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3. Dueling Bands and Good Girls: Gender and Music in Luanda’s Musseques, 1961–75
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3 w Dueling Bands and Good Girls Gender and Music in Luanda’s Musseques, 1961–75 One prominent historian of Angola refers to 1961 as the pivot of Angola’s contemporary history. The year signals a rupture in the Angolan historical narrative in relation to colonial rule and the metanarrative of Angolan nationalism . Three popular revolts occurred in 1961. In January cotton producers in the Baixa de Kassanje, east of Malanje, rebelled against the system of forced cotton production for the Cotonang cotton monopoly. In February musseque residents armed with machetes attacked Luanda prisons, hoping to free the political prisoners rounded up in the Processo de 50 and subsequent raids. And in March, primarily Bakongo coffee producers attacked the local colonial authority, white plantation owners, assimilados, mixed-race individuals , and Ovimbundu migrant workers after their demonstrations demanding payment of wages in arrears were met with gunfire. In all three instances the colonial government and white settlers responded with extreme violence and in all three instances the newly formed MPLA and FNLA nationalist movements scrambled to claim or deny authorship and tailor their interpretation of the events to their own interests. The Portuguese colonial government crushed each of these rebellions and intensified the repression of political activity both in the cities and in the rural areas. In this environment, and given the government ’s grisly response to these uprisings, the nationalist movements saw no alternative but to take up arms. In order to wage war against the Portuguese colonial state, the MPLA and the FNLA moved to neighboring countries to set up guerrilla bases: first in Kinshasa , Zaire, then in Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo, and finally in Lusaka and along the border in Zambia. The metanarrative of Angolan nationalism 81 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. followed along behind them. Those who stayed behind in the urban centers are, in the literature, reduced to the status of “the masses”—passive, faceless beings acted upon by the colonial state and later by the returning political leadership.1 This characterization fails to specify the conditions of life in the musseques in the period between 1961 and 1974 and it inaccurately homogenizes the musseque population. Finally, the metanarrative insists that although nationalism may have been born in the musseques of Luanda (and secondarily Benguela), it grew up in the enclaves of guerrilla struggle.2 Angolan nationalism is more complex than this trajectory allows. Scholars recognize that there were three liberation struggles but they do not attend to the lived experience of urban residents in the musseques or explain how their practices , visions, and dreams figured prominently in creating a sense of the Angolan nation. The people who remained in the country, particularly in the impoverished urban neighborhoods, also shaped the history of Angolan nationalism through the music they played and listened to and the clubs they patronized . They rearranged relations between themselves and the colonial state, between urban and rural societies, among members of the urban milieu, and between and among men and women while forging a new sense of nation. We have seen the often explicit link between culture and politics in early nationalism and the participation of women as cultural producers. This chapter complicates the relationship between culture and politics by focusing on the production of nation. Gender and class are two aspects of the urban experience through which this creation of nation is inflected. Here the discussion of class shifts from people’s self-description as “middle class” to an analysis of economic changes that occasioned the growth of a petty bourgeoisie. In the last chapter, “middle class” referred to the consciousness some urban residents had of themselves and of their social position. In this chapter, the term “petty bourgeois” derives from scholarly work on Angola in this period. It describes the material conditions and cultural world of this emerging group. But the consciousness that emerges from that cultural world and the experiences of people from this group are more of nation than of class. Finally, this chapter shifts the focus from female and male participation in the nationalist political movement to a focus on the production of gendered subjectivities in the cultural practice of music in which Angolans imagined and made their nation. The ways in which African residents of urban shantytowns shaped the cultural basis...