Empire in Africa: Angola and Its Neighbors (review)

David Birmingham's Empire in Africa: Angola and Its Neighbors is a lucid, readable account of characters and events over nearly five centuries of Angolan history, from Portuguese colonization to the current challenging peace. The book draws mainly from addresses the author has given to professional conferences and gatherings over the years, or builds on writings he has published previously in journals and other books. In this regard the work has a solid scholarly foundation. However, chapter titles such as "Wine, Women and War" (exploring the political economy of Portuguese wine imports into colonial Angola) and "Carnival in Luanda" (addressing the social dimensions of Luanda's annual street celebration) offer hints as to how wide a berth Birmingham has given to academic tedium.

In addition to resurrecting material and packaging it in different forms, the book includes a fair amount of updated and new material. For example, Birmingham expands on the complex relationship between merchants and missionaries in Angola in one chapter, swatting down the persistent historical view that, generally, there was "Catholic support for the [Portuguese] imperial cause and Protestant antagonism toward it" (29). He recounts, for example, that the Scottish Presbyterian David Livingstone wrote in his diaries how, at one point in his travels across Africa, he "enjoyed the comfortable hospitality of a great colonial planter in the Luanda highlands and admired his estates" (30). Not once, though, did Livingstone mention that his host was one of the largest dealers of slaves in the region. Birmingham rightly drives home the point that in Angola, "pragmatic cohabitation" between Protestant missionaries and the purveyors of empire—even those practicing slavery—was more often the norm than the exception.

If Birmingham's book has a shortcoming, it is that in compiling and modifying previous work, blending some new and updated material into the mix for good measure, he stretches the idea of empire too much. This stretch is supposed to provide the book with its unifying theme. But the theme is not convincing across all chapters and with regard to all topics. At various points Birmingham claims the footprints of empire can be seen in Angola in everything from the popularity of wooden xylophones (originally brought to Africa by seafaring Indonesians as much as two thousand years ago) to the presence of Roman legal traditions (initially adopted by Lusitanian peoples and later carried to the African continent by Portuguese colonizers). In fact, if one buys into the presence of an overarching "imperial theme," a chapter entitled "A Swiss Community in Highland Angola" is supposed to be just as indicative of a kind of empire as that dealing with apartheid South Africa's violent destabilization of the southern African region. Arguably the existence of xylophones in Angola speaks not to the imposition of empire, but to the assimilative qualities of Angolan cultures. And most scholars are of the opinion that apartheid South Africa's military activities in neighboring countries were less about extending that country's imperial reach and more about consolidating a white minority's security and privilege at home.

Yet thematic overreach cannot eclipse the many strengths of Empire in Africa. The book is an incisive, engaging piece of scholarship punctuated with impassioned, informed commentary. In "The Death Throes of Empire," for example, Birmingham observes that with regard to Africa, modern conflict is often explained in terms of "ethnic divisions rooted in thousands of years of incompatible linguistic, cultural, and political evolution." This "tribal explanation" is inadequate, he says, as it does not acknowledge or attempt to explore "deeper concepts of modernization, acculturation, education, conversion, commercialization, and professional and personal ambition in civilian and military life" on the continent (96). Birmingham then weaves into this point a plea for politicians, educators, students, businesspeople, and "the international white Land Rover brigades" to get more than a cosmetic view of Angola's—and indeed Africa's—people. His book provides an excellent place to start.