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Claudia Gastrow, "The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda" (UNC Press Books, 2024)
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A
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B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Belcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Claudia Gastro about her book titled the Aesthetics of Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil Boom Luanda, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2024. This book takes us to, well, clearly one place we're going to, Luanda, but looking at it in a bunch of different time moments and kind of individually and how they interact as well. Because, of course, Luanda is a place that experienced centuries of colonial rule. It's also a place that was in the midst of a pretty long civil war. And those obviously have impacts for the people living there and the urban cityscape itself. But then there's also the third element of kind of what's happened since the war ended, where, as the subtitle suggests, a lot of oil money was involved at one point and that it wasn't. And that has impacts too. And throughout all of this, we have real people going about their lives, trying to have a life and make sense of all of this with a bunch of massive kind of external things impacting the ability to go about that as we're going to be discussing. So it's a really interesting city. To examine what all these different levels mean, you know, big government policy, but also individual daily life. Those things are a lot less separate, maybe, than we would think. And examinations like this kind of help us put all of those pieces together. So clearly we have a lot to talk about. Claudia, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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C
Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here.
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B
I'm very pleased to have you as well. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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C
Thanks, Miranda. So I'm an assistant professor of anthropology at North Carolina State University. But I guess to understand where I'm coming from the book, I am an anthropologist by training, but I really kind of see myself, I guess, as an urbanist. I'm someone who's really fascinated by how cities and the processes that happen in cities, whether they're social, economic, political, can really sort of illuminate larger questions, I guess, about the human condition and about the world that's shaping us. I came to this book. I've had, like, a long fascination with urbanism. I was born and raised in South Africa. I kind of saw the transitions in South African cities that took place between kind of when I was little to the present. And this question of how urban planning, urban life, intersects with politics is just something that I think has followed me through, through that trajectory from undergraduate. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on race and urban planning in Cape Town into the present. And the book kind of came about. I really wanted to do a project, in fact, which was not about South Africa. I'm kind of, I guess from this. Not quite what people would call born free. Not a generation born after apartheid, but a generation that kind of came of age post apartheid. And I know a lot of my sort of colleagues, friends, we were really interested in thinking about what our connection was to the rest of the continent. And through my studies, I did an undergraduate in African history. I did an MA in African studies. I became really interested in thinking about the region and especially sort of Portuguese, like the former Portuguese colonies, Mozambique and Angola, which, from the perception of South Africa, because of the sort of linguistic division, always seemed more distance, even though the country was so bound to them because of the ways that the party of South Africa had kind of invaded these places and been very involved, in fact, the civil wars in these countries. And so when it came to graduate studies, I knew I wanted to work in urbanism. I knew I wanted to work on cities, and I landed up working in Angola. How I came to the book specifically is when I started doing my research in Angola. It was after the civil war, which ended in 2002, and was in the midst of this massive oil boom, when really the government at the time had this huge opportunity because of the amount of kind of foreign reserves that oil was bringing in to really reshape the country. And I had gone there initially to kind of look at these huge urban displacements that were taking place in Luanda. There was mass demolitions of where thousands of people's homes were knocked down, people were being removed edges of the city. And I was interested in what this meant for people's relationship to the state. And what I had expected, which I did find were kind of political criticisms of the state, a questioning of what it meant to be living in a post conflict moment where instead of kind of some sort of peace, people felt their lives are really in turmoil. What I didn't expect, and I guess this is the value of long term immersive fieldwork, is the ways in which this became expressed through very, sometimes even very small details in the built environment. The anger over a concrete block house being knocked down as opposed to a corrugated iron structure, complaints about sort of the design of a government house. And so my attention really got pulled to the ways in which these sort of broad scale political narratives, political moments, sort of international changes in relationships between African countries and China, these large international changes in urban planning, which were all being reflected in sort of the planning process in Luanda, were being felt and critiqued through these very sort of, at times, micro questionings about design and about the built environment. And that's really how I got specifically to the question of aesthetics and the question of kind of the built environment and materiality and thinking about them as spaces of politics and mobilization.
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B
That is a very helpful introduction to the book that gives us a whole bunch of things to talk about in more detail. So thank you for starting us off with that. I think the first thread I want to pick up on is the kind of evolution, I suppose, of the project, of the things you were sort of expecting to find and the things that developed as you started to engage with people in Luanda. So is there anything further you want to tell us about? Kind of the questions that you went in with, the questions that developed as you went, the questions that kind of lead your explorations in the book?
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C
Sure. I mean, I think initially I went in wanting actually to know about citizenship, like how did people understand themselves as, you know, members of a state who have certain rights in a Location where it seemed that their rights were being so undermined by a planning process. This post conflict reconstruction of the city, that in theory was meant to be addressing the harms that had been caused by a war. And so there seemed this contradiction where you had a government that was claiming that it was sort of repairing what had been damaged, but seemed to be damaging so much. Now, I don't think that question ever necessarily disappeared, but in some ways it got enlarged and the focus through which to understand it shifted. And I moved to kind of thinking more broadly. Citizenship is such an important thing, but in my mind very often kind of sticks to legal categories, like what are the formal legal rights that people have? And I started to realize that the way that people felt connected to the government or not felt connected to each other within an urban space was precisely, as I said, through the built environment, through the ways in which they communicated to other people and communicated to the state and whoever was, was kind of watching that they belonged in the city. And so my question kind of expanded, and I guess the question at the heart of the book is really, what does it mean to belong? And in relation to urban space and kind of urban construction, then who belongs in a city? Like, how do we determine what is urban? And given that what we think should be part of the city and who should be part of the city? And in Luanda, what I increasingly realized was that these kinds of questions were expressed through what I have called urban aesthetics. And I'm kind of coming at that in two ways. The one is, I guess, a more sort of everyday way in which you might talk about aesthetics. So design, beauty, decoration, materials. So basically people would say, like, oh, that house is a formally built house. Sometimes the house had no legal status. It just looked good. It looked what people imagined to be formal and official. Therefore, they assumed it was legal and official. People would say things like, well, they knocked down that kind of. That structure, but it's not a real house because it's not built out of XYZ materials. And so it started really dawning on me that a lot of the ways in which decisions, not just kind of in the public, but by the. But by the state and state representatives and construction companies were being made were rarely these aesthetic decisions. And that kind of gets to the second meaning of aesthetic, which is really kind of these judgments, whether they be of beauty, of desire, of disgust, that we basically make with our kind of, if you want, like, sensorial, with our senses. Like, we look at something and we're like, oh, that's gross. Or that's yuck. And we treat it as if it's something which is just a natural reaction or when basically all the literature on it from the social sciences, from histories, from philosophy, shows that these kinds of judgments of beauty and desire and disgust are really deeply rooted in sort of cultural, political and class dynamics. And so my attention really got drawn to these kinds of moments where people expressed an aesthetic judgment of the built environment, of design, of. Of materiality, but also of their kind of experience of the city as an aesthetic experience. And this is. And that was something which really struck me was that belonging was both kind of registered publicly as kind of this material fact, but the experience of it was this deeply embodied sort of subjective experience. And so everything from kind of heat to coolness became markers of where one fitted in kind of a political world. And so I guess the kind of shorter stories I moved from what I think is still an important question, but I think a more obvious sort of political, legal question about how does displacement affect people's understandings and experience of the state to something much more rooted in notions of desire, beauty, the built environment, judgments of disgust. To understand the question of belonging is a much more broader category.
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B
Okay, that's very helpful for sort of expanding out the possibilities of this investigation and also raises some obvious questions. If we're talking about details, we're talking about perception, things that are subjective people's experiences. This isn't something that you can just sort of figure out by looking at government policies. So you mentioned fieldwork earlier. Can you tell us a bit more about the fieldwork you undertook for this?
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C
Sure. So I lived in Angola in terms of long term fieldwork for about a year and a half, and I did about another almost year's worth of kind of subsequent visits afterwards. So that kind of classical deep immersion that one has always asked for generally in anthropology. But the fieldwork itself, I would say was quite eclectic in the sense that most of my work was done in areas that Angolans refer to as museqs. And these are what we might. Some people might call them popular areas, some people call them self built areas. Although the question of whether people actually build houses themselves, or rather contract people to do it is another question. But incrementally built areas, basically areas that are very often called informal, AKA they're not designed by the state or built by the state. And so I had to think about how does one do research in these areas? Mostly because they are actually quite heavily sort of monitored in Luanda. And these were the people being most affected by demolitions, their neighborhoods, people who lived in the sex, their neighborhoods, who were being knocked down by companies, by kind of state by state projects. And so a lot of my research was working either with NGOs or with community organizations in these areas to really partially interview people, but also spend kind of lots of days sitting with people who'd had their homes knocked down or feared their homes had been knocked down, trying to understand what they viewed as kind of possible solutions, what they were doing to try and address these problems, what kind of actions they were taking to try and get compensation. And so kind of getting, in many ways, a geography that stretched across the city. I had originally thought I would do kind of a neighborhood study, but the scale of demolitions and the sense, the ways in which people across the city were communicating with themselves about this question of demolition and planning meant that I would move with organizations to different parts of the city, kind of seeing how they met with people, how they spoke with people, and then sometimes then go kind of deeper with specific groups of people. So there was that kind of classical part of field work, which is about immersion, about getting to know particular people, particular kinds of kind of areas particularly well. I also, however, did a large amount of historical work. I did a lot of. I spent a lot of time in the Luanda Municipal Library, which has an amazing collection of Angolan newspapers, and kind of going through, like, daily copies of the state newspaper. And this was actually partially to kind of track the more contemporary history of the city, because, unfortunately, during the Civil War, there weren't a lot of people who were kind of keeping records of what was happening in Luanda and kind of formally archiving. And I would hear a lot of claims about what had happened in the city, what hadn't happened, but there wasn't really kind of a comprehensive place I could look to understand how the city had changed during the war. And I kind of had to reconstruct that myself. And so I spent a lot of time kind of recreating that narrative and trying to understand what that subjective experience of Luanda was during the war. I also was very interested in kind of the visual imagery of construction. And so I both took a lot of photographs, but also collected a lot of pamphlets and books that were produced by state organizations or construction companies, trying to understand how they were selling this idea of construction and kind of remaking the city to a population that was being so badly affected by this process. How do you convince people that knocking down their homes is something that is going to be good for them? And then Finally, a lot of interviews and actually quite. Quite a few interviews with people who were working for the Angolan state. And I was actually quite proud of that. A lot of people told me that people working in the state would not meet with me and so not to bother to try. But in fact, I did try and I did get, I would say, almost 100% response rate from them. And I think this was because state representatives were actually quite invested in explaining why they thought what they were doing was actually, in the long run, the best thing for the city. And so I really tried to move between, I would say, the people who are being most harmed by these processes, but also try to understand the logics of the people who were implementing them and bring those together to get these sort of different images of the city in transition.
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B
Yeah, lots of things being combined there. So thank you for helping us understand the many pieces that you've put together. It definitely gives a very rich picture of what is going on and what has happened as well. I wonder if we can now turn to talking about a particular part of the city. Some really key neighbourhoods. You focus on a lot that are very clearly, especially combining your historical work and kind of the more recent stuff, core to kind of Luanda's urban spaces, and yet also often sort of marginalised in terms of kind of where government policy is or isn't and sort of the way in which these neighbourhoods are talked about. And that's a really interesting contrast, you know, people on the ground being like, no, no, this is really important, being able to show that historically, but then kind of the government not really agreeing. So can you tell us about these neighborhoods?
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C
Sure. So, I mean, as I mentioned, kind of the large majority of Luandans live in areas that are referred to as musekis. And I would say in most policy literature, these would be referred to as informal areas or. Or sometimes even as slums. And one of the major thrusts of the book is to make the case that we actually need to understand these areas as what I call an indigenous urbanism. And I'll get to kind of why that's so important. So these areas are largely. I mean, there's many different. If you want kinds of museqs, there's not one version of what a musaq looks like or who lives in it. I would say in policy documentation, you will usually find them described as very poor, lacking in infrastructure, having poorly constructed houses, but also at kind of a more macro level. Usually the way that policy, and unfortunately, even scholars sometimes talk about these kinds of areas is as if they are an outcome of poor planning, and that what needs to happen, then is a way of figuring out how to include these areas into the city. And one of the things that I took issue with was this kind of thinking already assumes a normative version of the city. That is, we know that the version of the city that planners are working with is the best version of a city that could exist. And so the problem is how to get the museqs to be like that version of a city or other areas like them. And this kind of rides off, in fact, all the kinds of assumptions that we would usually say are problems. The assumption that these areas are poorly constructed, the assumption that these are kind of informal, malleable areas, that people don't have deep connections to them. And so as I started to do my interviews, one of the things I noticed, and this actually started with the fact that these areas are often described as self built, I. E. That people build their homes themselves, they occupy land, and they build them themselves, was that there was a deep history of construction in these areas. Because to build your own house, you can't just kind of randomly wake up and decide to build a house. You have to have some kind of expertise, whether it's through the family or having watched other people do it, or training in how to do this. And as I kind of pursued that, I realized there was a whole kind of industry of house building. And this is not unique to Luanda. There you will find it in South Africa, you will find it in Senegal, you will find it in Tanzania. There's an industry of informal house building, of people who've apprenticed to be in wangola are called pedreiros, which is kind of like if you want an informal house planner and builder, people making windows for these homes. So that then got me more interested in kind of the history of not just these areas, but I guess, in their building practices. And one of the things, especially drawing of other people's kind of work from about sort of the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, that really dawned on me then was that these areas were not an outcome of just poor planning. These areas actually were part of a long history of city building and residence building that stretched back to the period of the transatlantic slave trade. That you could trace a link between areas that enslaved people had been in the barracoons that enslaved people had been kept in, and the structures that free Africans had lived in. And ultimately being kind of pushed out on to contemporary mossex. And that then posed the question to me of why these areas were considered unurban why they were considered areas that the government thought it had to get rid of, because that was ultimately what was happening post conflict. These areas had kind of been left to grow during the war, partially because Luanda was seen as the safe haven and people and headquarters of the ruling party, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola. Support. The government's focus was on the war. It wasn't really invested in providing large social services. And so they'd really grown exponentially during the war. And now at the end of the war, the state was saying, okay, well, these things are just an unfortunate problem, product of the disorganization of the war, and we have to get rid of them. But that discourse was actually incorrect. These kinds of areas had existed in one form or another, and their practices of construction could be traced back in some ways centuries. And so given this, what was it about them that made it unurban? And my argument was that in fact, they weren't an urban, they were a city. They were a form of indigenous urbanism. That has been, because it has been so maligned by those in power, whether that's kind of the colonial state, whether that's a post colonial government, have been starved of resources in many ways. So yes, most of them do not have adequate infrastructure, and they should have adequate infrastructure. There are a lot of people who are poor, but not everybody who lives in them is poor. And that is partially because of like the difficulty of accessing sort of formal, infrastructurally connected housing in Luanda. That it was basically political discourses that had entered both kind of policymakers, planners, but at times also scholars, language that had prevented us from seeing, I guess us, I would say scholars from seeing the fact that these areas could be viewed as a kind of indigenous urbanism. And so given that, I then began doing research into how people in these areas kind of conceived them as such. What were the stories they told about them building museqs and how both kind of the fact of construction, but also housing design and materials in massex took on very politically pertinent. Took on a very politically pertinent status that in fact, whilst people would say, like, yes, I feel like my area is underdeveloped because it doesn't have electricity, there were still very firm that if someone was going to knock down their concrete block home, which they'd spent 10 years building, they needed adequate compensation. And it needed to be recognized that they were kind of what I call kind of urban autochthons. They had built the city before the formal city had even arrived where they lived. And so it's kind of from that trajectory, recognizing this space as urban, not as a product of kind of planning on wrong, but as a product of kind of, if you want like an indigenous sense of aesthetics based on what was possible, a long history of construction, that these kind of spaces opened up as these incredibly political sites and a politics that was rooted in design and construction.
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B
Yeah, that's really helpful to understand how those pieces go together. And from a sort of the politics of it point of view, it is of course, these communities you've been telling us about that really feel this connection to kind of the political. No, no, no, we are here and this is on purpose. The government also clearly has sort of political points about what is built and where. If we're talking about the oil boom, obviously you mentioned there's a lot of money involved and there really is a lot of money and it could be used for a whole bunch of different purposes. So it's really interesting that we, a lot of the focus does seem to be on the government building buildings and saying that kind of we're going to build big shiny buildings and that's how we're using the money. And it's all about us as the government providing care and comfort. You have all sorts of examples of kind of really specific messaging using words like that. So the government is also seeing sort of housing and building as being really strongly political.
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C
Why is that? That's a wonderful question. And I think the kind of first point, I mean, so a lot of people who've looked at Angola's oil boom and post conflict construction will generally point to two to three things. The first thing that is always brought up is the fact that, you know, if you do big construction, it means big contracts and therefore it means that there's kind of tenders and corruption, et cetera involved. And that is true, but I think it is a lot more complicated than that. So the MPLA wins militarily, what is a 27 year long war and comes out, and it's very often portrayed as coming out and being in this incredibly strong position, as having sort of militarily won the war. But what people forget is that very often, and other people such as Ricardo Suarez de Oliveira have written on this, that the mpla, there's large swaths of Angola where the MPLA has never been present, ever or barely present. And so construction becomes a way of, on the one hand, and this is kind of in the ruling party and government's policy reports trying to, they claim, sort of stabilize a country. There's been massive amounts of infrastructure destroyed, and not just sort of physical infrastructure in terms of like bridges, roads, but if you want social infrastructure, hospitals, clinics, schools. I mean, this just the scale of destruction of the Angolan civil war is really appalling. As one would expect after 27 years, there's huge swaths of the country which have incredibly high numbers of landmines. And so the government makes this argument that in order to kind of address the destruction of the war, before they can even really get to larger social issues, they have to basically kind of fix the country. They need to build, they need to reconnect the country, parts of the country to each other. They need to get the economy going. And to do that, they need to invest in construction, and they need. So that's the one part. And they need to address kind of the needs of the population. And the way to do this, they claim, is through building big infrastructure, again, whether that be sort of roads, water, electricity, but also providing housing. And so you get this move to sort of these large housing projects as a way that the government is going to address what it claims was kind of the disorganization caused by the war. Now, many people have looked at this and said this was. These sort of projects, especially the housing projects, were a means through which the government was trying to sort of build its post conflict legitimacy, like appeal to a population and say, we didn't just win the war militarily, we are the best people to guide you in this post conflict moment. And I think there's a lot of truth there. I think this was seen as a means to kind of build population, buy in. Where the caring comfort comes in is that as part of this, the government, like the MPLA government, has to try and arguably reconfigure its relationship to the broader population. It's been a wartime state. It's been a state that's very. It's a very authoritarian state. It's a country where there's not a lot of sort of political rights are not easily exercised, freedom of speech is not easily exercised. And it's trying to kind of say, like, okay, in a way, ignore that and see what we can physically provide for you. And if you felt deprived because of the war, like you couldn't get a house, you couldn't get clean water, we are going to show that we care for you, that we are concerned about our citizens by precisely providing this. And one of the. And so that's kind of the one side that this discourse of care is about trying to reconfigure what the state means, that it's trying to build its legitimacy by saying, we can also deliver on these needs that you want. And what you find is, especially in Luanda, One of the things that's interesting about Luanda is that with the exception of sort of 1975 and the buildup to independence and then in 1992, which was directly after, in October to November 92, after the kind of the first post independence election, Luanda itself didn't experience a lot of kind of extreme violence from the war. Most of the fighting was more in the interior of the country. And so in a sense, the experience of war for a lot of people in the city was kind of the sort of the increasing dilapidation of the city, the sort of the collapse of a lot of municipal services. So rubbish collection became very bad. Maintenance of housing, because most of the housing was state housing was poorly performed, Elevators broke down, a lot of water cuts, a lot of electricity cuts. And so something I realized as I spoke to people was there was a sense that if you wanted domestic and sensorial comfort were in fact, the ultimate sign of state care, that if you could be in your house and the lights were on and water was running and the refrigerator was on and you could keep your food cool so you didn't have to go purchase it, every day was a sign that the state was kind of working for you. And so one of the things I became interested in was precisely how sort of, if you want, state propaganda tried to play off that notion of comfort. And one of the things I talk about in the book is there's been a lot of writing about sort of construction, spectacle, oil spectacle, mega infrastructure projects, which I think is very often quite mocking of the kinds of sort of state propaganda or imagery that come out of this, there's a little bit mocking of people's seeming willingness to sort of buy into the messaging of those images and points out that people might not be able to access it. Or this is all kind of exactly propaganda or sparkle, and it's not going to last over the long term. And one of the arguments I try to push back upon is, but, you know, actually that spectacle and those images is speaking, these states are really smart because they know their citizenry. And the way that these images are presented and the kinds of projects being proposed are speaking to sort of domestic demands, historical demands about what makes people feel included in a state. And so a lot of work was done to try and say, okay, well, in terms of sort of Visual work, propaganda work, choice of projects. Yes, there is. People are being, you know, expelled from the areas that, that they live in. There is a lot of violence. But what I argue the state was trying to do was say, okay, but that violence is justified. And this is why. So really trying to kind of make violence. I mean, because that's what happens when your house is knocked down. It's very violent. People, police are very often there, people are expelled. So kind of try and make people think that that extreme violence, that police presence, that loss of home is ultimately in kind of the propaganda that was out there, a form of state care. And that's why construction, specifically infrastructure, images of brightly lit buildings, sort of promises of running water become so key, because it's the tools that the state has to try and convince a population that sort of displacement and eviction and violence ultimately are going to be good for them. Whether that's successful is a different question. But I think there's actually a very kind of almost smart and deeply aware understanding of domestic politics that plays out in the oil spectacle that the state is producing in Luanda.
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B
Yeah, it's definitely targeted, it's definitely strategic, it's thought through and aimed at a particular goal. But as you said, whether or not it actually succeeds is something of a different question. Because in fact, you discuss in the book that it's more in this boom period that actually Luanda gets more dangerous for residents. So is it because of these violent evictions or what's going on that makes this post war moment actually in some ways more dangerous for the people in the city?
- [35:04]
C
Yeah, I mean, this was a point that was brought up by quite a few people that I interviewed and interacted with. And part of it has to do, again, like I said, with the fact that during the war, in a sense, people were, if you want, I don't want to quite say abandoned by the state, but let's say left by the state, in some cases abandoned. So basically, huge numbers of people tried to make their way to Luanda during the war, precisely because Luanda, in comparison to the rest of the country, was seen as a sort of haven. It was a place where a lot of food imports came in, where some level of infrastructure and governance was still working comparison to many other parts of the of the country. And so what would happen is people would come in, they would try and find family or someone they knew, they would try find a job very often in the informal economy. And then bit by bit, they would save up to buy a piece of land, sometimes Occupy a piece of land, save and start building a home. And so you have this long cycle linked to kind of the expansion of mersex of land, land occupation, house construction. And what really happened during the war is that yes, people were very much deprived of kind of state services, but it was quite rare that someone would come and say, I'm going to come knock down your house. And this is partially because big projects are just not happening, partially because state capacity is just not that great, partially because oil is not worth as much yet. And yes, and the government is really focused on the war. And so it's kind of this stasis of sort of abandonment, but also being left to kind of make your life however you can. So I'm not saying it's like a great situation, but your house is not going to get knocked down unless there's something very specific that happens. And this kind of starts to change in the 90s where you start to see the first sort of semi state states sponsored housing projects which began unfolding in the south of the city, what became known as the Luanda Seoul project, which eventually landed up being largely kind of gated communities for elites and foreigners employed by oil companies. And you start at that point seeing evictions right in the south of the city. They're large, ish, but not en masse yet. And you start kind of seeing what eventually becomes a whole apparatus of kind of eviction compensation rehousing, sometimes no compensation starting to be built up. And the first kind of symbol of this really of the fact that this is going to become something much more happens in 2001 when a very well known musec area called Boa Vista gets very brutally sort of knocked down. There's helicopters, there's police encircling it, people are arrested, people are beaten up, bullets are shot at, when the neighborhood kind of tries to resist and the people in that area are moved by sort of truck and bus and dumped in an area that becomes known as Zango, which eventually becomes the largest state re housing zone in the country. And that kind of initiates this process where people had assumed, okay, the state is not providing anything for me, it's not providing a job, it's not providing electricity, it's not providing water, but it's leaving me to at least build my life. And what happens after the war is for a lot of people in wassec areas who had thought that if nothing else was certain, at least they would be left to kind of build and start establishing a life based off kind of having built this home and having some location of certainty, that certainty gets removed from them. And so in some sense then Luanda, whilst there's more money circulating, the electricity becomes more frequent, et cetera, for people on the sex life becomes much more uncertain because you never know when suddenly someone's going to say there has to be like large scale redevelopment of your area and they're going to kind of come knock down your home. And this is also really then reinforced by the fact that there's a series of laws passed which ultimately strip kind of the status of good faith occupation away. And so people had thought that by building, by kind of establishing themselves in place, that they had some kind of recognition from the state. And all that certainty at a legislative level, at kind of everyday level, at a neighborhood level just disappears. And so it becomes a site of incredible uncertainty and sort of danger for a large majority of the population.
- [39:58]
B
Okay, that's really interesting to understand because I think more maybe than some of the other things we've discussed so far, that really kind of is some myth busting of what one might expect to happen in a post war moment. So very helpful to have that explained. Another thing I wonder if we can do, maybe some myth busting around is kind of the way in which critiques against this government policy manifest. Because you mentioned briefly Grafton corruption earlier. And of course that is something that has very much been discussed in the context of Angola, also many other countries, especially when we're talking about kind of oil revenue and natural resource revenue like that. And some of that comes up in the book. But you also talk about critiquing the aesthetics of government buildings being really a clear avenue for political dissent. So not necessarily saying kind of you've overspent here or it's super corrupt, but like it's ugly.
- [40:49]
C
Right.
- [40:50]
B
Which is sort of a different angle to take. So can you tell us kind of why that became a way in which people could express dissatisfaction with the government and why sort of one of the aesthetic charges levied against was sort of, it's ugly and it's foreign. Like that's really interesting that that's what like unhappiness could be expressed as.
- [41:14]
C
Sure. You know, it's interesting. It's almost something I only picked on by looking back at my notes near kind of the end of my long term field work. I'd collected all these statements about people saying buildings were ugly or they were designed wrong or they didn't like the roofs. But something I think to keep in mind is yes, there I think when people look at a country like Angola for a long time, because it was and remains a very authoritarian country where kind of public dissent is not necessarily welcomed at all by the ruling party. There was this constant claim that was happening that like the MPLA was successfully building its kind of hegemony over the country, especially through this process of national reconstruction, which is what this sort of post conflict construction boom was called in the press, that by building, by establishing itself in these different places, that it was successfully kind of claiming its space as ultimately a nominally, I mean, not an official one party state, but basically kind of an extremely dominant party state. Now around this time you did get more public expressions of dissent. So you had the first sort of public protests by small groups of youth which have now become something much bigger, like especially young men and hip hop artists. But most people were not engaging on that. And again, the argument that you saw from a lot of scholars was just that this was impossible to really critique the MPLA people were too scared. But that wasn't really what I was seeing in the world around me when I was doing my research. If I would show a picture of a state built high rise, someone might say, yeah, that looks nice. Because they, you know, it looks like it's, I don't know, it'll have good infrastructure, but. But then they would say like, yeah, but it looks like it's designed wrong. How am I meant to live in that? And so I started picking up on people saying like, you know, this design is wrong, this is ugly, this is, this is going to be too hot as a kind of critique, an everyday critique that people could engage in without having to be called out for being explicitly anti mpla. And I think one of the really important things about that for me is understanding. I think cultural studies has done this very well when people look at kind of literature or dance song, but that there's various ways in which political dissent can be expressed and those means of expression have a lot to do both with what is possible, but also kind of the cultural idioms that are present at the time. And construction was the big thing. And given that the state was the big figure driving construction, like there are lots of private firms, but usually the client was the state. To say that something was poorly designed was ultimately you saying, this government, the state doesn't know who to design things for, doesn't know how to do things, it doesn't know what Angolans really want. And so the built environment really became a, a way for different groups, whether it was kind of heritage activists to say like the Government doesn't appreciate our history. Whether it was people building in the museq saying they don't appreciate our architecture, whether it was saying these buildings are ugly. And very often they came up and that the claim would be like, oh, well, these are designed by Chinese, by like Chinese firms for Chinese people. They're not thinking of us. And I think the foreignness aspect became very important there. And this is because, as I was saying previously, you know, this is a moment in Luanda where people who feel very strongly attached to the city feel like they're being dislodged. And the most visible space of that kind of dislocation is the forms of buildings that are quite literally like physically displacing them. But with that a massive influx of, of kind of foreigners from across the world. So not just Chinese people tend to focus on China, but there's South Africans, there's Lebanese, there are Brazilians. But the big figure for a lot of people was China. Because this was. China was viewed as kind of a new presence in Angola. And so there was a sense that the government had made these sort of major pacts with all different foreign powers to build buildings that Angolans felt were not designed for Angolans. And so then the question became, well, who are these buildings for? They must be for foreigners. They must be based on foreign desires. AKA this is not a democratic process. This is not a process which is taking account of sort of the Angolan people. And sometimes that could flare into xenophobia. So it was interesting to track, but sometimes actually also worrying. But why that became particularly salient is that there has long been kind of a local, if you want, discussion about foreigners. And this has to do with kind of a long standing discourse. Even during that, actually during the civil war, where the leader of unito, which was kind of the, if you want, like the rebel movement or the movement fighting the mpla, Jonas Savimbi very often used to mobilize accusations that the leadership of the MPLA were kind of not truly indigenous because they were on the coast and they were kind of this cultural mixture that not enough of them spoke indigenous languages. So there's kind of this long standing discourse which accuses a lot of kind of the political elite. And it's, and I just want to preface that it's. They are Angolan. It's not like this is just kind of political discourses that exist out there. I'm not necessarily agreeing with this discourse, but a discourse that is available to pick up that critiques that elite for either being foreign or more Interested in foreigners. And so there's a way in which that very long standing discourse about who is African, who is Angolan, what does it really mean to be Angolan? Slid into the symbol of post conflict politics, which was construction and kind of intersects. And so the critique of foreign design really becomes a critique of the government and claims that kind of these buildings are ugly become a critique of government capacity to cater for Angolans as opposed to some other kind of population. And so I, yeah, and so I became really interested in this. How do we think about, I mean, especially in a moment like this internationally, what critique looks like under quite authoritarian conditions?
- [48:02]
B
Yeah, that's really helpful because as soon as you sort of peel back the layers there, it's like, oh, this is very clearly a critique. If you sort of know how to parse the history and kind of why certain things are salient in particular moments. This isn't a random throwaway comment, oh, I don't like that roof. Right. Like there's really something else being said there. So thank you for helping us interpret that. And obviously dissent. These sorts of critiques do cause some problems for the government, but to some extent, when one has lots of oil money, one can ignore naysayers, at least to some degree. What about though, when you don't have oil money anymore, what happened to these state projects once the oil boom wore off?
- [48:46]
C
Yes, that's a great question. So, I mean, I think it's in 2012, the then president, Jose Eduardo Santos, who's been in power for 30 something years by then, kind of makes a statement that national reconstruction is over and they're moving to national development. But in fact these projects continue because the oil is there. And then 2014, 2015, for anyone who works on the oil world will know, there's just kind of this collapse of the oil market. And so across the world, from Trinidad and Tobago to Angola to Equatorial guinea, where there have been sort of these oil boom constructions everywhere, a lot of these projects suddenly slow down. And what happens is at first the government kind of thinks it can carry on with them, but the funds just dry up. And because so much of its legitimacy, kind of post conflict legitimacy, was built on kind of promising to deliver these projects, this really starts to kind of induce a crisis. And people call it the crisis, like there's sort of a popular crisis because it has now both failed to kind of deliver en masse in the way that it promised to. But people are sort of looking around and saying, okay, we've had more than we've had about A decade of kind of massive oil profits, massive building, and yet we can't see sort of substantive improvements in our lives. Yes, electricity is a bit more regular. Yes, there's slightly more water connections, but are there far more opportunities? Are our schooling systems better? Has there been a proper effort to kind of address the broader political questions that opened up when the war ended?
- [50:33]
B
About.
- [50:33]
C
About culpability, about how people were harmed? Veterans are still not being paid, or sometimes are not being paid, their kind of veteran pensions. And so all those kinds of crises that the government was trying to paper over or avoid by kind of focusing on construction, but that were also, in a sense, being delayed. Because oil money, yes, it's kind of enclave, but it also circulates to a certain extent throughout society. It makes certain things possible. It makes it possible for people to have slightly more money to buy things. All of a sudden, the kind of those deprivations that hadn't been addressed became very glaring. And so these projects start to slow down because the government can't even get enough forex and foreign exchange to pay suppliers. And so you see this sort of rapid not end. And I think that's what's interesting is like, some of these buildings are kind of now being completed almost like a decade after the oil boom. You see the slowing down, massive slowing down of the project. There's a huge plan for kind of redeveloping Luanda, which is launched in 2015, which has largely been shelved. And so ultimately kind of a. I don't quite want to say collapse, because there's still this aspiration amongst certain parts of the bureaucracy to kind of proceed, but I would say a perpetual delay of the projects.
- [52:04]
B
Yeah, yeah, That's a pretty big gap.
- [52:07]
C
Yes, it's a massive gap. I mean, I think the project I always remember is there is a shopping center built in what is called. Which was meant to be built in Kinoshisha Square and was started in 2008 and part of it was only completed last year. So there's kind of this long, almost like morbid afterlife of these projects that were very destructive and then the money ran out, but people don't quite want to let go of them in very disturbing ways. And so we're really going to only see like the full. I don't think we'll ever see like the full post oil city, because it's, in a way, there are these last gasps which were always reappearing when you think they've been shut down.
- [52:52]
B
And just because a project's been shut down doesn't Mean that the neighborhood that was there before can kind of obviously go back.
- [52:59]
C
No, no. And sometimes they'll just keep these areas shuttered off until they. I'm keeping saying they. I don't know if it's a private investor or state representative, whatever, hopes that they can do something.
- [53:09]
B
Yeah, no, there's clearly still so much that kind of will develop somehow. I suppose we'll find out. So is that what you're continuing to investigate, or have you moved on to other projects you want to give us a brief sneak preview of?
- [53:23]
C
Sure. So I am still working on Lu. I've kind of two major projects. I'm still working on Luanda, but actually I'm moving back in time. So one of my projects is looking at Cuban Angolan cooperation in urban planning during Angola's socialist period. Something I really realized when I was doing the research for this project is that almost everything I read kept on saying, you know, during the socialist period, there was nothing built or almost nothing built except for a few Cuban buildings. And then like, you know, the MERSECS expanded. And I always found this like an interesting narrative because I could see things that had been built during the socialist period, but somehow that history had just been kind of marginalized, ignored. And so I became just very interested in some sense in recording that. And what I eventually found through sort of early research was there are sort of thousands of apartment blocks that were built in collaboration between Cuban teams and Angolan teams, which sort of brought prefabrication technology to Angola, were aimed at housing kind of an emerging civil service, international volunteers called cooperantes. And so I've kind of become interested in how we can kind of read the construction of a post independent statehood, both sort of institutionally, through what it took to build these buildings, but also in a sense for people who lived inside the buildings, what kind of a socialist statehood looked like. Because these were highly. It's one of the few spaces that were actually, in fact, highly managed by state institutions. And so I've just started on that, trying to think about kind of what this Atlantic post independence kind of state construction, citizen making looks like, especially as kind of a class project. So that's kind of one thing I'm doing. And then I actually have a project on the other side of the continent to sort of looking at Nairobi and specifically financialization during the pandemic, which I know many of us want to forget. But I was involved in a. A research collaboration with a number of researchers looking at unclaving in different African cities. And I landed up actually interviewing People who were in finance who financed formal construction, and this is something I've become very interested in, is that so much literature on African cities is about informality. And there seems to be an assumption that we know about the formal and that's or what even it means to be formal. And that's partially because so much, much of what is built, quote, unquote, formally in African cities is built by states because there's not a lot of major domestic capital in most countries outside of the state, but there is in fact, quite a lot of construction which is not state, you know, state led necessarily. And so I've become interested in kind of how financial flows that are largely managed by capital outside of the country is shaping African cities. What kinds of buildings are there, what can get planned. And Nairobi is a real hub of that and an interesting site, both because there are a lot of projects there, but there is some notable domestic capital that can also build. And so kind of what those tensions are and what that means for planning and sovereignty in African cities, given the extent of kind of the private market being so much located outside of the outside of the continent. So that's kind of the two major, very different. But yeah, major research areas that I'm hoping to pursue.
- [56:57]
B
Very different, but both very interesting. So best of luck with both of those projects.
- [57:02]
C
Thanks so much. Thanks so much.
- [57:05]
B
Anyone who wants to read more about what we've been discussing while you work on them can, of course, read the book titled the Aesthetics of Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil Boom Luanda, published by the University of North Carolina Press International in 2024. Claudia, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [57:22]
C
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate.