Diamonds in the Rough: Corporate Paternalism and African Professionalism on the Mines of Colonial Angola, 1917–1975 by Todd Cleveland (review)

Cleveland closely details and analyzes the recruitment, movement, work experiences, and repatriation of generations of diamond miners (with their families) employed by the Angolan corporate giant Diamang from its founding in 1917 to its closure after the military coup that ended colonial rule in Angola in 1974/5. His subtitle, “Corporate Paternalism and African Professionalism,” conveys his core arguments about the incremental changes in the relations between workers and the company.

A key point regarding the methodology is that Cleveland actually managed to conduct his intended research design. Diamang’s uncataloged archive was stored in a Universidade de Coimbra shed overseen by the Anthropology Department’s Museum. Material in Luanda’s national archive was cataloged, but notoriously difficult to access. Even more difficult was conducting archival research and extensive oral interviews in and around Diamang’s former headquarters in the conflict-plagued region of Lunda Norte, Angola. Cleveland collected fresh archival material and interviewed scores of Angolans and Portuguese between 2004 and 2006. He appropriately and generously acknowledges the many people who shepherded him through these challenges, but, in the end, his own patience and determination were crucial for the appearance of this remarkable work.

The book has seven chapters, an epilogue, helpful notes, a bibliography, and a fine index. The single map reveals the astonishing reach of Diamang’s privileged concessionary status. Cleveland carefully inserted photographs, dating from 1927 to 1966, throughout the book as well as a wealth of quantitative information about recruitment, families, food, and revenues in tables. Chapter 1 introduces Cleveland’s concepts of paternalism and professionalism. Chapter 2 paints Lunda’s lively and diverse economy and society from the 1870s to the l970s. The next five chapters are rich considerations of recruitment, labor processes, worker strategies, leisure time, and decisions about repatriation or renewal of mine-labor contracts from the early promising aluvial strikes until 1975 when Diamang essentially closed. Throughout, Cleveland draws from the treasury of oral narratives that he collected, interrogating their perspectives and contexts and remaining attentive to gender implications.

Cleveland carefully charts the company’s foundation, its early dependence on Katanga mining expertise and international capital, its growing revenues and enhanced influence, and its power over the Portuguese colonial administration. He emphasizes the pragmatism, or expediency, of actors, from the sobas and cipaes who accomplished the recruitment to the recruits and overseers. In a myriad of ways, Diamang realized that making life better for recruits and workers served the company’s best interests. Its incremental and pragmatic strategy to attract and hold a labor force in the sparsely populated Lunda region of Northeast Angola succeeded.

Although the narrative is repetitive at times, Cleveland ably illustrates the choices that the company and the workers made, describing them as incremental “paternalism” and “professionalization,” respectively. Echoing Karl Marx’s point that men make their own history but not under conditions of their own choosing, workers increasingly chose not to desert enroute to Diamang because the recruiters would return to punish the soba in their village and conscript a replacement, perhaps from their own family. Furthermore, deserters were often left to wander the bush “living like goats” (61). Workers and their families were not so much becoming “professional” in their behavior as accommodating a coercive regime that they could not escape. Pragmatism shaped the behaviors of all parties to this story, but the company obviously had a greater range of choices than the recruits and workers.

The epilogue returns explicitly to history and memory, drawing contrasts in black and white. Local people contrasted the security and predictability of work in the “time of Diamang” with their insecure and unpredictable present. Cleveland reminds us that by 1974, Angola’s white population was the largest on the continent outside South Africa. Whites who fled to Portugal from 1974 to 1977 were nostalgic about the idyllic...