A crack in everything: Violence in soldiers’ narratives about the Portuguese colonial war in Angola

Abstract

ABSTRACT How do soldiers recall and voice their wartime experiences when the war they fought is under scrutiny? How do they inscribe the recollection of private affairs in a potentially contested colonial past? Drawing from an ethnography of war memory and focusing on an artillery unit’s deployment in the Portuguese colonial war in Angola, in 1971, this article tackles both the soldiers’ memories and the military reports about the unit’s length of service. It articulates and contrasts the formulaic order of the official account with the veterans’ affective storytelling, to unearth the cracks that run beneath the reconfiguration of colonial war violence in Angola. Soldiers’ narratives, it will be argued, avoid the wars’ dystopic potential by dislocating attention to the affective reverberation of the past and by silencing accounts of bloodshed. And yet, they are unable to fully de-politicize their wartime stories, as soldiers unwittingly disclose episodes of sexual violence against African women, hence exposing the enduring entanglements of sexuality, race and colonialism.