations of the war, rather than the direct results of violence, or any direct influence of military service. In the next chapter, I will consider the implications of these findings for the literature on masculinity, military service and war in other African settings.

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CHAPTER 6

Conclusion – Veteranhood & beyond in comparative perspective

There are two distinct sides to the analysis presented in this book, one that specifically addresses the military experience of men, and one that considers the war’s broader effects on the maintenance of a senior masculinity. That this book takes in both sets of issues in a sense reflects the current state of the literature on militaries, masculinities and wars in Africa more generally, and neglected aspects of the longer-term impacts of war on masculinities. In popular representations and in many scholarly accounts the association between soldiering and manhood can seem self-evident, almost natural. The terms ‘soldier’ and ‘veteran’ tend to conjure up a picture of a man, and perhaps of an archetypal role-model masculinity with broad appeal. This idea is very present in popular culture, whether as an invincible hero or a suffering male sacrifice for the sake of the nation. However, there is an increasing recognition in research on veterans that the seemingly quasi-automatic relationship between masculinity and the military is in fact a contingent one, present in some settings and not in others, for historically specific reasons in each setting. More broadly, the idea that in post-war settings in general the violence of wartime leads inevitably to a powerful hegemonic masculinity oriented around a capacity for violence has also been increasingly questioned. In this book I have therefore sought to embed men’s experience of war within the longer flow of history and amongst the other influences on masculinity besides war that have preceded, outlasted and sprung from Angola’s civil war. This has necessitated an approach that focuses on the very intense encounter that men had with the state and with violence through military service, but also looks at the broader historical transformations that these men had to navigate after their service, which often constituted the most pressing worries for them in the long term, and were of more enduring importance for their masculinities. The fact of their veteranhood has thus often receded into the background, as the effects of war on their masculinities was more complicated and ambivalent than many accounts might lead one to expect.

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Historically, militaries have been seen as playing central roles in drawing groups of men into the nation and citizenship,1 into forms of social control characteristic of the modern age,2 and, in the global South, into development or modernity.3 While masculinity has often been implicit in classic accounts, some seminal feminist accounts have theorised that patriarchy and war have a mutually reinforcing relationship: patriarchy requires military violence to underpin its authority, and/or the military requires mythologies of the warrior and heroic manhood to legitimise its actions and to gain recruits.4 Other empirical studies have noted the difficulty in some highly militarised settings of performing masculinities that do not conform to a (violent) military archetype,5 and in which the denigration of the feminine and non-dominant masculinities played important roles. The well-developed literature on Israel provides a compelling case of how such a relationship might develop and be maintained, as well as its contingency and incompleteness. Eyal Ben Ari’s elegant ethnography of an elite Israeli military unit6 demonstrates how, for these soldiers, emotional control is an ‘occupationally conditioned habitus’,7 forming resilient and decisive men. Since this is grounded in soldiers’ very bodies and therefore carried out with them beyond their annual service, and also appeals to aspects of a valued masculinity in broader society, military culture and broader culture reinforce one another. However, once attention is turned to non-elite soldiers who are not part of the hegemonic group in the Israeli nation, the apparently smooth relationship between masculinity, military service and citizenship breaks down. While it





1

For example Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen; E. Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (London: Routledge, 1992). 2 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977); Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 3 Altinay, The Myth of the Military-Nation. 4 Betty Reardon, Sexism and the War System (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996); Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Nancy Hartsock, ‘Masculinity, Heroism, and the Making of War’, in Rocking the Ship of State: Toward a Feminist Peace Politics, ed. Adrienne Harris (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989). 5 Cock, Colonels & Cadres; Dolan, ‘Militarized, Religious and Neo-Colonial’; Robert A. Nye, ‘Western Masculinities in War and Peace’, American Historical Review 112, no. 2 (2007): 417–38; Jane L. Parpart, ‘Masculinity/ies, Gender and Violence in the Struggle for Zimbabwe’, in Rethinking the Man Question: Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, ed. Jane L. Parpart and Marysia Zalewski (London: Zed Books, 2008), 181–202. 6 Ben-Ari, Mastering Soldiers. 7 McElhinny, An Economy of Affect, cited in ibid., 110.

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may be true that the boundaries of the military community match those of the national community,8 the latter contains inequalities that are often reproduced in the military.9 For those subordinated in the military, the armed forces represent both cherished belonging in the national community and resented subordination relative to hegemonic groups in broader society. Thus, in Orna Sasson-Levy’s study, working-class Mizrahim Jewish soldiers, resenting their inferior status relative to Ashkenazi Jews, value their military service but orient their masculinities more around a home-based breadwinner masculinity than a military one.10 In a situation like that of FAPLA veterans in Angola, one can, from this point of view, easily understand why veterans might not identify with a military masculinity: an army is unlikely to be viewed with nostalgia if one was forcibly conscripted into the lower ranks, cast aside without compensation or recognition, and left to manage one’s own ‘reintegration into poverty’11 in a drastically unequal society where politicians were the prime benefactors of a bloody civil war. However, the marginalisation of FAPLA veterans in Huambo is not only socio-economic, but also a subordination in terms of their place in the national political community, and in this, Angola makes for a revealing comparison with its near neighbours. There have been struggles over liberation narratives throughout Southern Africa, as veterans attempt to use their putative status as national heroes to leverage the compensation that they feel the state owes them for their sacrifice. In this, the status of ‘veteran’ and ‘hero’ has proved to be very fluid, in terms of broader discourses and as bureaucratic categories, both of which are affected by veterans’ ability to organise collectively.12 As Jon Schubert has noted, in Angola,13 the post-war narrative has tended to elide the civil war, treating 2002 as ‘year zero’ for the independence period, memorialising the independence war and forgetting the civil war – and by implication FAPLA veterans’ contributions to the nation. This elision was clearly at stake in the 2012 veterans’ protests before the election, demanding pensions and recognition. The contests around national narratives are thus tied up with issues of distribution, rights to state support,

8 S.

Helman, ‘Militarism and the Construction of the Life-World of Israeli Males’, in The Military and Militarism in Israeli Society, ed. Edna Lomsky‐Feder and Eyal Ben-Ari (New York: SUNY Press, 1999), 292–313. 9 Yagil Levy, ‘Militarizing Inequality: A Conceptual Framework’, Theory and Society 27, no. 6 (1998): 873–904. 10 See also Rhoda Kanaaneh, ‘Boys or Men? Duped or “Made”? Palestinian Soldiers in the Israeli Military’, American Ethnologist 32, no. 2 (2005): 260–75, for an analysis of the even more conflicted position of Palestinian soldiers in the Israeli army. 11 McMullin, Ex-Combatants and the Post-Conflict State, 8. 12 Wiegink, ‘“It Will Be Our Time to Eat”’; Metsola, ‘The Struggle Continues?’ 13 Schubert, Working the System.

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and to political capital. The category of military hero in Southern Africa goes beyond mere symbolism, considerably complicating the link to masculinity that some of the accounts mentioned above have posited in Western contexts. If hero status is being withheld from FAPLA veterans by the party-state, as in Angola, and they struggle to organise collectively in a way that overturns this, it provides yet another reason why a veteran masculine identity is not primary for them in their everyday lives. Such a straightforwardly political interpretation of the link between veteran status and masculinity is potentially misleading, however. As has also been demonstrated in other cases, the idea of accountability contained in the military covenant articulated by FAPLA veterans was embedded in a moral normativity. As in Mozambique,14 Namibia15 and Liberia,16 expectations of compensation for service were articulated in the (clearly gendered) idiom of a moral community of kin – with national leaders as fathers with the responsibility to look after their faithful sons, and allow them to ‘eat’.17 The case of veterans of the tirailleurs Sénégalais presents an alternative case where the covenant is considered in terms of a ‘blood debt’ as well as an issue of human rights,18 illustrating that veterans’ claims are often made in several languages of moral and/or political accountability at once. In the case of FAPLA veterans in Angola there is a third moral language in which complaints against the party-state are made: the language of progressive modernity. These men had hoped to gain some training for a ‘modern’ or ‘developed’ career after their service, one that would represent progress compared to their fathers, meaning some sort of secure, skilled, salaried employment. The fact that the state, implicitly idealised by veterans as an arbiter of modern lives for its citizens, had not delivered such lives for them, was another aspect of its failure and betrayal. As noted in earlier chapters, the idea of modernity is both various, and one with strong moral associations – progress should be moral as well as technical, delivering organisation rather than confusion, and clarity over deception, amongst other things. The state’s breach of faith is therefore linked not just to political narratives of national heroes and moral narratives





14 J.

Schafer, ‘The Use of Patriarchal Imagery in the Civil War in Mozambique and Its Implications for the Reintegration of Child Soldiers’, in Children and Youth on the Front Line: Ethnography, Armed Conflict and Displacement, ed. Jo Boyden and Joanna de Berry (Oxford; New York: Berghahn Books, 2004); Wiegink, ‘“It Will Be Our Time to Eat”’; Wiegink, ‘The Forgotten Sons of the State’. 15 Metsola, ‘The Struggle Continues?’ 16 Söderström, Peacebuilding and Ex-Combatants. 17 See also the influential account in Schatzberg, Political Legitimacy in Middle Africa. 18 Gregory Mann, Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

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of national kinship, but also to veterans’ masculine life projects as progressive, organised and modern, and the party-state’s failure to enable such lives. An additional aspect of specifically Umbundu FAPLA veterans’ subordination is related to their ethno-linguistic-regional origin and how it is placed in dominant narratives of post-war Angolan society. As noted in previous chapters and by other authors, Umbundu ethnicity is often elided with political sympathy for UNITA in a strongly pejorative way. This is obviously particularly galling for Umbundu men who risked their lives fighting for the FAPLA against UNITA. However, it is more than simply a structural problem of inequality, akin to that analysed by Orna Sasson-Levy in Israel. As both Jon Schubert and Ricardo Soares de Oliveira have argued in the case of Angola,19 the result of the civil war can be seen to represent the victory of the values of coastal society over that of the hinterland, particularly the southern hinterland and the Planalto, in the fight to determine the character of the nation. The party-state elite in particular is invested in ideas of cosmopolitanism and Portuguese language proficiency, in which the longest-colonised spaces with strong links to the wider world are considered most representative of the Angolan nation.20 This is linked to the idea of the New Angola,21 in which seeking riches and emulating the elite are both aspirations and achievements worthy of respect and deference. This marks a contrast with what are seen in this discourse as the values of the hinterland, and accordingly denigrated: a more ‘African’ (rather than ‘Angolan’) population, favouring local languages over Portuguese, is seen as backward and less important. For the Umbundu FAPLA veterans with whom I worked this represented not just a denigration of their identities, but a competing and antagonistic moral economy of Angolan-ness and of social status and mobility. This is similar in some ways to Erica Weiss’s study of military refusers in Israel.22 In this she finds that, although different groups of men were committing ostensibly the same political act, refusing to enlist in the army, the ‘ethical regimes’ (analogous to what I refer to as moral economies) that motivated them were both different and incompatible. The Ashkenazi men refused to serve on the grounds of individual conscience, the Mizrahim men refused because they attached ethical value to providing for their families, and Orthodox Jewish men refused in order to respect the scriptural authority of the Torah. These moral visions were both incompatible and critical of one another.



19 Schubert,

Working the System; Soares de Oliveira, Magnificent and Beggar Land. de Oliveira, Magnificent and Beggar Land. 21 Schubert, Working the System. 22 Erica Weiss, ‘Competing Ethical Regimes in a Diverse Society: Israeli Military Refusers’, American Ethnologist 44, no. 1 (2017): 52–64. 20 Soares

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Similarly, the victory that Umbundu FAPLA veterans had helped to realise through their military service had partly resulted in their moral vision of society being marginalised at a national level and losing authority and prestige in everyday life (although, as we have seen, there were various other reasons why this moral economy had been eroded, such as urbanisation and a changing gender division of labour). Their ideas that masculine respect ought to be given to elder men, on the basis of their wisdom and responsible stewardship of their households and broader kin relations, was apparently being pushed aside by the New Angola, money- and consumption-oriented vision of social status. This presented another reason for their not identifying over the long term with their veteran identities: not simply their subordination in itself, but the victory of the MPLA representing the defeat of the particular moral economy that they were invested in. The case I have discussed in this book, then, underlines Sasson-Levy’s argument about the military and the importance of how it militarises the inequalities of broader society, leading to a weak and conflicted identification with one’s veteranhood. Crucially, however, it also demonstrates the importance of the moral economy lens in helping us to understand a central aspect of how and with what normative justification subordinate veterans may invest in alternative masculinities to a military one, suggesting that competing moralities have an important role to play. As Weiss argues, this is likely to be particularly important in a diverse society, but, I would add, perhaps even more important in developing countries fractured by recent long-term civil war and, in many cases, by a longer history of differential integration into colonialism in different regions.23 Beyond the broader subordination of veterans’ life projects and the moral economy that underpins them, there is the question of how military service fits into men’s life courses and the life projects that they are trying to build. In some settings and for some groups, military service can be a rite of passage to adult manhood within the normative life course of their home communities. For instance, in Mann’s study of tirailleurs Sénégalais he found that families from slave lineages in Mali often expected all their sons to be tirailleurs, meaning that a man was a soldier and a soldier was a man.24 This is often not the case, however, and it can be related to how military service helps or hinders men in pursuing their life projects, which are frequently concerned with how to become a respected elder man.



23 Christine Messiant, 1961: L’Angola Colonial, Histoire et Société: Les Prémisses Du Mouve-



24 Similar

ment Nationaliste (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2006). cases outside Africa include Turkish soldiers: Altinay, The Myth of the MilitaryNation; and indigenous Bolivian soldiers: Gill, ‘Creating Citizens, Making Men’.

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In some settings in Africa, ethnographic studies have seen taking up arms as a way of challenging existing social structures that frustrate young men’s aspirations for adult male status. In Guinea Bissau, Henrik Vigh has discussed how young Guinean men mobilised as a way of trying to escape the ‘social moratorium of youth’25 by gaining enough resources or a job that allows one to establish one’s own household. In Liberia and Sierra Leone young people’s frustration with abuses of power by elder men, especially of chiefly families, and the consequent hindering of marriages, was a prime motivator for conscription into rebel groups,26 and perhaps even a determinant of patterns of violence.27 In this sense, they were mobilising against an external enemy, but also against gendered social structures within their own communities.28 The link between masculinity and military service is therefore clearly influenced by the link between the moral economy of manhood in their home community and its relation to the moral economy of the state and/or military, as well as where it places the veteran’s home group within national social hierarchies, as in the cases above. This relation is often not straightforward, and may of course be ambivalent, as in the case of young Somali men joining pirate groups. As Tone Bleie found,29 these men were often encouraged to join by networks of kin operating through uncles, and were motivated to do so as a way of escaping poverty and succeeding as breadwinners. On the other hand, mothers and imams considered piracy as sinful (or, rather, haram), leading to the ostracisation of young men involved in it. This would often encourage them to give up their life of piracy and return to their home communities. A third possibility, however, as Guðrún Sif Friðriksdóttir finds in Burundi,30 is that military service is neither a rite of passage to manhood, nor a way of challenging existing gendered economic and power structures governing transition to manhood, but more straightforwardly a barrier to achieving manhood. The veterans she studied, for whom marriage was the principal achievement for gaining adult manhood, complained that military service had forced them to postpone marriage. Mozambican civil war veterans made similar complaints, seeing military 25 Vigh,

Navigating Terrains of War, 89. ‘Young Men and Gender in War and Postwar Reconstruction’. 27 David Duriesmith, Masculinity and New War: The Gendered Dynamics of Contemporary Armed Conflict (Oxon: Routledge, 2016). 28 See also the discussion of female Frelimo soldiers in H. West, ‘Girls with Guns: Narrating the Experience of War of Frelimo’s “Female Detachment”’, Anthropological Quarterly, 2000, 180–94; and the analysis of female Maoist rebels in Nepal in Tone Bleie, ‘Post-War Moral Communities in Somalia and Nepal: Gendered Practices of Exclusion and Inclusion’, Tromso: Centre for Peace Studies, 2012, 9. 29 Bleie, ‘Post-War Moral Communities in Somalia and Nepal’. 30 Friðriksdóttir, ‘Soldiering/ as an Obstacle to Manhood?’

26 Richards,

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service almost as a form of victimisation because it had interrupted their educational or professional progress.31 Again, as Erica Weiss makes clear in her work on Mizrahim military refusers in Israel,32 the fulfilment of a provider masculinity is not simply a ‘social’ factor, as the Israeli state would have it, but an ethical one. Providing for one’s family is, in many settings, a moral duty. Whilst it also brings with it the prerogatives and status of adult manhood, often implying (though not necessarily translating into) authority over one’s wife and children, and autonomy over dependence – and so a matter of gendered power relations – it is also a moral status entailing a duty of provision. The fulfilment of these responsibilities and the achievement of this status was centrally important to the masculine life projects of FAPLA veterans in Huambo, the basic foundation of adult masculine respect, and of men’s self-regard. Without success in this area, they would become ‘useless elders’, and any social advancement in terms of broader social stratification would probably be impossible, and anyway lose much of its value for their masculine status. This was one of the main reasons that military service was, over the long term, viewed principally as an imposition, and a costly waste of time and opportunity to advance plans for marriage and the building of lives – rather than as a valued status or achievement. It added little to veterans’ social repertoire as they looked for ways to pursue respected elder status and upward social mobility. Behind the naturalised idea of the link between men and military service and an enduring identification with a veteran identity, then, there are a number of conditions to be met before that link can operate smoothly. This study has demonstrated the centrality of moralities to that link, as they relate to: implied military covenants and whether the state is seen to respect them; various axes of inequality and how the military institutionalises subordination; the competing moral visions of differentially located groups of veterans vis-à-vis one another and the dominant post-war vision; and how the military experience and identity hinder veterans’ gendered life projects or, conversely, add to veterans’ social repertoires as they seek to execute them. However, in many settings, the link between masculinity and a military identity founders, raising the question of how the broader social transformations of wars affect masculinities in the longer term.

The moral contours of post-war masculinities Surveying the literature on masculinities in post-war settings, it is clear that the large majority of studies focus on men who have been perpetrators of

31 Scafer, 32 Weiss,

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Soldiers at Peace. ‘Competing Ethical Regimes in a Diverse Society’.

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violence. As Mary Moran has argued, this has led to the neglect of studies of men who have not fought, a category that seems to be almost a contradiction in terms to some policymakers.33 I would add that a privileging of the fact of veteranhood even for the study of veterans after wars has proved misleading, even mesmerising, for the study of masculinities and war. Men, especially in protracted conflicts, may spend as much time being civilians as they do being fighters, and may have, in the first place, been recruited against their will. The important effects of war on masculinities are not limited to, or overdetermined by, experiences of military service or violence. Indeed, this is true of the socioeconomic effects of civil wars more generally: the most important effects are often the tectonic shifts that accompany violence, and that transform societies over the long term. As Christopher Cramer has argued,34 these have in some cases, for instance, set the stage for long-term capitalist development. Of course, it remains to be seen what the long-term economic and structural consequences of the war will be for Angola, but what preoccupied FAPLA veterans in the performance of their masculinities were the deep and gendered social and economic shifts brought on by the war, and the complex manner in which they played into historical dynamics on the Planalto, and longstanding regional tensions in Angola. In his study of war and social change in Mozambique, Stephen Lubkemann35 conceptualises the social innovations that follow wars by using the idea of ‘social imaginaries’. With this term he denotes ideas that, far from being hegemonic and therefore taken for granted, are at least considered as debatable, even amongst those who oppose them. Which of the new social imaginaries might gain authority after war, he argues, is related to two factors: the power of the person(s) articulating the imaginary, and the epistemic power of the imaginary itself. He associates the first factor with Max Weber’s concept of power as the ability of an agent to carry out their will in the face of opposition from others. The second idea is related to a Foucauldian idea of power as embedded in discourse. From this point of view, the potential influence of a social imaginary after war depends, not necessarily on its radicalism or conservatism, but on how successfully it is woven into existing hegemonic constructions so as to seem ‘socially sensible’.36



33 M. H Moran, ‘Gender, Militarism, and Peace-Building: Projects of the Postconflict Mo-

ment’, Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (2009): 261–74; Henri Myrttinen, Lana Khattab, and Jana Naujoks, ‘Re-Thinking Hegemonic Masculinities in Conflict-Affected Contexts’, Critical Military Studies 3 (2016): 103–19. 34 Christopher Cramer, Civil War Is Not a Stupid Thing: Accounting for Violence in Developing Countries (London: Hurst, 2006). 35 Lubkemann, Culture in Chaos, 304–30. 36 ibid., 317.

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Manhood, Morality & the Transformation of Angolan Society

The MPLA party-state had certainly accrued instrumental dominance in Angola, and as has recently been convincingly argued, the epistemic power of the New Angola narrative was considerable in influencing many Angolans’ aspirations. However, there were long-established ways of speaking back to coastal power from the Planalto, and these were often arguments of a moral nature that veterans drew on in constructing their life projects. As several authors have noted,37 one of the strengths of the moral economy approach is that it allows the combination of a structural analysis of society with one that takes seriously the subjectivities of those in subordinate positions. It also locates the analysis in the flow of history, looking at the historical particularity of the social worlds of particular groups at specific moments.38 In the case presented in this book this has meant identifying, not an economic class as in Thompson’s classic analysis, but a group that is multiply located in the complexity of Angola’s historical legacies of colonialism, decolonisation, war and neo-authoritarianism. After the civil war these FAPLA veterans found themselves working in unskilled labour in the informal economy, with no significant links to the networks of enrichment associated with the party-state. This was complicated, as we have seen, by their position as Umbundu men who held dear a set of cultural and moral values that were seen to have been defeated along with UNITA – even though these values had a much broader appeal than that organisation. This vision was a gendered one with a particular vision of the masculine life course, with gradually accrued respect and authority based on breadwinning and the gaining of privileged wisdom over time. Many veterans found that there was continued support for a similar model of the responsibilities and prerogatives of senior men in the churches – whose values had become partially intertwined with some aspects of ‘Umbundu tradition’ in the past. Churches also offered a distinctive organised, modern and global identity that still had considerable epistemic power and moral authority in post-war Huambo. Thus, despite the outcome of the civil war and urbanisation during the civil war, this moral economy of masculinity was able to survive in a modified form as an influential social imaginary that clearly seemed ‘socially sensible’ in Lubkemann’s terms, backed up as it was by the long-established moral authority of the churches. However, this is far from being a hegemonic social imaginary, and nor is the associated masculinity hegemonic. Indeed, it was not possible to identify a coherent hegemonic model of masculinity in this context at all – rather, there were several competing and contested but socially sensible avenues available

37 Edelman,

‘E. P. Thompson and Moral Economies’; Palomera and Vetta, ‘Moral Economy’; Sayer, ‘Moral Economy’. 38 Fassin, ‘Moral Economies Revisited’.

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to veterans, each of which was, in Lubkemann’s terms, complexly woven out of existing constructions. Some historically established aspects of masculinity were mostly unquestioned as normative propositions – in particular the idea that adult men should have the means to establish their own households and to be the main breadwinners – even though this idea was difficult to realise in practice. The breadwinner ideal does not, however, add up to a coherent ‘model’ of masculinity – rather it is one thread in the uncertain and ongoing moral work of weaving together a life as a respected senior man in the wake of the social transformations of war. What I hope to have demonstrated in this book is that attention to historically situated moral economies and their complex everyday dynamics during and after war offers important insights into the negotiation and contestation of masculinities in the wake of wars, and what is at stake for the people caught up their midst.

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Index

27 May 1977, 18 affairs, 124, 153 n.9, 156, 163–7 alambamento, 131, 133–4 alcohol, alcoholism, 161–2 choice of drink and identity, 170–71 and Christian morality, 58 churchgoing veterans’ views of, 158–62, 167–71 and colonial authorities, 159 n.30 and confusão, 71 and football, 93 and group membership, 170 homemade, 159–60 household disputes, 144, 147 n.49 missions’ views of, 32, 159 and self-control, 160, 161 wartime shortage, 159 n.31 apresentação, 131 Asad, Talal, 63, 89 aspirations, 103–5, 147–8, 173 Associação de Apoio aos Combatentes das ex-FAPLA (ASCOFA) – Association of Support for Former FAPLA combatants, 66 avarice, see ocipulũlũ backwardness, 35, 47, 52, 76, 77, 161–2, 164, 179 Ball, Jeremy, 77 beer, 170

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Ben Ari, Eyal, 176 Bible, The, 51, 58, 75, 80–81, 88, 157, 162 Bicesse accords, 42 Bleie, Tone, 181 Botswana, 171 n.44 Bourdieu, Pierre, 85 breadwinning, autonomy, 103 companionate marriage, 155 domestic violence, 143–7 failure, 137–40 in other contexts, 134–5, 177, 181–2 intrahousehold dynamics, 134–41 struggles in veterans’ life histories, 48–9, 60 role in moral economy of senior masculinity, 58, 110 vulnerability, 124–5, 134–5 bride price, 131, 133–4 Brück, Tilman, 147 Burundi, 134, 181 Butler, Judith, 8–9, 128 Candea, Matei, 65 cars, 99, 111, 117–8, 142, 161, 172 Childs, Gladwyn, 33, 34, 115, 158 Christianity, see churches churches as distinct from politics, 5, 75–6 continuing moral authority, 57–8 gendered age hierarchies, 83–7 as global communities, 57, 79, 81, 154

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202 Igreja Evangélica Congregacional em Angola (IECA), 20, 30, 32, 37, 77, 152, 159 Seventh Day Adventist, 30–31, 45, 79–80, 88–9, 109, 156–7 modernity, 78 and ‘organisation’, 79 and political parties, 82, 90 and reconciliation, 82–3 Roman Catholic, 30, 32, 52, 158 civilians, 38, 40 class see social stratification Cockburn, Cynthia, 147 Cole, Jennifer, 155 colonialism, 31, 32, 33, 53, 180 combat, 39 Comissão de Reclamação de Sargentos e Soldados não-Desmobilizados das ex-FAPLA – Commission of Complaint of the non-Demobilised Sergeants and Soldiers of the exFAPLA, 67 confusão, 71–2, 102, 103, 113 Connell, Raewynn, 7–8, 10, 120 conscientious objectors, see military refusers conscription, 3, 33, 37–8, 39, 40, 41, 181 conversion (religious), 45 Cornwall, Andrea, 136 cosmopolitanism, 170, 179 Cramer, Christopher, 183 Crapanzano, Vincent, 80 n.49 Cuba, 42 Cuito Cuanavale, 42 cultural style, 9, 150–51 demobilisation, 43, 50 desenrascar, 87, 101, disability, 45–6 divorce, 48, 132, 139–41 Dobler, Gregor, 159 n.31 domestic violence, 143–7 dos Santos, Eduardo, 20 n.51, 23, 74 drunkenness, 167–71 Edwards, Adrian, 33, 115, 153 n.9, 154, 159 n.30

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Index education, 104–5, 140, 143 elders, 50, 83–7, 109–10, 136 elections, 67–9 embodied style, 149 employment, 100, 103–5, 178–9 Englund, Harri, 64 Enloe, Cynthia, 3, 7 envy, see onyã evamba, 34, 35–6, 42, 111, 173 Fassin, Didier, 2, 13–15, 81 fatherhood, 37, 72, 110–11, 134, 140 feitiço, 46–7, 50, 109, 114–17, 123–4 Ferguson, James, 9, 65, 150–51 fieldwork, 16–21, 28–9, 71, 164 food, 108–9 football, 45–6, 53, 72, 93–4, 159 Forças Armadas de Angola (FAA) – Armed Forces of Angola, 42, 43–4 Forças Armadas Populares de Libertação de Angola (FAPLA) – People’s Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola, and the FAA, 44 conscription into, 39, 40, 41, 73, 88 discipline in, 39 n.36 education and rank, 41 food supplies, 39 inequalities in, 56 life in, 37–9, 133 literature on, 37 motorised infantry, 41 Ovimbundu in, 76, 179 pensions for veterans, 66 protection of civilian areas from UNITA, 34, 46 reasons for exit, 45 relations with civilians, 38–9, 46 religion in, 80 targeting of veterans by UNITA, 44 veterans’ politics, 66–9 women in, 16 n.43 Foucault, Michel, 18 ‘freedom’, 169 Friðriksdóttir, Guðrún Sif, 181 Fumanti, Mattia, 159 n.31

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203

Index Hambly, Wilfred, 34 Heald, Suzette, 12, 53 Hirsch, Jennifer S., 154 history, distortion of, 17 veterans wanting to set the record straight, 17–18, 74 Honwana, Alcinda, 40, 101 household division of labour, 100, 138–9 housing, 42, 47, 105, 172 Huambo (city), cidade vs. bairro, 101–2 inequality in, 107 location, 2 markets in, 98–9 and missions, 32 neighbourhood and identity, 17–18, 105–6 post-war rebuilding, 49–50 racial segregation, 101–2 shops, 111 siege of, 42–3 UNITA flight from, 1976, 32 Hunter, Mark, 128, 155 independence war, 31–2 informal commerce, 97–100 initiation, see evamba Instituto de Reintegração Sócioprofissional de Ex-militares – Institute for the Socio-economic Reinsertion of Excombatants (IRSEM), 20, 66 intergenerational tensions, 110–11, 114, 169 Israel, 176–7, 182 Jacobson, Anita-Widding, 125 jango, 32–3, 36, 42, 109 n.27, 111, 173 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 88 Jeske, Christine, 172 Kalupeteca, Julio, 89 Kamulingue, Álvaro, 67 Kassule, Isaias Sebstião, 67 Keller, Eva, 81 n.50 kinship, 73, 125, 130, 132, 140–41, 151, 156, 172, 173, 178

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kupapatas, 98 labour, 100, 102, 103–5, 109 Liberia, 178, 181 life project, ageing and senior manhood in, 109–10 comparison with veterans in other settings, 180–82 definition, 9–10, influences on, 27–8 during the war, 48–9 and government compensation, 52 military service as interruption to, 56 and political disengagement, 65 progressive nature of, 106 spending and priorities in, 172–3 Lindsay, Lisa, 120 livelihoods, 97–100 Lonsdale, John, 72 Lubkemann, Stephen C., 21, 59, 151, 183, 185 Lyons, Harriet, 130 Madagascar, 155 Mahmood, Saba, 64 mais velhos see elders Mann, Gregory, 180 markets, 97–100 marriage, achievement of, 131–2 and class, 141–3 companionate, 153–8 counselling, 143, 147 love, 137 men’s accounts of, 43, 44 men’s vulnerability in, 124 and methodology, 128–30 and military service, 132–4 and ‘reintegration’, 127 and senior manhood, 133 trust in, 156 masculinity, hegemonic, 10–11, 95–6, 120, 184–5 Masquelier, Adeline, 154 matrilineality, 140–41, 156 Messiant, Christine, 38 methodology, see fieldwork

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204 Miescher, Stefan, 120 militarised inequality, 177, 179, 180 military covenant, 65, 72–3, 178 military refusers, 88–9, 179 missions, 32, 78, 84, 117, 158–9 mobile phones, 156, 172 modernity, alcohol, 161, 170 churches, 5, 37, 57–8, 76–8, 79, 84–6 companionate marriage, 154, 157 Umbundu ‘tradition’ and, 15, 18, 84–6 failure of state to provide, 178–9 feitiço, 47, 115–16, 117 militaries’ role in, 176 peace and war, 52 and separating of religion from other spheres, 64 urban neighbourhoods, 106 money, 107–8, 111–13, 140, 163–7 Moore, Henrietta, 126 moral economy conceptualisation, 12–15 and drinking, 170 and hierarchies of masculinities, 95–6 of the household, 125, 140 of manhood, 27–8, 58, 181 and moral diagnostics, 119–21 and the MPLA’s victory, 180 and political economy, 2, 9, 13, 14, 16, 62, 151 and politics, 63 of veteranhood, 27, 54–7, 181 to understand agency in wartime, 58–9 morality, Angolan civil war, 44 danger, 55–6 double standards, 141 and economic success, 103 in everyday life, 11 killing, 39–40 as lens, 1–3 moral diagnostics, 119–20 politics, 7, 63, 70–6 power, 11–12, 125–6 progress, 37 and cultural style, 151

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Index tensions and soldiering, 54 moral integrity, 58–9 moral responsibility, 55–6 Moran, Mary, 183 motorbike taxi drivers, 98 Moura, Tatiana, 144 Movimento Popular pela Libertação de Angola (MPLA) – Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, see also, ‘New Angola’ and churches, 82, 90 cultural significance of victory in civil war, 76, 85 elections, 2012, 67, 69 enlistment propaganda, 73 instrumental vs. epistemic dominance, 184 JMPLA (youth movement), 73 kinship imagery, 73 membership rates amongst veterans, 68–9 oligarchs, 173 order and confusão, 71 perceived obligations to FAPLA veterans, 72 as protector of the population, 72–3 on the Planalto, 42 state-building project, 72 Movimento Revolucionário Unido - United Revolutionary Movement, 67 Mozambique, 55, 116, 133, 156 n.20, 178, 181, 183 Namibia, 159 n.31, 178 nation, 176–7 ‘New Angola’, 5–6, 23, 25, 57, 118–19, 152, 173–4, 179, 184 Newell, Sasha, 170 Ngangula, Augusto, 41, 73–4 Nyamnjoh, Francis, 154 ocipulũlũ, 106–13, 119–20 ondjango see jango onyã, 71, 113–18, 119–20 organização, 79, 102 Organização de Pioneiros de Angola – Organisation of Angolan Pioneers, 36

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205

Index Ovimbundu, see also Umbundu alcohol, 158–9 assumed connection with UNITA, 17–18, 32 and authenticity, 106 n.20 in the FAPLA and FALA, 38 marriage and socialising, 154 resistance to demoralisation, 85 ovinganji, 35–6, 38, 173 patriarchy, 5, 176 Pearce, Justin, 31, 72, 161 n.32 Péclard, Didier, 15, 77, 84, 85 n.63, 87, 90, 159 pensions, 52, 53, 56, 66–8, 177 Peterson, Derek, 64 POEMA household survey of veterans and their spouses, 20–1, 32, 39, alcohol and socialisation patterns, 173 n.47 bride price payment rates, 133 church membership, 75 domestic violence, 143–7 drinking alcohol, 167 education level of FAPLA recruits and spouses, 41, 140 household economic decision making, 137 housing, 105 livelihoods and income, 100–101 marriage, 132 spouses’ respective earnings, 136 political engagement of veterans, 68–9 ranking household’s wealth, 104 reasons for leaving the FAPLA, 45 re-enlistment in the FAA, 44 sorcery attacks and enrichment, 115–17 women’s entry into the cash economy, 136 political economy, 1, 13–14, 62 politics, veterans’ disengagement from, 65, 69–76 veterans’ engagement in, 61–3 construction of political sphere, 70–76 polygamy, 51–2, 132

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Portugal, 31–2, 41, 73, 77, 85 n.30, 159 n.30, 160 Pössinger, Herman, 33, 115 power, 9–12, 14–15, 126 protests, in 2012, 67–8, 177 race, 56, 83 n.56, 129, 165, 166 religion, see Churches Roque, Sandra, 105 Roth, Philip, 128 Sanders, Todd, 119 Sasson Levy, Orna, 177, 180 Savimbi, Jonas, 20 n.34 Schafer, Jessica, 28 Schatzberg, Michael, 72 Schubert, Jon, 15, 73, 76, 81, 112, 118–19, 166, 177, 179 Scott, James, 95 self-control, 160 Senegal, 154, 178 sex, 39, 128–30, 137, 153–4, 156, 163–7 sexual violence, 38–9, 59, 144, 147, 147 n.49 shame, 37, 125–6, 142–3 Sierra Leone, 181 Soares de Oliveira, Ricardo, 15, 23, 76, 112, 119, 173, 179 social imaginaries, 49, 183–5 social mobility, 106–121 social navigation, 59 social stratification, 103–6, 141–3 socialism, 78, 82, 164 Soleil Archambault, Julie, 130, 156 n.20 Sommers, Marc, 134 Sonangol, 74 sorcery see feitiço South Africa, 42, 155, 172–3 state, see also, MPLA, military covenant, demobilisation, education corruption, 107 as father, 72–3 sponsored football tournaments, 53 military service changing men’s relationship to, 3, 61–3 moral failures of, 71–5 oil and, 23

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206 Stojetz, Wolfgang, 147 Strathern, Marilyn, 141 subject position, 8, 126, 143 tactical agency, 40, 58–9 Thompson, E. P., 12–13, 95, 113, 184 trust, 156 Udelsmann Rodrigues, Cristina, 106 Umbundu, food, 109 language, 17–18, 19–20, 76 ‘tradition’, 29, 33–6, 43, 58, 77, 83–7, 173 elision with political sympathy for UNITA, 76 União Nacional pela Libertação Total de Angola (UNITA), army, 38 attacks by, 34 Bicesse Peace Accords, 20, 42 capture by, 43–4 child soldiers, 40 common association with Ovimbundu, 18, 179 conscription by, 39 cultural significance of defeat, 76 FAPLA veterans’ views of, 44, 55 and IECA, 82 order and confusão, 71 n.25, 103 on Planalto, 32, 42–3 sexual violence, 38 state building narrative, 72 stigmatisation of ‘UNITA people’, 82–3, 161 n.32 veterans’ activism, 67 veteran’s alcoholism struggle, 161–2 violence against civilians, 43, 44

Z01 Spall Book B.indb 206

Index women soldiers, 38 urban living, 102, 103, 105–6 urbanisation, 42, 107 Uvin, Peter, 134 van Wolputte, Steven, 159 n.31 Velha Guarda, 19, 53, 168–9, 170 Vigh, Henrik, 181 violence, see also domestic violence, sexual violence aspirations for adult manhood, 181 as backward, 71–2 committed under duress, 59 conscription, 88 continuum between war and peace, 147, 147 n.52 fear of participating in research, 18 fear of veterans, 3 and hegemonic masculinity, 10, 175 indirect social effects of, 48 patriarchy, 176 and politics, 18, 70–71 overstating influence of, 21 Walhof, Darren, 64 Wardlow, Holly, 154 Weber, Max, 183 Weiss, Brad, 154 Weiss, Erica, 179, 180, 182 West, Harry, 119 White, Ellen, 79, 86, 109 wisdom, 22, 58, 84, 87, 110, 125, 136, 162, 180 witchcraft see feitiço womanising, 163–7 Young, Allan, 126

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During the 1975–2002 Angolan Civil War much of the non-elite male population was conscripted into one or other of the contending armies, the country urbanised very rapidly, and colonial-era political and moral economies were radically reshaped. This book examines the pronounced changes this wrought on Angolan society, and, in particular, the gendered impacts on a generation of Angolan men recruited by the governing MPLA. Spall shows that the war’s effects went far beyond the political and economic, to affect sexual relations, the social valuation of money, respect for elder male wisdom and what it meant to be a senior man, as well as the discourses and practices of Christianity. Masculinity was central to how the social transformations of war were intimately experienced by Angolan soldiers; the author investigates the consequences of the men’s experiences when they returned home and the particular role of military service in fashioning Angola’s post-war social trajectory. John Spall is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of African Studies and Anthropology at the University of Birmingham, UK. Cover image: FAPLA soldiers playing on a captured South African Olifant battle tank at Cuito Cuanavale, 1988. © Jeremy Harding.

MPLA Veterans & Post-war Dynamics

‘Offers important insights on the establishment of Angola’s import-dependent coping economy in the provinces after the war. . . its analysis of masculinities and moral economies gives it a completely different focus that opens [it] up to wider, comparative debates beyond Angola.’ Jon Schubert, Brunel University

Manhood, Morality & the Transformation of Angolan Society

‘An important contribution to the growing fields of study on gender and conflict and on the post-war social reintegration of combatants.’ Justin Pearce, University of Sussex.

Manhood, Morality & the Transformation of Angolan Society MPLA Veterans & Post-war Dynamics

John Spall

John Spall