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2 w In the Days of Bota Fogo Culture and the Early Nationalist Struggle, 1947–61 This chapter explores the connection between culture and nationalist political activity in the 1950s. It offers a perspective on life and cultural activities in the musseques unavailable either in the social science tracts of colonial origin or in the literary treatments by nationalist writers. Opening up an interior view of the relationship between culture and nationalism grounded in everyday life, this chapter brings class and gender to the surface. As aspects of the urban experience, class and gender do not displace or rend nation but rather inflect it. Although grounded in the urban quotidian, the primary objective of this chapter is to interrogate and complicate the teleological narrative of nation that leaps from the literary cultural flourish of the 1950s and its interest in representing the musseques, to the organization of underground political cells, to exile politics, and finally to independence. The unnamed narrative center of that teleology is male political elites in exile and in rural guerrilla bases. It otherwise ignores the participation and practices of urban residents, both male and female, elite and nonelite.1 An investigation of everyday cultural practice in the musseques reveals that female and male residents of the musseques imagined the nation sometimes in quite different ways than did the leaders of political movements. Nevertheless it was the urban residents’ “ethos of nationalism,” as Susan Geiger termed it, that male political elites scrambled to appropriate after 1974.2 Cultural practice mattered for a longer period of time and in different ways than the existing metanarrative of Angolan nationalism concedes. Historians and other analysts locate the cultural basis of Angolan nationalism in the writing of a small number of urban-based intellectuals in the 1950s. In this 56 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. standard historical interpretation, culture is read as immature politics. It receives scholarly attention only insofar as it leads to formal political activity. Scholarly analyses of Angolan history and nationalism describe assimilado associations (the Liga Nacional Africana and Anangola) as proto-nationalist organizations. Their ambivalent relation to the Portuguese colonial state and their valorization of a specifically Angolan culture and history (expressed in the cultural departments and predominantly literary cultural undertakings of these associations) give rise to the contradictions that impel a younger generation to engage in more explicitly nationalist anticolonial politics.3 Alongside these associations some scholars have noted, in passing, the appearance and importance of recreational and cultural associations, notably soccer clubs and music bands.4 Lúcio Lara, an MPLA leader, remarks that the MPLA had its origins, in part, in groups like Bota Fogo and Ngola Ritmos. He thereby subordinates their histories to and folds them into that of the party.5 Other scholars have suggested that these groups were formed autonomously by urban residents connected to Angolans in the rural areas and have pointed to their importance in mobilizing both urban and rural residents for all three nationalist parties (MPLA, FNLA, and UNITA).6 Yet even in this perspective these cultural and recreational groups are of interest only to the extent that they result in nationalist political organizing. Edmundo Rocha, like other scholars of nationalism in Angola, concludes that what characterized the period from 1955 to 1959, the period of the genesis of Angolan nationalism, in Luanda was the qualitative passage from a cultural and associative movement—one based on positions of compromise with the colonial authorities, but also affirming specific values that would come to be expressed as “Vamos descobrir Angola!”—to the initial organizational phase of the nationalist movements.7 Like Rocha’s writing, Douglas Wheeler’s historical work and Marcelo Bittencourt ’s Dos jornais às armas (From Newspapers to Arms) emphasize the literary cultural movements of the 1950s as a breeding ground for nationalist thinking. For most historians of Angola, culture is a good enough explanation for the antecedents of nationalist politics but it is not taken up again in its own right. It leads to politics and that is where the interest in culture ends. The study of cultural practice in Angola has generally been the bailiwick of literary critics.8 Yet here too, it is mostly strictly literary texts and movements that receive attention. As in the historical material, when musical or...

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