Åkesson, Lisa - Postcolonial Portuguese Migration To Angola - Migrants or Masters (2018)

MIGRATION, DIASPORAS
AND CITIZENSHIP
Series Editors: Robin Cohen and
Zig Layton-Henry
POSTCOLONIAL
PORTUGUESE
MIGRATION
TO ANGOLA
Migrants or Masters?
Lisa Åkesson
Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship
Series editors
Robin Cohen
Department of International Development
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Zig Layton-Henry
Department of Politics and International Studies
University of Warwick
Coventry, UK
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The Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship series covers three important
aspects of the migration process: firstly, the determinants, dynamics and
characteristics of international migration. Secondly, the continuing attach-
ment of many contemporary migrants to their places of origin, signified by
the word ‘diaspora’, and thirdly the attempt, by contrast, to belong and
gain acceptance in places of settlement, signified by the word ‘citizenship’.
The series publishes work that shows engagement with and a lively appre-
ciation of the wider social and political issues that are influenced by inter-
national migration and encourages a comparative perspective.
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Lisa Åkesson
Postcolonial
Portuguese Migration
to Angola
Migrants or Masters?
Lisa Åkesson
School of Global Studies
University of Gothenburg
Gothenburg, Sweden
Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship

ISBN 978-3-319-73051-6 ISBN 978-3-319-73052-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73052-3
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To Noa and Simon
Acknowledgements
This book draws on the support from many persons in Luanda. I owe a
great and profound gratitude to my three excellent female research assis-
tants, who provided me with invaluable contacts and many insights.
Academic colleagues and friends at Universidade Agostinho Neto as well
as friends outside the academic circles offered me great hospitality and
shared their visions about how to navigate life in contemporary Luanda. I
also want to thank my Angolan and Portuguese interviewees who patiently
answered my many questions during conversations that sometimes lasted
for many hours. I would have liked to mention all of you by name, but the
obscure workings of the Angolan party-state and the long history of wide-
spread state control and repression made me decide to preserve the ano-
nymity of everyone who resides in Angola.
During my research visits in Luanda I was accompanied by Pétur
Skúlason Waldorff, Reykjavík University, and his collegiality and kindness
made my work much more easy and fun. At the initial stages of fieldwork,
Erika Eckeskog and Lena Sundh at the Swedish Embassy in Luanda
opened up for important contacts. I wrote the main part of the book dur-
ing the last months of 2016, when I was a visiting research fellow at the
International Migration Institute, University of Oxford, and I want to
thank colleagues and staff at IMI for providing such a great environment
for concentrated writing. I finalized the text during a stay at The Swedish
Institute in Athen’s guest house in Kavala, and also here I encountered
many nice people and a fantastic environment.
vii
viii Acknowledgements
Caroline Valente Cardoso, University of Gothenburg; Maria Eriksson

Baaz, Uppsala University; and Palgrave Macmillan’s anonymous reviewer
have carefully read and commented upon earlier drafts. I have benefitted
enormously from Carolina’s deep and detailed insights into the research
topic and Maria’s profound grounding in postcolonial theory.
The project has been financed by the Swedish Research Council.
Contents
1 Introduction: Setting the Scene 1

Luso-Angolan History 7
Creoles, Assimilados and Settlers 8
Independence, Retornados and Civil War 10
Peace, Reconstruction, Economic Boom and Bust 11
Deep Entanglements: Contemporary Political and Economic
Relations Between Luanda and Lisbon 14
Trajectories of Portuguese Migrants in Luanda 16
Portuguese and Angolan Identities 22
Methodological Considerations 24
References 29
2 Postcolonial Encounters in a Lusotropical World 33

Hybridity and Ambivalence 37
Portuguese Postcolonial Studies and the Lusotropical Ideology 41
Lusotropicalism 42
Celebrating Hybridity (or Not): Sex and Race
in the Empire 43
Postlusotropicalism in the Shadow of a Lost Empire 46
Postlusotropicalism in Contemporary Luanda 48
Stories About the Colonial Past 48
Postlusotropical Positions and Contemporary Relations 52
References 54
ix
x CONTENTS
3 Mobile Subjects 57
Migrants? 59
Expatriates? 60
Return? 63
Returnees and Newcomers 66
Return as a National Re-conquest 67
Integrated? 69
North-South Migration and the Familiar Concepts of Mobility 73
References 74
4 Changing Relations of Power and the Party-State 77

The Party-State and the Angolan Business Owners 78
Securing Immigration Documents 79
Whiteness as a Marker of Potential Undocumented
Migrants 82
Encounters with the Traffic Police 85
Conflict-Ridden Business Relations 86
Corruption and Portuguese Business 89
Voices on Changing Power Relations 91
References 93
5 The Power in and of Labour Relations 95

Labour Relations in Colonial Times 96
Workplace Hierarchies 99
Portuguese Getting Jobs Without Proper Qualifications 101
Motives for Hiring Portuguese 102
Salary Differences 105
The Workplace as a Primary Arena of Postcolonial Encounters 107
References 111
6 Identities at Work 113
“The Laid-Back Angolan” 114
Cultural Racism 116
“The Angolan Reality” 117
The Postcolonial Legacy and Beyond 119
CONTENTS
xi
“The Ignorant Angolan and the Knowledgeable Portuguese” 121

“The Arrogant Portuguese” 125
Racism, Class and Arrogance 126
The Colonial Legacy and the Co-production of Identities 129
References 131
7 Conclusions: Continuity, Rupture and Hybridity 133

A Hybrid Space Fraught with Tensions 136
References 139
References 141
Index 151
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Setting the Scene
Abstract For the first time in postcolonial history, a substantial number of

migrants from a European ex-colonial power are seeking a better life in an
African ex-colony. This unexpected process has its origins in the conjunc-
ture of the financial crisis hitting Portugal and an oil-fuelled economic
boom happening simultaneously in Angola. Building on ethnographic
interviews, this book analyses how Portuguese migrants and Angolan resi-
dents reconstruct their identities and relations of power when they interact
in Luanda. At the forefront are questions about postcolonial continuities
and ruptures in a macro-context of radical change. The present chapter
provides a historical, political and economic background to the contem-
porary encounters between Angolans and Portuguese in Luanda. It also
describes the methods and material that the book is based on.
Keywords Portuguese migration to Angola • South-North migration •

Power • Identity • Postcolonial continuity and rupture • Luanda
For the first time in African postcolonial history, citizens of a former

European colonial power are seeking improved living conditions in an ex-
colony on a massive scale. The long line of Portuguese women and men
outside the Angolan consulate in Lisbon is a telling sign of a new era. In
the queue, people from different walks of life wait anxiously for the
© The Author(s) 2018 1

L. Åkesson, Postcolonial Portuguese Migration to Angola,
Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73052-3_1
2 L. ÅKESSON
c onsulate to open its doors. The majority of them have their hopes pinned
on acquiring an immigration document that would allow them to earn a
secure income in Angola. The queue outside the consulate indicates a
reversal of migration flows. Up until the early 2000s, many Angolans
moved to Portugal in search of personal security and a stable livelihood,
but now migrants move from the former metropole to the former colony.
An indication of the magnitude of this reversal is that in 2013 economic
remittances from Angola to Portugal were 16 times the remittance trans-
fers in the opposite direction (Observatório da Emigração 2016).
This unexpected event in European-African relations has its origins in
the accidental conjunction of Angola rising1 and Portugal falling. In 2008,
the North Atlantic financial crisis hit Portugal with the force of a gale.
Drastically decreased salaries, massive unemployment and deep uncer-
tainty soon overshadowed the life of many Portuguese, and a prolonged
recession begun. In 2013, one fifth of the population was unemployed,
the minimum salary was 485 euro and a normal age pension was less than
500 euro (Instituto Nacional de Eststística 2016; Portugal 2015). Most
Portuguese experienced a rapid decline in their social and economic situa-
tion, and many found it impossible to sustain themselves and dependent
family members. Simultaneously, a flow of international and Portuguese
media reports described a rapid economic development in the former col-
ony of Angola. Various sources made estimations of two-digit gross
domestic product (GDP) growth rates, and the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported a record macro-
economic growth of 27% for the year 2007 (OECD 2011: 52). The pro-
longed civil war had finally come to an end in 2002, and a few years later
the state had launched a comprehensive infrastructure reconstruction pro-
gramme. The oil-fuelled economy controlled by the party-state was char-
acterised by “turbo-capitalism” (Schubert 2016a), and in combination
with a lack of experienced professionals in most sectors the economic
boom created a high demand for skilled and semi-skilled labour. Owners
of Portuguese companies threatened by economic failure also came to see
Angola as an opening, and many of them hastened to develop trade and
business relations with Angolan economic interests. In a short period of
time, this development created new and fortified economic ties and depen-
dencies at multiple levels between the two countries.
Global discourses on migration as well as international migration
regimes tend to build on and reinforce the image of economic migrants’
border crossings as solely taking place in a South-North direction. This
INTRODUCTION: SETTING THE SCENE 3
book unsettles this idea by looking at the contemporary Portuguese labour

migration to Angola, which arguably is a novel historical development. As
such, it challenges stereotypical understandings of contemporary mobility
and makes us remember that the directions of people’s migratory trajecto-
ries largely are unforeseen. In the 1990s and early 2000s, public debate
and migration research in Portugal had been preoccupied with the inte-
gration of citizens from the former African colonies (e.g. Machado et al.
2011), but in the second half of the 2000s the discourse changed. Also, in
relation to the field of international migration studies, contemporary
European labour migration to Africa represents something new. While
there is a wealth of literature on international economic/labour migra-
tion, this literature is mainly focused on South-North migration and, to a
lesser extent, South-South labour migration. However, there is of yet little
research on economic migrants moving North-South. Moreover, the
existing literature on North-South migration tends to focus on privileged
travel and so-called “expatriates” (e.g. Amit 2007; Hindman 2013;
Leonard 2010). Estimates indicate that between 3% and 6% of all migrants
move from the North to the South and that China and Brazil are impor-
tant countries of destination (Laczko and Brian 2013). While Portugal
constitutes a specific case in Europe because of its severe economic crisis
and its history as both a colonial power and a country of emigration, it is
possible that North-South migration will increase in the future. Such new
movements will give rise to new questions that need to be addressed
within the vast research field attending to international migration, and this
book represents a step in that direction.
The need to secure a reliable income is a reality shared by economic
migrants all over the world and also by the Portuguese in Angola. Often,
their main motive for migrating has been to get out of unemployment or
precarious employment conditions in Portugal and thereby avoid social
degradation. Some were heavily indebted, others wanted to be able to
keep their house in Portugal or continue financing their children’s studies.
In Angola, they have identified possibilities of finding a stable job and
comparatively higher income and often also socio-professional advance-
ment. Some of the migrants have opted for earning enough money to raise
a family or to sustain family members left behind in Portugal. Thus,
acquiring a status as a legal immigrant and successfully integrating into the
labour market is the goal for most of these migrants, as for other interna-
tional labour migrants. Yet, like other international migrants, the
Portuguese do not always obtain these objectives, and they often find
4 L. ÅKESSON
themselves in a subordinate position in relation to powerful representa-

tives of the Angolan party-state. What is special in this case, however, is
that the Portuguese migrants’ inferior position in relation to the Angolan
party-state is combined with a position of symbolic power grounded in the
Portuguese historical identity as coloniser.
Thus, this is a case of ex-colonisers moving to the ex-colony. In the
African context, there is no other example of a high number of people
moving from a European ex-colonial power to an ex-colony on the conti-
nent. On a global scale, there is a limited European migration to Latin
America ex-colonies. Some Portuguese have left for Brazil (Marques and
Góis 2016) and there is a recent Spanish migration to Ecuador, Bolivia
and Colombia (Laczko and Brian 2013). In this last case, however, many
of these migrants once left Latin America for Spain, and now they are
returning to a country where they are perceived to be a part of the native
population. As I will make clear, some of the Portuguese are actually also
returning to Angola where they grew up as children to Portuguese settlers
in colonial times. Thus, they are returnees, but they are hardly considered
to belong to the native population.
This book explores everyday postcolonial encounters (Faier and Rofel
2014) between the Portuguese ex-colonisers turned migrants and the ex-
colonised Angolan “hosts” in the Angolan capital of Luanda. The thrust
in the chapters to follow is an analysis of how the Luso-African postcolonial
heritage interplays with the recent migration from Portugal to Angola in
the (re)construction of power relations and identities. In doing that, the
book proposes an interpretation of the Angolan-Portuguese relationship
as characterised not only by hierarchies of power but also by ambivalence
and hybridity. Arguably, the identities of the ex-colonised Angolan and the
Portuguese ex-coloniser are mutually constituted and constructed out of
a history of interdependence. This history has been marked by deeply
unequal and often violent power relations, yet it has produced two tightly
interwoven identities and a sense of intimacy between the two, though of
a very fraught and conflictive nature. The Angolans and Portuguese who
meet in Luanda are well known to each other; when they meet, they con-
struct their identities interdependently.
The focus on power relations and identities implies that inquiries into
postcolonial continuities and discontinuities are central to this book. In
researching continuities and ruptures, I take the “post” in “postcolonial”
to signal both “continuance” and “after”. On one hand, many of the colo-
nial relations of power are still in place, not the least in terms of inequali-
ties between Angolans and Portuguese with regard to accumulation of

cultural and symbolic capital (Bourdieu 2005). On the other hand, enor-
mous social, cultural, political and economic changes have taken place in
both Angola and Portugal since Angolan independence in 1975, and these
clearly rule out any notions about the postcolonial period as simply an
ongoing and continuous process in relation to the colonial past. As Stuart
Hall remarks, the postcolonial not only is “after” but also “goes beyond”
the colonial (1996a: 253) and in that process new identities and power
positions emerge.
Explorations of identity constructions play a key role in postcolonial
studies, highlighting the ways in which identities are relational and shaped
by shifting power relations (Hall 1996a). Identities are made and remade
through discourse and practice; they are fundamentally relational and
shaped in interaction with important others. It is only in relation to its
“constitutive outside” (Hall 1996b) that identities can be construed. In
Luanda, it was obvious that Angolans’ and Portuguese’ talk about the
Other also reflected understandings of Self. This implies that while I use
the terms Angolans and Portuguese throughout the text, I do not see
them as fixed and essential categories. Rather, I use this categorisation “to
evoke contingent and relational formations of meaning and practice that
are constantly being made and remade” (Faier 2009: 8).
Colonial power relations continue to shape the production of power in
the interplay between the ex-coloniser and the ex-colonised. Power per-
meates identities through the meanings we provide to Self and Other,
shaping practice in various ways (Eriksson Baaz 2005). In the present
study, power relations are conspicuously unstable and contested. The
dominance of the Portuguese ex-colonisers is broken as they are depen-
dent on being accepted on the labour market and among business partners
in the former colony. But power relations cannot be reduced to the ques-
tion of access to economic resources; they are also created through the
ongoing production of cultural ideas. These ideas, in turn, are informed
by the colonial history and its articulation with the changes taking place in
the postcolonial era.
In researching everyday postcolonial encounters, I have chosen to espe-
cially attend to identities and power relations at workplaces. There are a
number of reasons for this. First, contacts between Angolans and
Portuguese in Luanda were often limited to workplaces. The Angolans
and Portuguese I met talked often about their lack of contact with people
from the other category outside the workplace. Thus, their relationships
6 L. ÅKESSON
were often of a detached kind rather than characterised by friendship and

conviviality. Second, the search for improved living conditions and a secure
salary is a main cause of migration, but despite this, mainstream migration
studies have paid relatively scant attention to migrants’ work and work-
places (Olwig and Sørensen 2002). In particular, qualitative research into
the work and workplaces of skilled migrant labour is unusual (for excep-
tions, see Fechter and Walsh 2010; Leonard 2010), and most of the peo-
ple I interviewed can be classified as semi- or highly skilled. Thus, my
analysis of how Portuguese migrants and Angolan residents relate to each
other at workplaces contributes to a field of migration studies that is rela-
tively under-researched. Third, workplaces are key sites for the construc-
tion of identities and power relations and consequently they offer a critical
site for studies of how differences are made and privileges are achieved. As
argued by sociologist Pauline Leonard:
Difference is legitimized and normalized through work: both through

explicit practices – such as the allocation of who does what work, how, who
can go where, who can talk to whom, and when, and how; as well as through
the discursive underlying mentalities which frame the ‘doing’ of work. Work
is both economic and symbolic and discursive…. (2010: 30)
As I will demonstrate, in both colonial and postcolonial Angola the

organisation of labour has been absolutely crucial for the uneven access to
privileges. At workplaces in colonial times, strict boundaries were drawn
between the three groups of “natives”, assimilados (Angolans categorised
as “civilised” by the Portuguese) and Portuguese, and today boundaries
between Angolans and Portuguese are still in place. These boundaries are
shaped through (enormous) salary differences and through the delegation
of work tasks and positions of power. Workplace identities are also created
through discursive practices and constant comparisons between Self and
Other.
The book’s focus on work and workplaces resonates with many
Portuguese migrants’ understanding of the meaning of their sojourn in
Angola. Many of these migrants do not see Angola as a place to live but as
a place to work and earn money. They describe their move to Angola as
squarely related to work life. Whether they have emigrated to get out of
unemployment, secure a better income or advance in the career this is all
work-related. Yet the radical physical displacement necessary for the new
employment has far-reaching consequences, as it changes the migrants’

entire life world (cf. Hindman 2013: 11f).
In the following, I will first provide a historical background to Angolan-
Portuguese relations and an overview of the recent development in the
two countries, followed by a representation of the Portuguese migrants in
Luanda. The chapter concludes with a presentation of research methods
and material.
Luso-Angolan History
In 1484, the first Portuguese expedition arrived in the territory of what
today is Angola. Nearly five hundred years later, in 1975, Angola gained
its independence. This event had been preceded by 13 years of colonial
liberation war, which came to an end in 1974 as a consequence of the left-
wing peaceful revolution in Portugal, the so-called “carnation revolu-
tion”. The revolution brought about the demise of Europe’s longest
continuous twentieth-century dictatorship, which between 1932 and
1968 was headed by the infamous António de Oliveira Salazar, who
founded and led the Estado Novo (“New State”). When Angola and the
other Portuguese colonies in Africa became independent, “Portugal was
the longest reigning colonial power of the world and the poorest nation of
Europe” (Feldman-Bianco 2001: 478). In line with this and borrowing
from the postcolonial vocabulary, Feldman-Bianco and other postcolonial
scholars describe colonial Portugal as a “subaltern empire”.
Among the five African colonies (Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau,
Mozambique, and São Tomé), the Portuguese came to consider Angola
the “crown jewel” because of the colony’s wealth in natural resources. Yet
the Portuguese presence in Angola developed slowly, and as late as 1904
Portugal controlled only 10% of the territory (Soares de Oliveira 2016).
The frontiers of the colony were not finally fixed until the 1920s. Up until
the twentieth century, the white population in Africa remained very small
and consisted mainly of male convicts who sometimes stayed on as com-
mercial agents and fathered mestiço children (Birmingham 2015). This
slow process reflects the fact that it was not until Salazar’s regime that an
actual Portuguese colonial enterprise was set up in Africa. And, paradoxi-
cally, the African colonies became fundamentally important for the econ-
omy and self-representation of Portugal only after the start of the African
independence movements in the years following World War II.
8 L. ÅKESSON
Creoles, Assimilados and Settlers

Despite the scarce presence of the Portuguese in the Angolan territory,
there were two enclaves that were under Portuguese rule for centuries,
namely the slave trade ports of Luanda and Benguela. In these enclaves,
Afro-Portuguese communities were born which much later would come
to play a central political and cultural role in independent Angola. These
multiracial communities have been labelled Creole and consisted of people
who spoke Portuguese, were loyal to the metropole and held key trade
and administrative positions (Soares de Oliveira 2016). The Creoles
thought of themselves as civilised and thereby different and superior to the
rest of the Angolan population, and they were clearly a hybrid product of
Portuguese colonialism. When Portuguese participation in the scramble
for Africa started in the late 1800s, the number of white settlers increased
and the Creoles gradually lost their positions to them. This loss was the
first impetus to the formation of a particular Angolan nationalism among
the Creoles. Much later, the Creoles’ version of nationalism would become
a significant political element and also a highly disputed marker of social
and cultural capital in postcolonial Angola (ibid.).
Although the Creoles lost their standing as local rulers of Luanda and
Benguela to white settlers, they were still privileged in relation to the big
majority of the Africans, as the colonial regime granted many of the
Creoles a status as assimilados. This set them off from the absolute major-
ity of the population, which was classified as “natives”, and thereby not
part of the Portuguese nation. Only about 2% of the Angolan population
were classified as assimilados and given the right to Portuguese nationality.
The requirements for this status were that one should read, write and
speak Portuguese fluently; earn wages from a profession or trade; eat and
dress as a Portuguese; be Christian; and maintain a standard of living and
customs similar to the European way of life (Bender 1978: 150). However,
the Portuguese postcolonial writer Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2002)
argues that the Portuguese emphatically did not see the assimilados as
Portuguese. Blackness was a marker of this difference, and this marker did
not allow for more than an ambivalent and hybrid Creole identity.
Several historians (Valente Cardoso forthcoming) agree that Portuguese
access to forced labour was the main driver behind the implementation of
the Estatuto dos Indígenas (Statute of the Natives), which was a set of legal
document regulating the rights—or, rather, the lack of rights—for the
native population. The Estatuto dos Indígenas was not repealed until the
beginning of the 1960s when the first Angolan uprisings against the colo-
nial regime took place and it classified all black people as “native”, with the
exception of the few assimilados. “Natives” were required to pay a “head
tax” in Portuguese currency, and in order to be able to pay this tax, people
were forced to work for minimal salaries for a colonial employer. Moreover,
indígenas could easily be categorised as “vagrants” and then they were
subject to non-paid forced labour (Ball 2005). As I will discuss in Chap.
5, the workings of this colonial regime of forced labour still reverberate in
contemporary Luandan workplace relations.
The massive inflow of Portuguese settlers to Angola took place during
only the last two decades of colonial rule. In 1950, the population classi-
fied as “white” was less than 80,000 individuals, but in 1973 it amounted
to 324,000 persons (Castelo 2007: 143). From the 1950s onwards, the
colonial regime was pressured by mounting international critique as well
as by the Angolan anti-colonial uprising, which started in 1961. In
response to this, the Salazar regime started to promote Portuguese settle-
ment in order to “substantiate its 1951 proclamation that the colonies
were really ‘overseas provinces,’ while also coping with rising socio-
economic and demographic pressures within Portugal itself” (Lubkemann
2002: 192). Before that, the regime had counteracted the possibility of a
rapidly growing white population in Angola, as it wanted to prevent
Angola from becoming “a new Brazil” with a strong white population
demanding independence. In the 1960s, however, settlement became a
strategy to counteract Angolan liberation.
Many of the Portuguese migrants I met in Luanda were actually chil-
dren of the Portuguese settlers who arrived in the 1950s, 1960s and
1970s. These Portuguese settlers came from all over Portugal. Before the
mid-1960s, the majority were male, but as family migration successively
became more common, the numbers of males and females levelled (Castelo
2007). In a sense, the war for independence functioned as a kick-start for
the growing Portuguese settler community. Supported by the colonial
regime, the settlers developed and modernised the Angolan economy and
simultaneously kept black Angolans away from any form of influence or
professional work. When Angola finally became independent, the coun-
try’s private sector “ranging from multinational extractive industry to the
puniest of country stores, had been almost completely in the hands of
Europeans” (Soares de Oliveira 2015: 132). Thus, the lack of profession-
als was acute in all sectors and at all levels, and this lack was not remediated
during the 27 years of civil war that came after independence.
10 L. ÅKESSON
Independence, Retornados and Civil War

Although the Angolan fight for independence started in the early 1960s,
it did not affect the main cities severely until 1972–73. As most of the
Portuguese settlers lived in these cities, they could, with relatively few
disturbances, go on with their lives until the very last years of the colonial
occupation. In Portugal, large parts of the population had become increas-
ingly weary of the drawn-out colonial wars, and on the 25th of April 1974
a group of military officers carried out a peaceful coup d’état. A few
months after the coup, negotiations on decolonisation were initiated. In
Angola, the three liberation movements—MPLA, UNITA and FNLA2—
began to move towards the cities, where they met in armed battles. Efforts
to set up a unity government failed, and when Angola became indepen-
dent in November 1975, civil war had already started.
For the Portuguese settlers, the arrival of the independence movements
in the cities and the escalating civil war brought about a threatening sce-
nario. Between late 1974 and early 1976, the majority of the white
Portuguese left en masse. Some fled to South Africa and other African
countries, but over 300,000 left for Portugal. Among middle-class
Luandans, there are mixed memories of the rapid departure of the
Portuguese. Some lament that Portuguese families, from one day to
another, had to leave everything behind—”even the food on the table”—
whereas other describe Portuguese acts of revenge before departure. For
instance, there are Angolan testimonies about Portuguese working in the
construction sector who blocked the Luandan sewage system with cement
before leaving. In Portugal, the returning settlers were labelled retornados
(returnees), and together with those who returned from the other colo-
nies, they contributed to a sudden growth of the Portuguese population
by 5% (Lubkemann 2002: 190).3
In independent Angola, the MPLA, through use of force, had got hold
of governmental power and the largest cities but was under constant mili-
tary threat. The Angolan civil war soon became a proxy arena for the Cold
War. The Soviet Union supported a large Cuban force to help the MPLA,
while the US backed South African troops on the side of UNITA. Yet, at
the same time, Western oil companies set up business deals with the MPLA
regime. In an absurd consequence of this, oil installations financed by
Western capital were defended by Soviet-backed Cuban troops against
attacks from US-supported UNITA. This exemplifies that although the
superpowers were involved in the Angolan war, they had very little notion
about what was happening on the ground.
The FNLA movement lost most its influence soon after independence,
while UNITA, led by the cunning Jonas Savimbi, became a long-lived
enemy to the MPLA government. In practice, Angola throughout many
years consisted of two distinct “societies” (Messiant 1994, 1995 in Soares
de Oliveira 2015) or “states” (Pearce 2015), governed by MPLA and
UNITA, respectively. Throughout the war, MPLA controlled Luanda and
the other major coastal cities, whereas UNITA dominated the southeast
and the rural parts of the central highlands. Other parts of the country
were under constant dispute, and in 1993, when UNITA was at the height
of its military influence, it controlled 80% of the Angolan territory (Soares
de Oliveira 2015: 15). With regard to the Luso-Angolan history, it is
important to note that UNITA based much of its ideological resistance on
a view of MPLA as led by Creole offspring of the former colonisers (Pearce
2015: 13). Savimbi portrayed the MPLA government as an elite regime
led by a “non-Angolan” minority and he built this upon “deep-seated
town-country divisions and a sense of victimhood and social resentment
against Luanda and its Europeanised elites” (Soares de Oliveira 2016: 74).
This division between a supposedly native and rural African movement
and an urban Luandan elite imagined as racially mixed and “portugicised”
arguably played a more important role in the civil war than the ethnic
dimensions, which during the war was foregrounded by many interna-
tional commentators (ibid.).
Peace, Reconstruction, Economic Boom and Bust

By the end of the 1990s, MPLA intensified its military campaign against
UNITA. The war escalated and the number of internally displaced people
reached more than three million (Bettocchi and Jamal 2002).4 In 2002,
government forces finally managed to ambush and kill Savimbi. Both sides
interpreted his death as a final military victory for the MPLA armed forces,
and at last peace came to the Angolan people.
After nearly 40 years of war, the lack of infrastructure and public insti-
tutions was nearly total, and the MPLA government embarked on a large-
scale reconstruction programme financed by the oil revenue. Almost
everything needed to be (re)constructed: roads, railway, ports, hospitals,
schools, water and electricity provision, sewage, and so on. In addition,
the government financed numerous showcase projects, such as football
12 L. ÅKESSON
stadia, new airports, a new parliament, and, not the least, numerous glim-
mering high-rise buildings in the city of Luanda. These investments came
as a life saver to Portuguese construction companies, which by 2008 were
in acute crisis. In a short period of time, the major Portuguese construc-
tion companies redirected many of their activities to Angola and soon
Chinese and Brazilian companies followed them. This implied that the
first comprehensive wave of post-war Portuguese migration to Angola
consisted of construction workers.
The post-war development in Angola has been totally dominated by
the MPLA party, which has gained an absolute majority in four consecu-
tive elections in 1992, 2008, 2012 and 2017. To ordinary people in
Luanda, the MPLA party, the Angolan state and the heavy bureaucracy
constitute one unified body, which they sometimes call o sistema (the
system) and which many non-elite actors believe is run behind the scenes
by foreigners and mulattos. This body is headed by President José Eduardo
dos Santos, who has managed to stay in power since 1979.5 The govern-
ment’s grip is fundamentally based on its control of three key institutions:
the system of patronage supporting the economic activities of the Angolan
oligarchs, the army and security apparatus, and the state oil holding com-
pany Sonangol (Sogge 2011). The relations between the president, the
army and the MPLA party are stable, and members of the political-
economic-military elite seldom find it worthwhile to challenge the estab-
lished order. Outsiders with a voice in the public space are few, and the
party-state has managed to entice many of its opponents into more secure
and enriching positions. This is true, for example, with regard to former
UNITA military officers (Schubert 2016a; Soares de Oliveira 2015).
The oligarchs’ investments tend to focus on rapid profits rather than
long-term sustainable production, and many international economists
would characterise the Angolan capitalists’ businesses as “an evolved form
of rentierism” (Soares de Oliveira 2015: 137), but in Angolan official dis-
course, the clients of the patronage system are invariably termed “entre-
preneurs”. In a speech in 2013, the president defended the elite’s economic
activities by referring to these as “primitive accumulation” and arguing
that Angola was undergoing the same kind of economic transformations
which had occurred in Europe “hundreds of years ago” (dos Santos 2013);
thus, a Marxian rhetoric mixed with the colonial evolutionary idea that
Africa “lags behind”. The inner circle of Angolan investors consists of only
some hundred insiders plus their family members and friends (Soares de
Oliveira 2015: 140), and Portuguese business people and managers have
to relate to these powerful Angolans in their roles as company owners,

business partners and clients.
The president’s control over the armed forces, which are amongst
Africa’s largest; the presidential guard; the intelligence services and the
police, has only got stronger over the years, and their importance as guar-
antors of the stability of the party-state is fundamental (Soares the Oliveira
2015: 46; 2016). Former UNITA generals have been incorporated into
the army and the police, and the armed forces are currently led by General
Sachipengo Nunda, who during the war was a UNITA officer. The
economic future of all higher officers is secure, to say the least. Besides the
high remunerations they receive in consequence of their service in the
army, they are guaranteed a place among the rent-seeking oligarchs. In
everyday Luandan discussions about the wealthy elite and its shadowy
businesses, “the generals” are recurrently mentioned. As long as this con-
tinues, the hypothesis of any armed unrest seems far away. The peace
between MPLA and UNITA appears to be stable.
The political and economic importance of Sonangol, the Angolan
national oil company, is eloquently described by Soares de Oliveira when
he outlines the fundamentals of the MPLA regime’s historical approach to
power:
President José Eduardo dos Santos (JES) wrested control of the oil revenue
stream and carved out a parallel state centred on the presidency and the
country’s opaque yet capable oil company, Sonangol. In time, this gave rise
to an oil-driven, internationalized political economy and global networks of
support and patronage. This provided JES with an unprecedented degree of
discretionary power, allowing him to sideline the state administration, the
party apparatus and all other structures of potential influence across Angolan
society. (2015: 25)
The emergence of the strong oil industry represents a break with the
colonial past, as the recruitment of international managers and technical
staff into the industry has become globalized. Males from all over the
world flock to Luanda to reap benefits from the production of the black
gold. The oil sector’s importance for the Angolan economy is testified to
by the fact that, in 2014, oil represented around 95% of the total value of
exports and more than 65% of government revenue (International
Monetary Fund 2015). In 2013, the Sonangol group was ranked as
Africa’s second largest company (The Africa Report 2013). Yet develop-
14 L. ÅKESSON
ment benefitting the large majority of the Angolan population has never
been on the company’s agenda.
The oil revenue and, to a much lesser extent, the income from the dia-
mond business led to an extraordinary growth in Angola by the second
half of the 2000s. According to estimations from the OECD (2011: 52),
Angola was, for couple of years, one of the fastest-growing economies in
the world, and GDP growth rates were 20.6% in 2005, 18.6% in 2006 and
as much as 27% in 2007. For those who wanted to earn fast money, the
late 2000s and the early 2010s were golden years in Angola, and during
these years the inflow of Portuguese migrants grew rapidly.
The macro-economic boom in Angola came to a full stop by the end of
2014 when the international crude oil price drastically decreased. In the
beginning of 2015, the government cut public investment by 45%. The
same year, Bank of America halted its supply of dollars to Angola, presum-
ably in reaction to allegations about Angolan banks being used for financ-
ing “terror organisations”, among them Hamas. In consequence of this
development, projects financed by the state came to a standstill, the
Angolan currency (kwanza) was devaluated, the lack of hard currency
became acute and banks entered into crisis. For the Portuguese migrants,
this meant that salaries were paid with delay or not at all. Moreover, it
became increasingly difficult to send remittances to family members in
Portugal as access to hard currency became highly restricted. The golden
years appeared to be over this time around, and many Portuguese had to
return to Portugal, particularly those who had dependent family members
or debts (or both) in Portugal. Those who had their closest family mem-
bers in Angola as well as a reliable employment often chose to stay, as
conditions in Portugal continued to be bleak.
Deep Entanglements: Contemporary Political

and Economic Relations Between Luanda and Lisbon
In his 2013 state-of-the-nation address, President Eduardo dos Santos

praised Angola’s favourable relations with other nations and then he
uttered the brief sentence: “Only with Portugal, sadly, things are not
good”. Probably, his critique had to do with Portuguese investigations
into leading Angolans’ alleged money laundering and fiscal fraud in rela-
tion to some of their investments in Portugal. I was in Luanda at the time
of the president’s speech and witnessed the shock waves it sent through
the Portuguese community. Portuguese top politicians also reacted

strongly. Portuguese President Cavaco Silva was on an official visit to
Panama, but immediately after José Eduardo dos Santos’s speech he called
a press conference and said that there was a “misunderstanding” and that
the Angolan leaders “merit all our respect”. This “understanding” was
nothing new in Portuguese politics. All the major political parties have
historically rooted ties with either MPLA or UNITA, and the personal
connections between the leading families in the two countries are
manifold.
Arguably, Cavaco Silva was not concerned only about the welfare of the
Portuguese community in Luanda, the Portuguese companies that were
economically active in the country and the comprehensive export of
Portuguese products to Angola. The Portuguese president’s reaction also
had to do with the importance of Angolan investments in Portugal.
During the boom years, Angolan business interests invested heavily in
Portuguese key sectors, such as banking, telecommunications, media and
energy. Consequently, an angolanisation of the Portuguese economy
became a fact.6
In the book with the telling title Os donos Angolanos de Portugal (The
Angolan Owners of Portugal), Costa et al. (2014) account for the Angolan
political and economic elite’s investment in Portugal. They criticise the
country for keeping the doors open to Angolan PEPs (politically exposed
persons) using Portuguese investments as a way of laundering their money,
which, they argue, would not have been possible in other European coun-
tries. An OECD report directed the same kind of criticism towards
Portugal (OECD 2013). It is notable that the Angolan elite mainly
invested in enterprises that both symbolically and economically consti-
tuted the hearth of Portuguese economic life. This led one commentator
to remark that “Maximizing financial returns is not necessarily the point
here; some observers see instead Angolan elites gaining satisfaction in
lording it over the former colonisers in Lisbon” (Sogge 2011: 89).
In the same vein, I heard stories about Angolan oligarchs going shop-
ping in Lisbon and literally buying everything in their favourite shop and
afterwards reserving all the tables at some luxury restaurant and ruling
over the place for one night. Yet the Angolan elite’s interest in “buying”
and “owning” Portugal was seemingly not only driven by a postcolonial
desire to dominate but also founded on a certain attraction to the country
and its cultural heritage. Portugal is a preferred holiday destination for the
Angolan elite. In Luanda, government ministers and other influential
16 L. ÅKESSON
ersons send their children to the extremely expensive Escola Portuguesa

p
de Luanda (The Portuguese School in Luanda). The Portuguese state
owns this school and it strictly follows the Portuguese curricula, which, for
example, implies that history is taught from a Portuguese perspective.
Thus, leading figures in the former movement for independence send
their children to a school where they learn the Portuguese version of the
colonial wars. Another example of the deep entanglements between the
elite in the two countries is Angolan business leaders’ preference for work-
ing with Portuguese advisers. The most cited example is Isabel dos Santos,
who is the president’s daughter, Africa’s first female dollar billionaire and
since 2016 the chair of Sonangol and who supposedly surrounds herself
with hordes of Portuguese managers.
Moreover, the leaders of the MPLA party-state do not celebrate an
“African” heritage. Rather, they see their country as a product of the his-
tory of Portuguese colonialism, although they certainly continue to cele-
brate Angola’s independence. In the MPLA version of Angola, the
experience of Portuguese rule, Portuguese education and the Portuguese
language have unified the country (Soares de Oliveira 2016: 78).
References to precolonial times as well as to ethnic differences are absent
in the rhetoric of the MPLA leaders. Arguably, the portugisation of Angola
is profound and long-standing and has been instrumental in shaping cul-
ture and politics in the country.
As mentioned, the “MPLA nationalism” with its historical ties to
Portuguese rule and the Creole communities is ideologically opposed by
UNITA, and many people in Luanda argue that the MPLA is dominated
by a handful of “mulatto” families who are willing to give up the country
to foreigners. The recent inflow of Portuguese migrants is sometimes seen
as a sign of the governments’ support of foreigners, and many Luandans
believe that all Portuguese migrants enjoy favourable protection directly
from the president. This is definitively not a view shared by the majority of
the Portuguese migrants, who tend to believe that it is only the most privi-
leged of their compatriots who enjoy such support. As I will make clear,
the Portuguese community consists of many different categories.
Trajectories of Portuguese Migrants in Luanda

In Portugal, emigration has been a historically significant factor shaping
society and identity, which means that the outflow of migrants to Angola
is just another chapter in a long and comprehensive history of emigration.
To be Portuguese has for centuries been to leave for another country or to

have family members living far away (Brettell 2003), and the feeling of
saudade, which can be translated as “longing” and “nostalgia”, has been
described as an emotion that defines the Portuguese “soul” (Feldman-
Bianco 1992). Massive out-migration started already in the mid-1800s.
Between 1850 and 1930, nearly two million Portuguese left the country
for the Americas, and Brazil was the primary destination. After the Second
World War and until 1975, an additional two million people out-migrated,
mostly to Northern and Western Europe, and France was a leading desti-
nation (Pires et al. 2010). Today, Portugal has the highest proportion of
emigration in the European Union (EU). More than two million
Portuguese live abroad, which means that more than 20% of the Portuguese
nationals have left the country temporarily or permanently. Since the
North Atlantic financial crisis hit Portugal in 2008, a veritable mass depar-
ture has taken place, and in 2013 and 2014 more than 100,000 persons
left annually, principally to the UK, Switzerland, France and Germany
(Observatório da Emigração 2015). One of the many effects of this is that
the country has had a negative population growth rate in recent years and
that the population is ageing.
According to people I interviewed, it was around 2011 that the
Portuguese definitively became a visible group in Luanda. The same year
Portuguese Prime Minster Pedro Passos Coelho urged young unemployed
Portuguese to leave the country for Angola or Brazil. Yet the Portuguese
constituted only one element of the growing non-Angolan resident popu-
lation in Luanda. Business agreements, particularly in the construction
sector, between the Angolan government and China and Brazil had
resulted in an increase in immigration of citizens from these countries.
Media have reported about more than 250,000 Chinese workers in Angola
(Visão 2012) and 30,000 Brazilians (Agência Brasil 2014). The reliability
of these figures is uncertain, but they indicate the significance of the
Chinese and Brazilian migration to Angola. In addition, there are many
migrants from Southern, Western and even Eastern Africa. In difference
to the Chinese and the Brazilians, these migrants generally have arrived
without a labour contract, and they often live under precarious conditions.
As they sometimes are undocumented, their numbers are impossible to
tell.
Also with regard to the Portuguese, statistics are characterised by
“poor numbers” (Jerven 2013). Whereas the Portuguese union of con-
struction workers argued in 2015 that there were more than 200,000
18 L. ÅKESSON
Portuguese working only in construction in Angola, according to the

Angolan migration authority SME (Serviço de Migração e Estranjeiros, or
Migration and Foreigners’ Services), 44,761 Portuguese citizens lived in
the country in 2011 (Candeias et al. 2016: 212). In 2014, the Portuguese
consulate in Luanda reported that 126,000 Portuguese had registered
themselves at the consulate. So, basically, numbers are uncertain. Another
way of looking at the Portuguese presence and their participation in
Angolan economic life is to follow the development of monetary remit-
tances from Angola to Portugal. Remittances began to increase rapidly in
2005, which indicates that migration from Portugal to Angola started to
become important around 2004, which was the year when the post-war
reconstruction program took off. Between 2006 and 2012, remittances
increased by at least 30% every year, except in 2011. In 2012, the remit-
tances from Angola to Portugal were 18 times larger than the money sent
in the opposite direction. In 2013 and 2014, however, remittances dwin-
dled, and in 2015 they were “only” 11 times larger than the amount sent
the opposite way (Observatório da Emigração 2016). Probably, this
decrease reflects the effects of the 2014 “oil crisis” for the Portuguese
migrants. Some have left Angola and for those who have stayed it has
become harder to send remittances. A third way of depicting the
Portuguese presence is through the number of Portuguese companies in
the country. Again, statistics are uncertain, but in 2014 the Portuguese
ambassador in Angola estimated that 2000 companies financed by
Portuguese capital were operating in Angola and that 9000 Portuguese
companies were exporting products and services to the country (Kitari
2014).
The only quantitative study that exists on the Portuguese migrants in
Angola has been carried out by a team of Portuguese and Angolan
researchers (Candeias et al. 2016). Their surveys have partly been filled
out by self-selected respondents, which influences how representative
their sample is. Nevertheless, some of the results are interesting and tie in
with my impressions. For instance, they establish that the majority of the
migrants are male and that they often migrate individually, also when they
have a partner and children in Portugal. The fact that 75% of the study’s
participants send remittances to Portugal is an indication of strong trans-
national family connections. In socio-economic terms, the study describes
a heterogeneous group; among the Portuguese, there are highly paid
senior professionals, middle-class people who often have a specialised
technical training, and working-class labourers, the last category consist-
ing mainly of construction workers. The study also shows that the major-
ity of the Portuguese see their sojourn in Angola as temporary and that in
most cases they had secured a job in Angola before leaving Portugal.
Moreover, it demonstrates that some of the Portuguese have been moved
by their company, when it has downsized or closed its activities in Portugal
and instead tried to establish itself in the Angolan market. Thus, some of
the Portuguese have been sent abroad by their employer and thus not
migrated individually.
Some of the Portuguese in Luanda mentioned that they did not see
themselves as a member of a Portuguese “community”. They pointed out
that there were Portuguese working and living in many different neigh-
bourhoods in the logistically complicated megacity of Luanda and that
there were few natural meeting points. The only Portuguese association in
Luanda is the Associação 25 de Abril, which mainly attracts elderly people
with ideological roots in the Socialist Party and the Portuguese Carnation
Revolution in 1974. In fact, some of the Portuguese I met also talked
about an absence of solidarity among their compatriots and compared
themselves in a negative way to the Brazilians in Angola, whom they
believed were more supportive of each other. Yet, despite this alleged
absence of “a community”, people I interviewed often talked about their
impressions of other Portuguese in Luanda, and different groups some-
times criticised each other.
In general terms, internal divisions among the Portuguese migrants are
based on class differences. One group that constantly was pointed out by
members of the middle class as sharing certain, often negatively defined,
characteristics consisted of the construction workers. The first group
would criticise the second group for being uneducated and simple, and it
was quite clear that tensions based on socio-economic hierarchies were at
play. In particular, the construction workers’ relations to Angolan women
were criticised by middle-class people. A common belief was that all con-
struction workers had Angolan girlfriends and that they often preferred
young women. There was a lot of gossip about construction workers’
catorzinhas (“fourteen-year-old girls”) and also about workers having one
family in Angola and another in Portugal.7 Commonly, people working in
construction would not refute such rumours but rather insist on being
better integrated into the Angolan society than the “snobbish” middle-
and upper-class Portuguese. This attitude was common not only among
manual labourers but also among some of the highly educated males
working in the construction sector, who argued that they had more
20 L. ÅKESSON
Angolan friends, and knew much more about Angolan family life, thanks
to their Angolan girlfriends.
The privileged constitute another and less numerous group. They often
work in banking, sometimes as short-term consultants, and they have
strong ties to the Angolan economic and political elite. Members of the
elite tend to know each other and they seldom socialise with Portuguese
of other class backgrounds. Especially, younger people in this group cate-
gorised themselves as “expats”, thereby indicating a cosmopolitan con-
nectedness and a distance to other Portuguese in Angola. Non-elite
Portuguese sometimes argued that the elite lived in “a bubble” and knew
little about the life of the other Portuguese in the country.
There are also many Portuguese in Luanda who can be categorised as
belonging to the middle class. They have a university degree or a special-
ised vocational training, and they tend to be below the age of 45. These
persons commonly hold white-collar jobs in the construction sector or
work in banking, telecommunications, health or education. Some of them
had been sent out by their Portuguese company, but many had looked for
a new job in Angola when they became un- or underemployed in conse-
quence of the economic crisis in Portugal.
A special category consists of middle-aged people who lived with their
parents in Angola during colonial times and then have returned to Angola
in recent years. Thus, they are children of retornados, but they would sel-
dom use that concept about themselves, as in Portugal it is a label that
became stigmatised in connection to the massive return of settlers from
the former colonies in 1974–76. One reason for this was that “those left
behind” in Portugal perceived that the retornados had neglected their fam-
ily and community back home in pursuit of self-interest. Their departure
for Africa and their subsequent long-term stay in the “overseas provinces”
was read as a dissociation from kin and neighbours and accordingly they
were poorly welcomed by their relatives and communities of origin. In
addition, the post-revolutionary media described the retornados as com-
plicit in the colonial enterprise (Lubkemann 2002), so there was also a
public condemnation of this group.
One important difference between the retornados and the newcomers is
that the former often had a dual (Portuguese and Angolan) citizenship.
This is a much coveted asset, which freed individuals from problems related
to immigration documents and, in particular, work permits and
therefore made them attractive in the Luandan work market. Yet, in com-
parison with young Portuguese newcomers, people in this category often
have little formal education, which reflects the fact that the level of formal
education on average is low among Portuguese growing up before 1975.
Some of them had worked in small family-run enterprises in Portugal and
had been forced to look for something new when the enterprise had closed
down in consequence of the financial crisis. A number of them reported
that they had decided to go to Angola when they had found out that they
were considered “too old” to be competitive in the fierce Portuguese
labour market. Among the Portuguese in Luanda, the distinction between
“those who have been in Angola before” and newcomers was often pointed
out, especially when it came to relations to Angolans. Typically, the new-
comers would argue that those who had earlier experiences of living in
Angola still acted as colonial masters, whereas people in this category
would criticise the newcomers for coming to Angola only for the sake of
money and not having any affective bonds to the country and the people.
Yet, like the retornados, the newcomers often have some kind of family
connection to Angola, though of a more distant kind. Some have a male
relative who had served in the colonial army during the war, and others
have more or less remote family ties. They could have a relative who had
lived in Angola in colonial times or, more seldom, somebody who was still
living there. In the latter case, this could be persons who had chosen to
stay on in Angola after independence, or descendants of a relative who had
left, which commonly meant mestiço children and grandchildren of a male
Portuguese.
As mentioned, the survey conducted by Candeias et al. (2016) indi-
cates that the majority of the Portuguese in Angola are male. According to
my impressions, this reflects, on one hand, the gendered division of labour
and, on the other hand, constructions of Angola as a dangerous and
demanding place. The construction sector, which provides many of the
jobs for the Portuguese, is traditionally heavily male-dominated. There
were Portuguese female architects in Angola, but male dominance was
absolute in all other professional categories in the sector. Moreover,
employers outside the construction sector sometimes prefer to contract
men. A third reason has to do with the fact that families sometimes are
reluctant to bring children to Angola as child care is expensive, the quality
of the educational system is very low and the fees for the few private
schools considered to be “good” are exorbitant. As the care of children in
Portugal is still mainly the responsibility of women, this leads to a creation
of transnational families with the father working in Angola and the mother
taking care of the children in Portugal.
22 L. ÅKESSON
Portuguese and Angolan Identities

Hitherto, I have represented Portuguese and Angolan as two separate
identities, and this indeed needs to be qualified. As highlighted earlier,
these identities (as most others) are multiple, fluid and contingent. Yet the
two terms closely reflect the way people I met talked about and performed
their identities. With one exception, everyone I interviewed performed
mainly as either Angolan or Portuguese, although they would also qualify
and destabilise these basic patterns of belonging in different ways. It is
possible that the way I presented my project (i.e. as an investigation into
the relationship between Angolans and Portuguese) reinforced this
dichotomy. Nevertheless, my impression was that understandings of Us
and Them were constantly present in the discourse and in the way people
related to each other. Yet people could also challenge these stable
boundary-making processes in relation to a number of different features,
such as dual citizenships and constructions of race, which they then would
incorporate into their performance of self in different ways.
As mentioned, some Portuguese hold dual citizenship. According to
Portuguese informants, in the early days of Portuguese mass migration to
Angola, it had been quiet easy to illicitly “arrange” such documents
through well-placed bribes, also for those without close family ties to the
country. During the last few years, such procedures have gradually become
more complicated, but many of those who planned to stay for long in the
country were still trying hard to “arrange” Angolan citizenship. Portuguese
informants with dual nationality would sometimes present themselves as
“Angolans” and thereby indicate both that they were holders of a coveted
asset—an Angolan passport—and that they had a special belonging to the
country, which supposedly distinguished them from other Portuguese in
Luanda in a positive way. Nevertheless, in terms of linguistic accent, life
style and socialising, these Portuguese “Angolans” clearly performed as
Portuguese, and in social and cultural terms, they were categorised as
Portuguese by both sides.
Reputedly, also the majority of the Angolan elite and some members of
the emerging “middle class” (see Schubert 2016b for a discussion of the
concept) have dual (Angolan and Portuguese) citizenship. Elite Angolans
have generally managed to arrange dual citizenship through familial,
economic and/or political ties to Portugal. Normally, they keep a low
profile with regard to this asset and do not present themselves as Portuguese
unless they have lived for many years in that country. A Portuguese pass-
port owned by an Angolan has ambiguous political connotations as it indi-

cates a continued dependence on the former colonisers, but it is also a sign
of privilege and unrestrained access to European destinations. Moreover,
this document guarantees a certain security and a way out Angola if armed
violence again would become systematic and widespread.
Understandings of race are obviously also important for identifications,
and at first sight people would categorise each other according to such
understandings, which means that a black or mestiço person is assumed to
be Angolan, and a white to be Portuguese. Thus, when white Angolans
and mestiço/black Portuguese met strangers, they have to make clear that
they do not want to be categorised according to dominant norms.
Linguistic characteristics, such as accent and to some extent choice of
words and grammar, are then a dominant signifier, as there are clear dif-
ferences between how Portuguese is spoken in Angola and Portugal. The
differences in ways of talking are often pointed out, and besides function-
ing as signs of difference, accents can be used to challenge and play with
essentialised identities. Especially, young male Portuguese sometimes try
to imitate Angolan Portuguese, and they can be seen as hip and street-
smart by their Portuguese peers, whereas Angolans who speak in a por-
tugicised way can be ridiculed by other Angolans for trying to show off,
probably because such behaviour is read as a sign of being pretentious.
The few white Angolans I met belonged to the upper middle class and
talked with a suave but distinct Angolan accent. It seemed to be important
to them to emphasise the difference between themselves and the
Portuguese migrants, maybe in order to mark their absolute right to
belonging and to distance themselves from the Portuguese whom they
perceived to be competitors in the upscale Luandan labour market.
In addition, some individuals deviated from the general pattern of
dichotomous boundary-making processes and presented themselves as
mixed. A mixed Portuguese-Angolan can, for instance, be born in Angola
with a Portuguese father and an Angolan mother and then in addition
have developed strong ties to Portugal as an adult. More commonly,
mixed persons were first- or second-generation Angolan returnees who
had lived for a long period of time, or their whole life, in Portugal and
then moved to Angola for more or less the same reasons as the Portuguese
migrants. Some of them felt estranged in Angola, as their kin and other
people often received them with a certain hostility. Across the globe,
“stayers” often condemn people who return after having escaped armed
conflicts or economic crisis and brand them as disloyal opportunists who
24 L. ÅKESSON
avoided the hardships and then returned in order to reap the benefits of
new opportunities (Åkesson and Eriksson Baaz 2015), and this also hap-
pened to returning Angolans. People who identified as mixed were
sometimes very good at performing as alternatively Angolans and
Portuguese depending on the context, but they could also lament the
fact that they never were totally accepted in any of these national groups.
This liminality in combination with the ambiguity in being both Angolan
and Portuguese, and thereby harbouring two identities with an extremely
complex and historically violent relationship to each other, does maybe
explain why there were so few people who actually identified as mixed.
Methodological Considerations
Luanda is dynamic and fascinating but also repulsive and merciless. The
population has grown from about half a million in 1975 to seven million
in 2014 (Governo de Angola 2016). This has resulted in a megacity where
access to water, electricity, personal security and transports is part of the
daily struggle for everyone but the most privileged. The majority of the
population live in poor informal neighbourhoods, locally called musseqeus,
which cover enormous areas at the outskirts of the city. At the same time,
it is the absolute power centre of Angola. Both temporary visitors and
people who permanently live in the city call it “a horrible place”. Yet they
tend to state this with a certain twisted pride, which maybe indicates that
they are satisfied with themselves for managing to live and thrive in such a
demanding place. Constant traffic jams force commuters to spend up to
six hours per day in their cars. Garbage collection is deficient or non-
existent, depending on the neighbourhood, and both poor and rich peo-
ple live in fear of armed criminal attacks. Yet, at the same time, the megacity
is vibrant and fascinating and obviously holds a strong attraction for peo-
ple from all over Angola:
Luanda… is the setter of its parameters. Fashion, youth culture, patterns of

consumption, aspirations for personal success, the right Portuguese accent,
the comportment one aspires to master: all emanate from Luanda, the swal-
lower of men where a third of the population already resides and most oth-
ers aspire to join. (Soares de Oliveira 2016: 79)
The making of money is a central concern for almost everyone in the

city, or, as the anthropologist John Schubert argues, “developing esquemas
(schemes, business ideas) is a constant preoccupation across all urban

strata” (2016a: 11). I spent a lot of my time in Luanda walking up and
down the streets of city centre, and when I passed by people I noticed that
most of them were talking about money. This was true for the high-heeled
business women arriving in their Jaguar at the headquarters of the national
oil company Sonangol as well as for teenage boys in ragged clothes wash-
ing cars. This observation fits Schubert’s (ibid.) argument about the
strong Luandan culture of consumption and the “immediatism” which
drives the rapidly changing esquemas that people set up to earn fast and
easy money.
I collected the material for this book during recurrent visits to Luanda
between 2013 and 2015. In the beginning of this period, Angola was still
portrayed in the Portuguese mass media as an “Eldorodo” for national
migrants, but the end of this period covers a stage which many Portuguese
migrants called “the end of the party”. In 2013, Luanda was a Klondike
attracting mainly male “gold-diggers” from all over the globe. In the pres-
tigious part of the city centre, the Portuguese presence was conspicuous.
At every street corner, there was a Portuguese man who in a loud voice
was trying to resolve a business problem over his mobile phone. Numerous
large-scale construction projects were going on all over the megacity, and
at most of these sites there were large posters announcing the presence of
Portuguese construction companies. In the second half of 2014, the oil
price plummeted, but throughout that year, most of the Portuguese and
Angolans I met argued that the “oil crisis” would be short-term, and con-
sequently they did not start to re-organise themselves to confront the new
reality. In 2015, the economic crisis in Angola was a fact, and everyone
was concerned about its effects.
Luanda has been characterised as “an exceedingly difficult place to con-
duct in-depth research” (Schubert 2015) mainly due to difficulties in access-
ing visas (a problem researchers share with many of the Portuguese migrants
in Angola), everyday logistics and high costs. The visa problems in combi-
nation with the high costs implied that the traditional anthropological way
of data collection, namely one-year-long fieldwork dedicated primarily to
participant observation, was impossible. Instead, the material for this book
has been collected mainly through ethnographic interviews carried out dur-
ing four-month-long visits to Luanda. During these visits, I was accompa-
nied by post-doc Pétur Skúlason Waldorff from Reykjavik University, who
carried out interviews among Angolans working in Portuguese companies
(see Waldorff under review). As Pétur’s research was financed by my research
26 L. ÅKESSON
project, we shared transcriptions of our respective interviews between us.

In this book, I rely mostly on my own interviews but I have also had good
use of Pétur’s empirical material. Moreover, his social network in Luanda
and recent experiences of carrying out anthropological fieldwork in the
city (Waldorff 2014) were important for planning and carrying out the
field visits. An additional asset was my long-term experience from Luanda.
I lived and worked in the city between 1988 and 1991, and since then I
have followed the development in the country. Both Angolan and
Portuguese interviewees were interested in my experiences from this
period of time, and conversations about these often functioned as an
icebreaker.
In finding people to interview, I relied on earlier contacts as well as
three different female research assistants, who prefer to remain anony-
mous. Two of these were Portuguese migrants and the third was Angolan
with a background in non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The
research assistants helped me to identify interviewees through contacting
people in their own social networks. In total, I carried out interviews with
62 persons, out of which 33 (15 males and 18 females) performed as
Portuguese and 29 (16 males and 13 females) as Angolans. The fact that
the majority of my Portuguese informants were female obviously does not
reflect the overall male dominance among the Portuguese migrants.
Rather, it is a consequence of my female research assistants and me having
easier access to female informants. In addition, a characteristic of my two
Portuguese research assistants’ networks was that they consisted mainly of
people who had an open and positive attitude towards Angola and its
inhabitants. Both of them were interested in integrating into Angolan
circles and shared this attitude with most of their Portuguese friends and
acquaintances. Probably, this openness is not totally representative of the
Portuguese in Luanda. Especially, one of my Portuguese research assis-
tants was aware of this bias in her network and worked hard to provide me
with Portuguese informants outside her own circles as she realised it was
important for me to also meet people who expressed more stereotypical
and negative images of the Angolans they worked together with.
The absolute majority of the people I interviewed are semi- or highly
skilled. I have defined semi-skilled as somebody with a high school degree
or employment as some kind of specialist or both, whereas a highly skilled
is a person with a university degree. Among the 29 Angolans, 14 are
semi-skilled, 15 are highly skilled, and all of them have a formal job, which
sets them apart from the absolute majority of the population in Luanda who
make their uncertain living in the informal market. Nevertheless, the num-
ber of young people with a university education has sky-rocketed in
Luanda the last decade in consequence of the establishment of a large
number of private institutes offering tertiary education for those who are
willing to pay the high fees. Among the Portuguese, six are semi-skilled
and 28 are highly skilled. Thus, there is a bias towards highly skilled
migrants in the material, although generally Portuguese migrating to
Angola are better educated than Portuguese migrants going to other
countries (Peixote et al. 2016: 218f). Nearly one third of my informants
worked in the construction sector, and the rest worked in banking, tele-
com, education, human resources, media or the catering trade or were
self-employed.
A limitation in the material is that I did not manage to set up any inter-
views with unskilled Portuguese labourers, despite many efforts. In
2013–2014, there were still many Portuguese construction workers
employed in Luanda, and my research assistants put me in touch with a
number of these males, but either they declined my calls or they did not
turn up to interviews. Naturally, I reflected on the reasons for this and
thought about differences in terms of gender, generation and class as well
as the construction workers’ long working hours. Yet, when I discussed
this problem with my research assistants and other Portuguese, I realised
that power relations between Northern and Southern Europe probably
also were at play. Some Portuguese evidently saw me as a representative of
a super-developed Northern Europe that looked down upon peripheral
Southern European countries, such as Portugal. My fieldwork took place
a couple of years after Portugal had been subjected to the EU’s economic
austerity measures, and Portuguese friends joked about me being per-
ceived by their compatriots as a slightly thinner version of Angela Merkel.
Initially, I found that quite shocking, but given the fact that I am middle-
aged, blond and from Sweden—which in Southern Europe sometimes is
perceived as a proto-German country—I had to realise that this joke prob-
ably contained a grain of truth. In line with this, I learnt that many
Portuguese were highly aware of the existence of a “domestic Northern
European orientalism” (Peralta and Jensen 2017) which produces
Southern Europe as a space characterised by lack of responsibility, produc-
tivity and rationality. Also, highly educated Portuguese males were some-
times quite reserved in the beginning of our conversations. In addition to
hesitating because of my position as a Northern European, they probably
positioned me as an overtly gender-aware and politically correct person
28 L. ÅKESSON
and therefore thought it was necessary to carefully weigh their words.

Thus, especially, male Portuguese were sometimes initially reluctant to
talk with me.
Also, Angolan informants tended to categorise me as “another kind of
European” (i.e. not Portuguese). Often my non-Portugueseness was pointed
out by Angolan informants in the beginning of our meetings. Thus, to some
extent, Angolans and Portuguese shared the way they positioned me. Yet, in
relation to Angolans, there was obviously also the issue of race, and deeply
internalised images of whiteness as connected to power and status coloured
my contacts, especially with Angolans living in poverty. However, as I have
indicated, most of the Angolans I interviewed were middle-class, and I
would not say that my whiteness limited, for instance, their critique of the
Portuguese. Among middle-class and upper-class Luandans, there is a cer-
tain pride in being black and a strong aversion against subjection to white
people. My personal experience is that this kind of pride is much stronger in
Angola than, for instance, in Mozambique and Cape Verde.
Yet many Angolans were reluctant to participate in my interviews but
for different reasons than the Portuguese. One of the perennial traits that
I recognised in Angola from the early 1990s is the “suffocating national
security culture” (Soares de Oliveira 2015: 96). The many years of war, in
combination with widespread state control, intervention and repression,
has injected a “liquid fear” (Bauman 2006) throughout the Angolan soci-
ety, which, among other things, makes people wary of talking with strang-
ers about anything that smells of politics, and the Portuguese presence was
indeed perceived by many as connected to politics. As one young Angolan
student said when I asked him why he and others were afraid of talking
about their perceptions of the Portuguese: “The Portuguese have support
from highly placed politicians and from the generals. You can talk, but
there might be consequences”. Others saw “the Portuguese” in them-
selves as a threatening and growing power, especially in their capacity as
employers. Fears run deepest among unskilled Angolans working on inse-
cure contracts in Portuguese companies or under Portuguese managers or
both, but also Angolans in more stable positions were afraid of losing their
jobs if they criticised Portuguese superiors. This meant that some of the
Angolans I interviewed started the conversation by praising their
Portuguese bosses and would express criticism only if during the interview
they came to trust me.
Thus, there were some challenges related to setting up interviews and
creating a fruitful dialogue. Yet a strong advantage was both groups’
engagement in the theme of our conversations. Most Angolans were

intrigued by the conspicuous presence of the Portuguese in Luanda and
interested in discussing how it should be interpreted. They also commonly
had strong opinions about Portuguese colleagues and bosses and they
were eager to express these. Like other migrants across the globe,
Portuguese interviewees were often occupied by an effort to define their
position in relation to their new environment. In addition, their arrival in
Angola had often sparked their interest in colonial and postcolonial his-
tory, and they seemed to enjoy discussing these issues with me in my posi-
tion as an outsider. I will return to these interviews in the chapters to
follow.
Notes
1. As I will make clear, the recent criticism levelled against the narrative of
“Africa rising” (e.g. Melber 2016) is also valid for the exaggerated stories
that have been circulating about Angola’s economic wonder.
2. Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA), Angola’ ruling party
since 1975; União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola
(UNITA); and Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola (FNLA).
3. For an in-depth political, social and cultural account of the retornados, see
Valente Cardoso (forthcoming).
4. The plight of this population is described by Andrade (2000).
5. In connection with the elections in August 2017, Eduardo dos Santos
stepped away from the formal office of Angolan presidency, but he will con-
tinue as the leader of MPLA. It remains to be seen what room to manoeuvre
this leaves for the new president, João Lourenço.
6. According to some of my Portuguese informants, a parallel process of ango-
lanization has taken place during the last decade in Portuguese popular cul-
ture. Angolan music and dance styles, such as kizomba and kuduro, have
become immensely popular, especially among young people, in Portugal.
7. For an in-depth analysis of intimate relationships between Portuguese and
Angolans, see Valente Cardoso (forthcoming).
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CHAPTER 2
Postcolonial Encounters in a Lusotropical

World
Abstract During the last decades of colonial rule, the Portuguese regime
adopted the ideology of lusotropicalism as a legitimation for its resistance
to decolonisation. This highly criticised ideology portrayed the colonial
enterprise as characterised by a specific Portuguese capacity for mixture,
intimacy and hybridity. In a more subtle form, such notions are still at play
among Portuguese migrants. In a “postlusotropical” vein, they describe
themselves as good at mixing with Angolans and they bring up hybridised
similarities between themselves and the Angolan Other. Before discussing
these findings, this chapter provides a theoretical frame for the book by
discussing “ethnographies of encounters” and linking them to the postco-
lonial concepts of ambivalence and hybridity. Moreover, the chapter gives
an overview of how Lusophone postcolonial scholars have theorised
lusotropicalism.
Keywords Ethnographies of encounters • Ambivalence • Hybridity •

Lusotropicalism • Postlusotropicalism
Theoretically, I position my study within the anthropological field of

“ethnographies of encounter” (Faier and Rofel 2014). This perspective is
particularly helpful for my exploration of the importance of the Luso-
African postcolonial heritage for the reconstruction of power relations and

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73052-3_2
34 L. ÅKESSON
identities among Portuguese migrants and Angolan “hosts”. Ethnographies

of encounter distinguish themselves by focusing on how the creation of
relations and identities occurs through everyday interaction between
members of two or more groups with different backgrounds and unequal
power positions. Studies in this field demonstrate how cultural meanings
and social positions emerge through such encounters. The studies depart
from the encounter to consider how understandings of identities and
power relations are produced in the engagements between differently situ-
ated groups. They also consider how understandings and power relations
are reproduced through these processes. Thus, ethnographies of encoun-
ters move beyond the original denotation of ethnography as the analysis of
a people or a culture and focus on the encounter between differently situ-
ated people.
The focus on encounters implies that studies in this field aim to juxta-
pose voices, practices and understandings of members of different groups
of people. As I am interested in the encounter between two parties, I have
set out to explore the experiences and meaning making of both these par-
ties, and I have tried to avoid privileging one perspective over the other.
This is somewhat unusual in anthropology, where the traditional fore-
grounding of the emic perspective prescribes that in-depth representa-
tions shall explore constructions of meaning in one social group. From a
postcolonial power perspective, it is also unusual in both anthropology
and postcolonial studies as both of these traditions tend to give voice to
the “subaltern” ex-colonised. However, in the present case, the usual
postcolonial power relations are at least partly set out of play, and the ex-
colonised sometimes turn the table to their advantage. Nevertheless, it
has been both a methodological and analytical challenge to try to under-
stand and represent both perspectives. During the writing process, I have
constantly grappled with the question of “who’s voice am I representing
here, and why?” In doing that, I have shifted the focus between represen-
tations of the two groups, and I have tried to contextually give voice to
the unprivileged. Obviously, this means that throughout the text I dis-
tance myself from the long history of colonialism and exploitation by
representing Angolans who are critical of colonial and postcolonial power
relations. Yet there are also instances when the Portuguese migrants are in
unfavourable positions (e.g. in their relations to powerful representatives
of the Angolan party-state) and in these cases I have tried to bring out
their perspectives.
POSTCOLONIAL ENCOUNTERS IN A LUSOTROPICAL WORLD 35
The problem of striking a balance between different voices illustrates

the way in which power dynamics is at the heart of postcolonial encoun-
ters. Studies of such encounters tend to pay attention to the interaction
among unequally positioned groups while moving beyond unidirectional
models of power. Thus, ethnographies of encounters demonstrate that
relations of power are reshaped in the meetings between the members of
the different groups. Yet, at the same time, these studies are committed to
demonstrate how historical hierarchies continue to reproduce unequal
social, economic and cultural effects (Faier and Rofel 2014). Evidently,
the colonial project has profoundly shaped the positions of both sides.
Accordingly, ethnographies of encounters on one hand remind us that
history matters, but on the other hand, they also make clear that historical
relations of power can be changed through the contingencies of encoun-
ters. For the case I am presenting here, the concept of contingencies is
very relevant in both senses of the word: as the unexpected and open-
ended and as the dependent and conditional (Faier 2009: 10f). The
encounter between the Angolans and the Portuguese is unexpected
because by as late as the early 2000s, Portuguese labour migration to
Angola was a more or less inconceivable phenomenon. Then came the
period of rapid economic growth in Angola at the same time as economies
in southern Europe suffered the consequences of the North Atlantic
financial crisis. However, the encounter is also conditioned by earlier colo-
nial encounters between these two groups and the different and unequal
genealogies of meaning created throughout the colonial history. In paying
attention to the contingency of the encounter, we can see that colonial
and postcolonial formations of power shape the relationships between the
Angolans and the Portuguese, but we can also appreciate that the
unexpected character of the new encounter opens up for new understand-
ings of the relationship.
Lastly, ethnographies of encounter also build on the tradition of colo-
nial and postcolonial studies in anthropology and their exploration of the
ambiguity and complexity of engagements (Faier and Rofel 2014).
Anthropological studies of colonialism have inspired analysis of ethnogra-
phies of encounter because these studies were among the first to focus on
everyday encounters and how these were shaped by the colonial power
dynamics (see e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; Stoler 2002; Taussig
1987). These studies challenged conventional top-down models of power
as they did not perceive power as unidirectional but as processual. Through
focusing on negotiations, resistance and unforeseen co-production, they
36 L. ÅKESSON
demonstrated that meanings, identities and power are created in a com-

plex interplay.
In line with this, I do not approach the encounters between Angolans
and Portuguese in Luanda as simply the case of a subjugated ex-colonised
Other dominated by powerful ex-colonisers but as meetings between two
interrelated groups that negotiate their relationship on a daily basis. Yet
their relationship is ingrained with racism and internalised stereotypical
images deriving from the colonial period. To an important extent, both
parties are recreating meanings and positions of power within the same
discursive framework, although they are differently positioned. They
understand each other well, but it is a kind of wretched understanding
building on a deeply unequal relationship that long ago has broken down.
In a sense, they approach each other as two ex-partners who a long time
ago were tied to each other in a violent and abusive marriage. Today, both
sides have a certain interest in rebuilding the relationship, but they are
guarded in relation to the other. As I will make clear, the co-production of
meaning within the same discursive repertoire was one of the characteris-
tics of the encounters between Angolans and Portuguese.
Accordingly, postcolonial continuities play an important role in this
book, but I highlight the problems of a deterministic approach. As I will
show, power relations and identities in Luanda are shaped by the colonial
past, but they are also constituted by other sources of meaning, not the
least the rapid, complex and tumultuous development that has taken place
in Angola since independence in 1975. Four decades of civil war, recon-
struction programs, turbo capitalism, economic crisis and repressive politi-
cal leadership have contributed to reshape identities and hierarchies
implicating both the Angolans and the Portuguese. In Angola, a new
social reality has been born every decade. Hence, I take the “post” in
“postcolonial” to signal both “continuance” and “after” (Eriksson Baaz
2005: 34), and I try to acknowledge that both colonial and postcolonial
histories are characterised by complexity and contradictions.
This book’s partial engagement with “after” and ruptures with the
colonial past sets it apart from the majority of other postcolonial studies.
Despite their attention to change and context, I would like to argue that
most postcolonial studies tend to document continuity to a larger extent
than discontinuity. Postcolonialism is often seen as an ongoing process
steadfastly rooted in the colonial past. Many studies have disclosed the
unbroken dominance of colonial images and notions. For example, in
much research on South-North migration, the disastrous effects of post-
colonial prejudice and stereotypes of migrants have been explored. In par-

ticular, racialisation as the outcome of colonialism has been pointed out as
being a continuous source of discrimination (Bardhan and Zhang 2016;
Silverstein 2005). Arguably, postcolonial studies have not yet attended to
the potential manifestations of changing North-South relations in the
wake of changing migration patterns, as those reflected in the case of
Portuguese migration to Angola.
Hybridity and Ambivalence
The postcolonial analytical notions of ambivalence and hybridity are par-
ticularly relevant for analysing the reconstruction of identities and power
relations taking place in encounters between Portuguese migrants and
Angolans in Luanda. In relation to earlier understandings of colonial
encounters, concepts such as ambivalence and hybridity open up for
understandings that are more dynamic. They clarify that encounters
between the colonised and the coloniser, as well as between the ex-
colonised and the ex-coloniser, comprise not only processes of domination
or assimilation or both but rather reconfigurations of cultures. Moreover,
they point beyond simplistic understandings of “resistance” and “complic-
ity” as dichotomous stances characterising the position of the ex-/colo-
nised. In a broader perspective, these concepts illuminate that mixture is
something that characterises all human encounters.
Questions of difference, similarity and mixture were at the core of
Angolan and Portuguese discourses about each other. Processes of other-
ing were obvious on both sides but in different ways. Historically, colonial
discourses have profoundly shaped these processes and created an
internalisation of racialised images. Resonating with general traits of ste-
reotyping, both Portuguese and Angolans tended to describe the Other in
terms of depersonalised collectives. They constructed Self and Other in a
dichotomous way, and the Other tended to be characterised in essen-
tialised and unchanging terms. Typically, and reflecting more general
colonial stereotyping, the Portuguese would describe the Angolans as
laid-back and irresponsible, while the Angolans would talk about the
Portuguese as cold, distant and arrogant. This division was sometimes set
in stone.
Yet there was also a great ambivalence in the drawing of lines between
us and them. The concept of ambivalence has been adapted into postcolo-
nial theory by Homi Bhabha (1994). Ambivalence refers to the complex
38 L. ÅKESSON
and dynamic mixture of attraction and repulsion that characterises encoun-

ters between the ex-coloniser and ex-colonised. The term is borrowed
from psychoanalysis, in which it describes the workings of the subcon-
scious. In postcolonial theory, it refers to processes whereby various desires
are projected upon the colonised other. This is reflected, for instance, in
the images of the simple and innocent “savage”, free from the tourna-
ments of modern life (Eriksson Baaz 2005: 54ff) and in the sexualisation
of the colonised.
In everyday social processes, postcolonial encounters are inescapably
ambivalent because the two sides are never simply and completely opposed
to each other. Rather, both the ex-colonised and the ex-coloniser tend to
nurture ambivalent feelings towards the Other (Ashcroft et al. 2000).
Within the ex-colonised subject, there may simultaneously exist senti-
ments of resistance as well as of complicity, and these feelings may mingle
and fluctuate dependent on the context. Feelings of hatred and admiration
may exist side by side. Ambivalence may also characterise the way in which
the ex-coloniser relates to the ex-colonised subject. Expressions and prac-
tices of exploitation and desire may coexist at the same time. The objecti-
fied ex-colonised Other may create feelings of disdain as well as fantasies
of erotic pleasures.
In Luanda, the Portuguese tended to be more prone to describe them-
selves as similar to Angolans, than the other way round. Thus, an open
acknowledgement of ambivalent similarities was more common among
the Portuguese, probably because they as the former and dominant colo-
niser had less to lose in acknowledging mixture. In particular, some
Portuguese described themselves as similar to urban middle-class residents
of Luanda (e.g. in terms of vanity and extravagance). Many Portuguese
formulated the ambiguous tension between attraction and desire in terms
of Angolans and Portuguese being involved in a love-hate relationship,
and they seemed to assume that such feelings were shared by Angolans.
Among Angolans, few expressed sentiments of desire and “love” towards
the Portuguese. As one of them said when criticising Portuguese notions
of intimate relations between Angolans and Portuguese, “A big brother
wouldn’t beat his little brother for 500 years”. Thus, they seldom talked
about themselves as attracted by the Portuguese, but they would often
express desires for things Portuguese. Portuguese food and beverages were
very popular in Luanda. An example of this was the opening of the
Portuguese supermarket Kero in Luanda in 2014, which caused a major
crisis for the South African supermarket Shoprite, as Luandan residents
seemingly assumed that products imported from Portugal were better

than those from South Africa. Portuguese football was also immensely
popular in Luanda, and people cheer for either Benfica or Porto, the two
main Portuguese football teams. The Angolan elite’s conspicuous con-
sumption “of Portugal” in terms of investments in key businesses, real
estate and luxurious holidays described above is another example of the
same tendency.
Accordingly, there is an ambivalent but strong feeling of recognition
between the Angolans and Portuguese whom I have interviewed in
Luanda. In the postcolonial literature, such transcultural forms produced
out of colonial encounters are discussed in terms of hybridity. Hybridity
has a dialogical character, engaging all parts involved in the process of its
production (Rosengren in press). The concept of hybridity has been used
by, for instance, Homi Bhabha (1994), who describes the colonial encoun-
ter not as a process of cultural assimilation and homogenisation but as a
process of hybridisation, stressing the mutual constitution of the identities
of the ex-colonised and the ex-coloniser. In such constitutive processes,
postcolonial subjects become neither the one nor the other but a hybri-
dised self. In a similar vein, the philosopher Y. Mudimbe (1997) writes
about the colonial encounter as an espace métissé. In this space, he argues,
a transculturation process takes place and a new mixed cultural order is
created.
In postcolonial studies, hybridity is sometimes described as a process of
resistance and challenge of dominant forms of power by the ex-colonised.
Such conscious forms of hybridisation, Pnina Werbner (1997) calls “inten-
tional hybridity”. However, in most cases, including the present one, it is
also a question of historical processes of “organic hybridisation” (ibid.) or
unconscious borrowing, exchanges and appropriations taking place over a
long period of time. In Luanda, Portuguese and Angolans performed
both conscious and unconscious forms of hybridity, and both sides were
implicated in these processes.
The concept of hybridity has a dark history, as in nineteenth-century
discourse it was used as a metaphor for presumed negative consequences
of racial mixture. A hybrid was supposedly characterised by weakness and
bad health. The concept has also been criticised for carrying connotations
of essential purity (i.e. a hybrid being the mixture of two original and pure
essences) (Papastergiadis 1997). When discussing cultural hybridity, such
connotations are naturally disturbing as they invoke ideas about the exis-
tence of bounded and unchanging cultures. Yet, as “hybridity” evokes
40 L. ÅKESSON
understandings of mutual transformations and interdependence, it is

despite these weaknesses an indispensable concept for discussing identity
formation in contemporary Luanda. It is also important to remember
that, in the postcolonial literature, hybridity does not refer to any kind of
cross-cultural exchange but to exchanges in settings characterised by
unequal power relations. However, it is not a question of a dominant cul-
ture totally absorbing a weaker culture but of processes of borrowing and
mixing and creating something new (Ashcroft et al. 2000). Thus, in the
postcolonial tradition, the concept of hybridity stands for a move beyond
stereotypical understandings of dominance and assimilation.
When Angolans and Portuguese in Luanda reflect on their hybridised
positions, they ascribe them very different meanings. Angolans tend to
describe the historical transformation process as enforced and as contain-
ing a loss of meanings and practices that once were “theirs”. Angolans I
meet in Luanda could say that “the Portuguese destroyed our culture
already long ago” and they would often ascertain that “Luanda is not
Africa” and thereby, in a classic way, underline a loss of something they
saw as original and authentic. In Luanda, some people seem to feel this
kind of loss in an acute way, and they describe Luanda as a place character-
ised by long-term mixture and the hybridised creole elites’ dissociation
from traditions. Today, people from all over the country live in the capital,
most inhabitants have Portuguese as their first language, and the particu-
lar Luandan culture of “immediatism” (Schubert 2016) and conspicuous
consumption is dominant. The Portuguese, rather, see their hybrid iden-
tity as something that has thrived in the wake of what they construct as a
glorious national past, which was characterised by navigation, discoveries
and explorations. For one side hybridity entails a loss and for the other
side a history of conquest.
Inherent to the colonial production of transcultural hybrid social forms
was the desire to reform the colonised Other. The rhetoric of the civilising
mission was crucial in legitimating the colonial mission. Yet, at the same
time, it was necessary to evade the threat that the colonised Other became
more competent than the colonisers. Homi Bhabha (1994) has pointed at
this contradiction and called it “the ironic compromise of mimicry” or the
idea that the colonised should be reformed and civilised but not quite as
civilised as the colonisers. The Portuguese colonial approach to assimila-
dos, which I mention in Chap. 1, is an example of such a compromise of
mimicry. The assimilados were supposed to perfectly embody everything
that was defined as “typically Portuguese” but simultaneously they were
not accepted as fully Portuguese. In contemporary Luanda, the ironic

compromise of mimicry is still perceivable though in a more subtle way.
Many Portuguese seemed to harbour the idea that it was their duty to
reform the Angolans they worked with but simultaneously indicated that
the Angolans were different and would never become as knowledgeable
and developed as a Portuguese. This was witnessed by many Angolans,
who said that the Portuguese are good as teachers but are incapable of
taking advice from Angolans or admitting that Angolans can be as compe-
tent as themselves.
Portuguese Postcolonial Studies

and the Lusotropical Ideology
Until quite recently, perspectives from the Lusophone world have been
more or less absent in postcolonial studies. Some Portuguese postcolonial
scholars have criticised what they perceive to be an Anglophone domi-
nance in this field of study. The sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos is
one of the most cited of these critics, and he states, “the history of colo-
nialism has been written in English, not in Portuguese” (2002: 11).
According to Sousa Santos, British colonialism from the beginning has
been the norm in colonial and postcolonial studies, and consequently
there is a need to define Portuguese colonialism in terms of its specificity
vis-à-vis hegemonic colonialism. Moreover, Sousa Santos underlines that
Portuguese colonialism should be represented on its own terms and not
only in relation to the discourses on hegemonic British (and to some
extent French and Spanish) colonialism.
One of the fundamental specificities that characterised Portugal as a
colonial power was the country’s position as a semi-peripheral nation,
located somewhere between the centre and the periphery of the world
economy. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Portugal expanded
its global empire, but after that, the economy declined. The Industrial
Revolution never reached Portugal, and in 1822 Brazil gained indepen-
dence, which implied that Portugal lost the economically and politically
most important colony. At times, Portugal was more or less an “informal
colony” of England, and several times England did defend Portugal
against Spanish and French interests. Thus, as various Lusophone postco-
lonial scholars argue, Portuguese colonialism can be defined as a subaltern
colonialism (Feldman-Bianco 2001; Sousa Santos 2002; Vale de Almeida
42 L. ÅKESSON
2002). This definition goes against the grain of Anglophone postcolonial

theory, which rests on a fundamental distinction between the European
coloniser and the subaltern Other (e.g. Eriksson et al. 2005).
Integral to the notion of Portuguese colonialism as subaltern is a stigma
of incompetence, which is often mentioned by Portuguese postcolonial
scholars (Alexandre 2006; Sousa Santos 2002; Vale de Almeida 2002).
Supposedly, because of poverty and disorganisation, Portugal is still imag-
ined as not having had the capacity to colonise efficiently. Sousa Santos
(2002: 35) describes Portuguese colonisation as “a chaotic process” and
argues that “the Portuguese were unable to govern their colonies effica-
ciously, and were therefore unable as well to prepare their emancipation
orderly. The colonial war in Africa best demonstrates this double
incapacity”.
Yet advocates of Portuguese colonial power rhetorically turned this
“incapacity” and the subaltern position of Portugal as a colonial power
into an advantage. They described the supposed inability to rule in terms
of Portugal being a softer and less repressive colonial power. Moreover,
they argued that this led to a specific closeness between the coloniser and
the colonised in the Portuguese empire. On a more abstract level, such
claims were related to the idea that the Portuguese were exceptional in
creating a creolised syncretic harmony in their colonies (Venâncio 1996).
This kind of colonial ideological rhetoric became known as
“Lusotropicalism”.
Lusotropicalism
The ideological underpinning of Portuguese colonialism has a special his-
tory. By the 1950s, the Portuguese Salazar dictatorship had adopted the
lusotropical ideology as a legitimation for retaining its African colonies
despite growing anticolonial pressure from the burgeoning independence
movements as well as the international debate. The term lusotropicalismo
gained scientific clout through the studies of the Brazilian sociologist
Gilberto Freyre (1933, 1960). However, although Freyre often is quoted
as the “founder” of the lusotropical ideology, Freyre’s characterisation of
Portuguese colonialism resonates with both pre-existing and subsequent
interpretations of Portuguese identity and colonial project. Arguably,
Freyre’s ideas are strongly linked to deep-founded Portuguese
self-representations.
The fundamental idea in lusotropicalism is that Portuguese colonial

rule was unique because it created a hybrid creolised social formation
wherever it was entrenched. Freyre argued that the Portuguese colonies
were characterised by a harmonious unity as the colonial masters adapted
to the culture of the territories they ruled and rejected ideas of racial purity
that marked, for instance, British colonialism. According to the lusotropi-
cal ideology, the Portuguese had an innate and creative empathy for tropi-
cal lands and people (hence lusotropicalism). This particular attraction was
supposedly related to the Portuguese own hybrid ethnic origin. Freyre
described the Portuguese lusotropicalism as the result of contacts with
Jews in the Iberian Peninsula as well as the Moorish influence that predis-
posed the Portuguese to intimate contact, including sexual relations with
“dark-skinned” people. Thus, Freyre saw adaptation, cultural interpene-
tration and miscegenation as characteristic of Portuguese colonialism
(Castelo 2015). Yet, as several postcolonial analysts have highlighted,
despite its emphasis on intimacy and community, lusotropicalism func-
tioned to legitimise and hide deeply unequal relations. Critics have
described lusotropicalism as “a more or less conscious attempt to elide the
issue of racial oppression in the Portuguese colonies” (Helgesson 2001).
Celebrating Hybridity (or Not): Sex and Race in the Empire

In postcolonial writing on the Lusophone empire, conceptions of ambigu-
ity and hybridity play a prominent role. Scholars bring up the notion of
“miscegenation” and discuss how mixed relationships should be
interpreted. Some also question Portuguese exceptionalism in relation to
other colonial powers. An important catalyst for this debate was Sousa
Santos’s essay “Between Prospero and Caliban: Colonialism, postcolonial-
ism and inter-identity” (2002), in which he describes colonial ambiguity
as a trivial fact (my emphasis) based in widespread miscegenation in
Portuguese colonial societies. According to him, the commonality of mis-
cegenation was not a consequence of an absence of racism, as argued by
lusotropicalist reasoning. Rather, it was grounded in a different kind of
racism based on sexist rules that allowed the white Portuguese man to
have sex with the black woman, but not the white woman with the black
man. Thus, he rules out the absence of racism, but, in similarity with the
lusotropical discourse, he maintains that miscegenation created a kind of
closeness between the coloniser and colonised which sometimes mini-
mised or even subverted colonial power inequalities, although it was
44 L. ÅKESSON
unequal in terms of gender. He describes this closeness as marked by

ambivalence and hybridity:
[T]he ambiguity and hybridity between colonizer and colonized, far from
being a postcolonial claim, was the experience of Portuguese colonialism for
long periods of time. The practice of ambivalence, interdependence, and
hybridity was a necessity of the Portuguese colonial relation. (2002: 16)
Furthermore, Sousa Santos argues that, in the case of Portuguese post-

colonialism, a supposed ambivalence, or hybridity, related to skin colour
signals a difference from other postcolonial traditions. Here, he refers to
what he calls “the mulatto man and woman” and argues that their bodies
incorporate an “in-between space”. He compares this standpoint with
Anglo-Saxon postcolonial critics and argues that for them “the color of
the skin is an inescapable limit to mimicry and assimilation practices”
(2002: 17). Thus, Sousa Santos defends Portuguese exceptionality and
the idea that widespread miscegenation has shaped a different identity
regime, which builds on a different system of racialisation.
Others are more openly critical of the effects of miscegenation. The
anthropologist Miguel Vale de Almeida (2002: 194) maintains that “neu-
tral” interpretations of the notion of miscegenation have led to overtly
positive understandings of a history of extreme inequality, as these inter-
pretations have left out racialised social and economic relations. The his-
torian David Birmingham is very direct in his critique:
Portuguese society protected the virginity of white women… This protec-

tion did not extend, however, to black women. The female victims of empire
continued to carry mestizo children fathered by their employers, or by the
promiscuous sons of their employers, but these children were all too often
dismissed as black. (2015: 62)
In addition, critics have questioned whether miscegenation actually was

a case of Portuguese exceptionalism (e.g. Krug 2011: 112). Arguably,
such practices were widespread in most colonial contexts, though not offi-
cially underpinned by a colonial ideology, such as lusotropicalism. For
instance, the anthropologist Ann Stoler (1989) contends that the domi-
nant domestic arrangement in British, French, Dutch and Spanish colonial
societies was a colonised woman living as a concubine to a European man.
This kind of arrangement became less common only in the early twenti-
eth century, when white women started to arrive in large numbers in the

colonies. Actually, the same kind of gendered migration process took place
in Portuguese colonies, though some decades later. It was only in the
1960s that a more equal balance between Portuguese male and females
was created in the Angolan colony (Castelo 2007). The lusotropical idea
that Portuguese colonialism produced an exceptionally large mixed popu-
lation is also contradicted by colonial statistics showing that in 1960 only
1% of the Angolan population was registered as “mestiços” (ibid. 216).
In addition to notions of miscegenation, images of another social pro-
cess, namely “cafrealization”,1 came to underpin lusotropical understand-
ings. In his sophisticated version of “lusotropicalism light”, Sousa Santos
describes cafrealisation in the following way:
Cafrealization is a nineteenth-century designation used mainly in Eastern

Africa (sic) to stigmatize the Portuguese men that yielded their culture and
civilized status to adopt the ways of living and thinking of the “cafres,” the
blacks depicted as primitive savages. (2002: 24)
“Cafrealization”, according to Sousa Santos, happened when

Portuguese males interacted in what he (in an idealising style) describes as
a reciprocal and horizontal way with the local population and set up
“deeper kinds of relationships, often including family ties and the acquisi-
tion of native languages and manners” (ibid. 25). One of my Portuguese
interviewees, a man who was born in the late 1940s and had vivid memo-
ries of colonial Angola, described “cafrealization” in the following way:
The Portuguese sometimes lived in sloppy conditions. They were badly

dressed, there was no hygiene. They were cafrealizados, a bit like some of
the Boers. They were people without any qualifications. And the Portuguese
did not have high demands. So we created a mestiçagem.
In the nineteenth century, the Portuguese political and religious elite

disqualified and stigmatised this kind of practice and saw it as degenera-
tive. The spectre of “cafrealization” created fear and anxiety among those
who saw themselves as supervising the colonial project. Yet, as pointed out
by the anthropologist Christina Bastos (2008), Gilbert Freyre and his
lusotropical theories would later turn the stigmas of “cafrealization” and
miscegenation into something positive. Hybridity became a point of luso-
tropical pride when Freyre “converted the weaknesses of hybridizing and
mixing into the strengths of hybridizing and mixing” (ibid. 31).
46 L. ÅKESSON
At their core, both lusotropicalism and postlusotropicalism build on an

idea of Portuguese notions of race as different and purportedly more “tol-
erant”. In a sophisticated version, this idea is evident in Sousa Santos’s
essay (2002) when he talks about the ambivalence of “skin colour” and
relates that to “mulatto men and women”, whom he portrays as represen-
tative of the “inter-identity” of Portuguese colonialism. The crude luso-
tropical version portrays the absence of racism as a typical characteristic of
Portuguese colonialism. This was the message of the colonial regime, and
large parts of the population came to interiorise it (Maseo and Araújo
2010). The Salazar regime’s discourse on lusotropicalism and the absence
of racial discrimination resonated with the deeply held beliefs of many
Portuguese about their national identity. Moreover, the dictatorship suc-
cessfully framed the narrative of colonialism in Africa within the epic
national story about Portugal’s role in “the discoveries of the world” and
European expansion:
All became part of the same: Camões epic The Lusiads, Vasco da Gama’s
discovery of the sea route to India, the colonization of Brazil as the major
civilizing success of Portugal, and the 20th century occupation of Angola,
Mozambique. They were all part of a national narrative in which discovery,
expansion and colonization played an absolutely central role. This of course
became hegemonic and part of people’s representations, not just imposed
propaganda. (Vale de Almeida 2008: 5)
The lusotropical story about the Portuguese as a people with a grand

history and free from racial discrimination created a specific understanding
of the national Self. In colonial Portugal, this entailed that brutal racial
discrimination could coexist with an idea about the nation as exceptional
in its openness to the world and to different people:
Discourses on the inferiority of blacks could be proffered at the same time

as discourses on the different way in which the Portuguese had encountered
and colonized other people – with supposedly less violence, with more mis-
cegenation, with more dialogue, and in opposition to cruder and more dis-
tant ways by other colonial powers. (Vale de Almeida 2008: 5f)
Postlusotropicalism in the Shadow of a Lost Empire

What roles do the colonial past and the lusotropical ideology play in
Portugal today? This is a pertinent question for this book as we naturally
can assume that the Portuguese migrants in Luanda arrive with a set of
preconceived notions about colonial and postcolonial relations. Only a

minority of the Portuguese migrants in Luanda have personal memories
from the colonial period and these memories are from their childhood. Yet
stories about colonial experiences as well as postlusotropical notions argu-
ably are an important part of their repertoire.
In Portugal of today, memories of the colonial past are all but forgot-
ten. Some Portuguese express guilt over the colonial past and especially
over the colonial wars and the badly managed decolonisation processes in
the African colonies. Moreover, as I have shown, in academic circles, there
is a strong engagement in postcolonial questions, and in the media, critical
reflections on the colonial past as well as racism have become increasingly
common in recent years (see e.g. Gorjão Henriques 2016). Yet there are
also clear signs of an idealisation and celebration of the colonial past. This
became very clear to me in 2015 when I visited Portugal dos Pequenitos
(Portugal for Kids), a popular tourist attraction in the city of Coimbra.
The Salazar regime opened Portugal dos Pequenitos in 1940, and it can be
described as an outdoor theme park that represents each and every
Portuguese colonial possession through a miniature building, constructed
in a supposedly vernacular style. In the case of Angola, this implies a little
whitewashed hut guarded by statues of three anonymous and sinisterly
looking black men dressed only in loincloths. In the middle of the theme
park, there is a big map of the world marked with the travel routes of the
Portuguese explorers. The caption of the map reads E se mais mundo hou-
vera la chegara (“If there had been more of the world, we would have
arrived there”). When I visited the park, it was full of families, and parents
were busy explaining to their children the importance of Portugal to the
history of the world. To my mind, it was quite astonishing to find that
there were absolutely no traces in the park of any reflexive stances in rela-
tion to the colonial history. Instead, the kids who happily run around in
the park were told the story about Portugal as a great civilising power that
opened up the world for the benefit of other Europeans.
Miguel Vale de Almeida (2008) has used the term “postlusotropical-
ism” to describe the contemporary Portuguese narrative about the colo-
nial experience and Portugal’s role in the world. In this case, “post” should
be read primarily as a sign of continuity, as an indicator of the influence of
the lusotropical narrative for contemporary constructions of the
Portuguese national identity. As argued by Vale de Almeida (2013: 596):
[T]he old colonial rhetoric, now reprashed as universalism, non-racist

humanism, miscegenation, and “cultural encounters,” continue[s] to be a
48 L. ÅKESSON
structuring element of Portuguese official and common sense narratives of

identity and self-representation.
Thus, to be non-racist and open to cultural encounters continues to be

seen as a part of Portugueseness, and the imperial past still plays a key role
for the image of the nation. In the national imaginary, the greatness of the
former empire is construed as a counterbalance to the present position as
a small semi-peripheral nation in the global political economy. In official
narratives, the former subaltern colonial power is still busy trying to trans-
late itself into a semi-important global player. Alexandre (2006: 11) talks
about this as an “obsessive preoccupation with external acknowledgement
and the status of the country in the hierarchy of nations” (my translation).
In line with this, a discourse about a lusotropical communalism across the
(former) empire continues to shape official Portuguese rhetoric on the
African ex-colonies. Political and economic alliances with former colonies
are important to Portugal, and they rely on references to a specific broth-
erhood of cultural continuity and language. The issue of a common lan-
guage—the Lusophony—has become a leading theme in political efforts
to reconfigure a Portuguese global community. This community presup-
poses a common language and shared cultural continuity but omits its
historical imposition (Maseo and Araújo 2010: 26).
As Vale de Almeida makes clear in the quote above, postlusotropicalism
continues to be a part not only of official rhetoric but also of “common
sense narratives”. In the following, I will bring up postlusotropical notions
that commonly were expressed in Luanda.
Postlusotropicalism in Contemporary Luanda

Understandings of mixture, hybridity and absence of racism appeared in
the Portuguese migrants’ narratives about the colonial period as well as in
their descriptions of relations between themselves and the Angolan Other.
Also, middle-class Angolan informants could sometimes refer to postluso-
tropical images, though to a much lesser extent. As postcolonial scholars
have shown, the continuous power of colonial processes comprises both
the ex-coloniser and the ex-colonised.
Stories About the Colonial Past

In general, the Portuguese I met were more engaged in talking about the
colonial past than the Angolan informants. To Angolans, colonial times
often seemed to be a distant reality, which had been followed by a number

of dramatic changes: the long period of war, the peace, the economic
boom and then the new and recent economic crisis. When young Angolans
talked about the colonial period, it was sometimes as if they just uninter-
estedly repeated what they had learnt at school. This was different for the
Portuguese migrants. For them, the colonial past had gained a new actual-
ity when they moved to Angola, and they were often eager to discuss it,
maybe also because it reflected the present rewarding effects of investing
in an identity as a former superior coloniser. However, when I specifically
asked Angolan interviewees about how elderly people in their family talked
about the colonial times, some of them had stories to tell.
When I asked people to compare Portuguese colonialism with other
colonial regimes, Portuguese interviewees mostly painted a positive pic-
ture. They often mixed a more or less openly declared pride of the colonial
past with idealistic images of a time of non-discriminatory racial mixture.
Postlusotropical notions permeated the discourse. For example, a man
working with import of material for the construction sector exclaimed:
“Portugal was the best colonial power. The Spanish in Latin America, they
murdered a lot of people. But the Portuguese, they mixed themselves
[with local inhabitants] and they still do. Just look at me!” A Portuguese
male engineer was equally proud of his country’s colonial past: “The
British were deeply racist and segregated. We mixed. We were never rac-
ist”. Similarly, a male bank director held up Portuguese colonialism as an
exemplary model of integration:
We were good at mixing. [Therefore] Portuguese is spoken everywhere in

Angola. Out in the countryside in Namibe I met people who said “bom día,
obrigada” [good morning, thank you]. We were different as a colonial
power. The Angolans thought we were sympathetic. There was integration.
The Portuguese are well accepted all over Africa.
Sometimes continuities with the lusotropical ideology were nearly over-

explicit, as in the following statement by a highly educated Portuguese
male:
We use to say that God invented the white and the black, and the Portuguese
invented the mulato. We didn’t have any complexes. We created our own
families in the colonies. Still today there are many Portuguese living with
Angolans.
50 L. ÅKESSON
Other Portuguese were more nuanced in their assessment of the colo-

nial period, although they would still maintain that Portuguese colonial-
ism was “different”. A female economist said:
In the beginning we were very brave, we were to first to discover the world,
we mixed more which was good, but we were also very racist, although a bit
less than the other colonial powers. And we didn’t prepare the colonies for
independence. Even the Angolans say that everything worked when we were
here. Everything fell apart at decolonization.
Like this interviewee, many Portuguese talked about how they believed
that Angolans had experienced colonial times. A common belief was that
the colonial period had been better for them than the post-independence
period. A Portuguese female working in telecommunications represented
this standpoint in the following way:
The elderly, those who are forty plus, would blatantly tell you that every-
thing worked during colonialism. They were treated with dignity, and they
miss these days. Health care was accessible, and there were schools even
though they had to learn the names of Portuguese rivers and railway sta-
tions. The younger generation is different. They have felt the consequences
of the war. And they have heard the propaganda that all problems are due to
the Portuguese. That is every day on the news.
Other Portuguese argued in similar ways, and this kind of one-sided

view contrasted markedly with instances when Angolans themselves talked
about their experiences of Portuguese colonialism. There were those who
were strongly critical, while others produced narratives of colonial memo-
ries that were more nuanced and sometimes quite ambivalent. Yet others
voiced postcolonial notions that reproduced a colonial rhetoric. A young
male Angolan architect belonged to those who criticised the colonial
regime: “The salaries were very low. The Portuguese were not fair. The
Angolans were forced to work, they received a bag of rice as payment, and
it they complained, they were whipped”. A male waiter was equally critical
and said that elderly family members had told him that “Portuguese men
just took the women they wanted to have”.
Those who had family members who had been exposed to colonial acts
of cruelty naturally hold strong and emotionally charged aversions against
the colonial regime. A male Angolan student talked about atrocities com-
mitted against his family by the colonialists:
The Portuguese maltreated people. My father’s father was beaten, and tied
to a chair until he died a week later. Then he was buried still tied to that
chair. That was because he was a soba [traditional leader] in Malanje and
protested against the Portuguese. My parents still harbour strong regrets
against the Portuguese, but I’ve let it go. For me that belongs to the past.
Other Angolans painted a more mixed picture of colonial times when

they talked about how elderly family members had described these.
Typically, they would bring up both positive and negative aspects, as did
one man working in a Portuguese company:
My father says that the Portuguese used to be very strict, you had to respect
them. They even punished people in the street. The city was better orga-
nized, there was no garbage, and everyone behaved well. The war and the
departure of the Portuguese destroyed the city. Today they are trying to
reconstruct it, but the government just thinks about filling its own
pockets.
Another Angolan male working as an assistant to a Portuguese accoun-

tant shared the same view:
Sometimes the elderly in my family say it was better, it was cleaner and it was
easy to find a job, although wages were low. Today it is worse than during
colonialism. Then somebody else was exploiting us, but today brothers are
exploiting brothers, it’s even worse.
A female secretary balanced her positive and negative impressions of

the colonial period by saying “My father says it was better organized, but
you were repressed. You couldn’t be a normal person in your own coun-
try”. The idea that Luanda was better organised and cleaner during colo-
nial times was expressed by many Angolans. From a postcolonial
perspective, this can be seen as a reproduction of colonial ideas about
Europeans as orderly, organised and rational and Africans as unruly and
laid-back. Clearly, the influence of such notions has been profound not
only among the ex-colonisers but also among the ex-colonised. Yet
Angolans’ pictures of the colonial “orderliness” can also be read as a cri-
tique of the contemporary Angolan regime and its failure in creating a
decent economic and social environment for the population. People
strongly feel that the central parts of Luanda, where the privileged white
population lived, actually were better organised before the war started and
52 L. ÅKESSON
the Portuguese left. To many middle-class Luandans, the garbage, pot-

holes and traffic chaos in the city are constant sources of shame.
Postlusotropical Positions and Contemporary Relations

Postlusotropical notions were not only discernible when Portuguese infor-
mants talked about the colonial past. Seemingly, they also shaped their
understandings of contemporary relations between themselves and the
Angolan Other. Notions about mixture and intimacy often permeated
their discourse about the relationship between Portuguese and Angolans—
in particular when they talked about that relationship in general terms. As
I will show in the chapters to follow, critical judgements of the Other were
more common when Portuguese informants talked about their everyday
experiences of working together with Angolans. Thus, there was a
discrepancy between on one hand a generalising discourse about a harmo-
nious conviviality and on the other hand an everyday reality marked by
tensions and contested power relations. Arguably, this discrepancy is a
continuity from the colonial period. Both colonial and postcolonial luso-
tropical ideals seem to thrive best in isolation from everyday experiences.
As I demonstrate throughout this book, Angolan interviewees were
generally quite critical towards the Portuguese they met in Luanda, and
unlike the Portuguese they seldom expressed lusotropical ideas. Yet
notions about similarity between themselves and Portuguese people were
sometimes articulated by middle-class informants. For example, one
Angolan man said that “Some Portuguese say the Angolans are very simi-
lar to them. Our African culture has disappeared so we are very similar to
the Portuguese”. Another Angolan informant maintained, “It is good for
the Portuguese to see that there are many things here that are similar to
Portugal. People eat similar foods, cheer for the same Portuguese football
clubs, etcetera”. Other Angolan interviewees mentioned that they saw
vaidade (vanity but also pretensions and pride) as a “national characteris-
tic” they shared with the Portuguese.
The Portuguese I met quite unanimously described themselves as good
at mixture. For example, one female teacher, who had lived in Angola as a
child, said:
The Portuguese are generally well integrated in Luanda. They mix and the
Africans open up. They get on very well with each other. Angola was a col-
ony, Angola have much from Portugal, the Portuguese are at home. A
mixture.
Others were of the same opinion. A young female engineer said, “The
Portuguese have a capacity for mixture. Maybe we are more human. We
know how to socialize, there is always a mixture”. Another woman said,
“We mingle, we are not invasive, we tend to do that, it is in our DNA”,
while a male informant maintained, “The Portuguese attitude is more inti-
mate, we move around with less fear in Luanda. There is strong cultural
tie”.
Also, intimate relationships between Portuguese and Angolans were
often discussed by Portuguese informants. In particular, they had many
opinions about what they often described as Portuguese male construc-
tions workers’ “obsession” with young Angolan women. A male
Portuguese who had been involved in a number of relationships with
younger Angolan women described this “obsession” in the following way:
Men who are 40–50 years of age arrive here and suddenly they become
20 years younger. They are courted by young good-looking women who
don’t make any demands on them. Instead, they cook their food, take care
of their clothes, give them compliments, dance and have sex with them.
They believe they are in heaven.
Other Portuguese were much more critical of this kind of relationship.

This was particularly true for females and the highly educated. One women
said, “Portuguese men 40 and 50 years of age who behave as they were
20. They go out with very young girls and they stupidly believe these girls
are in love with them”. Many middle-class informants criticised the male
construction workers for exploiting very young girls, for betraying their
wives in Portugal and for “losing their heads” and believing in “love”
when the Angolan women only dated them for money. Obviously, com-
plex and intertwined dimensions of race, class, gender and age were at play
(see Valente Cardoso forthcoming), but what is interesting in relation to
postlusotropicalism is that intimate relationships between Portuguese
males and Angolan females still were described as an ambivalent epitome
of the relationship between the two national groups. The postlusotropical
echo of mestiçagem and cafrealização was nearly too obvious.
Thus, Portuguese informants emphasised their capacity for mixture and
talked a lot about the supposedly frequent relationships between male
construction workers and young Angolan women. Yet, under the surface
of the descriptions of mixture and intimacy, there were also strong fears of
assaults and other violent acts directed at them by “the Angolans”. In the
Portuguese community, there was a creeping fear of being exposed to
54 L. ÅKESSON
untamed violence but also to unknown diseases. One group of Portuguese

engineers went as far as demanding that their company provide them with
a helicopter that should be constantly ready to fly them out of Angola “in
case something happened”. Some Portuguese hinted at this ambivalent
mixture of feelings by describing the relation between themselves and
Angolans as a “love-hate relationship”. The love they would readily talk
about, but the hate was mostly left out of the conversation.
Thus, both colonial fears and ideals are still discernible in the Portuguese
migrants’ discourse. These ideas play a central role for postcolonial conti-
nuities. In the next chapter, I will discuss perceptions of the Portuguese as
mobile subjects and inquire to what extent this position signals a rupture
with the colonial past.
Notes
1. According to Sousa Santos (2002: 25), in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries the term “cafre” did not have the negative connotations that it has
today.
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CHAPTER 3
Mobile Subjects
Abstract This chapter links up with migration studies through exploring

how the familiar keywords of “migrant”, “expatriate”, “return” and “inte-
gration” work in relation to the Portuguese in Luanda. The analysis cen-
tres on the different meanings that Angolans and Portuguese ascribe to
these concepts and it relates these meanings to the two parties’ under-
standings of the social, economic and cultural incorporation of the
Portuguese in Luanda. As the chapter demonstrates, these understandings
are linked to the identities and power positions of the Portuguese. In addi-
tion, by discussing local understandings of these keywords, the chapter
illuminates some bias and limitations inherent to the ways these concepts
commonly are applied in globalised discourses on human migration.
Obviously, these keywords are classed and racialised, and they are intrinsi-
cally tied to South-North mobility.
Keywords Keywords of migration • Migrant • Expatriate • Return •

Integration • Global discourses on human migration
In the mass media, the movement of Portuguese people to Angola has

often been described as a kind of reversed migration which unsettles com-
mon understandings of what migration is about (e.g. Nieves 2015; Smith
2012). The fact that the present case causes surprise and bewilderment can

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73052-3_3
58 L. ÅKESSON
be linked to a critique of mainstream migration studies as contributing to

simplified and skewed notions of “who migrants are”. The fact that main-
stream migration studies tend to emphasise immigration into European
and North American nation-states leads to rather particular and limited
notions of migration processes as a whole (Fechter and Walsh 2010:
1198). As I will make clear in this chapter, this bias also becomes evident
when applying some of the basic concepts in migration studies to the pres-
ent case of South-North migration.
In this chapter, I will bring up the familiar keywords of “migrant”,
“expatriate” and “returnee” and analyse how these work in relation to the
Portuguese in Angola. In addition, I will discuss how understandings of
“integration” are produced in this particular case. The aim is not to
explore the extent to which these terms may be useful for analytically con-
ceptualising the Portuguese. Such an exercise would not be very fruitful as
these concepts often are used in a broad sense in the migration literature
and therefore do not have a particularly strong analytical appeal.
Nevertheless, the concepts I bring up here are keywords in migration
studies in the sense that they are “significant binding words” and “essen-
tially contested concepts” (Salazar 2016: 4; Williams 1976: 15). Keywords
are controversial words that continuously acquire new meanings while
retaining their links to older connotations (Salazar 2017: 7). The objective
here is first and foremost to ethnographically explore how these keywords
are used in relation to the Portuguese in Angola and what they signify in
an emic way—for both Portuguese and Angolans. Are the Portuguese
seen by themselves and Angolans as migrants or expatriates? In what sense,
if any, are they envisaged as returnees and to what extent are they per-
ceived to be integrated? This exploration, in turn, aims to deepen the
understanding of the identities and power positions of the Portuguese in
relation to the Angolans. A second objective is to illuminate some of the
bias and limitations of these keywords by departing from the emic view-
points I encountered in Luanda. My analysis will make clear that the work-
ings of these concepts are influenced not only by the local particularities of
this case but also to an important extent by globalised discourses on
human mobility. It is evident that global notions of migration, race and
geopolitical power differences feed into how people in Luanda speak
about the Portuguese as mobile subjects. Thus, the chapter discusses these
keywords both as local lived experiences and as globalised broad-scale
phenomena (cf. Salazar 2017).
MOBILE SUBJECTS 59
Migrants?
The Portuguese in Luanda sometimes talked about themselves as emi-
grantes, and thereby they used a concept that departs from the homeland
perspective. In Portugal, they are conceptualised as some of the many
emigrants who have left the country. Yet the term “migrant” was seldom
used by Portuguese and Angolans when they talked about Portuguese
people who have moved to Angola. Arguably, a fundamental reason for
that is that the term “migrant” is racialised, postcolonialised and classed in
Angola in similar ways as in Europe (e.g. Gullestad 2002; Leinonen 2012).
In Luanda, the idea of a migrant tends to be connected to people from
other African countries living in a precarious legal and economic situation
in Angola. Thus, “the migrant” is supposedly black and poor. As one
female middle-class intellectual Angolan explained: “The Portuguese are
seen as expatriates. They say they aren’t migrants because they have a con-
tract with the government [a formal high status employment]. Migrants
are the poor who illegally cross the border”. In line with this, “migrant”
is, in Angola, often conceptually linked to smuggling, undocumented resi-
dence and illegal garimpo—the seeking for diamonds by people from
neighbouring countries who, without authorisation, have crossed the bor-
der into the diamond-rich Lunda provinces in northeastern Angola. Thus,
in line with the globally dominating discourse, migrants are associated
with a certain kind of threat and problem. In Luanda, the term “migrant”
refers to people originating from poorer, non-white African countries who
are seeking to gain residence in resource-rich Angola.
In addition, in media and popular discourse, “migrant” has a connota-
tion of involuntary mobility. In the global discourse on migration, migrants
are imagined to be people who have been forced to move because of
poverty or for security reasons, and thus being involuntarily mobile.

Anthropologist Ruben Andersson remarks that mobility has become both
a privilege and stigma and that movement plays an increasingly important
role in “our understanding of what it means to be a fulfilled, rights bearing
human being” (2014: 7). Privileged human beings with all kinds of rights
can decide if and when they want to move, whereas others are forced to
undertake uncertain and perilous movements. Thus, there is a “global
hierarchy of movements” (Salazar 2017: 6). This distinction explains why
it was so important for many of the Portuguese to portray themselves as
individuals who moved to Angola out of free will. Especially, highly skilled
interviewees were keen to underline their agency in respect to the decision
60 L. ÅKESSON
to move to Angola, and to describe their sojourn in the country as one of

a number of options that were open to them. As a Portuguese male who
had been in Luanda since 1980 explained: “An engineer would never
admit that he had to go to Angola for economic reasons. He would never
admit that he had a hard time at home”.
Another reason why people in Luanda did not use the term migrant in
relation to the Portuguese is more particular to this case and has to do
with the postcolonial interrelatedness between the two countries. As men-
tioned, many Portuguese tend to underline the existence of a Luso-
Angolan cultural communality across borders (e.g. Pina-Cabral 2010).
This belief in a shared Luso-Angolan space makes the idea of being “a
migrant” foreign to many of the Portuguese in Angola, as the globalised
image of a migrant is connected to border crossings that are not only
administrative but also cultural and social. This concerns especially those
who have lived in Angola as children or are members of a family with ties
to Angola. For these persons, understandings of a Luso-Angolan continu-
ity includes not only the nations but also their own intimate familial
belonging. When travelling between Portugal and Angola, they see them-
selves as in one sense moving within a continuous space and thus they are
not migrants.
For many Angolans, the idea of a shared historical Luso-Angolan space
has few positive connotations and is often connected to stories of oppres-
sion and slavery. Yet the idea of continuity is still there. This implies that
the Portuguese in Angola are not seen as strangers or outsiders, which are
notions that tend to be connected to “migrants”, but as a special category,
“the Portuguese”, the former colonisers who now have come back. Also,
from the Angolan viewpoint, there is a quality of intimacy (although it is
fraught) in the relationship with the Portuguese, which from an emic
perspective means that “the Portuguese” are too well known to be seen as
migrants. Thus, this is a hint of the hybrid character (Bhabha 1994) of the
Portuguese identity in that it is not totally separated from the Angolan one
but shaped out of a long-standing, intimate and violent encounter.
Expatriates?
Whereas “expatriate” in English can signify both “a resident in a foreign
country” and “a person who has been exiled or banished from her/his
native country”, in Portuguese the term expatriado normally holds only
the second meaning. Despite this, middle-class people in Luanda use expa-
MOBILE SUBJECTS 61
triado for designating the Portuguese and other Western foreigners work-
ing in Luanda. As I will make clear, this semantic shift reflects a reality
where many of the Portuguese (and most other Westerners) in Luanda
have special economic privileges tied to their employment.
Both Angolan and Portuguese informants used expatriado when they
wanted to differentiate between persons who were paid a local salary in
Angolan kwanzas and those who had special benefits such as part of the
salary paid abroad in hard currency, housing allowances and free holiday
trips. As an Angolan construction worker said when he talked about his
Portuguese supervisors: “A boss who is Angolan never has the same rights
as an expatriado. There is a difference in salaries because they come here
with a contract from there”. Also, Portuguese interviewees made a differ-
ence between expatriados with fringe benefits and locally employed staff,
who in some cases were Portuguese. People in this latter category could
be somebody who had decided to stay permanently in Angolan and live
more or less according to Angolan middle-class standards, or they could
be a female “trailing spouse” who had joined a male partner moving to
Angola with an expat contract. Once the couple had established them-
selves in Luanda, the female “trailing spouse” often applied for a locally
paid job (e.g. as a teacher or administrator). Thus, there is also a gender
dimension to the expatriado/local dichotomy (cf. Fechter 2010). In addi-
tion, it is notable that the concept of expatriado is exclusively tied to work
life and to migrants’ relation to their employer, which demonstrates the
central importance of employment contracts and incomes in this setting.
An expatriado in Luanda is primarily not a stranger but a person with the
right to certain economic benefits (cf. Hindman 2013), albeit that this
right is closed for the local population.
In addition to expatriado, people sometimes used the English short
form “expat” when they drew up distinctions between different kinds of
foreigners in Luanda. Among the Portuguese, “expat” was used as a self-
designation by young successful people to signal their international con-
nectedness. These interviewees underlined that they frequently socialised
with non-Portuguese Westerners working in Luanda, which mostly meant
people in management positions in the oil sector, and they were often
keen to demonstrate a certain distance from other Portuguese. Generally,
they voiced more or less critical opinions of their compatriots, and one of
them said, “Most Portuguese here are junk. They live in ghettos and are
ignorant. But of course there are differences between different people”.
Another “expat’s” opinion of her compatriots was even harsher: “A bunch
62 L. ÅKESSON
of retards. Pompous assholes, who still think it’s a colony and behave like
that. Stupid, and in Portugal they were nothing”. Thus, whereas the con-
cept expatriado basically implies economic privileges, “expat” in addition
signals a distance from other Portuguese and a stance of alleged openness
towards other privileged people and the world, resonating with ideals of
cosmopolitanism (Hannerz 1990) and of privileged travel (Amit 2007).
Accordingly, “expat” indicates a superior position supposedly floating
above all the other foreigners in the city not only in terms of economic
privilege but also regarding social and cultural capital. The “expats” tend
to live in the most luxurious apartments in Luanda,1 and they frequent a
few expensive restaurants and nightclubs. Other Portuguese could catego-
rise the “expats” as “snobbish”. The distance between the highly privi-
leged “expats” and other Portuguese exemplifies the internal hierarchies
that exists among the Portuguese in Luanda, which was a highly diverse
category where family background, money and education play key roles
for how people related to each other. Moreover, the fact that the
Portuguese “expats” rate the white international community in Luanda as
clearly superior to their Portuguese compatriots reflects the subordinated
and marginal position of Portugal in relation to the dominant countries in
Northern and Western Europe. This position is nothing new. As discussed
in Chap. 2, Portuguese postcolonial studies stress Portugal’s status as a
subaltern colonial power that occupied a liminal position in Europe.
Thus, both the concept of expatriado and of “expat” are linked to
social stratification, though in different ways. Many observers have pointed
out the racialised connotation of the global term expatriate (Koutonin
2015) and shown that the term is reserved for white Western migrants
(Fechter and Walsh 2010; Leonard 2010). Highly educated and/or rich
black Africans working or carrying out business in Europe or North
America are seldom called expatriates. This is also the reason why I refrain
from using the term as an analytical concept in this book, although some
of the most privileged Portuguese migrants could be defined as expatriates
according to mainstream categorisations. In Luanda, the talk about expa-
triados reflects an equally racialised socio-economic reality, although the
concept is used in a specific way in this setting, and I did not meet any
black persons who were hired on an expatriado contract. The few African
immigrants in Luanda who have formal employment are generally
employed in unqualified positions without any kind of extra benefits.
Especially in the oil sector, many of the companies hire staff from all
around the world, and their recruitment and staff policy reproduces a
MOBILE SUBJECTS 63
highly racialised order. As an Angolan woman, working as an HR assistant

in a French company in the oil sector, explained:
The best off are the French expatriados, they earn more than the Portuguese.
The French have free housing and drivers, while the South Africans and the
Congolese live many together in the same guest house. When it comes to
people from Congo and the Ivory Coast, the less they cost for the company,
the better.
Needless to say, the expatriados in this case were white whereas the
Africans were black and locally hired as technicians and manual workers.
Thus, although expatriado is conceptually linked to employment condi-
tions, it denotes racialised hierarchies. It is also important to note the
distinction the HR assistant made between the French and the Portuguese,
which points to the Portuguese subaltern position in a European
context.
Return?
In migration studies, return is conceptually linked to a notion of origin
that is ethnic or national, which implies that returnees are supposed to
come back to a place that is “theirs”, also in a collective sense. In the pres-
ent case, such a belonging is highly contested—to say the least. In a legal
sense, the Portuguese are definitively not returning to something that is
theirs, although for the retornados it is a return to a place that used to be
theirs.
Nevertheless, a fundamental factor that singles out the Portuguese
from other international migrants in Luanda is the fact that they had been
there before, if not as individuals then as a nation. In comparison with
other migrant communities, such as the Chinese and the Brazilians, the
Portuguese have a special position in the mind of most Angolans not only
because they were the former colonial rulers but also because they are well
known and have lived in the country before. The memories of the
Portuguese are not only anonymous and collective. In many Angolan fam-
ilies, elderly members tell stories about their personal memories of
Portuguese settlers in colonial times.
When people in Luanda discussed the return of Portuguese, they would
not use the verb retornar (to return). One reason for this was that retornar
is still associated with the more than 300,000 retornados who left Angola
64 L. ÅKESSON
for Portugal in the mid-1970s and that it is a label pregnant with negative
stereotypes, as earlier mentioned. Moreover, in both Portugal and Angola,
the return of the former settler to Portugal is perceived as a very specific
event and as a final move, and the idea is firmly established that retornados
are those who more than 40 years ago permanently re-settled in Portugal.
Accordingly, Portuguese migrants who were born in Angola and had left
as children or young adults in the mid-1970s did not call themselves
returnees (retornados) in relation to Angola, although they often under-
lined that they were “coming back”. These middle-aged returnees were
generally prone to underline their belonging to Angola, sometimes in
terms of presenting themselves as “Angolans” when they met a new per-
son. Children of retornados below the age of 40 (i.e. people born in
Portugal) would naturally not say they were coming back, but sometimes
they claimed a special familial belonging. To claim a new (re)location in a
family history of multiple movements is typical for “second-generation
returnees” as discussed by Russel King and Anastasia Christou (2010).
Returnees’ attitudes varied in relation to what it meant to them to
come back. In their “narratives of emplacement” (Farrer 2010), some
claimed a special belonging to the country and the people whereas others
had an open and searching attitude to the new Angolan reality they
encountered. As Farrer shows, narratives of emplacement may be claims to
a place but also stories of displacement, dislocation and exclusion. In most
cases, the returnees had left Angola as children or teenagers 40 years ago,
and coming back implied a totally new start where they had to relate their
childhood memories and their parents’ stories to a new and very different
reality. Several of the returnees described how their first impression of
Luanda had produced feelings of revulsion. A middle-aged woman
expressed such sentiments:
I arrived in February 2010 and it was a shock. I’d heard about the changes
taking place, but it was still a shock. My brother fetched me at the airport
and we didn’t go straight into the city center because of the traffic; instead
we made a roundabout through the musseques2 close to the airport. I left a
small city without confusão (turmoil). I immediately regretted coming here.
The first-generation returnees often talked in nostalgic terms about a

happy childhood in Angola. As Fatima, who left Angola at the age of 15,
said: “I long for my childhood Angola, the excursions we made, the good
social life”. Many mentioned that such memories had been important for
MOBILE SUBJECTS 65
their decision to return to Angola. In most cases, they had mentally pre-
pared themselves for meeting an Angola that would be very different from
their childhood memories, but still many of them described feelings of
estrangement. One man who had lived in Angola until the age of 16 found
it particularly difficult to visit the city of Huambo, where he grew up. He
told me that he once had been forced to go to Huambo for business rea-
sons, and as a defence against the changes that had taken place, he had
constantly filmed what he saw. By looking at his childhood town through
an objectifying camera lens, he tried to distance himself from what he
described as “displeasure” and “sorrow”. The fact that he did not meet a
single person he knew accentuated his feelings of unhomeliness in his
childhood town.
Some of the first-generation returnees were not able to integrate their
idealised childhood memories with their experiences of contemporary
Luanda and constantly longed for their home in Portugal. Like many
other returnees around the world, they found that return is never a com-
plete movement but rather a partial homecoming to a place where the
migrant once lived (Åkesson and Ericsson Baaz 2015). The homeland
some of these Portuguese dreamt of was a Luso-Angolan space rooted in
the colonial past, and they tended to paint a very negative picture of con-
temporary Luanda and to romanticise the colonial past. Resonating with
the Portuguese colonial ideology, they would describe pre-independence
Luanda as “organized” and “modern”, and they would indulge in stories
about how people “respected” each other. However, there were also
examples of opposite reactions, and some tried to find a balance between
childhood nostalgia and the Luanda of today by idealising the latter. A
somewhat extreme attitude was presented by a man who said that, in his
eyes, the sewage water leaking out on Luanda’s streets looked like glitter-
ing ponds and the garbage heaps like piles of valuable things.
Those who voiced the strongest connections to Angola generally had a
close family member, often a male relative, who had stayed on in the coun-
try after independence. As King and Christou (2010) argue, it is impor-
tant to distinguish between returnees moving back independently from
those who move back to kin who already live in the country of return.
Some of the returnees with family in both Angola and Portugal had an
experience of repeated movements between the two countries. They gen-
erally performed an identity as Portuguese but also claimed a strong
belonging to a postcolonial Luso-Angolan space. In their “narratives of
emplacement”, they could move between describing contemporary
66 L. ÅKESSON
Luanda as a foreign and rather scary place and talking about what they
often called “my little bubble” consisting of family, work and close friends.
Their processes of postcolonial emplacement consisted of finding a place
in the “little bubble” and simultaneously trying to manage what they saw
as the difficulties and dangers of contemporary Luanda. The experience of
living in a “little bubble” they shared with other Portuguese, but what
differed was the long-term rootedness of this space. This rootedness made
them feel a right to belong, a feeling which Portuguese migrants without
strong family connections to Angola generally did not share.
Returnees and Newcomers
To be a retornado and having spent (part of) one’s childhood in Angola
was an important internal distinction in the Portuguese group. This factor
was of fundamental importance for how the Portuguese categorised them-
selves and talked about their relations to the Angolan people and to the
country. Often, young newcomers described the retornados as “more rac-
ist” and “having a colonial attitude”, thereby implying that people in this
category would more openly express colonial stereotypes and prejudices.
In contrast, the retornados could talk about the younger newcomers as
arrogant and as not understanding “African traditions and customs” and
being in Angola only for the sake of money. As one middle-aged female
retornada said: “Some of the young have a bad attitude, they humiliate
and degrade native persons, they understand nothing. This is not the pos-
ture of a Portuguese”. The middle-aged retornados would also typically
argue that the young were “only hanging out among themselves at bars
and nightclubs”. In saying this, they implicitly described themselves as more
committed to support a positive development in Angola, whereas the
younger generation resided in the country only for the sake of money and
easy-going partying. Thus, whereas the young criticised the retornados for
still behaving as colonial masters, the retornados pointed out the newcomers
as merely interested in exploiting the country. The notions of the “racist”
retornados were linked to descriptions of their attitude as both paternalising
and intimate, whereas the young were criticized for being distant and arro-
gant. Thus, the hybridity and ambivalence of the postcolonial relationship
were more marked with regard to images of the retornados. These kinds of
distinctions, however, were seldom discussed by Angolans talking about the
Portuguese. In general, they treated them as one single category. This, in
turn, reflected the fact that Angolans and Portuguese in Luanda seldom
MOBILE SUBJECTS 67
developed personal ties beyond instrumental workplace relationships and

accordingly had few chances of developing a nuanced understanding of the
Other. In the eyes of most of the Angolans I interviewed, the Portuguese
was a national category with a set of special characteristics, and in the same
way, Portuguese people tended to view Angolans.
Return as a National Re-conquest

Many Angolans talked about the return of the Portuguese in national
terms, and some were wary of what they saw as tendencies of neo-
colonialism. The idea that the Portuguese were returning not only as indi-
viduals but also as a nation was often expressed by Angolans and generally
in negative terms. Highly educated Angolans would use terms such as
“re-colonization” and “neo-colonialism”. They clearly saw the mass immi-
gration of Portuguese as a new chapter in Angolan-Portuguese relations,
and they were wary of what it could bring about. A male Angolan who
holds a qualified job in an international company told me that he had
become afraid when he first heard about my study, as he interpreted it as a
sign of the Portuguese coming to Angola to stay. Then he continued:
First we had more than 30 years of war, and now it suits the Portuguese to
come back. According to my opinion we would have needed another 30
years left on our own. We need to develop ourselves; we haven’t had time to
grow up. It’s necessary to act on your own to learn.
According to this man, the Portuguese differed from other national

categories of migrants in Angola, as they were the only ones having the
ambition to stay and gradually take over if not the country then at least the
upscale labour market:
When the Portuguese first returned they had to collaborate with Angolans,
but soon they will leave us behind. They will bring more and more
Portuguese, and they will become self-supporting. We can’t do much against
the entrance of the Portuguese.
In the same vein, some other Angolan informants described the immi-
gration of the Portuguese as part of a larger political conspiracy set up by
the Angolan and Portuguese elite together. In contrast, the idea that the
mass migration of Portuguese to Angola represented a neo-colonial con-
quest was naturally never explicitly articulated by any Portuguese. For
68 L. ÅKESSON
obvious reasons, Portuguese informants generally avoided talking about

themselves as a people or nation coming back. To do that would be to
question the political fundament of their right to live and work in Angola,
namely the supreme power of the Angolan party-state. However, some
Portuguese hinted at the idea that the arrival of the new Portuguese
migrants represented a revival of colonial orders and hierarchies. This idea
was explicitly voiced by a former officer in the Portuguese army, who dur-
ing our interview performed as an outspoken representative of a strongly
marked colonial and paternalistic stance:
I talk with everyone. Sometimes I meet a person in the supermarket who is

poor, but you can see in the proper way he dresses, that he has been working
for the Portuguese in the colonial times. I great him and make him happy. I
can see that he’s thinking “you came back”.
In the last sentence, “you” obviously does not refer to the officer per-
sonally but to the return of a generic Portuguese colonial master. Although
this interviewee’s blatant repetition of a colonial attitude was far from
representative for most of the Portuguese I met, it was telling that he had
found a place for himself in the Luanda of today, where he with some suc-
cess performed a role as the incarnation of a righteous but firm leader
whom “the Angolans” identified as their superior. The register of behav-
iour he embodied evidently resonated with colonial attitudes that were
still recognisable and acceptable in Luanda. I actually observed this man
interacting with some Angolan acquaintances, and it was both alarming
and fascinating to see how they immediately “clicked” with each other.
In addition, it is important to point out that the officer had never vis-
ited Africa during colonial times and had no familial ties to Angola. Thus,
his attitude cannot be attributed to his being a returnee repeating a behav-
iour he had learnt. One explanation, however, is that he belongs to a
generation growing up in colonial times. Although racism is described as
common in all generations in the Portugal of today (Vala et al. 2015), a
younger Portuguese would hardly perform as an incarnated colonial mas-
ter, which points to the importance of differences between generations. In
turn, this means that the difference many Portuguese make between
returnees and newcomers may be as much a generational issue. Whereas
the older migrants have grown up in a life world impregnated by ideas
about how subaltern people in the African colonies should “be treated”,
some of the young migrants said that before deciding to emigrate they had
MOBILE SUBJECTS 69
not even been sure of Angola’s geographical location. Also, often mem-
bers of the young generation have grown up with a mythical image of an
expansionist and globally important Portugal, but their embodied behav-
iour tends to be less marked by a straightforward colonial register.
Integrated?
In Europe, the term integration has become an emic way of talking about
how migrants are conforming to social norms and cultural values that are
seen as fundamental to belonging in a society (Olwig and Pærregaard
2011). It is telling that “to conform” is part of the general understanding
of how integration should be achieved in Europe, as conforming implies a
degree of submission. In Europe, those who principally are expected to
conform are migrants from non-Western countries, who tend to be seen
as lacking proper norms and values. In contrast to this, Angolan residents
seldom expect Portuguese migrants to conform to local norms and values,
although, as we shall see, they may have other expectations of their inte-
gration. Arguably, this has to do with notions of a superior knowledge
and moral being associated with the Portuguese postcolonial identity. To
ask the Portuguese to adapt to Angolan norms and values would be to
fundamentally challenge a postcolonial epistemology in a way that still
seems far away.
Nevertheless, both Angolans and Portuguese could use the concept of
integration when they talked about how the Portuguese adapted to life in
Luanda. Yet, in this case, integration was rather understood as a question
of having Angolan friends and enjoying living in the country. Conviver,
which can be translated as “to live together”, “to socialize”, “to hang out
with”, was a key concept in discussions about integration. Thus, a positive
attitude to Angolans and a habit of mixing with them were seen as indica-
tors of good integration. In particular, there were two very different
groups of Portuguese who were described as socially well integrated: male
construction workers and members of the elite. With regard to construc-
tion workers, both Portuguese and Angolans often described their alleg-
edly habitual relationships with Angolan women as an indicator of
integration. As mentioned, highly skilled Portuguese often criticised con-
struction workers for having girlfriends much younger than themselves
and for sexually exploiting Angolan women, but they still saw these rela-
tionships as an indicator of integration as they provided an entry into
Angolan family life, which was closed for themselves. Concerning the
70 L. ÅKESSON
elite, both Angolans and Portuguese emphasised the strong economic and
social ties between the politico-economic elites of the two countries and
maintained that they backed each other up in large-scale corrupt affairs.
In Portugal, the image of the national self includes an idea about being
good at integration. This resonates with the colonial lusotropical ideology
and the belief that the Portuguese colonial settlers had a special capacity
for adaptation to local African culture. The idea is also related to the
national discourse on the many Portuguese who during more than
100 years have emigrated to northwestern Europe and North America (cf.
Brettell 2003). In Portugal, the emigrants tend to be portrayed as hard-
working people who are good at adapting to new circumstances. In line
with this, a highly skilled male Portuguese migrant in Luanda said:
Portuguese emigrants are found all over the world, and they are good at
integrating. For instance, in France they speak French with each other and
not Portuguese. This doesn’t mean that they abandon their culture, but
they don’t close themselves off from the rest of the society, which some
other migrants do.
When I asked him to compare Portuguese migrants with other migrants,

he used the verbs remediar and desenrascar to characterise what he saw as
the special Portuguese capacity for integration. Remediar can be trans-
lated as “to make do” and desenrascar as “to get by” or “to fend for one-
self”. Other Portuguese interviewees characterised themselves in similar
ways. In doing this, they hinted at a capacity to adapt to difficult situations
and to find a way out that was not always “by the book”. Thus, they saw
it as characteristic for Portuguese migrants to be creative, flexible and
sometimes disregardful of rules and norms.
Some interviewees also reflected the colonial lusotropical notion of the
Portuguese as having a special propensity for adaptation into African
countries. This was connected to a belief in a postcolonial Luso-Angolan
continuity which guarantees that the Portuguese are “at home” in Angola.
In line with such ideas, these informants did not see the integration of the
Portuguese as a process where they have to change and adapt to new social
practices. Rather, they can continue to “mix” as they always have because
at least on a symbolic level Angola continues to be “theirs”. Actually, most
Portuguese were eager to underline that they were good at mixing in the
sense that they knew how to handle what they often called “the Angolan
reality”. This included knowing one’s way around the city, handling the
MOBILE SUBJECTS 71
traffic police, bargaining at the market and knowing some of the key words
that are specific to the Angolan version of Portuguese. Some young male
informants went a step further and were keen to perform an identity as
street-smart insiders. In interacting with Angolans, they would switch to
an Angolan accent, frequently use Luandan slang words and adapt their
body language to an Angolan way of moving.
Other Portuguese informants were less certain about an easy integra-
tion. Some maintained that there were two categories of Portuguese in
Luanda: those who loved being there and those who hated it. Yet I met no
Portuguese who singularly “loved” to be in Angola. Some liked it a lot,
and they would alternatively talk about the easy-going lifestyle, the money
they earnt, the good climate or their feelings of doing something that was
important for others (often formulated as being util [useful]), but they
would also have negative things to say about their life in the mega-city. At
the opposite pole, there were definitively people who “hated” being in
Luanda. One of them was a middle-aged woman:
I would leave tomorrow if I could. This wears me out, I’m tired. The traffic,
I live nearby my job, but it might take an hour to get home. Often there is
no electricity, no water. The noise of the generators makes it difficult to
sleep. Stress, there is no life quality. There is nothing nice here, no shopping
centers. The only reason why I’m here is that my husband doesn’t have a job
in Portugal. At the weekends the only thing you can do is go to the beach,
and then the road is full of potholes. This is Africa.
In addition to similar complaints presented by other interviewees, there

were Portuguese who talked about their fears of becoming ill, because of
both the standard and the cost of health care in Luanda. Yet the fear of
being assaulted was even more present in the interviews. A number of the
Portuguese I met had been assaulted by somebody holding a knife or even
a gun. Some described this as an inevitable evil and presented a stoical
attitude, whereas a few others described how their fear of being assaulted
more or less had turned them into prisoners in their own home, which
they seldom left besides going to work. Most Portuguese would say that
such fears severely limited their freedom of movement and made them
very cautious—which also was true for many middle-class Angolans.
There were many Portuguese who, like the woman quoted above,
stayed on in Luanda despite disliking being there, and their reasons were
in most cases strictly economic. Business people with shares in companies
72 L. ÅKESSON
stayed on to protect their economic interests, while those who lived on

their salaries continued to live in Luanda out of fear of losing their (high)
monthly income. Angolans working with Portuguese were well aware of
the fact that their colleagues’ residence in Angola sometimes was squarely
economically motivated, and they often found this hurtful. They would
associate economistic motives with the tendency of some Portuguese to
keep to themselves, and they could portray this as a dissociation from both
the people and the country. As one man said:
They are not establishing themselves here; they continue to send their
money to Portugal. They are not buying a house here and setting up a fam-
ily. Recently when the government started to restrict the outflow of money
from Angola, there was even talk about the Portuguese leaving or not want-
ing to come here.
This man (as well as other Angolans) was critical of what he saw as
Portuguese exploiting the country economically without any interest in
contributing to its development. It happened that middle-aged Angolans
compared the postcolonial migrants with the colonial settlers, and
sometimes they spoke more favourably about the integration of the latter
category. As Lucas, an Angolan intellectual with a well-paid job, said:
The big problem is that the majority come here for economic reasons and
not because they identify with what would be their roots. Their parents, no,
the parents of their parents, many of them died from longing for Angola.
They had really strong connections to Angola and they left because of the
post-independence situation. But in general terms I would say that many of
those coming here today and asking for Angolan citizenship are coming
because of economic reasons. If they could choose and Portugal had contin-
ued as it was, many of them would never have set a foot here.
Like some other informants, Lucas was afraid that the new Portuguese
migrants’ lack of social integration could lead to tensions in Angola:
And this is, in my opinion, a big problem that needs to be resolved. The
Angolan government needs to help these people to insert themselves in the
society, and show for a fact that they have integrated beyond economic
motives. If not, in the future we will have problems. Many of them don’t
have the humility of their parents and grandparents. In colonial times many
of the Portuguese, and, by the way, many of them were Angolans of the
MOBILE SUBJECTS 73
white race and were born in Angola, they lived in the communities; they
lived with the people and related to them. Their children played with the
children of the indigenous, they went to the same school. Therefore, there
was a strong integration, but today this integration is almost inexistent.
There is a great detachment, a detachment that reminds us of the times of
Salazar, in which some were seen as the real bosses and the others as subor-
dinates. I think that this can hurt the Angolan pride. And I think this is bad,
and a lot of caution is needed.
The ambiguity of this quote is interesting. On one hand, Lucas criti-

cises the contemporary migrants for being less integrated than the colonial
settlers and paints a rather nostalgic picture of colonial Angola; on the
other hand, he warns of the danger that the Portuguese lack of integration
may make Angolans draw comparisons with “the times of Salazar” (i.e. the
Portuguese dictatorial colonial rule, which they rose up against). Maybe
what he is trying to say is that the present migrants who are in Angola only
for the money remind people of the colonial state apparatus and its pre-
dominant goal of exploiting Angolans for the sake of the Portuguese
economy.
North-South Migration and the Familiar Concepts

of Mobility
Thus, the Portuguese are seen and see themselves as some kind of very
ambivalent mobile subjects, who somewhat uneasily linger between posi-
tions as migrants, returnees and expatriates. Evidently, these concepts are
rooted in global mainstream notions of mobility, race and “geographies of
power” (Gardner 1993) that are at odds with the reality of the Portuguese
labour migration to Angola. According to such notions, migratory move-
ments take place from “peripheral” African countries to the European and
North American centres of power and not the other way around. The fact
that the Portuguese seldom are classified as migrants points to the stigma
that is associated with that term. It is classed, racialised and postcolonised
and conceptually tied to South-North mobility. This implies that, even
though many of the Portuguese have been forced to migrate to Angola for
economic reasons, their race and European nationality—as well as their
position as former colonisers—entail that they are labelled expatriados
rather than economic migrants. Also, “expatriate” is a classed and racialised
term tied to understandings of global power relations. The stereotype of
74 L. ÅKESSON
the expatriate is the opposite to the image of the global labour migrant, as
the former supposedly is white and highly educated, originates from a
country in the global core and moves out of free will.
Also, understandings of integration vary between the European and the
Angolan context. Whereas immigrants in Europe are supposed to conform
to the majority population in terms of their way of thinking and acting,
many Angolans rather hope that the Portuguese shall enjoy their stay and
build relationships, but they do not expect them to integrate in the sense
of transforming their norms and habits. Thus, in the first case, the migrants
are expected to change, whereas in the second case, Angolans want
Portuguese migrants to value their company and choose to spend time
with them. This clearly points to asymmetries in how the direction of
mobility flows—South-North versus North-South—shapes understand-
ings of mobile subjects. These asymmetries have to do with the level of
choice in relation to integration, as European immigrants are expected to
integrate, whereas the Portuguese can choose whether they want to do
that or not. Moreover, the asymmetries are related to attraction. Simply
put and according to global hierarchies of power, Europeans do not care
about whether migrants like them or not, whereas that obviously is impor-
tant for Angolans in relation to the Portuguese.
Accordingly, this chapter has shown that the Portuguese position as
mobile subjects does not necessarily challenge their postcolonial status and
power in relation to Angolans. In contrast to this, the next chapter will
focus on an arena where ruptures with the colonial past are apparent,
namely the relation of the Portuguese to the Angolan party-state.
Notes
1. In 2013, I met a person employed by a transnational oil company who told
me that his employer paid $2,500 USD per day for his apartment.
2. Historically, Luanda has been divided between the cidade, the colonial
cement city, and the musseques, the surrounding informal quarters built on
sandy ground.
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Chapter 4
Changing Relations of Power

and the Party-State
Abstract Portuguese migrants’ subjection to the rulings of the powerful

Angolan party-state represents a fundamental rupture with colonial power
relations. The migrants’ difficulties in acquiring Angolan immigration
documents exemplifies these new dynamics. As in other migration destina-
tions, payment of bribes is often necessary. The same is true in the migrants’
encounters with bribe-seeking police, where whiteness sometimes prompts
a special targeting. In business life, Portuguese managers are dependent
on Angolan company owners and business partners (i.e. on the party-
state’s elite clients). Yet, in terms of corruption, many Portuguese compa-
nies are well integrated into the workings of Angolan business. In
conclusion, the chapter shows that Portuguese migrants’ vulnerability in
relation to the party-state may bring out feelings of pity as well as postco-
lonial score settling among residents in Luanda.
Keywords The Angolan party-state • Securing immigration documents

• Undocumented migrants • Whiteness • Corruption
There are important variations among the Portuguese migrants in terms

of power and relations to the party-state. The most influential Portuguese
in Luanda are closely allied with the Angolan party-state elite and
have access to privileges that are out of reach for the majority of their

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73052-3_4
78 L. Åkesson
compatriots. At the other end of the socio-economic spectrum, there are

Portuguese working illegally for uncertain and low salaries and struggling
to secure immigration documents. As in many other migration destina-
tions, this involves payment of bribes to different state officials.
Undocumented Portuguese migrants are also at risk of becoming prey for
bribe-seeking police officers. Yet, unlike other migration settings, here it is
“whiteness” that becomes and works as a marker of a potential “illegal
immigrant”—sometimes prompting special targeting by the police.
The vulnerability of non-elite Portuguese in relation to the party-state
makes some middle-class Angolans pity them, whereas others voice feel-
ings of postcolonial score settling. In Luanda, tales circulate about
Portuguese being dominated or cheated by Angolans. These kinds of sto-
ries reflect notions of an absolute division between the Angolan Self and
the Portuguese Other. The stories also contain an element of revenge, a
sense of turning the table. This sense is still a part of the colonial legacy
but also reflects a new turn in Angolan-Portuguese relations; the power of
the Angolan party-state and its elite clients is something that all Portuguese
in Angola have to take into consideration. In order to frame the discussion
on the party-state, I will, in the following, provide a short overview of its
workings.
The Party-State and the Angolan Business Owners

The Angolan state is heavily centralised to Luanda and divided into as
many as 33 ministries. Ministries are often marginalised in relation to the
real power that rests primarily with the president but also with the national
oil company (Sonangol), the army and the oligarchs. The state apparatus
is sizeable, bureaucratic and, with a few exceptions, inefficient. The
Portuguese migrants often complained about their contacts with Angolan
bureaucrats and in particular about their dealings with representatives of
the migration authority SME and the police. Many regretted their subor-
dinated position in relation to these authorities.
Moreover, the Portuguese who work in Luanda are heavily dependent
on another category closely connected to the party-state, namely the
Angolan owners of the companies where they are employed. All the
important Angolan business owners are clients in the patronage system
headed by President dos Santos. In his seminal book Magnificent and
Beggar Land (2015), Ricardo Soares de Oliveira describes how this pow-
erful system creates personal security, economic benefits and political
Changing Relations of Power and the Party-State 79
influence for its elite clients while making it expensive and sometimes dan-
gerous to be an outsider. Ultimately, it is the president who controls the
patronage system and he supports family members, senior officers in the
army and the police, and key figures in the MPLA party in their accumula-
tion of wealth.
The patronage system would not have been possible without the inflow
of oil money. Over the years, the national oil company, Sonangol, has sup-
ported the accumulation of wealth by the Angolan elite. Large sums have
disappeared from accounts, and oil-backed loans have provided the
Angolan oligarchs with an easily accessible source of money outside any
sort of control either by the national public administration or by interna-
tional regulators (Ovadia 2016; Soares de Oliveira 2007, 2015). The elite
also profits from a systematic disregard of the separation between public
and private roles, which means that their business interests are regularly
given preferential treatment in state-financed business deals. In the
Angolan political context, it is quite impossible to draw a line between the
party, the state and the wealthy elite. Moreover, the oligarchs thrive on
different forms of kick-backs—also from Portuguese companies, as I will
show. In short, Angolan business life prospers on a myriad of corruptive
practices, and in every important deal, there are people at many different
levels who expect to get their share of the cake.
In the last decade, the Angolan oligarchs have invested strongly in con-
struction, banking, telecom and media. Companies in these sectors are
frequently managed by Portuguese directors and staffed by highly and
semi-skilled Portuguese. Besides that, control over import monopolies
since the 1980s has been important for the profit of the elite. Despite
abundant national natural resources, most consumer goods, including
food, are imported to Angola. Food and beverage products from Portugal
are imported on a large scale, and they are popular in Luanda as they suit
local preferences and are perceived to be of high quality.
I will return to business relations in the following, but first I will discuss
Portuguese migrants’ encounters with front-line party-state bureaucrats,
namely the police and the representatives of the migration authority (SME).
Securing Immigration Documents

A basic requirement for all Portuguese nationals in Angola is to secure
immigration documents. Obviously, this process involves negotiating their
status in relation to representatives of the Angolan party-state and being
80 L. Åkesson
dependent upon their decisions. Thus, traditional postcolonial dynamics

of power are upset by the Angolan immigration regime. In order to work
in Angola a visto de trabalho (work permit) acquired at an Angolan consul-
ate in the country of origin is needed. This is a one-year visa that can be
prolonged up to a total of three years. Although the process of acquiring
a work permit is slow, it may be relatively unproblematic to acquire such a
visa for migrants whose employer has favourable connections with the
migration authority (SME). For other migrants, however, securing a work
permit may turn into a problem that overshadows everything else.
Migrants who work for a company that is less well established or unscru-
pulous or both,1 migrants who change jobs, and migrants who come to
Angola without an employment contract are examples of categories that
may be working without a work permit. In many of these cases, the
migrant holds a so-called “ordinary visa”, which disallows the holder to
gain an income in Angola and which also has to be renovated in the
migrant’s country of origin every third month. In Angola, as in other
important migration destinations, immigration documents can be arranged
in illicit ways. For instance, this may include sending one’s passport to
Portugal with a courier, who then arranges a new three-month visa. In
addition, there are undocumented Portuguese migrants in Angola, who
live and work illegally in the country.
A basic prerequisite for an employer wanting to arrange work permits
for non-Angolan staff is to have good and reliable contacts at the relevant
sector ministries and, in particular, at the Angolan migration authority
(SME). I interviewed a couple of HR officers who represented their
Portuguese-managed company in relation to SME, and they were all
Angolans, probably because their Portuguese bosses believed that as
nationals they were better equipped to navigate the opaque decision-
making processes at SME. These persons presented quite different pic-
tures of their dealings with SME. One of them said that it was enough to
have good contacts and sometimes do a favour, such as pôr um sobrinho a
trabalhar (lit. “give a job to a nephew”). Another HR officer said her
company paid bribes for “difficult cases”. For instance, such cases could
involve hiring of personnel for low-skilled jobs, as the Angolan govern-
ment in recent years has tried to reserve such jobs for nationals. A third
person working at a large company believed that his company paid at least
$5,000 USD for each work permit, and he added, “there are many per-
sons receiving money, it’s a pyramid”.
In addition, there were persistent rumours among, for instance, some

Portuguese teachers about enormous bribes paid by Portuguese individu-
als who had tried to obtain work permits from SME without the interven-
tion of a company. According to these rumours, in 2014 the illicit fee for
a work permit at SME was as high as $13,000 USD, which is an enormous
sum of money even in a city that has been reported to be the most expen-
sive in the world (World Economic Forum 2015). Thus, it could be very
costly and sometimes difficult to arrange work permits, which implied that
quite a few of the Portuguese migrants opted for working on an “ordinary
visa”, although this could cause them serious trouble. A female architect
described how she was nearly deported from Angola on a short notice:
I worked one year for my company on an ordinary visa. One day when I
visited a building site the police caught me. I tried to tell them that I was not
working, just paying a little visit, but they gave me 48 hours to leave the
country. My company then intervened and paid 4.000 USD [in bribes].
A number of other informants described similar situations. For instance,

a male engineer working for a Portuguese construction company on an
ordinary visa told me that he was caught at his workplace and brought to
the police station. However, he was lucky:
I was to travel to Portugal the next day, and fortunately I had my flight
ticket, so I showed it for the police, and they let me go. It only took 10
minutes. It was more of an “awareness campaign” and they had a pedagogi-
cal attitude. I didn’t have to pay.
Thus, it might be risky to work on an “ordinary visa”, and those who

do so live under a constant fear of being detected by the police. This
means that they are constantly reminded about their inferior position in
relation to the Angolan party-state. Work permits are a better option, but
these have to be applied for anew every third year in a slow and costly
process. In addition, as the economic boom years came to an end, the
Angolan authorities became more and more reluctant to issue work per-
mits. In consequence of this, the most coveted solution was to acquire
residence rights in Angola or, even better, a double Portuguese and
Angolan citizenship as that would put an end to problems related to work
and immigration documents. Migrants with these kinds of rights were also
much sought-after by employers as they would not cause the company any
82 L. Åkesson
troubles related to their legal status. In addition, long-term residence sta-

tus included the right to open an “Angolan” company. Some Portuguese
married an Angolan as a way of gaining residence rights and later national-
ity. Others managed to prove that they had family ties to Angola, whereas
yet others paid bribes for arranging a false birth certificate stating that they
were born in Angola. According to persistent rumours, sobas, or tradi-
tional leaders, sometimes issued such documents. However, in 2014, the
Angolan Parliament approved an alternation in the Nationality Law stat-
ing that only those who had hold Angolan nationality after independence
in 1975 could be eligible for citizenship (Rodrigues 2014). As usual in
Luanda, many contradictory ideas circulated about the interpretation and
implementation of the new rule, but the tendency was clear: it was getting
increasingly difficult to arrange immigration documents.
Whiteness as a Marker of Potential Undocumented Migrants

Experiences of vulnerability due to lack of proper immigration documents
are common among migrants all over the world (de Genova 2002;
Gomberg-Muñoz 2016; Holgersson 2011) and so also among the
Portuguese in Angola. One way out of being trapped without a work per-
mit, or, even worse, without any immigration documents at all, is to resort
to a broker. In Luanda, there are both Angolan and Portuguese middle-
men offering their services to Portuguese migrants in needs of documents.
Informants talked about Portuguese “lawyers” contacting newly arrived
compatriots and offering to help them arrange a work permit for $10,000
USD. There also circulated stories about untrustworthy middlemen. One
of my male informants was quite depressed because of his experiences in
Angola and in particular his dealing with an unscrupulous broker:
I have the right to permanent residence after being here for many years, but
I’ll never again try to get it. Last year I paid an Angolan to organize it for
me, but he took my passport and a lot of money and I never got it back.
How much money?
All in all about 15.000 USD. He asked for more and more all the time. I
was fragile and he used the situation.
Obviously, this kind of business is a parallel to the illicit trade in immi-

gration documents in Europe. According to media reports, it is possible to
buy residence rights in, for instance, Sweden (Palm 2015), Romania
(Mogos and Calugareanu 2012) and probably most other European

Union countries.2 In the same way, undocumented Portuguese in Angola
share some of their living conditions with irregular migrants in Europe (cf.
Alpes 2015; Bloch 2014; Sigona 2012). Like undocumented migrants in
Europe, irregular migrants in Luanda live in constant fear of police con-
trols and raids. They are constantly on their watch and try to blend in and
avoid public spaces. For the undocumented, moving around the city cre-
ates strong feelings of fear as the police routinely stop vehicles and ask
drivers and sometimes also passengers for documents. The careful plan-
ning of how to move about in the city to minimise risks, coupled with the
fear of being caught, often has psychological effects. A Portuguese man I
met talked about an undocumented friend of his who was living under
severe stress:
He came here on an ordinary visa, which expired months ago. He can’t

drive as he’s afraid of being stopped by the police, so he’s totally dependent
on other people. He’s extremely stressed, and often he feels as if he was
about to faint, and then he seeks medical care. He can’t send home any
money as he’s illegal.
The fear felt by the undocumented Portuguese migrants was height-

ened by the fact that, as white, they were favourite targets for bribe-seeking
police. Many Portuguese interviewees pointed out that they were fre-
quently stopped because of their skin colour, and two Angolan friends
who both had a Portuguese girlfriend complained about being bothered
by the police much more frequently when driving around together with
their white partner. Another Angolan talked about the police picking out
white people during a raid at his workplace:
The police came here and picked out the two white persons that happened
to be here. Some people from Kenya were visiting at the same time, and they
found it very funny that the police were only questioning the whites.
A similar kind of raid was described by another informant, who also

maintained that the police sometimes targeted white people because they
hoped that they would pay higher bribes.
One and a half month ago, the police blocked the street here, and all for-
eigners had to go into their jeep. Then they transported us to a police station
84 L. Åkesson
in Maianga, but I refused to give them my passport. They kept me until my

boss arrived, and then they made apologies.
Thus, in Luanda, whiteness sometimes works as a marker of a potential

undocumented migrant and in some situations non-elite Portuguese
migrants experienced a treatment that was similar to discriminated African
migrants in Europe. While this was particularly true for undocumented
migrants, those with their migration papers in order also sometimes
expressed feelings of fear and vulnerability in relation to the migration
authority, the police and other representatives of the powerful Angolan
party-state. Such fears were shared by other migrants from, for instance,
neighbouring African countries, who also were targeted as potentially
undocumented and harassed by the police and other authorities. In their
case, it was not skin colour but other more subtle markers, such as clothes
and body language, that the police looked for.
Some middle-class Angolans reacted to the change in power relations
by feeling sorry for the Portuguese who had problems with their immigra-
tion documents. One woman, who had Portuguese family ties, went as far
as talking about “the slavery of the Portuguese”. Another man, working
at an international non-governmental organisation, talked in a compas-
sionate way about the sufferings of an undocumented Portuguese:
I have a friend who has a Portuguese boyfriend who is sick and needs to go
back to Portugal, but he’s afraid and doesn’t want to leave because he
believes that it would be difficult for him to return [to Angola]. He suffered
a lot to come here and now he’s afraid, he’s sick, but he doesn’t want to leave
because he could lose his job here, he has a good salary. But if he travelled,
he would lose the job here and he thinks it would be very difficult to come
back after that. So he’s making a big sacrifice, sick as he is, which isn’t good.
So he’s already illegal?
He’s already illegal, and he’s working here.
Do you think there are many people in this situation?
Many, many, there are a lot of Portuguese in this difficult situation. Many
Portuguese have this problem, Many Portuguese. But let me tell you one
thing, many of them are waiting for the Angolan authorities to create a solu-
tion because at the time when the Angolans were going to Portugal, they
went with tourist visas and then they stayed in Portugal [after their visas
expired]. The immigration services in Portugal opened a kind of register for
all those who were residing illegally in the country. Everybody had to come
and present themselves to them, even those who were illegal. They had
campaigns that weren’t a threat to the people, it was more to say, come and
register yourself. Because it was an opportunity they were offering to the

people who then could continue to stay in the country.3 And I think that our
immigration services should do the same thing. They should open a register
for all the illegals who are here and give a provisionary document to all of
them…. There are people, I myself know at the moment a Portuguese who
works with my brother and he has no documents, coitado (poor thing)….
But we are trying to arrange some documents for him. But at this moment
he’s illegal. We are helping, but he’s illegal.
This quote is interesting not only because it demonstrates the empathy

some middle-class Angolans feel for the undocumented Portuguese but
also because of the way this interviewee compared Angola and Portugal
and the changing migratory movements between the two countries. To
him, the comprehensive migration of Angolans to Portugal during the
civil war—or, as he said, “at the time when Angolans were going to
Portugal”—is comparable to the present movement of Portuguese to
Angola. In both cases, the undocumented migrants suffer, and in both
cases, the respective governments should register the undocumented and
provide them with some opportunities. Thus, his discourse provides a pic-
ture of how some Angolans (arguably, mostly members of the middle
class) put the two countries on an equal footing and thereby distance
themselves from colonial power hierarchies.
Encounters with the Traffic Police

Besides the acquirement of immigration documents, traffic police extort-
ing bribes is a problem of great concern to the Portuguese migrants—as
to most other car drivers in Luanda. For everyone, except members of the
exclusive party-state elite, driving a car in Luanda implies being the prey of
traffic police agents.4 The risk is especially high on Friday afternoons when
plans concerning the upcoming weekend make it urgent for the police to
arrange for some extra money. The police agent’s control of the driver’s
documents often results in his finding some (fictive) imperfection, or
alternatively he finds that the driver has committed a (fictive) traffic
offense. For example, the police agent may set up a control a few hundred
meters after a traffic light, stop some of the cars passing by and tell the
unfortunate drivers that they have driven through a red light. The prob-
lem is often solved through the payment of a more or less substantial
bribe, in Angola called gasosa (lit. soft drink).
86 L. Åkesson
Newly arrived Portuguese especially were uncertain about how to han-

dle this kind of situation, and they could dwell on this at length in my
interviews. Even if their paperwork was in order and they had committed
no offence, they often resorted to paying a bribe, as they were afraid of the
heavily armed police. In contrast, migrants who saw themselves as “veter-
ans” in Angola tended to either refuse to pay a gasosa when stopped by the
police or quickly pay a small amount because they did not want to “lose
their time and temper in endless discussions”, as one of them argued.
When they met in the congested Luandan traffic, the police agent as a
representative of the Angolan party-state was in an advantageous position.
Informants stated that police agents could hint at being protected from
above (i.e. having family members or patrons among highly placed police
officers or elsewhere in the heavy bureaucracy of the party-state). Police
agents sometimes indicated that they were better placed than the
Portuguese car driver in relation to those in power and therefore that it
was pointless trying to avoid paying a gasosa. Especially among Portuguese
newcomers, it was clear that the lack of favourable connections to authori-
ties could foster a helpless feeling of being exposed to a threatening system
they had little chance of influencing. Traffic police would act in the same
way towards car drivers of other nationalities, including Angolans, but
what is interesting in the case of Portuguese car drivers is the rupture with
colonial relations of power.
Conflict-Ridden Business Relations

It is not only everyday encounters on the Luandan streets that are marked
by contestations of power between Portuguese migrants and representa-
tives of the Angolan party-state. Also, relations between Angolan business
owners and Portuguese entrepreneurs and managers are conflict-ridden.
Angolan co-ownership is a legal requirement in branches of key economic
and political importance such as oil, diamonds and media, but, de facto, this
applies to business more generally. In order to set up an independent non-
Angolan foreign company, it is necessary to invest as much as $1 million
USD (Jover et al. 2012). Obviouly, this is an investment that is out of reach
for small and medium-sized companies. In addition, some of the Portuguese
business managers I met talked about the risks of investing independently
in Angola.5 As one middle-level manager in the construction sector said:
“It is an enormous risk that some bureaucrats create problems for you,
and you lose your money. You should only enter into business here if you
are supported by somebody”. All this implies that co-ownership between

Angolans and Portuguese business interests is common.
For Angolan investors who have a lot of money but less experience and
know-how, joint ventures with foreign companies may be important for
the growth of their business (Soares de Oliveira 2015: 49). It happened
that the Portuguese partner lost out badly in such partnerships. Both
Angolan and Portuguese interviewees talked about cases when the
Portuguese business partner carried out all of the job and then had to give
most of the profit to the Angolan owner. In reaction to this kind of risk,
Portuguese business people tried to acquire residence rights, as this legal
status entails the right to start and own an “Angolan” company. In Luanda,
I visited and heard about a number of “Angolan” companies that were
owned and run by persons who identified and performed as Portuguese
but had residence rights or Angolan citizenship. Although some of these
persons had acquired their rights in a lawful way—and often were born in
Angola—there circulated stories about how some of them had acquired
residence rights in illicit ways.
Yet there were many who did not succeed in qualifying as “Angolans”
and therefore invested in joint ventures. Soares de Oliveira describes the
risks for the non-Angolan business partner:
[T]here is a great degree of turbulence with Angolan partners, especially

generals, routinely reneging in payments, going cold on foreign associates,
and having them expelled from the country. A number of foreign business-
men have been killed in recent years, and the top legal offices in Luanda are,
according to a prominent lawyer, “stuffed with cases of business disputes
between Angolans and foreigners”. (2015: 145)
One of my Angolan informants was a person with very good insights

into the upper levels of the MPLA party-state and the associated business
enterprises, and her stories about deportations of Portuguese businessmen
tied in with Soares de Oliveira’s account. For instance, she related the fate
of a Portuguese manager employed by the Luandan oligarch and former
MPLA politician Mello Xavier:
Mello Xavier had a Portuguese manager whom he wanted to get rid of. He
didn’t pay his salary, and then he ordered SME to steal his passport. Then
he called SME again and told them to deport the Portuguese, as he had no
documents.
88 L. Åkesson
Later in our conversation, the same informant observed that there

often is an aspect of vengeance when powerful Angolans relate to
Portuguese business interests, and she concluded: “We like to humiliate
the colonizer”. The fact that the elite Portuguese in Angola are “deport-
able” (De Genova 2002) is obviously a sign of changing power relations.
A similar sign was the submissive attitude presented by many Portuguese
managers in front of Angolan company owners and important clients.
Reportedly, Angolan company owners were seldom present, but when
they showed up, Portuguese managers became tense. As an Angolan
accountant working in a Portuguese managed company remarked: “The
heads of the company are Angolan, and the Portuguese managers are care-
ful with what they say. They are very submissive”.
Yet there also circulated stories about Portuguese business people
cheating their Angolan partners. These stories were told by some of the
middle-class Angolans I met, and they often painted Portuguese entrepre-
neurs as cunning swindlers (vigaristas) trying to deceive less experienced
and knowledgeable Angolan business partners. A recurrent figure in such
stories was the Portuguese businessman transferring all the company’s
economic assets to Portugal and thereby excluding Angolan partners from
their share of the profit. Often, Angolan informants who did not belong
to the elite described Portuguese businessmen as powerful, ruthless and
successful because of contacts with highly placed personnel in the
party-state.
The absolute veracity of all these stories about unscrupulous Angolans
and swindling Portuguese is uncertain, but it is interesting that so many
stories circulate about conflicts between Angolan and Portuguese business
interests. Overall, business in Luanda is carried out in a climate of distrust,
rapid changes and unpredictability, but in addition, Portuguese-Angolan
business relations are marked by the postcolonial legacy. The Portuguese
business people I met commonly found it difficult to adapt to the ultimate
dependence on Angolan capital and decision-making. There are Portuguese
at many different levels in the Luandan labour market and also in top posi-
tions. However, on all levels there exists an ultimate “glass ceiling” in the
form of Angolan economic and political power, which the Portuguese—
independent of their position—always have to consider. Yet, despite the
conflict-ridden relations, business people from both sides seem to under-
stand each other’s intention and strategies quite well. Seemingly, they are
used to similar kinds of business practices and bureaucratic apparatus.
Also, in a figurative sense, Angolans and Portuguese seem to share the
same language. This is true, for example, when it comes to corruption,

which international media often describes as a premier characteristic of
Angolan business.
Corruption and Portuguese Business

In postcolonial European discourse, corruption is often used as a discur-
sive tool for creating a hierarchy between Europeans and Africans (Åkesson
and Orjuela 2017). This, however, was not the case among Portuguese
business people in Luanda. To them, corruptive practices were rather
something that created a similarity between themselves and their Angolan
counterparts. Seemingly, corruption shaped an interdependence between
Angolan and Portuguese business interests. I interviewed altogether seven
Portuguese middle-level managers in the construction sector and all of
them talked openly about corruption as an intrinsic part of conducting
business in Angola. Without much hesitation, they gave concrete exam-
ples of different instances when their respective companies had resorted to
corruptive practices. They mentioned practices such as overrated and fake
invoices and provision of free goods and services to important Angolan
clients, but in particular, they brought up bribes as a way of gaining con-
tracts with the Angolan state or a party-state client. One engineer working
as project manager in a large construction company explained:
There are always envelopes. And you have to know the people who are
responsible for the competition [procurement process]. Then when you win
the contract, you share the profit with them. The Angolans only accept
companies that give [bribes]. Other companies will not enter.
Also, representatives of the banking sector talked about Portuguese

involvement in illicit practices, such as nepotism and favouritism. One
young and successful Angolan bank manager described in detail how
Portuguese top managers made it easier for Portuguese companies to get
a loan so they could be more competitive than Angolan-owned compa-
nies. Yet he also made clear that when confronted with powerful Angolan
prospective clients, Portuguese bank managers would in similar ways bend
the rules for them. Corruption also seemed to be rampant in small com-
panies owned by Portuguese people. For example, a waiter at a restaurant
explained that the Portuguese owner regularly arranged false stamps on
his employees’ health cards in order to avoid becoming responsible for his
staff’s compulsory vaccinations.
90 L. Åkesson
In general, Portuguese business people were not overtly critical about

the corruption taking place in Angola, and anti-corruption was clearly not
part of a postcolonial Portuguese civilising mission. Many were quick to
point out that corruption is recurrent also in European countries and
especially so in construction. Managers in the construction sector were
eager to legitimise the corruptive practices of their own company. One
way of doing this was to describe bribes and other corruptive practices as
necessary for their company’s survival in Angola. “We have to be flexible
otherwise we cannot conduct business in Angola”, was a common
argument. Another way to phrase this legitimisation was to compare

Angola to Portugal. As one male project leader said:
Here corruption is shameless, but it happens also in Portugal. The elite in

Portugal are as corrupt as the Angolan elite. In Portugal there is promiscuity
between the construction companies, banks and politicians. In Angolan the
corruption is openly declared and assumed.
In the same vein, a female Portuguese consultant in the telecom sector

noted, “We do things just the same in Portugal, but more in the hidden.
And we welcome all the [corrupt] Angolan investors. The corruption is
more transparent here”. As in these two quotes, comparisons between the
two countries could even speak in favour of Angola when informants
maintained that corruption was more “open” in Angola and thereby, as
they saw it, more honest. In addition, Portuguese informants commonly
argued that corruption was part of the Angolan inheritance from Portugal.
For example, when talking about a recent political dispute between the
Portuguese Minister of Foreign affairs, Rui Machete, and the Angolan
MPLA leadership, a Portuguese university teacher exclaimed, “It’s so
arrogant of the Portuguese ministers to claim that they are corrupt here in
Angola, when they have learnt it from Portugal”.6
Hence, many of the Portuguese who work in Angola contribute to the
normalisation of corruption as an inherent part of Angolan life. In line
with this, they do not adhere to the otherwise widely spread image of a
dichotomy between the supposedly non-corrupt European self and the
corrupt African other. Although Angolan-Portuguese business relations in
general are ridden by struggles for power and a certain sense of postcolo-
nial Angolan vengeance, the example of corruption points to similarities
and interdependence. Somewhat paradoxically, corruptive practices can be
read as an indicator of the hybrid character of Angolan-Portuguese
relations.
Voices on Changing Power Relations

As this chapter demonstrates, the power of the Angolan party-state and its
elite clients is a sign of changes in postcolonial dynamics. What were the
reactions to these changing power relations? As I have shown, some
middle- class Angolans pitied vulnerable Portuguese who were having
troubles acquiring immigration documents. Other Angolans, however,
delighted in stories about how they themselves or other Angolans gained
a hold over “the Portuguese”, and these stories often contained elements
of revenge. For instance, people repeatedly talked about an incident as far
back as 2007 when the Angolan football player Mantorras was charged
with fines in Portugal for driving on an Angolan driving licence. This
immediately caused Angolan traffic police to stop everyone they believed
was a Portuguese car driver and ask for gasosas—because the driver did not
hold an Angolan driving license. This kind of event clearly expresses a
sense of postcolonial score settling. Arguably, score settling is still part of
the colonial legacy, as subverting the inequalities in colonial relationships
is not the same thing as moving beyond them, but it is also part of a new
chapter in Angolan-Portuguese relations, as the following story told by
male Angolan waiter illustrates:
My girlfriend used to work in a fancy Portuguese restaurant. The Portuguese

owner used to mistreat her and one day he pushed her so she fell over. She
called me and I went there together with two of my cousins and beat the
Portuguese. He threatened to call the police, but I said, “If you report me
to the police, my girlfriend will report you”. Then we all went to the police
station. I asked the police to put me in the same cell as the Portuguese, so I
could continue to beat him. Then I called my uncle who is a policeman, and
asked him to talk to the policemen. The policemen apologized to me and let
me go, but the Portuguese had to pay heavy bribes to be set free.
Like this informant, other Angolans dwelled on how bad Portuguese

they met were at handling the opaque bureaucracy of the party-state sys-
tem. Some Angolans also commented on the fact that the migratory
movement had changed direction, as people now were moving from
Portugal to Angola instead of the other way around. This was interpreted
as a sign of changing power relations. As a female administrator at a tele-
com company said:
The Portuguese speak badly about us, but today they have to go to Angola
to earn their daily bread. Before they were more racist. In the 1990s
92 L. Åkesson
Angolans emigrated to Portugal to work in construction. Today, the

Portuguese emigrate to Angolan to work in construction, while Angolans
go to Portugal for holiday.
In a similar vein, a male university professor explained:
A friend of mine who lives in Portugal told me that formerly Portuguese

people used to move seats when she sat down beside them on the metro.
Today, however, people come up to her and ask if she is from Angola, and
what it is like there, and they say they want to move here.
Among the Portuguese I met, reactions to changing power relations

often had to do with their uneasy relations to the Angolan party-state.
Many blamed Portuguese politicians for creating “unnecessary” conflicts
with the Angolan party-state, which they believed would have negative
effects on their own situation in Angola. Talking about Portuguese inves-
tigations into leading Angolans’ money laundering in Portugal, an accoun-
tant at a construction company said:
When the Angolan general was caught in Portugal with a lot of money in his
car, we were penalized. We suffer when there is a political conflict. Our gov-
ernment should not criticize the Angolan government because it means that
we are penalized.
To this informant and many others, personal security and possibilities

of earning money in Angola were more important than abstract principles
about equality before the law. Some of the Portuguese migrants were even
against their politicians bringing up offences against human rights com-
mitted by the Angolan government. From these migrants’ perspective,
political controversies between the two countries were a threat to their
own security. Such reactions can possibly be explained by sentiments of
fear and uncertainty regarding their present and future safety in Angola.
Feelings of fear were caused not only by the many armed assaults directed
at white people and other supposedly rich persons but also, I would like to
argue, by a creeping fear of “instability” and armed political uprising.
Some Portuguese feared that, if a state of widespread armed violence
would afflict Angola, they would become one of the first targets. “We have
seen it happen before”, as one middle-aged retornado remarked, referring
to his memories from the mid-1970s.
A common strategy among the Portuguese I interviewed, which partly

had to do with sentiments of fear, was to keep a low profile. This could
entail efforts of blending in in public spaces combined with an avoidance
of becoming too socially integrated. Many of the Portuguese seemingly
preferred to keep to themselves outside work hours. In order to keep a low
profile, they avoided showing off material status symbols, evaded bringing
up sensitive topics and adopted some Angolan expressions and habits. As
a Portuguese project leader in a telecom company said: “In the beginning
I created some confusion at my workplace, but then I stopped. Here it’s
better to be a good kamba (Angolan slang for friend)”. Like other
Portuguese interviewees, this man was keen to demonstrate his capacity of
adaptation and his knowledge on “how to deal with the Angolans”. At the
same time, he admitted that he seldom met any Angolans outside his
workplace. As I will make clear in the chapter to follow, this was often the
case among the Portuguese in Luanda.
Notes
1. In 2011, Angolan authorities detected that at least 42 Portuguese construc-
tion workers employed by one of the mayor Portuguese construction com-
panies were working without a permit (Público 2011).
2. Besides that, it is perfectly possible for the global elite to legally buy resi-
dency rights or citizenship through sizeable investments in, for example, the
UK, Portugal and the Netherlands (Sumption and Hooper 2014).
3. Probably he is referring to the legalisation campaigns that took place in
Portugal in the 1990s.
4. For a comparison with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, see Eriksson
Baaz and Olsson 2011.
5. In the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index from 2015, Angola ranks
182 out of 190 countries.
6. A similar observation was made by the historian Malyn Newitt (2007: 58)
when describing how the Salazar colonial regime bureaucratised public life
in Angola and put in place centralised, inefficient and corrupt administrative
procedures.
References
Åkesson, Lisa, and Camilla Orjuela. 2017. North-south migration and the corrupt
other: Practices of bribery among Portuguese migrants in Angola. Geopolitics.
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Alpes, Jill. 2015. Social protection and migration control: The case of migrant care
workers and Parisian welfare hotels. Transnational Social Review 5 (3):
296–311.
Bloch, Alice. 2014. Living in fear: Rejected asylum seekers living as irregular
migrants in England. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 40 (10):
1507–1525.
de Genova, Nicholas. 2002. Migrant “illegality” and deportability in everyday life.
Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 419–447.
Eriksson Baaz, Maria, and Ola Olsson. 2011. Feeding the horse: Unofficial eco-
nomic activities within the police force in the Democratic Republic of the
Congo. African Security 4 (4): 223–241.
Gomberg-Muñoz, Ruth. 2016. Criminalized workers: Introduction to special
issue on migrant labor and mass deportation. Anthropology of Work Review 37
(1): 3–10.
Holgersson, Helena. 2011. Icke-medborgarskapets urbana geografi. Munkedal:
Glänta Produktion.
Jover, Estefanía, Anthony Lopes Pintos, and Alexandra Marchand. 2012. Angola
private sector country profile. Tunis: African Development Bank.
Mogos, Adridan, and Vitalie Calugareanu. 2012. How to buy EU citizenship. euob-
server.com. Accessed 28 Nov 2016.
Newitt, Malyn. 2007. Angola in historical context. In Angola: The weight of his-
tory, ed. Patrick Chabal and Nuno Vidal. London: Hurst & Company.
Ovadia, Jesse Salah. 2016. The petro-developmental state in Africa: Making oil work
in Angola, Nigeria and the Gulf of Guinea. London: Hurst.
Palm, Olle. 2015. Tre års fängelse för sålda uppehållstillstånd. svt.se. Accessed 28
Nov 2016.
Público. 2011. Estão em situação irregular no país: Angola expulsa 42 portugueses
sem visto de trabalho. publico.pt. Accessed 3 Feb 2017.
Rodrigues, Venâncio. 2014. Lei da Nacionalidade: um freio à permissividade. O
País. opais.co.ao. Accessed 28 Nov 2016.
Sigona, Nando. 2012. ‘I have too much baggage’: The impacts of legal status on
the social worlds of irregular migrants. Social Anthropology 20: 150–165.
Soares de Oliveira, Ricardo. 2007. Business success, Angola style: Postcolonial
politics and the rise of Sonangol. Journal of Modern African Studies 45 (4):
165–187.
———. 2015. Magnificent and beggar land: Angola since the civil war. London:
Hurst & Company.
Sumption, Madeleine, and Kate Hooper. 2014. Selling visas and citizenships: Policy
questions from the global boom in investor immigration. Washington, DC:
Migration Policy Institute.
World Economic Forum. 2015. Why is Angola’s capital the most expensive city in the
world? www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/06. Accessed 2 Nov 2017.
CHAPTER 5
The Power in and of Labour Relations
Abstract Workplaces are key sites for encounters between migrants and
residents and are fundamental for constructions of power relations and
identities. In Angola, there are striking continuities between the social
relations of labour during the colonial period and the relations of power
between Angolans and Portuguese at workplaces in contemporary Luanda.
This chapter opens with a representation of the organisation of work in
colonial Angola and shows how this interplayed with colonial identities
and hierarchies. Thereafter, it discusses contemporary Portuguese-
Angolan relations through analysing workplace hierarchies and economic
inequalities. It also shows that contacts between Angolans and Portuguese
in Luanda generally are limited to the workplace, which arguably enforces
the distance between the two groups as well as the continuous difference
in social status.
Keywords Work • Colonial labour • Workplace hierarchies • Power

relations
Workplaces play a key role for meetings between migrants and residents in
receiving countries. At work, migrants and locals enter into relationships
that often are of a hierarchical character, and they create and recreate

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73052-3_5
96 L. ÅKESSON
images of each other. Thus, as Leonard (2010) argues, work and labour
settings are fundamental to constructions of power relations and identities
in our mobile world. This means that migration studies must acknowledge
the power of work and labour relations in shaping how migrants and resi-
dents together construct their mutual relationships. In particular, work-
places offer a critical site for exploring how access to privilege is achieved.
In most cases, economic privileges and upward professional mobility are
associated with claims of being “native”. In the present case, however,
advantages often accrue to the Portuguese migrants, although Angolan
business owners and authorities ultimately are in power.
Power relations and identities at workplaces emerge out of economic
materialities (such as salaries and other economic benefits) as well as socio-
professional hierarchies and cultural discourses. This chapter as well as the
following one will bring out these different aspects. The present chapter
discusses workplace hierarchies and economic inequalities, whereas the
next chapter brings up the images that Portuguese and Angolans con-
struct of each other as co-workers. Thus, the present chapter stresses social
relations of power at workplaces, whereas the subsequent discusses iden-
tity constructions in relation to work. As a background to both these
chapters, the next section provides a representation of how work and
labour were organised in colonial Angola and how this contributed to the
making of colonial identities and hierarchies. In particular, this historical
retrospect opens up for an understanding of the striking continuities that
exist between understandings of work in colonial Angola and postcolonial
labour relations in contemporary Luanda.
Labour Relations in Colonial Times

Since at least the fifteenth century, deeply asymmetric labour relations
have been central to Angolan-Portuguese history. The colony of Angola in
itself was founded in order to facilitate the most asymmetric of all labour
relations: slavery. For the Portuguese, slavery remained the most impor-
tant economic activity in Angola until the end of the nineteenth century;
according to estimates, as many as 40% of all trans-Atlantic slaves came
from Angolan ports (Ball 2005). When slavery finally was abolished, the
colonial regime instead introduced a legal and moral obligation for all
Africans to work. The regime of forced labour continued into the 1960s
and was stopped by the Portuguese regime only after the Angolan inde-
pendence movements had initiated their armed rebellion (Bender 1978).
THE POWER IN AND OF LABOUR RELATIONS 97
The system of forced labour is still remembered by elderly Angolans

(see Ball 2006), and some younger people have heard stories about it from
old family members. This was the case of Jorge, a man in his early forties
from the province of Kwanza Sul, who told me about his relatives’ memo-
ries of forced labour:
My grandfather was a contratado (contract worker). They worked many

hours without rest. They could not choose which job to do; they were just
contracted by force to do a certain job. My grandfather worked with con-
structing the railway and roads and with the urbanization of Waku Kongo.
They worked for six months away from home, and then they were entitled
to visit their family for one week. They lived in huts that they built them-
selves. They were given trousers, but no shirt. This was in the 1950s, and
they were not paid every month, but at the end of the six months. In the
villages, there was a representative for the colonial regime. When boys were
12–13 years old, he sent them away as contract labourers. They could not
flee, they were controlled, but sometimes they went to the bush to escape.
An uncle of mine was transferred to Lunda Norte in the 1960s when he was
13–14 years old. He was then lost for many years, and had no contact with
the family. In the 1990s, he returned as an old man. He had worked in the
mines, and had not earned enough to be able to return to Kwanza Sul. He
was sent to Lunda Norte together with other people from the village, and
he was the only one who returned. He told stories about others from the
village who had died.
Thus, as Jorge’s story testifies, in Angola the system of forced labour

has continued to cast its shadow into our times. What were the legal,
administrative and ideological underpinnings of this deeply entrenched
colonial practice?
In colonial Angola, access to cheap labour was more important than
access to land (Ball 2005: 2). Slavery was formally abolished as late as
1878 (Bender 1978: 139), and according to the historian Jeremy Ball
(2005: 2), Portugal did not fulfil its treaty obligations to totally end slav-
ery until 1910. Slavery was gradually replaced by a system of state-
sanctioned forced labour. An infamous vagrancy clause was introduced
which considered all “non-productive” Africans vagrants and therefore
subjects to non-paid labour. The definition of “non-productive” was left
to the arbitrariness of local colonial administrators. The vagrancy clause
was succeeded by new laws stipulating that all Africans were obliged to
work for public interests during a period of time each year. The “public
98 L. ÅKESSON
interest” in this case included private white farms, and the Portuguese set-
tlers came to assume that the government was obliged to provide them
with labour (Bender 1978). Forced labour was part of the colonial system
in all sub-Saharan colonies, but after 1945 all colonial powers—except the
Portuguese—decided to finish with these practices. In the Portuguese
colonies, forced labour did not start to diminish until the late 1950s
(Keese 2013).
As Ball remarks, “compelling people to work for low wages at undesir-
able jobs in distant locations from their homes and families required more
than simply a law” (2006: 61). By introducing a head tax for all African
men, the colonial authorities forced people to work for a colonial employer
in order to be able to pay this tax. The Portuguese also set up a network
of colonial administrators to ensure access to both male and female labour,
and it was actually women who built much of Angola’s vast road system.
Traditional leaders (sobas) who did not comply with the system of forced
recruitment could be severely beaten (ibid.). These measures led to a situ-
ation where entire villages could be devoid of able-bodied people as these
either had been abducted as forced labourers or had fled in order to escape
the dreaded labour contracts. By 1954, the United Nations estimated that
about 500,000 Angolans had left the country. A few years earlier, a colo-
nial inspector noted in a secret report to the Portuguese Assembly that the
white settlers’ demand for labour had led to a situation where “Only the
dead are really exempt from forced labour” (Galvão 1961 in Bender
1978).
The memories told by former contract workers make clear that their
working conditions were appalling (Ball 2006). Workers report that they
rarely received wages as they were either kept by the colonial administra-
tors or stolen by their employers. Colonial officials forcibly recruited
workers for particular white settlers and then received bribes from these
employers as well as the workers’ salaries. Whippings and other kinds of
corporeal punishment were commonplace. Women also ran the risk of
being sexually exploited by supervisors and colonial administrators and
seldom had the option of fleeing because of their family care
responsibilities.
The contrast between these conditions and the colonial ideology under-
pinning the regime of forced labour is stark, to say the least, as the latter
builds on an idea of (forced) work as beneficial for colonial subjects. Like
other colonial regimes, the Portuguese maintained that their mission was
to impart civilisation to Africans. Yet, in contrast to the British and the
French, the Portuguese regime emphasised manual labour as the singu-

larly most efficient instrument of civilisation. They saw neither Christian
propaganda nor formal schooling as having the same strong civilising vir-
tues as work. In line with this, the Portuguese agent of civilisation was not
the formal school teacher but the employer. Thus, from the colonial
regime’s perspective, forced work was an ideal solution to two problems:
It benefitted the African population as it met their “need of civilization”
and it provided the colonial administration and white settlers with cheap
labour (Abrantes and Berthet 2015; Jeronimo 2015).
One of the first academic texts to be published on the Portuguese
labour regime in colonial Angola was Gerald Bender’s seminal work
Angola Under the Portuguese: The Myth and the Reality. His concluding
remarks (1978: 224ff) on attitudes towards human labour at the end of
the colonial era are fascinating as they clearly resonate with the conditions
I met in Luanda. First, Bender argues that the colonies provided the first
opportunity for most white settlers to manage the work of others and that
many of them were not adverse to deprecating their subordinates as they
themselves had been bossed around in Portugal. Second, he establishes
that the average white earned many times more what an African employee
earned, and he argues that this created an insurmountable barrier in life-
style between them, even when differences with regard to cultural values
and practices were small. Third, he finds that contacts between white and
black people normally were limited to working life and that this reinforced
the view that white people were superior. In the following, I will come
back to same issues but set in contemporary Luanda. I will start by discuss-
ing workplace hierarchies and the hiring of sometimes unexperienced
Portuguese in managerial positions. This is followed by an account of the
economic and material differences between Angolan and Portuguese col-
leagues, and lastly I analyse the workplace as a primary arena of postcolo-
nial encounters permeated by power relations.
Workplace Hierarchies
Portuguese people are to be found at many different levels of the Luandan
labour market and also at the top. As mentioned, members of the Angolan
elite often prefer to have Portuguese managing their business interests.
Accordingly, the most privileged Portuguese in Angola move in top circles
and are rewarded with substantial economic benefits. Portuguese also
often occupy middle-level managerial positions in bigger companies, they
100 L. ÅKESSON
are managers in smaller companies and they are hired for carrying out
specialist functions, which sometimes include quite basic tasks, such as
accountancy. In addition, there are Portuguese entrepreneurs who have
started their own companies, which has to be done in partnership with an
Angolan citizen if the Portuguese does not hold double citizenship.
The Portuguese presence is conspicuous at some workplaces, in par-
ticular at banks and construction company headquarters. This was illus-
trated by Celia, a middle-aged Portuguese retornada who talked about the
bank where she worked:
The Portuguese are important here. The president is Portuguese, the com-
mercial director is Portuguese, the juridical section is Portuguese, and
accountancy is Portuguese. If it wasn’t for us… The Angolans here all have
a university degree, but they know nothing. The educational system is very
bad. The Portuguese are everywhere, the Angolans don’t succeed.
The Portuguese being “everywhere” in the upscale labour market was

something that worried many Angolans—especially, young people with a
university degree, who competed with the Portuguese for coveted job
positions and who saw them as an impediment to the social mobility they
believed themselves entitled to. Many Angolans saw it as unjust that
Portuguese people had easier access to qualified and well-paid jobs. They
resented the fact that to be “a Portuguese” at Angolan workplaces was a
key asset linked to professional upward mobility and economic
compensations.
In addition, the hierarchical relations between Angolans and Portuguese
at workplaces implied that nearly all Portuguese were supervising the work
of a number of Angolans. On the Angolan side, some of those who worked
under Portuguese supervision complained about being constantly moni-
tored. Complaints were especially common among low- and semi-skilled
Angolan workers who claimed that they would be penalised through a
reduction of their salary for any small offence. In their eyes, the same was
not true for Portuguese co-workers, who could sit down for a coffee or a
cigarette without supervisors reprimanding them (Waldorff under review).
According to critical Angolan voices, at work the Portuguese could easily
hold onto their privileges.
Portuguese Getting Jobs Without Proper Qualifications

A related and common critique among Angolans was that many of the
Portuguese working in the country had obtained their jobs without pos-
sessing the necessary qualifications. This critique was especially targeted
towards young Portuguese, who regularly were blamed for either being
too inexperienced for the job they had acquired in Luanda or having
obtained it through presenting falsified CVs. Accusations about young
Portuguese transforming their secondary studies certificate into a univer-
sity exam were commonplace and sometimes epitomised into a joke about
TAP, the Portuguese air company, being the most efficient university in
the world “because when you embark in Lisbon you have only a high
school education, but when you disembark in Luanda you have a univer-
sity degree”. Accusations about falsified Portuguese degrees were part of
a generalised Angolan discourse on “the Portuguese” and were more sel-
dom directed towards a specific person. In contrast, complaints about
unexperienced young Portuguese taking up positions they were not pre-
pared for were more often tied to specific persons and circumstances. One
case was presented by Eduardo, a middle-aged Angolan bank employee,
who explained that he had changed jobs in consequence of having been
asked to introduce a young Portuguese woman to her job and support her
with on-the-job training. After this initial training, she had left Angola for
some time, and when departing, she had told Eduardo, “When I come
back, I’ll be your boss, I’ll be doing your work and you will work for me”.
This eventually turned out to be true, which naturally hurt Eduardo
deeply and made him look for a new job.
Complaints about having to work under unexperienced Portuguese
were presented not only by highly skilled persons, such as Eduardo. For
instance, an unskilled Angolan construction worker I interviewed had the
same experience and presented the same kind of complaint. Unsurprisingly,
highly skilled Angolans were in a better position than construction work-
ers to resist what they perceived to be unjust staff policies, based not on
merit but on national belonging—and race. In the discourse on labour
place relations, it was the nationality and the associated social and eco-
nomic conditions that people focused on, rather than race. Yet it was per-
fectly clear that “Portuguese” was linked to whiteness.1
One example of resistance against unjust hiring policies was described
by Maria, an Angolan woman working at a bank. When the bank where
Maria worked had appointed a highly educated but unexperienced young
102 L. ÅKESSON
Portuguese man as director, a conflict had immediately broken out

between him and the experienced Angolan staff. They had started to
ignore him and refused to provide him with any information or help and
continued to do so despite reprimands from the bank management.
For a young and unexperienced person this was probably an uncom-
fortable situation. In general terms, however, the Luandan context pro-
vided Portuguese migrants with good career opportunities. The majority
of my Portuguese informants were employed in higher positions than they
had been in Portugal. Young students who had been dependent on their
parents all their life, and who in Portugal probably would have been
reduced to look for an internship, were in Luanda employed in leadership
positions, which was a very new experience for them. According to both
Angolan and Portuguese interviewees, this kind of rapid promotion could
cause feelings of self-importance and made some of these young Portuguese
treat their subordinates in a distanced and arrogant manner. As I will make
clear in Chap. 6, middle-aged Portuguese commonly accused young
Portuguese of being arrogant towards Angolan and this purported arro-
gance might be explained in part by the quick professional ascension that
many of the young experienced.
Motives for Hiring Portuguese

During the Angolan economic boom years, the presence of Portuguese
professionals increased rapidly, and arguably there were a number of rea-
sons for this. At the top management level, the Angolan company owners
often found it more secure to hire a Portuguese than a co-national. A
female Angolan interlocutor who is well connected to the inner circles of
the MPLA party talked about this:
Some of the Angolan business owners prefer to contract a Portuguese,

because they can get rid of him whenever they want. They can just give SME
[the migration authority] a call. It’s also better to have a Portuguese man-
ager because he’ll not talk as much as an Angolan, he isn’t involved in the
Angolan circles.
In the same vein, Alexandro, another Angolan with a good understand-

ing of the affairs of the Angolan executive elite, underlined that the
Portuguese managers’ position as outsiders is an advantage for the Angolan
business owners: “So they hire a foreigner to manage the company, and
the owner knows that this foreigner won’t fazer politica [‘do politics’],
because as he’s a foreigner he can’t enter into politics”. A non-Angolan
manager has to rely on the Angolan owner and be loyal to him as he lacks
strong ties to the inner circles of the party-state. The competition in the
Angolan economic-political elite is fierce, and business relations are dis-
trustful and volatile. This implies that in comparison with an Angolan
manager an outside manager will have few chances of playing dirty tricks
on a well-connected Angolan owner.
Alexandro also said that it is good for national business owners to be
able to “hide” behind Portuguese managers and “earn money in their
shadows”. He added that this is the case because the big company owners
are linked to the party-state, and the party-state is also their customer, “so
these people own companies, but they should not be seen”. Thus, to hide
behind a Portuguese manager makes it easier to act as a company’s owner
and its client at the same time and to do it on a large scale. To “hide in the
shadows” is also important for members of the Angolan party-state elite
when dealing with international companies as these may be prohibited to
set up contracts with firms owned by PEPs—politically exposed persons—
and their family members and close associates.
Another and more general motive for employing Portuguese for differ-
ent positions is that both Angolan company owners (Soares de Oliveira
2015: 76) and Portuguese managers see the Portuguese as better edu-
cated, more experienced and more disciplined. This view was reflected
among literally all the Portuguese I met, and also among many of the
Angolans, although it often caused them mixed feelings. A young Angolan
woman who worked as a waitress and followed a university evening course
gave vent to her ambivalence:
We need qualified labour from Portugal, but it makes us feel revolted. The
only good thing is that the presence of the Portuguese forces the Angolans
to make an effort in order to be able to surpass them.
Although most of the highly educated Angolans would agree that there
was some need for experienced Portuguese professionals, they were criti-
cal of the practice of hiring Portuguese to all kinds of jobs. For example,
they criticised the employment of Portuguese restaurant waiters and con-
struction workers and the view that there were no Angolans who were
qualified for such positions. During my visits to Luanda, however, it
became clear that the Angolan government had started to restrict the
104 L. ÅKESSON
entrance of low-educated Portuguese labour. According to Portuguese

construction managers, many Portuguese construction workers did not
get their labour visas renewed and were obliged to return to Portugal.
A third motive for hiring Portuguese has to do with a racialised gaze.
Among employers in Luanda, there is a tendency to see the presence of
white staff as good for business. Both Angolan and Portuguese interview-
ees maintained that having white staff was regarded as a quality sign—also
by Angolan customers. Supposedly, white personnel indicate high ambi-
tions and good organisation, and in upscale restaurants in Luanda a racially
based staff strategy was obvious. The majority of the waiters were black,
while the headwaiter and a few others were white. At some restaurants, the
difference between the two categories was further emphasised by their
clothes; the black waiters wearing black T-shirts and the white waiters
wearing well-ironed white shirts. A similar pattern was obvious in racialised
bank staff strategies and in advertisement. The giant billboards lining the
constantly gridlocked motorways connecting central Luanda with the sub-
urbs displayed few black faces. Instead, the smiling owner of a new sports
car or a luxury domicile featured on these billboards was mostly mestiço
and sometimes white. All this ties in with Pauline Leonard’s (2010: 1254)
pessimistic observation about the enduring stereotypical representation of
whiteness “as something stable and enduring, needed in the postcolonial
just as it was in the colonial context, as a universally admired quality, a
guarantor that things are being done ‘properly’, in spite of any evidence to
the contrary”.
A fourth driver behind recruitment of Portuguese staff can be related
to a well-known strand in migration studies, namely network theory
(Brettell 2000; Gurak and Cases 1992; Ho 1993). The importance of
networks for mobility is well established, and network theorists have
shown that migrants move in transnational social fields with the support of
networks consisting of family and friends. The network perspective also
provides an insight into how particular individuals become migrants while
others do not. In the case of the Portuguese in Luanda, it was clear that
those who were in a position to influence the hiring of new staff often
opted for recruiting family, friends and ex-colleagues in Portugal. The
reasons for this were twofold. First, many wanted to support un- or under-
employed kin and friends. Many of the Portuguese in Luanda had decided
to migrate to Angola when their company in Portugal had reduced the
staff or closed down. Thus, they had former colleagues who were unem-
ployed and whom they wanted to support by arranging a job in Angola.
In addition, like other migrants around the world, the Portuguese felt a
responsibility to support family members left behind through finding
them a good job in the country of destination. Second, the preference of
the Portuguese for employing co-nationals had to with feelings of confi-
dence. In hiring somebody from the homeland, especially a family mem-
ber or ex-colleague, Portuguese managers believed they would get a
reliable co-worker.
Portuguese managers’ wish to hire somebody they knew in Portugal
entailed that they sometimes tried to bend the rules of employment pro-
cedures. According to Angolan law, a prerequisite for hiring a foreigner
was that there were no Angolans who had the competence to fulfil the
position. Employers circumvent this rule in various ways, as exemplified by
Maria, the bank employee quoted above:
If we want to employ somebody from abroad, we must first advertise the

position in Jornal de Angola [the leading government controlled newspa-
per]. Then we must carry out interviews with those who have applied for the
job, and only if there is nobody [with the right expertise], we can employ an
expatriate. Once one of the Portuguese directors published an advertisement
in the Jornal de Angola, but neglected to carry out the interviews. We have
to put together a report of the recruitment process, and send it to the
National Bank of Angola. This Portuguese, who is the director of our juridi-
cal division, stated [falsely] that we had carried out interviews and asked me
to sign the report. I refused as there were Angolans who could fill the
vacancy, and the Portuguese director couldn’t sign the document as he’s a
foreigner. Then my boss summoned me, and after that my salary didn’t
increase for two years.
Thus, as indicated by Maria, there could be repercussions for Angolans

who protested against employment procedures set up to promote employ-
ment of Portuguese.
Salary Differences
Yet, according to Maria and the majority of the Angolans, the most impor-
tant source of tension between them and their Portuguese colleagues was
not skewed recruitment processes but salary differences. In the beginning
of the interview with Maria, I asked her about the relations between
Angolans and Portuguese at the bank where she worked, and her answer
106 L. ÅKESSON
was clear: “The relations are complicated. There are many inequalities
related to salaries and benefits. This is the main cause of tensions”.
Many Angolan interviewees provided similar statements, and they often
gave detailed accounts of differences in salaries and benefits, although
these generally were supposed to be a company secret. Alberto, an archi-
tect who has worked for 11 years as a project assistant at a Portuguese-
managed architectural firm, was upset about the economic discrepancies
between his Portuguese colleagues and himself:
The salary differences are considerable. They don’t disclose the salaries, but
we know. It’s a discomfort. A foreigner without any experience receives
more than an Angolan with a lot of experience. I earn 2300 dollars2 per
month, and a Portuguese architect with two to three years of experience
earns 5000 dollars and a Portuguese with 20–25 years of experience earns
11–12,000 dollars. The Portuguese also have a subsistence allowance which
was 800 dollars per month in 2007, but now it is lower. They also have free
housing and free a car with all expenses paid and a telephone. Thus, the
company can hire four to five Angolans for the same cost as one Portuguese.
In the new contracts with the Portuguese, however, their compensations
have been cut. They are sent to the provinces, and they have to accept these
conditions because of the situation in Portugal.
In the last sentences, Alberto refers to the cut in benefits because of the
economic crisis in Angola, which as mentioned earlier started in late
2014 in consequence of the global drop in oil prices. During my visits in
Luanda in 2013–2105, I heard stories about fantasy salaries and perks dur-
ing the “gold digging” years in the second half of the 2000s, and it was
clear that the economic advantages for the Portuguese had decreased since
then, although many still earned much more than they would have done
in Portugal. Thus, Alberto points out that although the benefits of the
Portuguese have decreased in Angola, they have to stay because they
would be even worse off in Portugal. This, in turn, can be read as a refer-
ence to the changing power relations between the two countries.
On the Portuguese side, people often avoided to talk with me about the
income gap between themselves and Angolan colleagues. I interpreted
this avoidance as pertaining to an “appearance of equality”, which was an
attitude commonly adopted by Portuguese informants. For some indi-
viduals, this attitude seemed to be grounded in an actual desire for more
equal relations with Angolans. To these persons, the salary differences
were an embarrassing reminder of the postcolonial hierarchies that still
existed. In most cases, however, the “appearance of equality” was related

to feelings of having to be careful because of the ambiguous position of
the Portuguese in Angola. Arguably, the position of the Portuguese as
migrants and their ensuing dependence on the Angolan party-state made
some of them try to downplay and conceal privileges, as these were associ-
ated with their position as ex-colonial masters, whites and Europeans. An
“appearance of equality” seemed to be especially prevalent in regard to
salaries and other economic compensations, as these were heavily loaded
issues in the interaction between the two groups.
In conclusion, differences with regard to salaries and economic com-
pensations were at the heart of workplace tensions between Angolans and
Portuguese, and one reason for that was the straightforward way that they
revealed workplace hierarchies and inequalities. Another reason had to
with the social and cultural importance of money in Luanda. As men-
tioned in the introduction, life in the city is impregnated by a cult of con-
sumerism, which dominates the lifestyle of the Angolan elite and much of
the emerging middle class and also serves as a model for those less well-off
and especially for young people (Schubert 2016; Soares de Oliveira 2015:
149–158). This implies that monetary incomes were a central preoccupa-
tion for the absolute majority of the Angolans I interviewed. Yet the same
was true for many of the Portuguese who struggled to send remittances to
family members, pay off debts in Portugal and maintain a decent standard
of living in super-expensive Luanda. Besides that, patterns of consumerism
were manifest among the Portuguese, and some Portuguese informants
maintained that the Luandan drive to show off through conspicuous con-
sumption was shared by many Portuguese. As mentioned, some interview-
ees saw vaidade [vanity] and a desire for luxury expenditures as cultural
characteristics that were common to Angolans and Portuguese.
The Workplace as a Primary Arena of Postcolonial

Encounters
The workplace plays a fundamental role for both Angolan and Portuguese
understandings of the other’s identity and of how it interplays with their
own subject position. As I have shown, the context of work and the social
and economic conditions at workplaces are also central to social differen-
tiation and power distribution between Angolans and Portuguese. These
dynamics not only are important for what is going on at workplaces but
108 L. ÅKESSON
played a key role for how the interviewees imagined the other in general
terms. The key importance of workplaces for people’s (re)construction of
Portuguese-Angolan identities and power relations can be related to two
features: first, the centrality of work in people’s lives and, second, the fact
that many had little contact with people from the other group outside the
workplace. This latter point, in turn, pointed to the instrumental character
of the relations between the middle-class Portuguese and Angolans I
interviewed. For different reasons, they mostly avoided each other’s com-
pany outside work. In particular, perceptions about differences in status
played an important role.
The key importance of work and the workplace for many of the
Portuguese had to do with work being their singular reason for staying in
Angola. This was especially true for people without historical family ties to
the country. Some of them went as far as stating, “I’m in Angola to work,
not to live”. To these informants, work was the factor that determined
their present geographical location in the world, and it was also decisive
for their possibilities to live an enjoyable and meaningful life. In lamenting
that they did not “live” in Angola, they indicated that they longed for fam-
ily and friends and what they often talked about as a higher degree of
“freedom” in Portugal, by which they particularly referred to the possibil-
ity of moving around in urban space without fears of being assaulted. Yet,
despite feeling that quality of life was low in Angola, they felt obliged to
stay there to work and earn money. Obviously, this is a predicament they
share with labour migrants across the world. The key role of the workplace
also has to do with long working hours, as many of the Portuguese have
very little leisure time. Also, many Angolans spend most of their time dur-
ing weekdays at their work, and those who were stuck for hours in endless
queues when commuting between home and work literally have no life
outside their work from Monday to Friday. Furthermore, and in line with
globalised trends, both Angolans and Portuguese often see their profes-
sional status as inseparable from their personal identity and social position.
Another key factor is the link between work and money and the fact that
life in contemporary Luanda largely revolves around the spending of
money as an indicator of individual and family status. Thus, work and
income are central to identities in both groups.
Furthermore, many interviewees said that they rarely met with persons
from the other group outside work hours. This was especially true for
Angolans, who often indicated that they had little contact with Portuguese
outside the workplace. Their private networks generally did not include
any Portuguese people, as witnessed by, for instance, an interviewee who

worked as a salesman at a company where many Portuguese were
employed. He scrolled through his impressively long list of cell phone
contacts and told me that it did not include “a single white person”3 and
said that the same was the case with his friends’ contacts. Thus, interaction
between Angolans and Portuguese working together often was confined
to the workplace. Alberto, the assistant architect quoted above, painted
the following picture of his relationship with Portuguese colleagues:
We are not friends outside work. None of the parties is interested in that.
They go out separately, and we go out separately. We can’t go to the places
they go to, it’s too expensive. There is a lot of disparity, we have to pay for
everything and often our money is gone by the 25th.
But can’t they go to the places you frequent?
No, they want to show they are superior, they don’t go to inferior places.
If you have a standing as super-highly educated you don’t socialize with
other people.
Along the same line, other Angolan informants said that they did not
socialise outside work with Portuguese colleagues because these were, or
behaved as, “bosses”. Thus, the lack of contacts outside the workplace
created feelings of inferiority among Angolans and sometimes also feelings
of revenge. An exception to this pattern was young highly skilled individu-
als who had carried out university studies abroad and especially those who
had studied in Portugal. Another exception was some young male infor-
mants who belonged to privileged Angolan families and who, although
they had studied in Angola, performed as “cosmopolitans”. They had
family members living abroad and had been travelling in Europe or the
US, and one of them underlined that he “wasn’t afraid of the Portuguese”.
Instead, he wanted to demonstrate an “open mind” and argued that he
was prepared to hang out with Portuguese as well as with Swedes or
Chinese.
When talking about relationships at workplaces, some Angolans por-
trayed their relations to Portuguese colleagues and superiors as instrumen-
tal. One college teacher said:
My experience of working with Portuguese is that we only talk job with each
other. The Cubans are different, they party with us. Once we invited a
female Portuguese teacher for an excursion during a weekend. She accepted
the invitation, but underlined that everyone should pay for themselves.
110 L. ÅKESSON
These kinds of things makes socializing harder, the Cubans let us pay for
them. Maybe it’s also a question of class. The Portuguese construction
workers go out with Angolans they work together with. There are even
intimate relationships; my sister was involved with a Portuguese. The intel-
lectual Portuguese are more closed.
Thus, this informant presented the same view as many of the Portuguese,
namely that the construction workers were better integrated because they
socialised with Angolan co-workers and had Angolan girlfriends. In con-
trast to that, he saw the highly skilled Portuguese as more arrogant and
superficial in their relations to their colleagues.
If most of the Angolans said they had seldom interacted with Portuguese
outside the workplace, there was a greater variation concerning how the
Portuguese talked about their contacts with Angolans. In the first place,
most had employed an Angolan domestic worker, whom they often com-
plained about (which also was common among highly skilled Angolans).
When it came to more equal relationships, some of the highly skilled
Portuguese were eager to demonstrate that they had Angolan friends.
This especially concerned those who wanted to signal that they were lib-
eral and integrated and saw Angolans as equals. This category included
some female informants who had Angolan male partners and who, in con-
trast to most of the male Portuguese with Angolan girlfriends, described
their relationship as equal. Another category of people who talked about
socialising with Angolans friends, though not always on terms of equality,
consisted of retornados who had family ties to Angolans, and a third cate-
gory were men in the construction sector who had Angolan girlfriends.
However, the majority of the Portuguese I met said they had no Angolan
friends, and explained this in various ways. One person said that relations
in Angola had become commercialised, that friendships were all about
money. Another person said that the cultural gap was too big, and a third
informant maintained that he only went to expensive places where the
Angolans could not afford to go.
Accordingly, although most Portuguese said they had no Angolan
friends, it was still more common among them than among Angolans to
maintain that they had, or wanted to have, friends from the other com-
munity. Sometimes, this seemed to be underpinned by a genuine wish to
learn to know the other, whereas in other cases I read it more as a
manifestation of a will to present an “appearance of equality”. The fact that
the Portuguese in general had a stronger wish to befriend the other was
epitomised by an Angolan student who critically said, “Nowadays the

Portuguese very much want to be our friends, but we don’t want to be
their friends”. It is tempting to read her comment also as a comment on
the new and changing macro-economic and political relations between the
two countries. Yet, as I have shown throughout this chapter, these changes
seemingly had a limited influence on the daily life at workplaces in Luanda.
At these sites, postcolonial relations between Portuguese and Angolans
were remarkably similar to the social relations of labour during the late
colonial period. The next chapter will demonstrate that this continuity
also was apparent with regard to the construction of identities.
Notes
1. Understandings of privileges related to race included not only the Portuguese
but also the perceived over-representation of Angolan whites and mestiços in
the filling of attractive jobs.
2. Probably, he was paid in kwanzas but stated his salary in dollars in conse-
quence of the dollarisation of the Angolan economy.
3. His statement about “white persons” was a response to my question about
whether he knew any Portuguese.
References
Abrantes, Carla Susana Alem, and Marina Berthet. 2015. A gestão do trabalho
indígena frente à resistência política em Angola, 1950. Revista de Ciências
Sociais, Fortaleza 46 (2): 117–140.
3: 1–9.
———. 2006. “I escaped in a coffin”: Remembering Angolan forced labor from
the 1940s. Cadernos de Estudos Africanos 9/10: 61–75.
Brettell, Caroline. 2000. Theorizing migration in anthropology: The social con-
struction of networks, identities, communities and globalscapes. In Migration
theory: Talking across disciplines, ed. Caroline Brettell and James Hollifield.
London/New York: Routledge.
Gurak, Douglas T., and Fe Cases. 1992. Migration networks and the shaping of
migration systems. In International migration systems: A global approach, ed.
Mary Kritz, Lin Lean Lim, and Hania Zlotnik. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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Ho, Christine. 1993. The internationalization of kinship and the feminization of

Caribbean migration: The case of Afro-Trinidadian immigrants in Los Angeles.
Human Organization 52 (1): 32–40.
Jeronimo, Miguel Bandera. 2015. The ‘civilising mission’ of Portuguese colonialism,
1870–1930. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Keese, Alexander. 2013. Searching for the reluctant hands: Obsession, ambiva-
lence and the practice of organising involuntary labour in colonial Cuanza-Sul
and Malange Districts, Angola, 1926–1945. The Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History 41 (2): 238–258.
Waldorff, Pétur. Under review. Renegotiated (post)colonial relations and the new
Portuguese migration to Angola.
CHAPTER 6
Identities at Work
Abstract For both Angolans and Portuguese, the construction of identi-

ties in relation to work was a central concern. On both sides, the produc-
tion of identities was related to a few contrastive notions with their roots
in the colonial past: laid-back–hard-working, ignorant–knowledgeable,
and arrogant–humble. These notions were often co-produced by Angolans
and Portuguese as both sides had internalised central strands of the colo-
nial discourse, which they recreated. Yet consequences of the colonial past
may also be more indirect, as in the case of Angolan understandings of
work as suffering and subjection. In conclusion, this chapter demonstrates
that the postcolonial legacy works in both direct and indirect ways and
that it is impossible to exactly delimit the influence of the colonial.
Keywords Identities • Colonial discourse • Postcolonial legacy •

Internalisation of colonial ideas
The production of identities in relation to work is a key concern for the

Portuguese and Angolans who meet at workplaces in Luanda. Portuguese
in all kinds of professions would generally focus on how they perceive
Angolans to perform their work tasks, whereas Angolans would rather talk
about how their Portuguese colleagues and superiors behave in relation to
them. The production of identities at work largely reflects the hierarchies

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73052-3_6
114 L. ÅKESSON
described earlier. Both parties have internalised a colonial discourse, which

they reproduce. Most Portuguese I interviewed were overseeing the work
of some Angolans, whereas all Angolan informants were dependent on
Portuguese in positions of superiority. In everyday work settings, Angolan
company owners were generally absent, which meant that the Portuguese
often were superior to most of the Angolans they met on a daily basis at
the workplace.
Two themes were prominent in the interviews: attitudes and work eth-
ics. Concerning attitudes, accusations about arrogant behaviour were con-
stantly presented in the interviews. Such accusations were mainly, but not
exclusively, produced by Angolans about Portuguese, but as the chapter
will show a discourse on the “arrogant Angolan” will complement this
picture. In contrast, allegations about irresponsibility and lack of commit-
ment to work singularly targeted Angolans and were mainly produced by
Portuguese but also by Angolans. In a nearly over-explicit way, such
understandings were signs of a postcolonial continuity. Images of the “lazy
native” were inherent to colonialism everywhere (Eriksson Baaz 2005:
121; Pieterse 1995), but arguably they played an especially prominent and
long-lived role in the Portuguese colonial project. As I have made clear, a
view of labour as the primary tool of “civilization” played a central role in
the Portuguese colonial ideology. The African population was character-
ised as idle with a deficient faculty for work and a rudimentary nature, and
work was construed as a means of curbing this idleness and instilling a
more civilised nature. In the interviews with Portuguese in Luanda, the
discourse on the Angolans as “laid-back” and not committed to work was
still overwhelmingly dominant.
“The Laid-Back Angolan”

Many of the Portuguese whom I met in Luanda painted a picture of their
Angolan colleagues as lacking a “spirit of work”, and they described it as
manifest in many different ways. Portuguese informants maintained that
their Angolan colleagues often were absent from work, always arrived late,
worked slowly, were irresponsible, disappeared on endless errands during
working hours, used a lot of time on Facebook, were negligent, and so on.
A quite typical proponent of such ideas was Elena, who had been in Angola
for a couple of years:
The first week here was amazing, but then it became terrible. I’m a fast
person, 1000 kilometres per hour compared with these people. I’m used to
IDENTITIES AT WORK 115
having things done. They move ten kilometres per hour in the best of days.
The lack of commitment to work is the main problem! People believe they
are entitled to something from the government and from employers. They
want salary just for showing up.
When Portuguese interviewees talked about Angolans as passive and

idle, they often referred to them as an anonymous collective. Also a couple
of Angolans talked about themselves—in a collective sense—as laid-back
in relation to work and therefore as different from the Portuguese. One
young woman said, “The Portuguese enjoy working. We Angolans are
very relaxed, at least 50 per cent more. We want a papa feita [lit. the por-
ridge done], just ready to eat”. Another Angolan presenting a similar pic-
ture was a woman who had lived in Portugal for a number or years and
then had returned and opened a restaurant in Luanda. As an Angolan with
experience of living in Portugal, she occupied a discursive position some-
where in between the two identities. She had hired a Portuguese manager
and defended this in the following way:
Angolans do not have a spirit of work. I don’t want to say that there is
nobody with a spirit of work, but it’s a minority. When I had an Angolan
manager there were problems, but the Portuguese manager works intensely,
he arrives at the restaurant very early.
Thus, the lack of a work ethic could be imagined as part of the Angolan
identity by both sides, and in an over-explicit way this image reflects back
to colonial ideas. The European colonial image of the African as passive
and irresponsible has a long history (Eriksson Baaz 2005: 120f) and was
definitively not limited to the Portuguese colonial ideology. Yet, even
though the image of the “lazy native” was widely spread in colonial times,
it seems to have carried a special and long-standing weight in the
Portuguese empire, where work was imagined as the royal and single road
to civilisation while comparatively little importance was given to formal
education. In addition, the fact that forced labour was abolished in
Portuguese colonies much later than in the other colonial empires gave
the ideology of work a political importance in the late colonial era. When
Portugal became a subject of increased international anti-colonial criti-
cism, the colonial government defended its interests by arguing that
labouring for the Portuguese was beneficial for Angolans (Bender 1978).
The Portuguese colonial regime described hard work as an effect of
being civilised and accordingly a sign of a higher evolutionary level, which
116 L. ÅKESSON
the Africans would eventually reach thanks to the civilising work of the
Portuguese. This implies that the colonial ideology of work very well fit-
ted the dominating evolutionary paradigm (e.g. Ferguson 1997). In addi-
tion, hard work was seen as a means of becoming civilised and therefore a
moral obligation. Thus, hard work was seen as an essential trait separating
the Portuguese from Africans but also as tool of civilisation. This is typical
of what Maria Eriksson Baaz (2005: 45) describes as the contradiction
“between the discourses of otherness—the need to fix the colonized in a
perpetual otherness—on the one hand and the civilizing mission on the
other”. Homi Bhabha (1994: 86) has termed this contradiction “the
ironic compromise of mimicry” and argues that the idea was that the colo-
nised should become “almost the same, but not quite”.
Thus, there is a strong link between the images of Angolans produced
by the colonial regime and those constructed by contemporary Portuguese
migrants—as well as some Angolans—in Luanda. But how did people
explain what they portrayed as an Angolan lack of work ethic?
Cultural Racism
In a quite basic way, some of the Portuguese portrayed what they saw as a
lack of commitment to work as a problem generated by “the Angolan
culture”. For example, a female Portuguese engineer said:
According to the Angolan culture, it’s not necessary to demonstrate much

effort, punctuality and professionalism. But when they work together with
us, they acquire some of that.
A rather blunt representation of Angolans’ “cultural” lack of responsi-

bility and work ethic was provided by a male Portuguese manager working
at a media company:
It is a challenge to lead Angolans. They are capable, but you must always
follow up what they are doing. They do not understand the meaning of
work, the importance of what they are doing. They just let go, their perfor-
mance is very inconsistent. It is part of their culture that today is the only
thing that counts. They don’t care if they have food for their children
tomorrow.
Both these interviewees had been in Angola for a couple of years and
saw themselves as experts on “how to handle Angolans”. Their view of
“Angolan culture” was that it was unchanging, as long as the Angolans

were not provided with the enlightened influence of the Portuguese/
European. Thus, their understanding was linked to evolutionism as well as
close to earlier understandings of race. Race, however, was a topic that
Portuguese seldom mentioned in the interviews. Instead, they often tried
to perform as non-racist. Yet, although the very concept of race was absent
from their discourse, “culture” played the same role as a provider of static
boundaries between Portuguese and Angolans and as an ideological plat-
form for constructing a hierarchical relationship. Arguably, this move from
racism to culturalism or cultural racism is typical of contemporary postco-
lonial understandings (cf. Eriksson Baaz 2005).
A somewhat more nuanced picture was presented by Clara, a Portuguese
woman who had lived in colonial Angola as a child and then returned to
the country in 2011.
The Angolans are often absent. Their ambitions in terms of work aren’t
similar to ours. We’re much more competitive, but they aren’t interested in
that. To them work is for subsistence; it’s not a means of self-realization or
a way of becoming happy. Work means much more for us than for them. We
have to deal with that. We’re in their country.
Although her statement constructs a dichotomous difference between

the Portuguese “us” and the Angolan “them”, it seems to reflect an effort
to understand the experience of the Angolan other. Yet Clara did not
reflect upon possible explanations as to why many of her Angolan col-
leagues seemed to be uninterested in their job.
“The Angolan Reality”

In contrast to Clara, other Portuguese tried to put their Angolan col-
leagues’ situation into a wider social and economic perspective. They
would bring forth problems such as heavy rain causing flooding in the
musseques, traffic congestion forcing people to commute for up to six
hours per day, the high risk of contracting malaria and other serious ill-
nesses and, not the least, demanding family responsibilities.
On the Angolan side, many of those I interviewed argued that their
Portuguese colleagues and superiors did not understand “the Angolan
reality” and that this was a constant source of conflict and stress. One of
those who felt pressed by her Portuguese superiors was Katia, the female
118 L. ÅKESSON
assistant to the male manager cited above. In contrast to his sweeping

generalisations about Angolans never thinking about tomorrow, Katia
talked about how she carefully planned her life and about her fear of losing
her job:
Last year I lost two sisters, there were many rituals and I had to be absent
from work for two weeks. And my twins are often ill and then I have to
bring them to the clinic. The company accepts it, but I’m always fearful of
losing my job. One of my bosses said “It is only your children who always
are ill”. We work 8.00–17.30, and also on Saturdays, but I’ve asked not to
do that to be able to be with my children, so instead I’ve only 15 minutes of
lunch break.
Some Angolans were more frank than Katia in their critique of what
they saw as a Portuguese lack of understanding. One of them was Graça,
who worked at a Portuguese restaurant:
The owner always compares with the situation in Portugal, and doesn’t
understand that it’s different in Angola. When it rains here the taxi [infor-
mal collective transport] can’t enter my neighbourhood and we’re stuck.
My Portuguese boss enjoys working very much, and if we’re ill, he thinks
we’re lying. In Portugal, the sick goes to work. If I have malaria, let me stay
in bed!
Both Katia and Graça mentioned illness as a source of conflicts, whereas

others talked about how they were met with criticism when they were
absent from work because of having to solve some bureaucratic matter or
handling private business. Yet the practice that seemingly created most
opinions among both Portuguese and Angolans was attendance at obitos,1
or burial rituals. Most Angolans in Luanda are involved in vast social net-
works typically involving relatives, neighbours, members of their church
congregation and friends from various walks of life, and it is a fundamental
moral and social obligation to attend the obito of persons in these net-
works. Yet some Portuguese saw their Angolan colleagues’ attendance at
obitos as simply a way of escaping work, and a couple of the highly edu-
cated Angolan interviewees mentioned that obligations to attend obitos
sometimes clashed with demands of work efficiency and results. An
Angolan intellectual said that he had attended three obitos the previous
two weeks and that this went against what he called “logics of productiv-
ity”. However, most Angolans depicted obitos as a space for demonstrating
solidarity with the extended family as well as with neighbours and friends.
In relation to Portuguese superiors and colleagues, attendance at obitos
sometimes seemed to function as a moral boundary maker, and there was
an implicit critique of Portuguese morality embedded in Angolans’
descriptions of workplace conflicts related to obitos. This critique was
directed towards both a lack of understanding of the harsh Angolan reality
causing many premature deaths and an emphasis on work at the expense
of sociality and collective solidarity. Paula was one of the Angolans who
came to such conclusions:
We go to obitos more often because we more often die from health prob-
lems, so there are more obitos. There are many unexpected deaths. If the
relations between Portuguese and Angolans were closer, more familiar, they
would understand better. The cousin of a cousin of a cousin is my family.
And we even may go to obitos in solidarity with somebody who knew the
deceased.
Thus, Paula drew a moral line between the imagined distant Portuguese
on one hand and the vulnerable, loyal and social Angolan on the other
hand.
The Postcolonial Legacy and Beyond

As I have shown, Portuguese understandings of identities in relation to
notions of work and labour reflect colonial discourses in a quite direct way.
But what about Angolan positions? I would like to argue that when
Angolan informants describe themselves as “lacking a spirit of work” and
as avoiding hard labour, this is linked to complex workings of postcolonial
memories. On one hand, they echo the colonial ideology in the same way
as many Portuguese, which in turn underlines the fact that the also
Angolans have been influenced by colonial discourses. On the other hand,
however, Angolan positions may also reflect long-lasting and more indi-
rect social effects of the colonial ideology of labour. Arguably, one conse-
quence of the Portuguese labour regime was that it created an association
between labour and subjection and suffering. A couple of the informants
presented ideas along this line. One of them was a Portuguese female
manager who said, “They inherited the worst from the Portuguese. In
colonial times, the Portuguese made other people work and then they laid
back. For Angolans it’s natural to be outdoors, to work indoors is like
slavery”.
120 L. ÅKESSON
The informant who most eloquently defended the idea that Angolan
notions of work continue to be shaped by the colonial legacy was
Alexandro, a middle-aged Angolan intellectual with an interest in history
as well as contemporary social relations. In his view, colonialism and the
Portuguese regime of forced labour created a long-lasting negative view of
work and especially of labouring for someone else:
This has to do with the colonialism, one of the failures of colonialism was to
create in the minds of Africans the thought that work was a punishment.
Therefore, the fight for independence was seen as a fight against work.
Alexandro also underlined the importance of colonial role models:
The European did not work, he just accumulated a big belly, and his wife
wore beautiful dresses. The Africans did all the work and the European
reaped the benefits from this work. Thus, in the minds of the African work
did not enrich him but the European. So the fight for independence was a
fight to end work. The idea was to create a socialist state were everything
was free, people wouldn’t have to work like they had done before, and the
state would own everything. There is still inertia in consequence of this,
many people still think this way.
Furthermore, Alexandro made clear that this is not just an Angolan or

African problem:
This is not only an African way of thinking, this exists all over the world, to
think that one’s work is not for one’s own benefit but someone else’s. And
if it isn’t for my benefit why should I strive to work well. In Europe, this is
a pure economic question but here in Angola it is a wider question, it’s a
political and ethnographic question, and if we don’t manage to solve these
problems the country will remain confined by them.
In addition to Alexandro’s conclusions, I would like to argue that the

influence of the contemporary Angolan elite plays a pivotal role for under-
standings of work. As mentioned, the post-war oil-fuelled economic boom
in Angola in combination with the widespread use of public resources for
private gains has created a fabulously rich Luandan elite, which, as argued
by Soares de Oliveira (2015: 145), prefer to “collect their share of divi-
dends without much involvement beyond the cash side of things”. In
addition, they readily display their overnight wealth and conspicuous con-
sumption and have as role models fostered a desire for quick money
throughout the Luandan society. According to anthropologist Jon
Schubert (2016)—and his Luandan interlocutors—the repertoire of this
elite has created a “culture of immediatism” (cultura do imediatismo),
which is regenerated not only by the dominant elite but also by actors with
little access to wealth and power. To work for someone else and receive a
modest salary is not in line with the idea of quick and easy wealth. As
Schubert argues, the “idea that material betterment and social ascension
are almost within reach, and there for the taking if only one is cunning
enough and well-connected, has according to many had a corrosive effect
on class solidarity and the work ethic of Angolans” (ibid. 15). Thus, in
addition to the postcolonial legacy, the post-independence development
that has taken place in Angola plays an important role for understandings
of labour and work ethic in Luanda.
“The Ignorant Angolan and the Knowledgeable

Portuguese”
Besides the picture of Angolans as laid-back, many Portuguese migrants
painted a stereotypical image of Angolan colleagues as ignorant. Some
Portuguese seemed to see this as a more or less innate trait, fostered by a
static Angolan “culture”, which also in this instance functioned as a euphe-
mism for race. Others, however, would rather attribute what they saw as a
lack of knowledge to the national education system. Also, many Angolans
were highly critical of this system, and they told stories about absent teach-
ers, deficient curricula, no access to literature and a widespread practice of
“buying” grades and even exams. Thus, the people I met in Luanda,
regardless of whether they identified as Angolans and Portuguese, were
unanimously critical of the national educational system. There are few
available studies on the Angolan educational system, but those that do
exist corroborate a view of education—from primary schools to univer-
sity—as highly deficient (e.g. Carvalho 2012; Correia 2015; Ferreira
2005; Figueira and Inácio 2012).
Despite the inadequacies of the educational system, many young
Angolans aspire to obtain a university exam, and their families are often
prepared to go to great lengths to find the money for paying the fees.
However, in many cases, higher studies are seen as a pass to upward social
mobility rather than acquisition of knowledge and technical skills. One
male student I met exemplified this by saying that at his university (which
122 L. ÅKESSON
was a private institution) dress codes were more important than knowl-
edge and that you had to wear a suit during exams in order to be granted
a pass. In the Angolan elite, no one would consider an Angolan university
education for their children (Soares de Oliveira 2015: 153). The super-
rich send their children to expensive universities in the US, the UK or
Portugal, whereas those who are somewhat less affluent send their chil-
dren to public schools in a number of different countries. At the time
when I carried out interviews in Angola, many seemed to choose a univer-
sity in Namibia. A couple of my Portuguese informants worked together
with Angolans who had a university degree from abroad, and they under-
lined the differences in competence between these colleagues and locally
trained university graduates.
Among the Angolan informants, it was common to position the
Portuguese migrants as teachers.2 In doing that, they sometimes com-
pared the Portuguese with other migrants. As argued by a retired con-
struction worker:
The Portuguese in Angola have something that no other emigrants have,

namely the will to contribute with knowledge. The Brazilians are here only
in order to earn fast money, exactly as in Brazil, and the Chinese and the
others are not capable of teaching anything.
One result of the widespread view of the Portuguese as knowledgeable

and pedagogic was that many of the Portuguese migrants in Luanda were
hired as professors in higher education despite never having given a single
lecture before arriving in Angola. It was simply assumed that, as Portuguese,
they would be good teachers. Thus, engineers became professors of engi-
neering, and nurses became professors of nursing. In addition, many of
those who were not specifically hired as teachers assumed that an inherent
and important part of their work consisted in training their Angolan col-
leagues and that their position as white Portuguese gave them a natural
faculty to do that. Many took a pleasure in their position as instructors and
talked about being useful or supporting personal growth among their
Angolan colleagues. Some also praised themselves for introducing novel-
ties, such as new IT technology.3 Obviously, there is a postcolonial conti-
nuity embedded in the fact that both Angolans and Portuguese mostly
took it for granted that those categorised as “Portuguese” automatically
were in possession of superior knowledge and skills and that it was part of
their “mission” in Angola to share these with the Angolans they met.
From one perspective, the postcolonial positioning of Portuguese

migrants as teachers is surprising. As mentioned, formal education was not
part of colonial ideology and practice. According to Bender (1978: 151),
in 1950 less than 5% of Angolan children ages five to fourteen were study-
ing and only 3% of the adults were classified as literate. There were as few
as 37 high school graduates in the country, and most of them were white.
These figures are considerably lower than in French and British colonies.
Moreover, among the Portuguese settlers, the level of schooling was low.
Only 12% of those who migrated to Angola in 1967–73 had more than
four years of schooling (Castelo 2007: 191). One consequence of this was
that Portuguese settlers performed many tasks that African workers would
have carried out in other colonial empires. Despite this, in Angola educa-
tion is constructed as a Portuguese speciality. The most obvious historical
reason for this is the enormous significance that, in colonial times, was
given to white persons with a “higher education” (i.e. more than four
years of schooling), in combination with the dominance of Portugal as a
point of reference in all education. Portuguese has always been the lan-
guage of instruction in Angola, even in primary school, and disciplines
such as history and geography have been focused on Portuguese condi-
tions (Zau 2002). In contemporary Angola, national education does not
offer a viable alternative in terms of quality. Therefore, members of the
political and economic elite continue to send their children to the
Portuguese schools in Luanda, and the “Portuguese teacher” continues to
be an important postcolonial figure.
The image of the benevolent teacher was, in some interviews with
Angolans, unsettled by a picture of Portuguese colleagues as knowledge-
able but preferring to keep their knowledge to themselves in order to
maintain their privileged position. The idea behind this was that Portuguese
colleagues, especially those in management positions, deliberately tried to
hinder Angolans from advancing by not offering them training, and
thereby continuing to keep the good jobs for themselves. Another notion
along the same line was that Portuguese managers prevented Angolan
employees from acquiring competences in order to be able to hire family
members and Portuguese ex-colleagues. Yet another kind of critique was
that Portuguese colleagues certainly liked to teach but were incapable of
taking advice from Angolans or admit that Angolans could be more com-
petent with regard to certain issues. Angolans tended to be especially
annoyed with Portuguese who refused to listen to them when they tried
to explain the workings of the complicated and opaque Angolan
124 L. ÅKESSON
bureaucracy. This, in turn, obviously had a negative effect on the integra-

tion of the Portuguese. From an analytical postcolonial perspective, these
situations can be read as instances of the “ironic compromise of mimicry”
(Bhabha 1994: 86) in the sense that they allude to the idea that the ex-
colonised should not be allowed to become “quite the same”. Although
many Portuguese saw it as their mission to educate and train Angolans, it
was important that the latter remain different and less knowledgeable in
order not to threaten a Portuguese professional superiority.
In sum, most Portuguese migrants see themselves as better educated
than their Angolan colleagues, and many quite willingly assume a position
as a more or less informal teacher. Many Angolans also perceive their
Portuguese colleagues to be more knowledgeable and experienced than
themselves, and they attribute this to the low quality of the national edu-
cation system and to the many years of war, which have prevented them
from developing professional experiences. Thus, many Angolans acknowl-
edge that they lack knowledge and skills, but they naturally resist an image
of themselves as ignorant and underdeveloped. Miguel’s story about how
he and his colleagues deluded a Portuguese teacher is an illustration of
this:
I will tell you a story about what happened some ten years ago. At a certain
point our boss, who was Angolan, started to bring in some Portuguese,
and many of them were illegal [without work permit]. He said to them
“I’m going to bring you to Angola, to become a boss, you will meet a
bunch of lazy people there, and you will have to put them right, okay? To
us he said, “A Portuguese gentleman will come here, he’s very good, he
will help us grow, he will help us improve our work techniques.” And what
happened? The Portuguese came and asked us, “Do you know how to use
computers?”. And I told the others, “Let’s sit down and listen to him with-
out any protest”. So when he asked us if we know how to use a computer
we said “A little, but we want to learn from you”. And the next day we
arrived early and he said “Today we will start with how a computer func-
tions. You will have to be very careful”. We all pretended that we know
nothing, the first day, the second day, the third day. Then he understood
what was happening and said, “I believe you are making fun of me!” And I
answered, “Of course, you believed that you were going to meet a bunch
of monkeys hanging from the trees, while we believed that you were going
to bring us something new”. But he was OK, he went to our boss and told
him that he wanted to work somewhere else, because there was nothing he
could teach us.
The defiant attitude adopted by Miguel is uncommon in my material.

Instead, both Angolans and Portuguese commonly talked about an
Angolan “inferiority complex” in relation to knowledge and skill, and by
this they intended an inherited and internalised position of inferiority. This
concept has been discussed in the postcolonial literature, most famously
by Frantz Fanon, who indicates that an inferiority complex may be most
common among the highly educated ex-colonised (1986: 25). A central
argument in postcolonial studies is that both the ex-colonisers and the ex-
colonised have internalised important strands of the colonial discourse. In
discussing an assumed Angolan inferiority complex, some Portuguese
went as far as maintaining that there did not exist any discriminatory or
racist attitudes on their side; the problem was only the Angolans’ feelings
of inferiority. Thus, they blamed the unequal relationship on the Angolans
who supposedly in a one-sided way put themselves in a subordinate
position. A less simple reading of the Portuguese-Angolan relationship
was provided by a female Angolan working in an international non-
governmental organisation:
On the Portuguese side there is a feeling of superiority, and on our side

there is an acceptance of inferiority. But if somebody does not accept the
inferiority, what would happen? We accept the inferiority, and that gives
them permission.
Thus, she did not reject the possibility that Angolans could have inter-
nalised a sense of inferiority; she argued that it was produced and main-
tained in a dynamic relationship with Portuguese attitudes. Among these
attitudes, one specific trait—arrogance—stands out as central in the
interviews.
“The Arrogant Portuguese”

If Angolan informants’ view of the Portuguese as teachers was often
appreciative, they were generally critical of what they described in generic
terms as “Portuguese arrogance”. “Arrogance” functioned as a flexible
discursive concept that could stand for anything from open discrimination
to rigid behaviour. “Arrogance” was sometimes also used as a euphemism
for racism. Thus, “arrogance” could indicate many different kinds of atti-
tudes, but a common denominator was manifestations of superiority and
disdain. Interviews with Angolans also made it clear that there were
126 L. ÅKESSON
important differences between how “arrogance” was played out at differ-

ent workplaces. As mentioned, I interviewed some Angolans working in
Portuguese construction companies or at Portuguese restaurants, and
both construction workers and waiters talked about open abuse and
racism.
Racism, Class and Arrogance

Not only Angolans but also Portuguese pointed at construction sites as
workplaces where conflicts frequently occurred, and many Angolans
described these conflicts as caused by Portuguese racism. As one Angolan
construction worker said:
The tensions are strongest in construction. It’s because of the level of the
Portuguese who work in construction, they are the least educated. The
Portuguese who work at hotels and other places can’t show racism, they
would lose their customers. But in construction we have to put up with it.
Also, many of the highly educated Portuguese maintained that

Portuguese construction workers had racist attitudes, and thereby they
also constructed themselves as morally superior to the supposedly more
racist construction workers. The idea that racism was limited to construc-
tion workers was defended by a number of my Portuguese middle-class
informants, and their criticism can be seen as a way of creating and uphold-
ing class differences in the Portuguese community. One female Portuguese
who worked in construction furthermore argued that racist behaviour at
workplaces had to do with the “very male climate” in construction and
that the same kind of what she called “aggressiveness” was also apparent
at construction sites in Portugal.
A particular grievance presented by some Angolan construction work-
ers had to do with food and eating habits. One person maintained that the
company where he worked had set up different canteens for Portuguese
and Angolan workers, and others said that Portuguese employees did get
better treatment in the workplace canteen and were served at the table but
that the Angolans had to queue up for their lunch. A common critique was
that Portuguese staff avoided eating at the same tables as Angolan co-
workers, which the latter found very insulting. Sharing food and eating
together obviously carry a strong symbolic weight, which probably at least
partly reflects colonial times. In the Portuguese colonial empire as well as
in other colonial contexts, food was a fundamental way of expressing

asymmetrical power relations and divisions based on race and nationality,
and it was used to produce colonial hierarchies and to reinforce the pres-
tige of the colonisers (Åkesson 2016; Robins 2010; Rosales 2012).
Like construction workers, interviewees who worked as waiters also
talked about being subjects of racist speech, not only by Portuguese bosses
but also by clients. One male waiter said:
They call me offensive things like “son of a bitch”. Costumers sometimes

call us “preto [negro]”, and the bosses do the same, but then I take off my
uniform and leave. You should come here on Friday or Saturday when we
have music and see how costumers behave towards us. They shout “come
here”, they don’t say “please come here”.
When I discussed this kind of behaviour with a couple of the Portuguese

I met, they defended their co-nationals by saying that Angolans sometimes
played “the racist card” and accused Portuguese co-workers and superiors
of being racist as soon as a conflict arouse. Yet to downplay possible inci-
dents of racism or blame them on the “other Portuguese”, which in par-
ticular implied the construction workers, is in the interest of many
Portuguese migrants, as accusations of racism can put them in a vulnerable
situation. Racism is a common theme in Angolan everyday conversations
(Gorjão Henriques 2016), and accusations of racism carry a weight that
many Portuguese find difficult to handle. As many Angolans underlined,
the Portuguese were not in their own country, and they were dependent
on Angolan company owners and other representatives of the party-state.
Thus, the (partial) avoidance of demonstrating racist attitudes is a conse-
quence of new dynamics that go beyond colonial patterns. In consequence
of these dynamics, it is important for Portuguese migrants to appear as
non-racist in relation to powerful Angolans, while it is less of a danger to
be insulting towards anonymous waiters or subordinates at the workplace.
Thus, there is a strong class dimension concerning racist speech. In addi-
tion, a couple of the Portuguese informants maintained that expressions of
class-related racism also occurred among Angolans. According to these
informants, it happened that privileged Angolans shouted “negro” at poor
Angolans and that people categorised each other according to nuances in
skin colour.
At workplaces with highly educated staff, racist speech and open dis-
crimination seemed to occur less frequently, but many of the highly
128 L. ÅKESSON
educated Angolans still lamented what they perceived to be arrogant

Portuguese attitudes. One Angolan accountant described his Portuguese
superiors in the following way:
The Portuguese mostly treat me well because they are here in our country.
They have two different characters: Some are closed, cold, unsympathetic,
they separate themselves from us, aggressive, very direct which the Angolan
do not like. But there are those who are very good as well. One person who
went home in January was very participatory, not many are like him, he was
very good.
Besides voicing complaints about Portuguese being distant and

demanding, some Angolan informants maintained that Portuguese col-
leagues and superiors never showed confidence in them. On the Portuguese
side, some admitted that the Angolans they worked with saw them as
arrogant. Yet these interviewees talked about their own arrogance in terms
of being demanding and direct rather than being cold, rigid and haughty,
and they tended to describe this attitude as a consequence of having to
oversee Angolans who supposedly were not committed to their job.
Most Portuguese, however, did not describe themselves as arrogant but
rather used that concept when describing other Portuguese. This was
often the case when middle-aged Portuguese talked about “the young”
(i.e. people around 30 years of age) and sometimes also when low- and
semi-skilled people talked about the economic elite working in banking.
Thus, the accusation of arrogance is yet another example of how people in
the Portuguese community constructed a distance between themselves
and other categories of Portuguese. Interestingly enough, middle-aged
retornados who had spent their childhood in Angola were seldom described
as arrogant towards Angolans by other Portuguese, although young
Portuguese sometimes characterised them as racists. Probably, this indi-
cates that Portuguese interviewees saw arrogant attitudes as comprising an
element of distance and indifference, whereas they perceived racism in the
case of retornados as a somewhat more old-fashioned and colonial stance.
Arguably, in the understanding of some Portuguese, racist attitudes and
closeness to Angolans could very well coexist. Intimacy and racism were
not seen as two incompatible attitudes but, as in the case of the retornados,
were imagined as two sides of a particular (post)colonial stance.
An interesting twist to the discussion on arrogance is the fact that
“arrogance” is a term that people from other Portuguese-speaking African
countries often use when they talk about Angolans. When I told friends in
Cape Verde and Mozambique that I was carrying out interviews in Angola,
a frequent response was to warn me of the supposed arrogance of the
Angolans. In a column, the Angolan author José Eduardo Agualusa
(2016) describes meeting Africans from other countries and how they at a
certain moment in the conversation often turn to him, smile and give him
a pinprick: “Your problem is the arrogance”. According to Agualusa, how-
ever, it is not the ordinary Angolan, a category in which he includes him-
self, but the Angolan leaders who are arrogant. Thus, in parallel with the
Portuguese case, the arrogant Angolan is the other Angolan, a co-national
belonging to another class.
Thus, accusations of arrogance are directed not only by Angolans to
Portuguese but also by Portuguese to other Portuguese and by Angolans
(and other Africans) to Angolans. The view of the Angolan elite as arrogant
is widespread in the Portuguese community, and I once witnessed two
angry Angolan and Portuguese managers who at the top of their voices
blamed each for being arrogante. Thus, understandings of arrogance as
pivotal for causing conflicts and hurt feelings seem to be part of a common
Angolan-Portuguese repertoire. Accordingly, the interdependence and
hybridity between the two parts also encompass constructions of feelings
and personality traits.
The Colonial Legacy and the Co-production

of Identities
It may seem surprising that themes such as arrogance and lack of commit-
ment to work, which in an over-explicit way echo colonial ideas, still play
such a central role for the construction of identities at workplaces.
Nevertheless, these themes are fundamental for how Angolan and
Portuguese informants perceived of each other, and as I have shown in
this chapter, they cannot be described as simply echoes of colonial images
and ideas.
One point I have made is that the colonial legacy works in both direct
and indirect ways. Simplistic and stereotypical understandings of Angolans
as lazy draw directly on the colonial library, while Angolan understandings
of work as subjection and suffering may be read as an indirect conse-
quence of the colonial practice of forced labour. Arguably, this under-
standing of work concerns working for someone else and in particular
130 L. ÅKESSON
working under Portuguese supervision. Needless to say, this attitude to

salaried work has little to do with the fulfilment of the myriad of tasks and
responsibilities that occupy most Angolans in their everyday life. Maybe it
is possible to compare Angolans’ attitudes to work with other colonised
people. Comaroff and Comaroff (1987) argue that South African Tswana
speakers use different words for “work for myself” and “wage labour done
for whites” and that these concepts carry many distinguishing associa-
tions. In short, whereas “work for myself” is related to self-construction
and creative processes, “wage labour” is associated with self-destruction,
loss of control, dehumanisation and alienation. According to the
Comaroffs, the latter concept was inextricably bound up with processes of
colonialism.
A second and related point is that it is impossible to exactly delimit the
influence of the colonial. I have pointed to the desire for quick and easy
wealth as well as the deficient educational system as post-independence
features created in and by an Angolan party-state, but naturally the party-
state system in itself has historical roots. The inheritance from the
Portuguese of a rudimentary and deficient educational system and an inef-
ficient and corrupt bureaucracy are but examples of this. In postcolonial
studies, the metaphor “rhizomic” is sometimes used for colonial power.
This metaphor compares the colonial influence with a root system that is
spread laterally across the ground and grows from several points. In resem-
bling rhizomic roots, colonial power is manifested in a dynamic and inter-
mittent way (Ashcroft et al. 2000: 232f). Therefore, instead of looking for
a single and easy identifiable colonial root, we may establish that postcolo-
nial continuities may come in various shapes and forms and not always be
easy to identify. In addition, it is important to acknowledge that post-
independence development also is linked to economic, social, cultural and
political processes that go beyond colonial continuities.
A third and final point refers to the co-production of identities.
Although workplace relations between Angolans and Portuguese often are
fraught with conflict, the two sides recognise and are familiar with the
images they paint of each other. Their respective constructions of the
Other are related to the same handful of contrastive concepts: laid-back–
hard-working, ignorant–knowledgeable, and arrogant–humble. Obviously,
these concepts make sense to both parties. The interdependence and
mutuality in the construction of identities are obvious. The deep inequal-
ity—but also the violent intimacy—characterising colonial times is all but
bygone. The two partners are meeting again on partly new grounds, but
embodied memories from the past shape present patterns of behaviour,

which in turn create and renew feelings of superiority and of revolt. In this
tragic repetition of the past, Portuguese and Angolans recognise each
other all too well.
Notes
1. Most obitos consist of all-night mourning by family members, neighbours,
and friends, followed by a funeral service. Food and drink are usually offered,
and the obito can last for some days. Money is a key concern because of the
costs involved for food, drinks and transport for many people.
2. For an in-depth analysis of the Portuguese as a teacher, see Valente Cardoso
(forthcoming).
3. There was a gendered pattern to this: women tended to talk about being
useful, whereas men generally talked about introducing novelties.
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CHAPTER 7
Conclusions: Continuity, Rupture

and Hybridity
Abstract In conclusion, this book shows that the changing political and
economic power relation between Angola and Portugal is not simply
reproduced in everyday postcolonial encounters. On the contrary, colonial
hierarchies and stereotypes have a long-standing and profound effect even
in this context of drastic changes. Yet, in Luanda, there are also signs of
ruptures with the colonial past, which contribute to shape an ambivalent
position for the Portuguese migrants. Thus, the encounters between
Portuguese migrants and Angolan residents are characterised by a mixture
of continuities and ruptures with the colonial past. Moreover, the chapter
concludes that Portuguese-Angolan colonial and postcolonial history has
created hybrid subject positions, which are not characterised by a harmo-
nious postlusotropical mixture but by an intimacy fraught with tensions.
Keywords Structural changes • Everyday relations of power • Hybrid

subject position • Intimacy
Indeed, things have changed since Angola’s independence in 1975 and

the concomitant departure of more than 300,000 Portuguese settlers.
Portuguese economists have established that their country has become
colonised by Angolan investments, and in a famous 2011 press conference
Angola’s President Jose Eduardo dos Santos promised to help Portugal

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73052-3_7
134 L. ÅKESSON
cope with its financial crisis. Highly aware of the dependence on the
Angolan economy, Portuguese politicians have tip-toed around their
Angolan counterparts. Unemployed Portuguese have travelled to the for-
mer colony in search of jobs, and subsequently remittances have flowed
from Angola to Portugal. Yet, as we have seen in the last two chapters, the
continuous power of colonial hierarchies and ideas is apparent when
Portuguese and Angolans meet at workplaces in Luanda. There is a
remarkable continuity between the social relations of labour during the
late colonial period and Portuguese-Angolan relations at workplaces in the
Luanda of today.
Both in colonial times and in contemporary Luanda, many Portuguese
had for the first time in their lives an opportunity to manage the work of
others. In both periods of time, some of those who experienced a rapid
upward social mobility from precarious living conditions in Portugal to
positions of power in Angola reacted by treating their Angolan subordi-
nates in a denigrating way. Moreover, the fact that white Portuguese
earned many times more than the Angolans they were working with cre-
ated in both cases an insurmountable barrier between them. As argued by
a number of my Angolan interviewees, the fact that the Portuguese earned
many times more than themselves functioned as both a material and sym-
bolic barrier to social intercourse between the two groups. Moreover, in
colonial Angola as well as in contemporary Luanda, contacts between
Portuguese and Angolans were generally limited to the workplace. This
arguably enforced both the distance between the groups and feelings of
superiority on the Portuguese side and feelings of inferiority—and
revenge—on the Angolan side.
Thus, the Portuguese are still often the masters and the Angolans their
unwilling subordinates. This is also evident with regard to the exchange of
knowledge at workplaces. The Portuguese willingly act as teachers but are
generally hesitant to take advice from Angolans and to admit that Angolans
can be more competent with regard to certain issues. From a postcolonial
perspective, this can be read as an instance of the “ironic compromise of
mimicry” (Bhabha 1994), or the idea that the (ex)colonised never should
be allowed to be as competent and knowledgeable as the (ex)coloniser.
The continued inequality at workplaces demonstrates that everyday
postcolonial relations of power do not reflect simply economic and politi-
cal processes at the macro level. They are also created in social processes
and in the ongoing production of cultural meaning. This production, in
turn, is historically shaped by colonial ideas, which obviously have had a
CONCLUSIONS: CONTINUITY, RUPTURE AND HYBRIDITY 135
long-standing and profound effect. Clearly, it takes more than inverted

migration flows and shifting macro-economic conditions to do away with
colonial identities and power relations. Yet, in our globalised world, social
and cultural constructions of postcolonial continuity are inherent not only
in relations between ex-colonisers and ex-colonised, such as the ones dis-
cussed in this book. Instead, we have to acknowledge that all of us—
including Portuguese and Angolans—are influenced by powerful global
postcolonial discourses. In particular, these discourses concern differences
between Europeans and Africans. Thus, even if the economic and political
structures are altered as in the present case, the effects of the global post-
colonial order are still prevalent. The fact that Angola is part of Africa and
Portugal part of Europe positions the two countries and their inhabitants
in a hierarchical relationship to each other—although the MPLA leaders
have a distant relation to an alleged “African” heritage and Portugal is a
subaltern member of the European Union.
In addition, national post-independence development plays a role.
Despite abundant economic resources, the Angolan party-state has largely
failed in constructing a decent educational system and reliable institutions,
and this obviously has had disastrous consequences for its citizens’ possi-
bilities to compete with the Portuguese in the labour market in Luanda.
Indeed, bureaucracy, corruption and a weak tradition of education are
part of the colonial Portuguese heritage but can hardly be used as a justi-
fication for the present conditions. This is evidenced by the fact that in
other arenas, such as the oil sector and the army, the Angolan regime has
demonstrated its competence and power as an independent actor moving
far beyond the heritage from the colonial past.
Thus, with regard to everyday workplace encounters between
Portuguese and Angolans, the postcolonial continuity is conspicuous, but,
as I have shown, in other contexts there are signs of ruptures with the
colonial past. Signs of postcolonial discontinuities are particularly manifest
in relations between the Portuguese and representatives of the Angolan
party-state and its patronage system, and new relations of power are
shaped in these encounters. The legacy of colonial hierarchies is unsettled
as Portuguese business managers and other professionals are compelled to
satisfy the demands of Angolan company owners and clients. Likewise, in
everyday encounters between Portuguese migrants and bribe-seeking
police agents, it is the ex-colonised partner who holds the trumps. Laws,
practices and notions related to the Angolan immigration regime consti-
tute another domain where changes in the relationship are manifest. The
136 L. ÅKESSON
raids against whites suspected of working and residing illegally are a strong
sign of a new era. The fact that elite Portuguese also are deportable force-
fully undermined the legacy of colonial hierarchies.
The ambivalence of the Portuguese identity position is striking as their
persistent postcolonial image of themselves as “civilizers” and “more
developed” coexists with the new position of subordination and vulnera-
bility in relation to the powerful and corrupt Angolan party-state. Among
Angolans, reactions to these changes are mixed. Some Angolans pity vul-
nerable Portuguese while others triumph. However, the triumphant posi-
tion does not necessarily signal a total break with the colonial past.
Arguably, score settling can be read as efforts of subversion but also as an
evidence of the fact that historical inequalities still play an important role.
The fact that the meetings between Angolans and Portuguese expose
both continuities and ruptures with the colonial past reflects the contin-
gency of their encounters. In postcolonial encounters, power relations
are crucial and they are dependent on contingencies. “Contingencies”
should then be understood as referring both to the unexpected and
open-ended and to the expected and conditional. In the present case,
economic and political structures have changed in new ways and pro-
duced migratory movements in an unexpected direction. Yet ideas rooted
in the colonial past continue to overshadow the encounters between the
two parties in this new context. Thus, in this case, the “post” in postco-
lonial should be read as marking both a continuity and a rupture with the
colonial past.
A Hybrid Space Fraught with Tensions

In all of this, the co-production of positions of power and inequality is
striking. There is an ambivalent but strong feeling of recognition between
the two parties. For example, this is the case in business deals involving
corruptive practices, where the two parties seemingly understand each
other all too well. Angolan and Portuguese discourses demonstrate an
interdependence and a mutual construction of identities, although this
process always has been—and still is—permeated by othering, conflicts
and unequal power relations.
As mentioned in the first chapter, the long-standing ties between the
two countries have created a portugisation of Angola and an angolanisa-
tion of Portugal. In Angola, a hybrid culture has risen out of the long-term
extinction of local meanings and practices and the creation of a particular

MPLA nationalism that builds on the Portuguese language, education,
legal system and bureaucracy. The desire for things Portuguese and the
elite’s obsession with “consuming” Portugal are other signs of the portu-
gisation of Angola. In Portugal, there are signs of a deepening Angolan
impact, in particular prompted by huge Angolan investments, the prolif-
eration of transnational family ties between the two countries and the influ-
ence of Angolan popular culture. At different scales and in different periods
of time, these processes have led to the reconfiguration of the culture of
both the coloniser and the colonised, and they have created postcolonial
hybridised subject positions.
The long-term creation of this hybrid social and cultural space implies
that the Portuguese are too well known to be categorised as migrants. The
globalised stereotype of “the migrant” as a stranger crossing spatial, cul-
tural and social borders does not tie in with the image of the Portuguese
in Luanda. The ambivalent and hybrid character of the Portuguese-
Angolan relationship rules out the possibility of using the alienating con-
cept of “migrant”. In Angola, the Portuguese are not strangers. Moreover,
the Portuguese are not expected to integrate in terms of transforming
their norms and habits, which otherwise is an expectation directed toward
migrants across the globe. Rather, many Angolans express a hope that the
Portuguese shall enjoy their stay and create ties of friendship with them.
In addition, the fact that the Portuguese seldom are categorised as
migrants points to the globalised stigma associated with that category.
Conceptually, it is tied to North-South migration and classed, racialised
and postcolonised. As the Portuguese are white, often highly educated
and from Europe they cannot be “migrants”. Thus, the direction of migra-
tion flows shapes asymmetrical understandings of mobile subjects.
In order to describe the intimacy that supposedly exists between them-
selves and the Angolans, many of the Portuguese migrants talked about a
love-hate relationship. In doing that, they on one hand acknowledged the
existence of dark and violent experiences but on the other hand exalted a
“love” that Angolan informants did not talk about. Thus, Portuguese inter-
viewees explicitly referred to the ambivalence between feelings of repulsion
and attraction, which is described in postcolonial theory. Moreover, in the
Portuguese migrants’ discourse, the attraction between themselves and
Angolans was connected to notions about their own capacity to mix
and integrate. When talking about themselves as a people, Portuguese
138 L. ÅKESSON
informants often described themselves as experts on mixture and they por-

trayed this capacity as a national trait originating out of the Portuguese
colonial history.
Some lusophone postcolonial scholars have described Portugal as a
colonial empire characterised by incompetence, miscegenation and cafre-
alização. During the dictatorial Salazar regime, this historical stigma was
in the propaganda turned into something positive, a marker of openness,
mixture and non-racism. The colonial lusotropical ideology turned hybrid-
ity into a source of Portuguese pride. Among the Portuguese migrants in
Luanda, this pride was still discernible in a postlusotropicalist discourse.
Portuguese interviewees gave voice to an idealised belief in a better kind
of colonialism characterised by mixture and absence of racism. In a similar
vein, they tended to describe themselves as harbouring an innate disposi-
tion to mixture and non-racism. Accordingly, many Portuguese expressed
postlusotropical ideals, although these seemed to exist in a strange isola-
tion from the same people’s discourse on actually collaborating with
Angolans on a daily basis at workplaces. Actually, Portuguese informants
quite regularly talked about both a smooth mixture and the impossibilities
of working together with Angolans. Needless to say, images of harmoni-
ous mixture and non-racism were not presented by Angolan informants.
Yet they could also talk about similarities between themselves and the
Portuguese but then mostly in negative terms. It was clear that for them
the hybridity entailed a loss but that for the Portuguese it was connected
to a glorious history of conquests.
The lusotropical ideology celebrated the capacity of the Portuguese to
create a harmonious hybrid social formation in the colonies. As I have
shown, the existence of a hybrid transcultural social form produced out of
the colonial encounter is readily discernible in Luanda. Clearly, the identi-
ties of the ex-colonised and the ex-coloniser have been mutually consti-
tuted in a historical process of “organic hybridisation” (Werbner 1997).
However, this has not resulted in the harmonious mixture propagated in
lusotropical and postlusotropical ideology. Instead, colonial and postcolo-
nial processes have produced a distrustful intimacy building on internalised
stereotypical images. In voicing these stereotypes, Angolan residents and
Portuguese migrants speak about a disharmonious hybrid space created
out of a common history. A mixed social formation has been created, but
definitively not harmony. Rather, what characterises the postcolonial
encounters in Luanda is an intimacy fraught with tensions.
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tion in colonial and postcolonial Portugal. Etnográfica VI (I): 181–200.
———. 2004. An earth-coloured sea: “Race”, culture and the politics of identity in
the post-colonial Portuguese-speaking world. New York: Berghahn Books.
———. 2008. Portugal’s colonial complex: From colonial lusotropicalism to postcolo-
nial Lusophony. Working paper.
———. 2013. Epilogue of empire: East Timor and the Portuguese postcolonial
catharsis. Identities: Global studies in cultura en power 8 (4): 583–605.
Venâncio, José Carlos. 1996. Colonialismo, antropologi e lusofonias. Lisbon: Vega.
References
149
Visão. 2012. Angola: Cerca de 259000 chineses vivem actualmente no pais. http://
visao.sapo.pt. Accessed 25 Jan 2017.
Waldorff, Pétur. 2014. The informal city: Candonga, governmentality and corrup-
tion in post-conflict Luanda. PhD dissertation, McGill University, Montreal.
———. Under review. Renegotiated (post)colonial relations and the new Portuguese
migration to Angola.
Williams, Raymond. 1976. Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. New York:
Oxford University Press.
World Economic Forum. 2015. Why is Angola’s capital the most expensive city in the
world? www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/06. Accessed 2 Nov 2017.
Zau, Filipe. 2002. Angola: Trilhos para o desenvolvimento. Lisbon: Universidade
Aberta.
Index1
A C
Africa rising, 29n1 Cafrealization, 45
Ambivalence, 4, 37–41, 44, 46, 66, China (business agreements with), 3,
103, 136, 137 17
Angolanisation of Portugal, 15, 29n6, Citizenship, 20, 22, 72, 81, 82, 87,
136 93n2, 100
Arrogant Portuguese, The, 125–129 Civil war (Angolan), 10, 36, 85
Assimilados (the Assimilated), 6, 8, 9, Class, 19, 20, 22, 23, 27, 53, 85, 107,
40 110, 121, 126–129
Colonial
settlers, 70, 72, 73
B relations of labour, 96–99
Bender, Gerald, 8, 96–99, 115, 123 Community of Portuguese in Luanda,
Benguela, 8 15, 16, 19, 53
Birth certificates, 82 Construction workers, 12, 17, 19, 27,
Boom, 120 53, 61, 69, 101, 103, 104, 110,
Brazil (business agreements with), 3, 122, 126, 127
17 Contested power relations, 52
Bribes, see Corruption Contingency, 35, 136
Business owners (Angolan), 78, 79, Contract worker, 97, 98
86, 96, 102 Co-production of identities, 129–131
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes

1

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73052-3
152 INDEX
Corruption Forced labour, 8, 9, 96–98, 115, 120,

encounters with the police (bribe 129
payment), 85–86 Frente Nacional de Libertação de
Portuguese companies and Angola (FNLA), 10, 11, 29n2
corruption, 89–90 Freyre, Gilberto, 42, 43, 45
Coup d´état 25th April 1974
(Portuguese), 10
Creoles/Creole Elite, 8, 9, 11, 16, G
40 Global discourses on migration, 2
Cuba, 10
Cultural racism, 116–117
H
Highly educated, 19, 27, 49, 53, 62,
D 67, 74, 101, 103, 118, 125–127,
Decolonization, 50 137
Diamond business, 14 Hybridity, 4, 37–41, 43–46, 48, 66,
dos Santos, José Eduardo, 12, 13, 15, 133–138
133 disharmonious, 138
Double citizenship, 100 as form of resistance, 39
‘organic hybridisation’, 39, 138
E
Economic boom (Angolan), 2, 49, 81, I
102, 120 Identity
Economic crisis in Angola, 23, 25, 36, formations and construction of
49, 106 identities, 6, 111, 129, 130, 136
Educational system in Angola, 21, hybrid identities, 40
100, 121, 130, 135 mixed/ambiguous identities, 43
Emigration from Portugal, 3, 16, 17 Immediatism (Angolan culture of), 25,
Estatuto do Indígena, 8 40, 121
Ethnographic interviews, 25 Immigration documents, 2, 20,
Ethnographic methods, 120 78–82, 85, 91
Ethnographies of encounter, 33–35 Independence, 5, 7, 9, 16, 21, 36, 41,
Expatriates/Expats, 3, 20, 58–63, 73, 42, 50, 65, 82, 96, 120, 133
74, 105 Integration
of citizens from the African colonies
in Portugal, 3
F of the Portuguese in Angola, 58
Fear among the Portuguese, 28, 53, Internalisation of colonial discourse, 37
54, 71, 83, 92, 93, 108 Intimacy, 4, 43, 52, 53, 60, 128, 130,
Financial crisis (North Atlantic), 2, 17, 137, 138
35 Isabel dos Santos, 16
INDEX
153
L Oil-fuelled economy’/‘Oil-fuelled
Labour, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 17–19, 21, 23, economic boom, 2, 120
35, 67, 73, 74, 88, 95–111, 114, Oligarchs, see Business owners
115, 119–121, 129, 130, 134, 135 Overseas provinces, 9, 20
Laid-back Angolan, The, 114–121
Luanda, 4, 5, 7–9, 11–22, 24–27, 29,
36–41, 46–54, 58–66, 68–72, P
74n2, 77–79, 82–85, 87–89, 93, Party-state (Angolan), 4, 12, 34, 68,
96, 99, 101–104, 106–108, 111, 74, 78, 79, 81, 84, 86, 88, 89,
113–116, 118, 121–123, 134, 91, 92, 103, 107, 127, 130, 135,
135, 137, 138 136
Luso-Angolan history, 7–14 Patronage system, 12, 78, 79, 135
Lusophone postcolonial scholars, 41, Permanent residence, 82
138 Police, 13, 71, 78, 79, 81, 83–86, 91,
Lusotropicalismo (lusotropical 135
ideology), 41–49, 70, 138 Portugal dos Pequenitos (‘Portugal for
Kids’), 47
Portugisation of Angola, 16, 136, 137
M Postcolonial
Managers (Portuguese), 12, 16, 28, continuities, 4, 36, 54, 114, 122,
86–89, 99, 102–105, 115, 116, 130, 135
119, 123, 129, 135 encounters, 4, 5, 33–54, 99,
Memories of colonial past, 47 107–111, 136, 138
Mestiços and/or mulatos (mixed-race), heritage, 4, 33
45, 49, 111n1 legacy, 88, 119–121
Mimicry, 40, 41, 44, 116, 124, 134 ruptures, 4, 36, 135, 136
Miscegenation, 43–47, 138 score settling, 78, 91
Mixed Portuguese-Angolans, 23 Post-independence development, 121,
Mixture, 37–40, 48, 49, 52–54, 138 135
Movimento Popular de Libertação de Postlusotropicalism, 46–54
Angola (MPLA), 10–13, 15, 16, Power relations, 4–6, 27, 33, 34,
29n2, 29n5, 79, 87, 90, 102, 36, 37, 40, 52, 73, 84, 88,
135, 137 91–93, 96, 99, 106, 108, 127,
135, 136
N
North-South migration, 3, 73, 74, 137 R
Race, 22, 23, 28, 43–46, 58, 73, 101,
111n1, 117, 121, 127
O Racism, 36, 43, 46–48, 68, 116, 117,
OECD reports, 2, 15 125–129, 138
Oil economy, 2 Raids against Whites (Police), 136
154 INDEX
Re-colonization and/or T
neocolonialism, 67 Teacher (Portuguese), 41, 52, 81, 90,
Relations of labour, 111, 134 99, 109, 122–125, 134
Relations of Power, see Power relations Turbo-capitalism, 2, 36
Remittances, 2, 14, 18, 107, 134
Retornados (returnees), 10, 11, 20,
21, 63, 64, 66, 92, 110, 128 U
Return migration, 2, 57 Undocumented migrants, 82–85
União Nacional para a Independência
Total de Angola (UNITA),
S 10–13, 15, 16
Salary differences, 6, 105–107 United States of America, 10, 17, 109,
Salazar, António de Oliveira, 7, 9, 42, 122
46, 47, 58, 59, 73, 93n6, 138
Saudade, 17
Savimbi, Jonas, 11 V
Semi-peripheral nation, 41, 48 Vale de Almeida, Miguel, 42, 44,
Serviço de Migração e Estrangeiros – 46–48
Migration and Foreigners’ Visa, see Immigration documents
Services (SME), 18, 78–81, 87,
102
Silva, Cavaco, 15 W
Soares de Oliveira, Ricardo, 7–9, Western oil companies, see Oil
11–13, 16, 24, 28, 78, 79, 87, economy
103, 107, 120, 122 Whiteness, 28, 78, 82–85, 101, 104
Sonangol, 12, 13, 16, 25, 78, 79 Work permit, see Immigration
Sousa Santos, Boaventura de, 8, documents
41–46, 54n1 Workplace hierarchies, see Relations of
South-North migration, 3, 36, 58 labour
Soviet Union, 10 Workplace relations, see Relations of
Subaltern empire, 7 labour

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MIGRATION, DIASPORAS

More information about this series at

Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018932754

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover illustration: Détail de la Tour Eiffel © nemesis2207/Fotolia.co.uk

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Caroline Valente Cardoso, University of Gothenburg; Maria Eriksson

1 Introduction: Setting the Scene 1

2 Postcolonial Encounters in a Lusotropical World 33

4 Changing Relations of Power and the Party-State 77

5 The Power in and of Labour Relations 95

“The Ignorant Angolan and the Knowledgeable Portuguese” 121

7 Conclusions: Continuity, Rupture and Hybridity 133

Introduction: Setting the Scene

Abstract For the first time in postcolonial history, a substantial number of

Keywords Portuguese migration to Angola • South-North migration •

For the first time in African postcolonial history, citizens of a former

© The Author(s) 2018 1

book unsettles this idea by looking at the contemporary Portuguese labour

themselves in a subordinate position in relation to powerful representa-

ties between Angolans and Portuguese with regard to accumulation of

were often of a detached kind rather than characterised by friendship and

Difference is legitimized and normalized through work: both through

As I will demonstrate, in both colonial and postcolonial Angola the

employment has far-reaching consequences, as it changes the migrants’

Creoles, Assimilados and Settlers

Independence, Retornados and Civil War

Peace, Reconstruction, Economic Boom and Bust

to relate to these powerful Angolans in their roles as company owners,

Deep Entanglements: Contemporary Political

In his 2013 state-of-the-nation address, President Eduardo dos Santos

the Portuguese community. Portuguese top politicians also reacted

­ ersons send their children to the extremely expensive Escola Portuguesa

Trajectories of Portuguese Migrants in Luanda

To be Portuguese has for centuries been to leave for another country or to

Portuguese working only in construction in Angola, according to the

Portuguese and Angolan Identities

port owned by an Angolan has ambiguous political connotations as it indi-

Luanda… is the setter of its parameters. Fashion, youth culture, patterns of

The making of money is a central concern for almost everyone in the

(schemes, business ideas) is a constant preoccupation across all urban

project, we shared transcriptions of our respective interviews between us.

and therefore thought it was necessary to carefully weigh their words.

engagement in the theme of our conversations. Most Angolans were

———. 2001. Colonialism as a continuing project: The Portuguese experience.

Postcolonial Encounters in a Lusotropical

Keywords Ethnographies of encounters • Ambivalence • Hybridity •

Theoretically, I position my study within the anthropological field of

© The Author(s) 2018 33

identities among Portuguese migrants and Angolan “hosts”. Ethnographies

The problem of striking a balance between different voices illustrates

demonstrated that meanings, identities and power are created in a com-

colonial prejudice and stereotypes of migrants have been explored. In par-

and dynamic mixture of attraction and repulsion that characterises encoun-

seemingly assumed that products imported from Portugal were better

understandings of mutual transformations and interdependence, it is

not accepted as fully Portuguese. In contemporary Luanda, the ironic

Portuguese Postcolonial Studies

2002). This definition goes against the grain of Anglophone postcolonial

The fundamental idea in lusotropicalism is that Portuguese colonial

Celebrating Hybridity (or Not): Sex and Race in the Empire

1 Introduction: Setting the Scene 1

2 Postcolonial Encounters in a Lusotropical World 33

4 Changing Relations of Power and the Party-State 77

5 The Power in and of Labour Relations 95

“The Ignorant Angolan and the Knowledgeable Portuguese” 121

7 Conclusions: Continuity, Rupture and Hybridity 133

ersons send their children to the extremely expensive Escola Portuguesa

Sometimes continuities with the lusotropical ideology were nearly over-