Intonations: A Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, From 1945 to Recent Times (review)

Among the twentieth-century African liberation struggles, Angola's has received comparably little scholarly attention in recent years. Existing scholarship spotlights the proxy armies and political organizations that challenged Portuguese rule at the country's borders until they achieved independence and turned on one another during nearly thirty years of civil war. This engaging and provocative study places urban Angolans at the center of the freedom movement narrative by exploring the emergence of the semba music scene in the musseques or shantytowns of Luanda. Drawing heavily upon interviews with forty-one musicians, club owners and club goers, Marissa J. Moorman argues that semba became a way of life that expressed Luandans' hopes for independence in the 1960s and 70s. As they established nightclubs, record stores, recording studios, and radio stations, Luandans created what Moorman dubs a "sonorous capitalism" through which they imagined their nation and rehearsed for self-rule.

Moorman tells the story of Angolan pop and nationalism in six chapters. The first chapter revisits colonial-era sociological studies to provide a history of the urbanization of Luanda and the origins of the musseques. After World War II, these settlements of mostly displaced rural Angolans became central to the development of Angolanidade or a uniquely Angolan identity that was not wholly African or European. Chapter 2 explores the early nationalist struggle (1947-61) through the pioneering band Ngola Ritmos, as well as a popular sports club and the Grupo Feminino Santa Cecilia, a women's educational and literary society. Each of these groups fostered a growing sense of nationhood among musseque residents and each was targeted during the crackdown on dissent between 1959 and 1961; members of Ngola Ritmos and the founder of Grupo Feminino served prison sentences for their political activity, while other young Luandans left for the borders to join the guerillas. Chapter 3 covers Luandan pop's "Golden Age" (1961-75), drawing our attention to the gendered dimension of the music scene at a time when "the role of women as cultural producers was eclipsed . . . as the music moved out of backyards and carnival groups to become professionalized and centered in clubs" (96). Luandan men and women became animated as they described for Moorman this period during which Angolan pop "started to claim its space" among Cuban, American, and Brazilian music. "It was people's first choice!" remembered musician Olga Baltazar (84). Chapters 4 and 5 examine song lyrics and the development of the recording industry and commercial radio to demonstrate how the performance of private grief served to forge a collective sense of grievance that shaped political consciousness. Radio especially tied those who stayed behind in Luanda to the war at the periphery and helped project the sounds and values of the musseques across Angola.

The final chapter recounts the collapse of Portuguese rule and the civil war. By the time the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) arrived in Luanda in 1975, those who had remained in the capital rather than joined the armed struggle had developed sophisticated expectations for the new nation through their own cultural and political organizing. The MPLA, however, was largely unprepared to deal with the nationalism of the musseque residents. This tragic disconnect, Moorman argues, led to the MPLA's brutal response to an attempted political coup in 1977. According to official accounts, several of Luanda's leading musicians were murdered for their support of the coup, while some of their comrades maintain that it was their popularity that threatened MPLA leaders. Moorman argues that the events represented a clash between the musicians' commitment to cultural autonomy, honed during the last fifteen years of colonial rule, and the MPLA's need for centralized authority.

Oral histories are at the center of Moorman's narrative for practical reasons. Vital written sources were destroyed during the civil...