Rebuilding the Angolan body politic: global and local projections of identity and protest in 'O Herói’ (original) (raw)
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O Herói (The Hero) and the Post-Colonial Angolan State
International Relations and Diplomacy, 2016
This article examines how postwar Angola is depicted in the film O Herói (The Hero). With a well-known international cast and funding from a number of foreign sources, this movie heralds in a new era for Lusophone African cinema. Director Zezé Gamboa highlights the difficult reality faced by those living in Luanda, the capital of Angola, with scenes of water and electricity shortages, unemployment, and gang violence. He also touches upon some of the themes from the work of famed Senegalese author and director Ousmane Sembène such as corruption and neo-colonialism. One of the very few Angolan movies that has been shown at international festivals and theaters, O Herói (2004) not only offers a harsh portrayal of living conditions after 40 years of conflict, especially that of the treatment of disabled veterans injured in the mine fields that still are found throughout the country, but also creates a sense of hope for families displaced by war to be reunited or at least form new bonds in the future.
History & Anthropology, 2021
This article examines Nelisita (Carvalho, 1982), an Olunyaneka-language feature fiction film made in the early years of Angolan cinema, and draws a historiography of its marginal production and ensuing scattered reception. Combining a historical approach to the film’s production and circulation, with an ethnographically-driven analysis of its recent screenings at a village sharing an Olunyaneka background, I discuss insights gained from its reception by an audience familiar with the cultural context portrayed on screen. Along with the history of the film’s production and circulation, the villagers’ engagement with the film sheds light on the evolving politics of cinema in Africa, particularly the complex relationships between popular and film festival audiences, film studies and visual anthropology. I examine shifting continuities and ruptures with regards to the film’s intricate social history, and analyse the production and reception of Nelisita as an experiment that highlights differing ways in which films can work as a contact zone. Accepted Manuscript. Please contact author in case you want a copy of the published version.
Journal of Lusophone Studies, 2023
I analyze two agit-prop plays produced in Angola during the social revolutionary phase immediately after independence (1975-1986). Arguably, this period's literary and cultural production was governed by a liberation script grounded on a largely "mythic" account of the armed struggle that afforded a monopoly of explanation of the decolonization process to the ruling party. In my examination of this modality of political or pedagogic theatre, I seek to explore the extent to which the political praxis mobilized by these collective productions risked lapsing into an imposed orthodoxy or a form of censorship, which is, in the last instance disavowed. I suggest that the fissures and divisions against which these plays strive to educate their audiences and participants are as much external to the political pedagogics they seek to activate (arising from social, ethnic and racial conflicts and rivalries) as they are internal to, and constitutive of it. The rhetorical construction of the People-the privileged agent of social and political change-finally reveals itself to be ineluctably fractured. The didactic ascription of agency to the People becomes, in this sense, slippery, revocable whenever political expediency warrants it. We might thus understand these largely forgotten samples of revolutionary theater as unintentionally "prophetic." They adumbrate a future in which the Angolan people will be consistently precluded from "writing their own history.
Fiction as History? Resistance, Complicities and the Intellectual History of Postcolonial Angola
2017
This research offers an interdisciplinary investigation of the intricate relations between literature, history and politics in Angola, focusing more specifically on the concepts of literary and political resistance and their instrumentalization since the anticolonial conflict. The thesis is mostly devoted to novels written after independence in 1975, encompassing a wide range of authors such as Pepetela, José Eduardo Agualusa, Ondjaki, Manuel Rui, Manuel Dos Santos Lima, Sousa Jamba and Boaventura Cardoso. This allows for a comparative perspective on the literary coverage of key topics, such as religion, the civil war or the 27th of May coup attempt, and highlights continuities and disjunctions within the forming novelistic canon of Angola. Comparing these works of fiction with academic sources on Angola and political discourses developed by the regime, this research assesses the contribution of autochthonous writers to debates on national identity, political authority and historical legacy in post-independence Angola. Through close reading and intertextual analysis, particular attention is devoted to the ways in which fiction has fed and shaped historical narratives and consciousness in Angola. I show how the novel has become a privileged site from which to address issues of collective memory and history-writing, in spite or because of the regime’s repeated attempts at tightly controlling the production of historical knowledge in the country. The strong relations uniting most Angolan writers to the MPLA, the ruling party since 1975, and the evolution of this complicity between artists and politicians at the highest levels of the nationalist party and the independent state allow for an original reflection on creativity, violence, race and class in a country still characterised nowadays by abysmal levels of inequality and authoritarian politics.
Visual Anthropology Review, 2024
This article discusses a serendipitous yet illuminating cinematic chain that played with genre and narrative of a singular film through archival film production and distribution. The film Nelisita (Carvalho, 1982), produced in a recently independent country, was one of the first Angolan feature-length fiction films and was pioneering in its use of vernacular language. Although Angola had established Portuguese as its official language, Nelisita was produced in Olunyaneka, a minority African Bantu vernacular language from the Southern region. Depicting African rural folk storytelling in a vernacular language and a fictional style, Nelisita embodies an unusual filmic genre in the history of cinema produced in the countryside. Three decades after its release, I found the film a stimulating point of departure for rethinking visual anthropology practice. In this paper, I trace my gradual repurposing of material derived from the original production and found in the personal files of its filmmaker Ruy Duarte de Carvalho. This culminated in producing a new version of the film that would enable audiences to engage with this thought-provoking cinematic work that, at the time, was not easily accessible. In this short archival remake, initially produced for a screening workshop in Lisbon, Portugal, where I am based, I sought to communicate many of the ways Nelisita engaged with the African vernacular. Reducing a 64-min feature film to a 14-min short entitled 127 stills or 34 scenes from
African Studies Review, 2018
Necessary Noise by Chérie Rivers Ndaliko is a refreshing addition to the literature on Eastern Congo for one particular reason. It does what no other study has done before, which is to focus on something besides the conflict minerals that have wreaked havoc in the Kivus, the epicenter of Congo's war zone, or its corollary, the abjection of weaponized violence, which includes child soldiering and martial rape. Instead, this well-wrought study, while not eschewing Congo's mineral conflict altogether, shatters the single narrative of war and conflict that has eclipsed so many other topics, from cultural activism through art, to the imaginary, and the quotidian demand for celebration and empowerment. Indeed, war in Eastern Congo is only half of the story or noise, as the author would put it, told by international and local media outlets in self-serving war narratives intended to raise not just outrage in the West but also their own profile and worldview. Through the lens of the Yole!Africa cultural center, an organization operating in Goma, Rivers Ndaliko looks at the ways in which art, as a vehicle of social change, gives voice to the youth and challenges the culture of war that has mobilized so many young people in Eastern Congo. The book also stands as a searing critique of the intervention by international NGOs in Africa, which continues to be redolent with saviorism and dubious do-goodism. The book is divided into four chapters, with the first chapter surveying the hip hop and cinematic scene in Goma, North Kivu's capital city, in the long aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. By the time its co-founder, Congolese filmmaker Petna Ndaliko Katondolo (the author's husband), moved back to Goma, Yole!Africa had become a powerful magnet that attracted scores of young people thirsting for change and ready to counter the way international media and outlets (mis)represented their lives in war-torn Eastern Congo with their own images, noises, and transcripts. The second chapter addresses the other war taking place in Congo, a war over history. Here again the analysis focuses on Yole!Africa's activities.