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Carnival at Luanda

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

David Birmingham
David Birmingham
Affiliation:
University of Kent
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Extract

The tradition of carnival-type street festivals and competitive dance troupes appears to be an old one in Luanda. In 1620, at the end of the most serious round of slave wars in Angola's history, political allegory and mimicry were included in the street processions celebrating the canonization of Saint Francis Xavier. In the nineteenth century the Creole community regularly adapted its public ceremonials to the shifting political and religious climate. In the age of white settlement, during the middle decades of the twentieth century, ‘native’ dance troops were officially encouraged until their potential nationalism was discerned. After independence, government tried to revive carnival for its own ends and according to its own calendar of state ceremonial. At one level the carnival continued to exorcise the fear of authority among the powerless. At another the political dimension was eclipsed by the competitive rivalries of local communities seeking identity and prestige. The structures continued to use the old ritual patterns of leadership with kings, queens, commanders and soldiers. Economic influence continued to be wielded by the great fishing families who invested important resources into conspicuous clothing and ceremonial feasting as they had done for centuries. The spectators responded at many different levels of appreciation.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 29 , Issue 1: Special Issue in Honour of ROLAND OLIVER , March 1988 , pp. 93 - 103
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

1 I should like to thank the government of the Popular Republic of Angola in general and the Secretary of State for Culture, Boaventura Cardoso, in particular for their invitation to visit Angola and, by incidental good fortune, to witness the 1987 carnival.

2 The government of revolutionary France allegedly changed the calendar in a vain attempt to hide the dates of the religious festivals.

3 Messiant, Christine, ‘Luanda 1945–1961: position des colonisés dans la société coloniale et engagement nationaliste’ (EHESS, Paris, forthcoming)Google Scholar, contains much the best treatment available to date of the history of the Luanda Creoles (the old assimilados) in the twentieth century.

4 Boxer, C. R., Portuguese Society in the Tropics: the Municipal Councils of Goa, Macao, Bahia and Luanda, 1510–1800 (Madison, 1965), ch. 4Google Scholar, contains an interesting account of high society in early Luanda.

5 Delgado, Ralph, História de Angola (2nd ed., Luanda n.d. [1970?]), 11, ch. 3Google Scholar, reprints the contemporary account of the procession in full.

6 de Almeida Santos, José, A velha Loanda nos festejos, nas solenidades, no ensino (Luanda, 1972, vol. ivGoogle Scholar of Paginas esquecidas de Loanda de hà cem anos) contains photographs of the desecrated church, of late nineteenth or early twentieth-century carnival costumes, regattas and bands, and descriptions of the royal processions of state.

7 de Carvalho, Ruy Duarte, Ana Manda – Les enfants du filet: identité collective, créativité sociale et production de la différence culturelle: un cas Muxiluanda (thèse de doctorat, EHESS, Paris, 1986)Google Scholar, contains a description of the 1985 Luanda carnival and a detailed anthropological analysis of the relations of the participating groups. I am extremely grateful to Ruy Duarte for introducing me to the carnival and for generously providing me with much oral information which I have not always interpreted as he himself might have done.

8 The ‘nurse’ as an influential figure in a carnival dance group is a curious phenomenon which it would be nice to be able to explain. It may be noted that when the militarization of the officer titles occurred in the dance societies of German Tanganyika during the first world war one role that was identified was that of ‘nursing sister’. For this and many other parallels with the dance societies of Eastern Africa, see Ranger, T. O., Dance and Society in Eastern Africa 1890–1970: the Beni Ngoma (London, 1975), 52Google Scholar and passim.

9 The carnival fund-raising bears similarity to the fund-raising dances of the Kim-banguist church in Zaire where long columns of dancing worshippers file past their leader, as if he were a pope in a football stadium, publicly depositing their contributions.

10 Ranger, , Dance and Society, 74.Google Scholar

11 Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, Ana Manda, ch. 10.

12 Iliffe, John, The Emergence of African Capitalism (London, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, elaborates on the concept of African ‘hedonism’.

13 Messiant, ‘Luanda’.

14 Birmingham, David ‘The twenty-seventh of May: an historical note on the abortive 1977 coup in Angola’, African Affairs, LXXVII (1978), 554–564.CrossRefGoogle Scholar