Intonations: A Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, from 1945 to Recent Times

1. Musseques and Urban Culture

1 w Musseques and Urban Culture Luandans assert an imaginary of nation and contemporary history born of particular musseques. In casual conversations and in interviews, Luandans repeatedly offered me a meaningful map of their city. Bairro Operário was the birthplace of nationalism and the quintessence of musseque culture, Bairro Indígena (indicated as B.I. on the map of Luanda) was the home of future politicians, and Marçal was the cradle of Angolan music.1 Luandans are known for being very neighborhood-centered in their identities: where you grew up, where you live, and the neighborhood with which you identify might say more about you than your political affiliation, your race, or your age.2 And yet, the association of particular musseques with particular aspects of the Angolan nation—consciousness, political leadership, and culture—transcends individual ties. When people told me that such and such a neighborhood was the birthplace of this or that it was proffered as a national fact and not as an article of faith or a demonstration of loyalty to one’s neighborhood. Of particular import to this book is the way these casual commentaries link culture, music, and nationalism to suggest a causal relationship. The musseques were the crucible where popular urban Angolan music was created, and within and around it a sense of nation. Alternately damned and lauded, the musseques, while on the physical periphery of the ever-growing city, have always been at the center of urban discourse and life. They are where the majority of Africans (as well as a small number of poor whites) in colonial Luanda found housing when they came to the city to enter the colonial labor market. Tracts written in the late 1960s and early 1970s by social scientists in the employ of the Portuguese government 28 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. Map of Luanda’s musseques, c. 1968 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. depict the musseques as peripheral urban spaces torn between the tradition, rules, and communal structures of rural life and the modernity, civility, and infrastructures of urban life. These works simultaneously reflect colonial government preoccupation with order and control (thanks to the Estado Novo’s censorial clutch), refract it through the lenses of modernization and development current at the time, and unwittingly offer a host of information inimical to colonial ideology. Based primarily on census data, police files, and information collected in interviews, colonial social science analyses sanitize the musseques. The rich histories recounted by the people I spoke with are nowhere to be found. Thus, the social science literature on the musseques is like much of the literature on urban Africa dating to the postwar period and continuing to the present in that its tendency to project fluid, contingent, and historically-specific situations into ahistorical indicators of a permanent condition of failed urbanism effectively substitutes assertion for critical investigation and analysis. . . . [It] tends to ignore the resourcefulness, inventiveness , and determination of the countless millions of ordinary people who somehow manage to successfully negotiate the perils of everyday life.3 While keeping those limitations in mind, we cannot and should not simply dismiss colonial social science studies of the musseques. This material contains important information about who lived in these urban shantytowns, how some people spent their money and time, and what concerns the colonial administration had about them. For Angolan writers of the colonial period who championed nationalist cultural values and political rights, the musseques symbolized the exploitation of Africans by the colonial system and the resilience of African culture despite such conditions. Like Richard Rive’s representation of Cape Town’s District Six in Buckingham Palace and Don Mattera’s descriptions of Sophiatown in Gone with the Twilight, works by Angolan writers located cultural rhythms that outpaced oppression in the musseques. They sketched threedimensional characters where the colonial social scientists tabulated twodimensional statistics. Along with a handful of social scientists sympathetic to the Angolan struggle for independence, they challenged the Estado Novo’s representation of itself and its history of colonization. In this chapter...