Contesting the Past in Angolan Politics

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2015 Vol. 41, No. 1, 103–119, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2015.991189 Contesting the Past in Angolan Politics* Justin Pearce (Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge) This article considers the politics of memory and memorialisation in Angola today in the light of existing scholarship on this theme elsewhere in southern Africa. I examine young antigovernment activists’ preoccupation with history, and argue that this can be understood only with reference to the MPLA government’s own renewed concern with history since the end of the civil war in 2002, and its attempts to recast the nationalist narratives of the pre-1990 era. Since 2002, the government has sought to contain the threat posed by democratic opposition by claiming an exclusive role for the MPLA as the defender of the nation and by silencing critical discussion of events from the one-party era: most notably the mass killings of May 1977. For opposition activists, the assertion of an alternative history serves not so much to attract the support of others as to provide evidence of the government’s dishonesty, and thus to reinforce the activists’ belief in the rightness of their own cause. As has happened elsewhere in the region, the Angolan government’s insistence on asserting a particular view of history does little to gather support, and serves above all to open up a space for contestation. The politics of memory and memorialisation has become a prominent theme in the study of southern Africa over the past quarter-century, but has scarcely been considered in relation to Angola. This development in the scholarly literature tracks the creation and contestation of new national narratives in the context of the transitions of the late 1980s and early 1990s, transitions that took different forms in the various states of the region. Memory and memorialisation have proved a more fruitful ground for scholars in some countries than in others; Zimbabwe has attracted the greatest interest, but such questions have also been addressed in writings on Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa. This literature has covered areas including the construction of monuments and sites of memory, the writing of history and its inclusion in educational syllabuses, and allusions to history in the rhetoric of government and opposition political actors. My primary material here is a series of interviews conducted in 2012 with members of Angolan civil society and political activists, and media articles from the period since the end of the Angolan war in 2002. Among the interviewees were members of a network of activists associated with the protests that have taken place since early 2011. The grievances made manifest in those protests have been varied, and also concrete and immediate. Yet despite the very real issues facing the activists and Angolan society at large, the people I interviewed consistently felt the need to evoke Angolan history as they explained to me the origins of their activism and the moral purpose that it served. They spoke in particular of one episode that was for many years a taboo subject: the 1977 uprising against the Movimento Popular de Libertac ão de Angola (MPLA) government by the former party official and government *I acknowledge the generous assistance of the Open Society Institute of Southern Africa in Luanda in facilitating the research on which this article is based, and I am grateful to all those who agreed to be interviewed. The article benefited from the comments of fellow participants at the European Conference on African Studies, 2013, in Lisbon, and of two anonymous reviewers. All views expressed here are my own. q 2015 The Editorial Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies 104 Journal of Southern African Studies minister Nito Alves, and the subsequent reprisals in which the death toll, while unconfirmed, is thought to be in the thousands. They also raised another incident that has been hushed up in official accounts of history: the killing of suspected opposition supporters in Luanda in the aftermath of the 1992 election. This article traces and tries to explain the renewed preoccupation with history in Angolan political discourses over the past decade: why it is that the MPLA’s campaign rhetoric has harked back to the independence struggle and civil war against the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA), and why young activists are preoccupied with events that they are not old enough to remember. In order to address the question, I will examine how political actors in Angola have attempted to define the boundaries of popular memory and of discourse about the country’s past. The significance of the activists’ insistence on asserting claims about history can be understood only in the light of the prior politicisation of memory and of history by the regime against which they voice their protests. I will briefly review some of the salient arguments from the literature on memory politics and memorialisation over the last two decades in southern Africa, before proceeding to examine the political uses of memory and memorialisation in Angola from the early postindependence period until the present day. Memory Politics in Southern Africa The period from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s saw interrelated political changes across southern Africa: the end of apartheid in South Africa, independence in Namibia, peace accords in Angola and Mozambique and the introduction of competitive electoral systems across the region. While the introduction of multi-party electoral democracy in the early 1990s was an experience common to most of Africa, for most states in the southernmost part of the continent this change took place at a time when the experience of anti-colonial struggle was less than a generation in the past: white rule ended in 1975 in Angola and Mozambique, and in 1980 in Zimbabwe, while for South Africa and Namibia the ending of white rule was simultaneous with the transition to electoral democracy. Hence histories of anti-colonial struggle, which in much of Africa had outlived their usefulness by the 1980s, remained alive in southern Africa. Political actors in the region were able to draw upon memories of colonial and racial subjugation and of participation in liberation struggles as the raw material for the articulation of historical narratives. Scholars have seen this tactic as central to the hegemonic efforts of post-liberation governments even as their practices become more authoritarian, exclusivist and venal: Melber, for example, argues that a new political elite has ascended the commanding heights and, employing narratives and memories relating to their liberation wars, has constructed or invented a new set of traditions to establish an exclusive post-colonial legitimacy under the sole authority of one particular agency of social forces. Such a perspective rests on a historiographical turn away from accounts that endorsed the liberation movements (in Namibia, Zimbabwe and latterly South Africa) as the bearers of inclusive national aspirations, and towards a recognition that even popular support for liberation struggles ‘was at times based more on coercion and the manipulation of internal contradictions among the colonised than on genuine resistance to the colonial state’.1 1 H. Melber, ‘Introduction’, in H. Melber (ed.), Limits to Liberation in Southern Africa: The Unfinished Business of Democratic Consolidation (Cape Town, HSRC Press, 2003), pp. xiv–xv. Contesting the Past in Angolan Politics 105 Other writers emphasise political crisis as prompting the re-evaluation of history and memory. Werbner notes that ‘state collapse or unpredictable interregna’ prompt state and opposition actors alike to confront a ‘crisis of memory’. He notes that while he was writing in the late 1990s, ‘efforts [were] being made to register memory for future accountability’.2 Similarly, Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Willems point out that culture becomes important as a political strategy at moments of crisis, not least for the potential of cultural interventions by the state to reinforce or to reconstruct a hegemonic narrative about the past.3 For Werbner, while states seek legitimation in a nation-building process founded in nostalgia, counter-hegemonic movements push for a break from the past. Particularly in southern Africa, he notes a struggle for ‘a right of recountability . . . the right, especially in the face of state violence and oppression, to make a citizen’s memory known, and acknowledged in the public sphere’. Interest in memory politics varies among scholars of the various states within the southern African region, in a way that roughly corresponds to the different levels of salience that memory politics has attained in different national political discourses. Scholars of Zimbabwean politics and history have embraced this subject area with particular enthusiasm, in keeping with the very deliberate moves by the Zimbabwean government to deploy history to political ends and with the contestation of this government strategy by Zimbabwean opposition and civil society groups. Salience varies not only from country to country, but also from one historical moment to the next as states and their opponents respond to crises. Scholars of Mozambique have documented the attempts by Frelimo to reshape memories of the civil war years in support of its continued legitimacy in the post-war period. Dinerman argues that Frelimo has since the war exaggerated the negative effects of its policies towards traditional authorities in the 1970s and 1980s, so as to reduce its past failings to a single cause and to support its contention that the end of the war marked a break with the past.4 Pitcher identifies the ‘forgetting’ by the Frelimo government of its socialist past since the post-1990 turn to neoliberal economic policies, against which workers and other opposition movements evoke the party’s former socialist discourses in support of their own claims against the current order.5 Igreja observes how, in the absence of any initiative by the Mozambican state to deal with the legacy of wartime abuses, partisan versions of history become the raw material for heated exchanges between Frelimo and the Renamo opposition in the realm of formal parliamentary politics.6 Literature on the political use of memory in southern Africa has considered both the physical infrastructure devoted to sustaining certain versions of past events and the discourses about the past that governments propagate. On the side of infrastructure, sites of memory such as the Heroes’ Acres in Zimbabwe7 and Namibia8 or Freedom Park in South Africa9 have 2 R. Werbner, ‘Beyond Oblivion: Confronting Memory Crisis’, in R. Werbner (ed.), Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power (London and New York, Zed Books, 1998), p. 1. 3 S.J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and W. Willems, ‘Making Sense of Cultural Nationalism and the Politics of Commemoration under the Third Chimurenga in Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 35, 4 (December 2009), pp. 945–65. 4 A. Dinerman, Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Revisionism in Postcolonial Africa: The Case of Mozambique, 1975– 1994 (London, Routledge, 2006). 5 M.A. Pitcher, ‘Forgetting from Above and Memory from Below: Strategies of Legitimation and Struggle in Postsocialist Mozambique’, Africa, 76, 1 (February 2006), pp. 88 –112. 6 V. Igreja, ‘Memories as Weapons: The Politics of Peace and Silence in Post-Civil War Mozambique’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 34, 3 (September 2008), pp. 539– 56. 7 Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Willems, ‘Making Sense’. 8 H. Becker, ‘Commemorating Heroes in Windhoek and Eenhana: Memory, Culture and Nationalism in Namibia, 1990– 2010’, Africa, 81, 4 (November 2011), pp. 519– 43. 9 D. Jethro, ‘An African Story of Creation: Heritage Formation at Freedom Park, South Africa’ (unpublished paper, European Conference on African Studies, Uppsala, June 2011). 106 Journal of Southern African Studies become prominent.10 On the side of discourse, researchers have turned their attention to the versions of history presented in school syllabuses, the allusion to historical events in political rhetoric and the state media’s presentation both of historical events and of efforts to commemorate them. Scholarly interest in memory politics has been sustained not only by these official processes of memorialisation, but also by the ways in which they have been contested by actors outside the ruling party. In Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) opposition politicians challenged the government’s practice of including only ruling party figures at Heroes’ Acre,11 while academics and students resisted the imposition of a ‘patriotic history’ that asserted a continuity between anti-colonial struggle and the practices of the Mugabe government some 20 years after independence.12 In Namibia as well as Zimbabwe, civil society raised questions about the partisan nature of official commemoration in the press.13 Outside the privileged space of civil society and the print media, processes of memorialisation have also been challenged by people who themselves experienced conflict. In Namibia, Becker suggests, this input contributed to the planning of a new monument in the part of the country that was directly affected by the war, which commemorates not elite heroes, but ordinary citizens’ experience of war. In Zimbabwe, attempts to decentralise the process of memorialisation by creating a hierarchy of national, provincial and local-level monuments were met with further objections from the people who, in the state’s eyes, were meant to be grateful for the acknowledgement accorded to them by these new levels of memorialisation. While such examples illustrate the popular contestation of official attempts at memorialisation, the construction and mediation of popular memory through shared narratives about the past happen not only in response to official memorialisation. Van Donge observes that citizens look for ‘mental maps even if it is merely to justify a total cynicism about a political system’.14 Malkki’s work with Burundian refugees shows how the creation of shared memory is an essential part of situating oneself in relation to the world and to a moral order, and is not necessarily attached to a political agenda.15 Although the account I have given so far has separated the official from the popular processes of memory making, a substantial thread that runs through the literature on official memorialisation suggests that official and counter-hegemonic discourses of memory are closely intertwined, with the official discourses constitutive of opportunities for resistance. The grandiose projects of the kind seen in Namibia and Zimbabwe, while supposedly intended to foster national unity, do exactly the opposite, since their exclusive nature provides a site for resistance. As Werbner points out, the rituals of official memorialisation serve as an arena ‘for proving the individual’s subjection to the state, for asserting the state’s encompassment of the personal identities of citizens and for testing their identification with the nation’.16 Similarly, Kriger17 and Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Willems18 note how in Zimbabwe 10 Igreja also writes about the unusual event of an opposition party, Mozambique’s Renamo, erecting a monument to one of its own war heroes in an area where it controlled local government, and the anxiety that this provoked within the ruling Frelimo elite. V. Igreja, ‘Politics of Memory, Decentralisation and Recentralisation in Mozambique’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 39, 2 (June 2013), pp. 313–35. 11 J. Alexander, J. McGregor and T. Ranger, Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the ‘Dark Forests’ of Matabeleland (Oxford, James Currey, 2000); Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Willems, ‘Making Sense’. 12 T. Ranger, ‘Nationalist Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: The Struggle over the Past in Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 30, 2 (June 2004), pp. 214–34. 13 Becker, ‘Commemorating Heroes’. 14 J.K. van Donge, ‘The Mwanza Trial as a Search for a Usable Malawian Political Past’, African Affairs, 97, 386 (January 1998), p. 92. 15 L. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995). 16 Werbner, ‘Beyond Oblivion’, p. 72. Contesting the Past in Angolan Politics 107 the process of memorialisation, with its hierarchies and exclusivity, deepened former combatants’ feelings of political alienation. The act of commemoration is constitutive of exclusion in such a way that contestation of the elite and partisan nature of public memory becomes in itself a site for political mobilisation. With reference to Angola, Faria has recently argued that where the government evokes a ‘pseudo-public’ in order ‘to absorb criticisms and conceal repressive and corrupt practices’, ‘truth telling’ may become constitutive of a ‘counter-public’.19 The consideration of the politics of memory in Angola in the remainder of this article advances two of the broad areas of inquiry that have emerged in the literature from elsewhere in the region over the past two decades. The first of these themes concerns how memory and memorialisation become more or less salient in political discourse and how the content of official discourses of memory changes as political elites seek ways to respond to crises and changes of circumstances. The second theme examines how the assertion of a version of the past that does not match people’s experiences of the present becomes a point of cleavage rather than a means of unity. Angola: The MPLA’s Uses of History Efforts by the Angolan state to produce and broadcast a particular version of national history have been less ostentatious and less consistently sustained than in Namibia or Zimbabwe. Nevertheless, the recent re-emergence of history in the discourses both of the regime and of the opposition is not without precedent in Angola and needs to be situated in the context of the changing discourses of the MPLA government since independence in 1975. In Angola as much as in Zimbabwe, the deployment of history as a political weapon has varied over time in response to the political demands of particular moments. This section will briefly review how the MPLA has evoked the past in support of its legitimacy, from independence until the present. The sovereignty that the MPLA asserted over Angola as the last Portuguese officials departed on 11 November 1975 was contested from the beginning. During the struggle for independence, three liberation movements associated with three regionally based elites had competed for influence: the MPLA, the Frente Nacional de Libertac ão de Angola (FNLA) and UNITA. Portugal’s decision to withdraw from its overseas territories following the coup d’état of 25 April 1974 resulted in a hasty process of decolonisation, which in turn left the rival movements to battle for control of territory. The rivalry was exacerbated by the international context of the Cold War and the security concerns of apartheid South Africa, which gave military assistance to UNITA. Cuban military support for the MPLA ensured the defeat of the FNLA soon after independence and the expulsion of UNITA from urban areas, but UNITA continued to wage a guerrilla war over a large part of Angola’s territory.20 Within the embattled enclaves of territory that the state controlled, the MPLA, in the model of the Leninist vanguard party, embarked upon a process of partisan nation-building in Footnote 17 continued 17 N.J. Kriger, ‘The Politics of Creating National Heroes: The Search for Political Legitimacy and National Identity’, in N. Bhebe and T. Ranger (eds), Soldiers in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War (London, James Currey, 1995), pp. 139–62. 18 Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Willems, ‘Making Sense’. 19 P.C.J. Faria, ‘The Dawning of Angola’s Citizenship Revolution: A Quest for Inclusionary Politics’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 39, 2 (June 2013), p. 295. 20 D. Wheeler and R. Pélissier, Angola (London, Pall Mall Press, 1971); J. Marcum, The Angolan Revolution: Volume II (1962– 1976) (Cambridge MA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1978); C. Messiant, 1961: L’Angola Coloniale, Histoire et Société. Les Premises du Mouvement Nationaliste (Basel, Karthala, 2006). 108 Journal of Southern African Studies an effort to secure hegemony. School syllabuses, the media and the political education carried out by the MPLA presented the party as the embodiment of the Angolan nation. This was achieved through a history in which the MPLA was Angola’s sole liberator from colonial rule, while UNITA was a reactionary, counter-revolutionary and neo-colonial force. Messiant has shown how the falsification of the MPLA’s date of foundation, so that it appeared to predate the FNLA, fed a logic that validated the MPLA as the first anti-colonial movement and dismissed its rivals as counter-revolutionary. Similarly, the party retrospectively assumed responsibility for a 1961 prison break, an early act of anti-colonial violence that was not actually the work of any organisation.21 Party discourses suggested continuity between the anti-colonial struggle and the post-independence war. They emphasised South African and US support for UNITA, as evidence of UNITA’s supposedly non-Angolan nature and racist or neo-imperialist character. The MPLA used this history, first, to disallow the legitimacy of UNITA, or indeed any movement other than the MPLA. Moreover, the narratives promoted by the MPLA required the presence of UNITA and its foreign backers precisely in order to bolster the MPLA’s legitimacy. These narratives made the MPLA more than simply the historic liberator of the nation from Portuguese colonialism. The party continued to defend the integrity of the nation against a threat of destruction by malign foreign forces and their proxy, UNITA.22 The first measure aimed at ending the Angolan conflict was the 1991 Bicesse Accord, which envisaged electoral competition between the MPLA and UNITA in a multi-party system. The agreement was the product of the international détente at the end of the Cold War, and the MPLA and UNITA accepted it only with some reluctance.23 Since 1975 the MPLA and UNITA had each defined its legitimacy in opposition to the other, and the national question that had been concomitant with the civil war in the first place remained unresolved.24 As planned processes of disarmament, armed forces integration and voter registration lagged behind schedule, the government made no attempt to articulate new national narratives in terms of the political pluralism that Bicesse envisaged but never achieved. In the months that followed, any possibility that there might have been of addressing the question was ruled out by the return to war early in 1993 and the suspension of the transition plan laid out in the Bicesse agreement. During the post-1992 phase of the conflict, the government put less emphasis on the postindependence narratives that expressed the MPLA’s legitimacy in terms of its historic role as national liberator. Instead, government discourse of the 1990s acknowledged the constitutional reality of multi-party democracy and also reflected the changed position of both UNITA and the MPLA in relation to the international community. The widespread international acceptance of the MPLA’s victory in the 1992 election and the ending of foreign military support to UNITA meant that the MPLA had little to gain from trying to portray UNITA as the puppet of foreign interests, as it had done in the 1980s. Instead, the new discourse emphasised the MPLA’s legitimacy as the winner of the elections and blamed UNITA for rejecting the election results and unilaterally returning to war. A deal between the government and a group of UNITA politicians who distanced themselves from the 21 C. Messiant, ‘Chez Nous, Même le Passé Est Imprévisible’, in C. Messiant, L’Angola Postcolonial: 2. Sociologie Politique d’une Oléocratie (Paris, Karthala 2008), pp. 153– 202; originally published in Lusotopie, V (1998), pp. 157 –97. 22 I describe the process of politicisation in greater detail in J. Pearce, ‘Control, Politics and Identity in the Angolan Civil War’, African Affairs, 111, 444 (July 2012), pp. 442 –65. 23 For a concise analysis of Bicesse and its aftermath, see C. Messiant, ‘Why Did Bicesse and Lusaka Fail? A Critical Analysis’ (Conciliation Resources, 2004), available at http://www.c-r.org/accord-article/why-didbicesse-and-lusaka-fail-critical-analysis, retrieved 15 March 2014. 24 See C. Messiant, ‘Angola, les Voies de l’Ethnisation et de la Décomposition: I. De la Guerre à la Paix’, Lusotopie, I, 1–2 (1994), pp. 155–212. Contesting the Past in Angolan Politics 109 movement’s founder and leader, Jonas Savimbi, led to the establishment of a group known as UNITA Renovada (UNITA Renewed). The existence of this group allowed the government to appear magnanimous by extending a hand to what it insisted was the real UNITA, while branding Savimbi as a bandit with no political motivation. In short, between 1993 and the end of the war in 2002 the MPLA’s emphasis shifted away from its claims to be the historic liberator of the nation and towards its role as the defender of a democratic dispensation against wanton banditry in the present. Revisiting Nationalist History Narratives of national liberation nevertheless emerged once again in government discourse following Savimbi’s death and the end of hostilities between UNITA and the government in 2002. The legacy of the period immediately after the cessation of conflict remains central to understanding how and why history is significant in official narratives today. I suggest here that since the end of the war the regime has reclaimed elements of the nationalist history that was central to its legitimacy in the pre-1990 period. It then deployed them alongside its preferred interpretations of more recent events in such a way as to create a politically functional ambiguity between the MPLA’s role as a competitor in a multi-party system and its role as a state-like embodiment of the nation that sits above the party system. This needs to be understood in the light of a change in the nature of the regime and in the MPLA’s relationship to it. In the years after independence, government policy and executive decisions were debated within the structures of the MPLA. Since 1990, power has become concentrated in a circle surrounding the president, and the MPLA’s main function has been to create legitimacy for the regime. The MPLA may be instrumental in propagating certain narratives that support the incumbent government, but the content of these comes not from within the party, as would have been the case in the 1980s, but top-down from the presidency.25 To understand the regime’s ideological strategy from 2002 onwards, it is necessary first to consider the balance of political and military power at the time when the war ended. From 1998 onwards, the government had resolved to defeat UNITA by force of arms. International sanctions against UNITA’s diamond-mining activities and against UNITA officials abroad began to undermine the organisation’s sources of finance. Inside Angola, the Forc as Armadas Angolanas (FAA – Angolan Armed Forces) pursued a counter-insurgency strategy that made it all but impossible for UNITA soldiers to obtain food from farmers in the affected areas. After Savimbi was shot dead on 22 February 2002, the government ordered officers of the FAA to seek talks with the surviving UNITA military leadership. UNITA politicians were given no place at the table and were not allowed contact with the military officers in Luena. In the absence of Savimbi, who had directed UNITA in an authoritarian manner since its founding in 1966, the surviving generals agreed to what was a surrender in all but name. The talks resulted in the cessation of hostilities and a technical plan for the quartering, registration and disarmament of UNITA soldiers. The government offered no new political concessions to UNITA. The state media and government and party representatives offered an interpretation of events during those early months of 2002 that contributed to the way that the end of the war continues to be remembered in government discourse. During the signing ceremony in Luanda on 4 April 2002, the FAA Commander-in-Chief, Armando da Cruz Neto, referred to President José Eduardo dos Santos as ‘the architect of peace’, reviving an epithet that had first 25 See N. Vidal, ‘The Angolan Regime and the Move to Multiparty Politics’, in P. Chabal and N. Vidal (eds), Angola: The Weight of History (London, Hurst, 2007), pp. 124– 74. 110 Journal of Southern African Studies been heard around the time of the initial peace process in the early 1990s. After the 2002 ceremony, the phrase was adopted and repeated by the state media and the MPLA. The framing of the settlement as a technical plan for the demobilisation of UNITA’s army and the reintegration of former UNITA soldiers into society excluded any political role for UNITA in the making of peace. The management of the process became a function of the Angolan state, a state that in the public mind was inseparable from the MPLA. In this way, the peace became the MPLA’s peace, and UNITA was relegated to the role of the problem that had needed to be solved. From this partisan framing of the peace process emerged a new discourse on national identity. This new national identity was based in a common project of rebuilding Angola in the aftermath of war and sharing in the benefits of peace.26 The manner in which this discourse defined roles for the MPLA and UNITA in relation to the war and the subsequent peace, however, limited the national inclusiveness that was implied by this common project of peace in such a way that identifying with peace and reconstruction meant aligning oneself with the MPLA.27 As the 2008 elections approached, MPLA politicians and journalists in the state media called on the ideas of nationalist history that had been so important to the party’s rhetoric in the 1980s and articulated them with the partisan narratives about peace and reconstruction that had emerged at the end of the war. The central plank of the MPLA election campaign was a programme of highly visible infrastructure projects. In the months before the 2008 election, dos Santos made an unprecedented series of visits to the provinces, inaugurating new schools, hospitals, electricity schemes and leisure facilities. The events at which he unveiled these projects took on the character of MPLA rallies, with party banners prominently displayed. No less important than the physical fact of the new infrastructure was the discourse that accompanied it: these public works were not simply the developmental work of the state, but a project of national reconstruction on partisan terms. The state, conceptually indistinct from the MPLA, was undoing the damage done by UNITA during the war. The discourse on peace and reconstruction propagated by government media and by MPLA spokespeople also assigned a personal role to dos Santos, through continued references to the president as ‘the architect of peace’, his role in inaugurating new infrastructure, and his prominent position in government media associated with reconstruction. This branding of the MPLA as the party of peace and reconstruction was complemented by occasional statements from MPLA officials and comment in the state media that accused UNITA of hoarding weapons and planning a return to war. Aside from the electoral campaigns, the commemoration in 2008 of the 20th anniversary of the battle of Cuito Cuanavale provided an opportunity to promote memories of the MPLA as the defender of the Angolan nation against foreign aggression and as the leader in a wider struggle against imperialism and apartheid. This has been reinforced by the revival of links between the MPLA and South Africa’s ANC during Jacob Zuma’s presidency, and by ongoing party-to-party relationships between the MPLA and other former liberation movements: Mozambique’s Frente de Libertac ão de Moc ambique (Frelimo), Nambia’s South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) and Zimbabwe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) (ZANU[PF]). 26 C. Messiant, in ‘The Mutation of Hegemonic Domination’, in Chabal and Vidal, Angola, p. 120, identifies in Angola a ‘nationalist discourse that is primarily geared to reject outside interference with the current political “transition”. The emphasis on unity and reconciliation . . . is . . . meant to call all groups to rally behind the banner of the MPLA, still today conceived as synonymous with the Angolan nation’. 27 J. Schubert, in ‘“Democratisation” and the Consolidation of Political Authority in Post-War Angola’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 36, 3 (September 2010), pp. 657–72, observes how progress towards formal democracy in Angola since 2002 has been accompanied by what he calls the ‘party-isation’ of the state and of civil society, which has served to tighten government control over many aspects of life. Contesting the Past in Angolan Politics 111 The revival of a nationalist history centred on the unique role of the MPLA gained further substance from the First International Colloquium on the History of the MPLA, held in Luanda in December 2011. Significantly, the colloquium, as the first systematic attempt to reexamine Angolan history after the end of the civil war, was left to the MPLA rather than the government to organise and set the agenda. The Cuban Communist Party central committee member Jorge Risquet Vadés spoke about ‘the contribution of the Cuban government in winning the independence of Angola and in preserving the sovereignty of the Angolan state’.28 Risquet’s presentation, according to the Angolan state news agency, highlighted Cuba’s role in defending the (MPLA) state during ‘the Apartheid regime, during which South African troops tried to invade Angola, in collaboration with the United States and UNITA’. Cuba had undertaken to ‘defy apartheid, taking into account the threat that it posed to Angola and Namibia, obliging it to withdraw from both countries, thus advancing the victory of the South African people and the ANC over the fascist regime’. An address by Victor Kajibanga, a lecturer at Agostinho Neto University, argued that UNITA’s transition to a political party after the end of the war became possible ‘only with the help and complicity of the ruling party (MPLA) which, endowed with a political platform and an ecumenical culture, allowed for the conditions to be created for its (UNITA’s) rebirth’.29 The conference served in this way to reaffirm the MPLA government’s historic role as the nation’s liberator and defender and to cast UNITA in the role of aggressor and destroyer, whose political redemption was possible thanks only to the magnanimity of dos Santos and the MPLA. Monuments and Silences Angola has no ‘Heroes’ Acre’ along the lines of those in Namibia or Zimbabwe. This article, therefore, emphasises the discursive aspects of memorialisation rather than infrastructure. It is nevertheless worth noting the physical monuments that do exist in Luanda, if only to observe the ways in which their creation and their use reinforce the messages of government and opposition discourses. The most noticeable of the memorials is in the mausoleum that was built to honour Angola’s founding president, Agostinho Neto, who died in 1979. The monument, in form reminiscent of a space rocket, dominates the Luanda skyline. Throughout the 1990s it stood unfinished and abandoned. Only after the end of the civil war was it completed and rebranded as a ‘cultural centre’, and the shanty dwellers in the surrounding site evicted to make way for a formal park. The other main memorial site in Luanda is known both as Largo Primeiro de Maio (First of May Square) and as Largo de Independência (Independence Square), at an important road junction on the edge of the city centre. Here Neto proclaimed Angolan independence in November 1975. During the 1980s the site was marked by a monument consisting of two armoured military vehicles, a Soviet vehicle on top of a South African vehicle in the manner of one animal attacking and subduing another: a representation of the MPLA’s victory over its enemies. The armoured vehicles were removed and the square was completely redesigned around the turn of the century and reopened shortly before the end of the war in 2002. Today, a statue of Neto stands atop a column, with mosaics around the base bearing the words of Neto’s poems and allegorical illustrations representing independence and peace. 28 Angop, 7 December 2011, ‘Destacada trajectória dos cubanos na Luta de Libertac ão de Angola’, available at http://www.portalangop.co.ao/angola/pt_pt/noticias/politica/2011/11/49/Destacada-trajectoria-dos-cubanosLuta-Libertacao-Angola,b2e09af6-030d-4506-a5c2-4eb5f15e4bdd.html, retrieved 13 April 2014. 29 Angop, 7 December 2011, ‘Cessar-fogo concede ao paı́s a reconciliac ão através da amnistia geral’, available at http://www.portalangop.co.ao/angola/pt_pt/noticias/politica/2011/11/49/Cessar-fogo-concede-paisreconciliacao-atraves-amnistia-geral,18a4ac0b-9dc8-4a69-8d44-ea2de84a98e7.html, retrieved 13 April 2014. 112 Journal of Southern African Studies The renovated square became the setting for a number of events related to the end of the civil war, which fitted into the efforts by the MPLA and the government, as already described, to create a new consensus based around a common project of rebuilding the country after the end of the war. These included a scheme called o reencontro da grande famı́lia angolana (the reunion of the big Angolan family), in which people who had been separated from family members during the course of the war could come to the square in the hope that their long-lost relatives would also be there. The reunions received prominent coverage in a television programme called Nac ão Coragem (Courage, Nation). This programme, produced by a Brazilian company, had been initiated during the last years of the conflict to drum up public support for the government’s war effort against UNITA. After the end of the war, Nac ão Coragem combined the themes of peace, national unity and reconstruction with the government’s (and implicitly the MPLA’s) victory over UNITA. The transformation of the Largo Primeiro de Maio and its use by the ‘reencontro’ project marked the shift in the government discourse from the 1980s to the 2000s: from the crude militaristic message of the two armoured vehicles to the images of peace and liberty beneath the figure of Neto, a party leader presented as an icon of national unity. Both during the war and since, the government and party’s strategy has been as much about silencing inconvenient versions of history as about promoting its preferred ones. For a quarter of a century, the biggest blank space in Angola’s history concerned the events surrounding 27 May 1977. The nature and the sequence of those events remain contentious, though after years of suppression they have, since the end of the war, become the subject of an increasingly audible public discussion. A minimal consensus exists that there was an act of resistance or rebellion – some have called it an attempted coup – led by an MPLA official called Nito Alves. To Alves’s supporters, he was advancing the cause of the poor, black Angolan majority against a well-to-do creole and mixed-race ruling elite. To his opponents, he was a counter-revolutionary. Following the events of 27 May, the state killed unknown numbers of people who had been involved or were suspected of being involved in the uprising. From then until the early 21st century, the reprisals remained a taboo topic. The official media immediately denounced the uprising itself as the work of counterrevolutionaries and factionalists, but in the years that followed, the incident disappeared from official accounts completely, and was discussed only in private and with circumspection.30 A more recent violent episode that has been excluded from government discourse involves the killing of civilians in Luanda in late October 1992, amid tensions between the MPLA and UNITA over election results.31 These civilian deaths serve to complicate the government’s preferred narrative that the return to war in 1993 resulted from unprovoked aggression by UNITA. UNITA, in contrast, has always maintained that the resumption of conflict began with the October killings in Luanda. 30 L. Pawson, in In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre (London, IB Tauris, 2014), describes how even Angolans who had lost relatives in the violence of 1977 appeared to collude in the silence. See also D. Mateus and A. Mateus, Purga em Angola: Nito Alves, Sita Valles, Zé Van Dunem, o 27 de Maio de 1977 (Lisbon, Edic ões Asa, 2007); Deutsche Welle, ‘27 de maio de 1977 – o tabu da história de Angola’, 16 May 2013, available at http://www.dw.de/27-de-maio-de-1977-o-tabu-da-hist%C3%B3ria-de-angola/a-15925292, retrieved 21 May 2013. 31 D. Birmingham, ‘Angola’, in P. Chabal (ed.), A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa (London, Hurst, 2002), p. 173; C. Messiant, ‘Entre Guerre et Paix’, in C. Messiant, L’Angola Postcolonial: 1. Guerre et Paix Sans Démocratisation (Paris, Karthala, 2008), pp. 160–1; K. Maier, Angola: Promises and Lies (London, Serif, 2006), pp. 95 –119. Contesting the Past in Angolan Politics 113 The Demonstrations This overview of the recurring themes and lacunae in Angolan government discourse since the end of the war serves to frame the counter-hegemonic discourse that has been articulated in the protests of the past three years, and the understandings voiced by civil society more broadly. The remainder of this article will consider opposition activists’ preoccupations with history, and try to understand these in relation to how the government has deployed history politically in a changing manner over the years since independence. Before I deal with the emergence of these anti-government discourses, a brief history of the protests is necessary. The emergence of regular street protests in Luanda from early 2011 is remarkable chiefly for the lack of precedent. Prior to 1990, the MPLA, under the Leninist-inspired single-party system, had a monopoly on political and civic activity in the government-controlled part of Angola. After the Bicesse peace accord of 1991, the political liberalisation that supposedly accompanied the adoption of a multi-party political system in preparation for the 1992 elections created a space for independent association. In practice, the newly repressive climate that accompanied the return to war in 1993 prevented this from becoming a reality. Those NGOs that addressed issues of human rights were elite pressure groups rather than instruments of popular mobilisation. Most demonstrations seen on the streets of Luanda were the initiative of the Movimento Nacional Espontâneo (National Spontaneous Movement), a group under the control of the presidency, whose task was to create the spectacle of public demonstrations in favour of dos Santos. Occasionally citizens’ groups working in particular areas of concern, such as housing rights, would apply for permission to demonstrate in public, but this was seldom granted. This pattern changed rapidly early in 2011. The moment that most clearly marked the break from the past was a rap concert by an artist called Luaty Beirão, who performs under the stage names Ikonoklasta and Brigadeiro Mata Frakusz. During the concert, Beirão called on dos Santos to step down, calling for a demonstration a few days later under the slogan ‘32 é muito’ (32 [years in power] is too much). This demonstration, on 7 March 2011, attracted only a few dozen people, and, true to precedent, it was quickly broken up by the police. The next demonstration, in May, highlighted poverty and inequality and was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the 1977 uprising. Further demonstrations, in September 2011, marked the 32nd anniversary of dos Santos’s accession to power. The detention of demonstrators on that occasion prompted further protests, until the detainees were released on a court order. As demonstrations have become established as part of the repertoire of political action in Angola, the number of people attending them has generally increased, and official reaction has varied. Organisers have made a practice of requesting permission from the provincial authorities before holding a march, but police or plain-clothes men have regularly stood in the way of marchers, beaten them on the spot or arrested them. During 2012, the demonstrations focused on the elections that took place at the end of August. Early in the year, controversy surrounded the appointment of an MPLA supporter to chair the electoral commission, an appointment that opposition parties challenged in court and eventually overturned. As the election approached, further concerns arose over the authorities’ failure to issue accreditation to poll observers. During and after the vote, the group of activists that had come into being in March 2011 co-operated with opposition parties in exposing and protesting against what they saw as the manipulation of the electoral process by the government on behalf of the MPLA and dos Santos. No formal organisation has emerged from the demonstrations. Members of the unstructured network that has led the protests have come to refer to themselves as Juventude Revolucionária (Revolutionary Youth), a term that reverses the appropriation of the words ‘revolution’ and ‘revolutionary’ by the MPLA for much of its history. Who, then, are the 114 Journal of Southern African Studies revús, to use the abbreviated version of the term? People who had been present at the early demonstrations said that they had come into contact with each other through their involvement in music. Others had heard about the demonstrations through social media or via word of mouth, and had come along to participate and in that way got to know others. The core group of activists is almost entirely male, aged mostly from late teens to early 30s, and spans a range of social classes. They include the sons of both MPLA and UNITA supporters and of families who admired Nito Alves, as well as others whose families never had any particular interest in politics. Ambiguity surrounds their status as a civic or a political grouping. The first protest was rallied around the call for dos Santos to step down. The conviction that dos Santos has been too long in power continues to unite the group: clearly a political demand. Yet many of the activists insist that their role is a civic one, in that their principal call is for citizens to be able to claim their rights: to decent living standards, to freedom from poverty and to free expression. Some see the absence of formal organisation or hierarchies as a positive trait, since the lack of leadership precludes any attempt by the government to isolate or co-opt key figures. In addition to dos Santos’s long tenure, the grievances that they most commonly mention when explaining their reasons for protesting include corruption, poverty, lack of housing and lack of decent education and health services. Such accounts of grievance and inadequacy are the raw material of political or civic activism anywhere. More remarkable, however, was how frequently the activists I interviewed articulated their own understandings of Angolan history in order to make sense of where they stood in relation to political power and to the possibility of change. Almost all the activists had been born after 1977, and the youngest after 1992, so they were not recalling experiences from their own memory. Of the events from the past that they invoked, the most frequent references were to the 1977 uprising and the reprisals that followed it. Another universal feature of the interviews was their belief that their political perspective was a function of the generation to which they had been born. They described the attitude of their parents’ and older generations as one of fear: a fear of taking political action as a result of the experiences they had lived through. ‘Those who lived through the trauma of 27 May are the ones who are frightened’, one activist said. Another added, ‘My own mother says “watch out or the MPLA will kill you” – I can’t live in this dictatorship’, and then proceeded to recite the names of Nito Alves and others killed in 1977, names that his mother would not have dared to speak publicly. Although they believed that their own generation was generally less fearful than that of their parents, the activists recognised that the ‘massacre of 1992, after the contestation of the election results’ had prompted a degree of fear among some younger people, too.32 Yet the activists’ use of history went further than simply explaining why Angolans, and the older generation in particular, feared challenging the status quo. The understanding of history that they articulated was intertwined with their understanding of the present: the poor living conditions, the lack of services, the corruption and dos Santos’s refusal to leave office. In the words of one activist: When dos Santos killed Savimbi, he destroyed everything. The electricity often goes off. For example, on 28 August 2012, the president reached the age of 70. There was no water in Cazenga. I spent two days without having a bath. But water from here goes to Namibia. Why not Angola? I am Angolan, why do I not have water? 32 Remarks quoted in this and the following paragraphs are from interviews conducted with a group of activists aged between 16 and 33 in Luanda in August 2012. Contesting the Past in Angolan Politics 115 This account of the past is dubious: it is not true that public services in Angola became worse after the death of Savimbi. It is, however, significant, in that it shows the need to answer the government’s narrative about its post-war role with a contrary narrative that puts dos Santos in the role not of the reconstructor but of the destroyer. The government’s version of the period within this young man’s memory (a narrative of post-war reconstruction) is measured against his own experience. In making the comparison, he finds the government version to be false. Hence, the government’s use of history in the end undermines its own credibility. Activists’ accounts took ideas of war and peace from the government’s discourse and used them for their own purposes. One of them declared, ‘we have been living with war since 1977’; in other words, they interpreted the repression of 1977 as an act of war against the people. Such a characterisation stands as a direct challenge to the government’s claims to the ownership of the peace that has prevailed in Angola since 2002. This attitude is reinforced by his comment that ‘in the last ten years we have seen that it is not UNITA who made Angolans suffer’. When asked why the group seemed so concerned with history alongside more immediate issues, other activists replied that ‘the government is trying to erase history on all sides’ and that ‘the government is frightened of the past, frightened of telling the youth about Angola’s true past’. Thus awareness of the government’s strategic use of history spurred the activists to assert their own version. The government’s response to the demonstrations that began in March 2011 was again framed within the discourse of peace and disorder that had been deployed against UNITA since before the 2008 elections. On several occasions, anti-government demonstrators were attacked by plain-clothes men armed with batons as police stood by.33 After a March 2012 demonstration, a police spokesman spoke of ‘two groups of demonstrators’, some of whom ‘supported the democratically elected institutions of state and others challenged the authorities’. Later, an anonymous man claiming to represent a grouping called ‘Cidadãos pela Paz’ (Citizens for Peace) was interviewed via telephone on television news, purporting to be linked to the counter-demonstrations. He received a sympathetic hearing from the news presenter as he promised that his group would take action again in response to further antigovernment demonstrations.34 Around the time of the 27 May demonstration in 2013, banners supposedly from a group called ‘Jovens Solidários Unidos’ (Youth United in Solidarity) were displayed at schools in Luanda, declaring that ‘Whoever criticises Zé Dú [the affectionate abbreviation of José Eduardo] is against peace in Angola. José Eduardo dos Santos – the guarantor of peace in Angola’. In December, a senior police official declared that a protest the previous month, against the killing by security forces of two activists, should be interpreted as no less than an attempted coup d’état.35 What I have suggested so far is the existence of two mutually constitutive sets of narratives about history that serve to justify the positions of, respectively, the government and the young activists. More difficult is to discern to what extent these narratives echo and shape the political consciousness of people beyond the MPLA’s ideologues and beyond the small circle of youth activists. Among people who had no strong political affiliation, interviews indeed suggested a broad generational difference in attitudes that was directly linked to the 33 Human Rights Watch, 7 December 2011, ‘Angola: End Violence Against Peaceful Protests’, available at http:// www.hrw.org/news/2011/12/07/angola-end-violence-against-peaceful-protests, retrieved 16 July 2014. 34 Club K, 12 March 2012, ‘Polı́cia diz que vai investigar as agressões contra manifestantes’, available at http:// www.club-k.net/index.php?option¼ com_content&view ¼ article&id ¼ 10336%3Apolicia-diz-que-vaiinvestigar-as-agressoes-de-luanda&catid ¼ 10%3Amanifestacoes&Itemid ¼ 142, retrieved 12 December 2013; L. Redvers, ‘Angola: Fighting to Keep the Peace?’ (Think Africa Press, 16 March 2012), available at http:// thinkafricapress.com/angola/fighting-keep-peace, retrieved 16 July 2014. 35 R. Marques de Morais, ‘A tentativa de golpe de estado’ (Maka Angola, 24 December 2013), available at http:// makaangola.org/maka-antigo/2013/12/24/tentativa-de-golpe-de-estado/, retrieved 27 December 2013. 116 Journal of Southern African Studies different experience of the war by younger and older people. In a group discussion with elderly women who had lived in Luanda since fleeing the conflict in the Central Highlands in the early 1990s, their accounts displayed the trope, also heard in government discourse, that connected the possibility of political change to the possibility of violence. One woman declared, ‘in our hearts we want change, but we are worried that if the government changes there could be war’. Comparing their views with the attitudes of younger people, another woman explained, ‘we older people have more gratitude (reconhecemento) because we lived through the war’. Their view of Angola’s future under the incumbent regime was modestly optimistic: ‘Things will go on changing because a lot has already changed. No more fires, now we’re cooking on gas. In the villages people will start using gas too’.36 Yet this did not have much to do with history, nor indeed with the agency of the MPLA or any other party. Things were getting better because the war had finished, but this improvement was fragile and liable to be disrupted. Younger women – relatives and neighbours of the older women – were not involved in any kind of political activity. Nevertheless their perspective differed markedly from that of the older generation. One complained, ‘the government makes promises they don’t keep’. Another young woman insisted, ‘what is needed is to change people’s mentality, to educate people. There has been economic growth since the war, but no development’.37 These interviews cannot be read as conclusive evidence that the government’s use of history had an impact on how its supporters, as distinct from its activists and cadres, made sense of their situation. The interviews do, however, show that the fear of a return to war exists independently of government discourse. The state media might articulate such fear into narratives about history and legitimacy, but, for the people who lived through the war, fear informs political action regardless of any attempt by the government to impose its own meanings. Conclusion Although Angola has not witnessed a concerted effort for memorialisation on the scale seen in Namibia and Zimbabwe, the discourse claiming an exclusive national history with the ruling party at its core has in recent years been projected as stridently by the MPLA in Angola as by other former liberation movements throughout southern Africa. This discourse has sought to claim what Melber called ‘an exclusive post-colonial legitimacy’ for a regime that has continually been accused of corruption and a lack of popular accountability, and which required new hegemonic strategies as soon as Savimbi’s death jeopardised the credibility of its claims to be defending the Angolan people against a real and present danger. Since 2002, state media and the speeches of MPLA politicians have articulated narratives about anticolonial struggle, the 2002 peace and post-war reconstruction into a coherent discourse about the exclusive legitimacy of the party and, by association with the dos Santos regime, as the embodiment of national identity and the defender of national interest. The ‘revolutionary’ legitimacy of the liberation movement years, which equated opposition to the party with opposition to the state and thus legitimated the use of violence against political opposition, underlies the threatened and actual violence by police and government supporters against protesters whom government discourse construes as a threat to the peace. At the same time, just as Werbner and other writers have suggested with reference to other countries, the 36 Group discussion with women aged 50 –70, Luanda, August 2012. 37 Group discussion with women aged 18 –26, Luanda, August 2012. Contesting the Past in Angolan Politics 117 mismatch between the vision of history offered by the MPLA and people’s own experience has created the opportunity for the government’s opponents to challenge its hegemony. In conclusion, I offer some reflections on what the study of contemporary Angola can add to the conversation about memory politics and political legitimacy across the region. The first of these has to do with the sequencing of political developments and how this shapes the necessity and opportunity for political memorialisation and for challenges to it. Memorialisation relies on selective attention to different periods in history. Numerous writers on Zimbabwe have observed how memories of the era of anti-colonial struggle were revived as the government faced a crisis of legitimacy under pressure from structural adjustment and the arrival of multi-party democracy. On the other hand, van Donge, writing about Malawi, notes a need for African nations to create memories of the era after independence and before multi-party democracy. In Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia and Zimbabwe, the liberalisation of media and the growth of independent civil society alongside multi-party democracy allowed the contestation of the ruling parties’ attempts to reshape the past in their own interests. Despite such commonalities across southern Africa, understanding individual cases requires attention to specific trajectories and the relationship of these to regional and global developments. As in Namibia and Zimbabwe, the ruling party in Angola has revived and sought to reshape memories of struggle in order to overcome the uncertainties of the present. In the case of Angola, however, the fact that the country continued at war after independence has allowed the Angolan regime, through the MPLA, to project its own narratives of anti-colonial struggle on to the single-party era. The period of one-party rule thus becomes a site of particular contention, as civil society and opposition actors challenge the MPLA’s narratives of national unity constituted in defensive struggle, and break the silence around incidents from that era, in particular the events of 27 May 1977. Their accounts of the government violently repressing fellow Angolans are politically subversive because they speak in direct opposition to the government’s portrayal of itself in its own narratives as being the bringer of peace and the embodiment of national unity. Furthermore, in Angola the temporal dividing lines between the colonial, the one-party and the multi-party eras, and between the eras of war and of peace, are hazy, even more so than in other southern African cases. A theme of ‘stalled transition’ runs through the literature on Angola from 1990 until the present: the selective adoption of certain aspects of liberalisation and of democracy has proved politically functional to the regime and permitted the continuation of authoritarian practices behind a fac ade of democracy.38 The political liberalisation that followed the adoption of multi-party rule elsewhere in southern Africa, and which facilitated the start of public discussion around questions of history and national identity, existed in Angola only in truncated form. The return to war after the 1992 elections provoked a clampdown on public discourse that lasted until the end of the century. Elsewhere in southern Africa, former liberation movements have revisited history in order to confront a crisis of legitimacy provoked by multi-party democracy. In Angola, however, the government has precisely determined the pace and character of those procedural reforms that have taken place. In this light, the government and the MPLA’s renewed evocation of the past since 2002 looks less like a reaction to democratisation and more like an ideological fortification prepared well in advance of the elections that followed in 2008 and 2012.39 38 The term ‘stalled transition’ is from T. Hodges, Angola: From Afro-Stalinism to Petro-Diamond Capitalism (Oxford, James Currey, 2001). See also Schubert, ‘Democratisation’, and R. Soares de Oliveira, ‘Illiberal Peacebuilding in Angola’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 49, 2 (June 2011), pp. 287–314. 39 On the Angolan state’s autonomy in determining its post-war trajectory, see Soares de Oliveira, ‘Illiberal Peacebuilding’. 118 Journal of Southern African Studies Mozambique is the country in the region whose history most closely mirrors that of Angola. This makes a comparison between the two lusophone states particularly illuminating, especially when one considers how the Angolan government’s preferred narrative of the past was barely challenged before the protests of 2011. Like Mozambique, Angola has refrained from investigating wartime abuses by either side in its past conflict: the provisions of the 2002 peace agreement between the Angolan military and UNITA included a blanket amnesty. However, whereas Igreja has noted that Mozambique’s ‘official’ silence has been broken by a strident partisan debate between Frelimo and Renamo,40 such a debate has no equivalent in Angola, where the defeat of UNITA’s armed forces ensured that UNITA returned to formal politics in a subordinate position, in contrast to the more equal status of Renamo and Frelimo in the 1992 Rome peace accords. While both Dinerman41 and Pitcher42 have noted efforts by Frelimo to refashion memories of its own ideology and strategies before 1990, in Angola the version of history propagated by the MPLA since the end of the war has been concerned above all with the government’s military role as the defender of the nation against UNITA and South Africa. No attempts are made to smooth the ideological contradiction between the MPLA’s nominally socialist past and its capitalist present: the Angolan state’s oil wealth has allowed it to engage internationally on its own terms, free of the restrictions imposed by aid dependency in Mozambique, and therefore not obliged to pay homage to the norms of neoliberalism. Lastly, the Angolan case gives us cause to reflect on the purpose and the effectiveness of the use of memory as a political strategy. The interviews on which this article is based suggest that the carefully constructed narratives about history count for little beyond a circle of politicians, ideologues and journalists whose job it is to promote them. For the elderly women quoted here, the desire for continuity in government appeared to stem from a fear of violence born of their own experience, which did not need to be filtered through a lens of nationalist history. On the other hand, for the youth activists who form the latest wave of opposition to the government, this official version of history is something that must be confronted because it is so forcefully asserted by the government and its media. This recalls Werbner’s idea, echoed by a number of writers whose work was discussed earlier, about how the principal consequence of suppressing memory is an unintended one: it opens up a space for contestation as people ‘recognise – and often ever more forcefully – that they have not been allowed to remember’.43 To see the use of history simply as an exercise in propaganda, aimed at convincing others of the worth of one’s cause, is not adequate. The activists quoted above mobilised support on the basis of everyday concerns around social well-being that were more immediate than past events. Invoking history, however, was important to creating an identity for themselves in relation to society, to the nation and to the government; beyond the political dimension, however, there exists a dimension of the kind that Malkki has identified as ‘moral’.44 Thus their invocation of history was as much about discrediting a government narrative as about asserting a different view of the past. Activists invoked their own experience of bad governance, poverty and corruption since the end of the war to show the inadequacy of the government version. They talked about history in such a way as to demonstrate that the ruling elite was not only corrupt and dictatorial: when the government’s version of history was demonstrably incompatible with everyday realities, this was taken to signify that the rulers 40 41 42 43 44 Igreja, ‘Memories as Weapons’. Dinerman, Revolution. Pitcher, ‘Forgetting from Above’. Werbner, ‘Beyond Oblivion’, p. 9. Malkki, Purity and Exile. Contesting the Past in Angolan Politics 119 were also liars and therefore all the more worthy of contempt. The activists’ accounts show how a hegemonic narrative about history can be contradicted and undermined by experience, but those whose experience resonates with the government’s narratives about fear do not need a lesson in history in order to activate their fears. To call on history as a source of political legitimacy may build solidarity among those who already share similar views and experiences, but the accounts presented in this article provide no evidence that hegemonic narratives about history might change preconceptions. What is clear is that the imposition of such narratives can provide the raw material for resistance on the part of those able to offer alternative narratives about the past. JUSTIN PEARCE Department of Politics and International Studies and St John’s College, University of Cambridge, 7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DT, UK. E-mail: justin.pearce@gmail.com Copyright of Journal of Southern African Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.