Les Incertitudes de la nation en Angola: aux racines sociales de l'Unita by Didier Péclard

Abstract

Reviews 266 Didier Péclard, Les Incertitudes de la nation en Angola: aux racines sociales de l’Unita (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2015). 370 pages. Print. Reviewed by Iracema Dulley (CEBRAP — Brazilian Centre for Analysis and Planning) This book addresses the relations between Christian missions, Portuguese colonialism, local societies, and the emergence of UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) in the Central Highlands of Angola. The book starts with a puzzle: how could a movement that on the verge of Angola’s independence had just a few thousand members and no significant international support manage to declare a rival government — together with the FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola) — in Huambo in November 1975? The government was short-lived and unrecognized by any foreign country, but UNITA would continue to challenge the legitimacy of the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) until the end of the bloody civil war, in 2002. In Savimbi’s retreat to Eastern Angola, he would be joined by a significant part of the Evangelical Congregational Church in Angola (IECA), known as the ‘church in the bush’. If UNITA’s ‘social roots’ include the Congregational church, Péclard’s analysis of the history of missionization in the Central Highlands outlines the conditions of possibility of this history, not its necessary causes. His examination of the architecture of the Congregational mission in the Central Highlands reveals both the introjection of an ethos in a long-term process of subjectification and the place of Christian missions as the only means of upward social mobility for the vast majority of Africans during Portuguese colonialism. The first chapter discusses the role of colonial knowledge in Angola and argues that the African population was rarely the object of detailed investigation. For the author, lusotropicalist ideology would promote the ontologization of the colonizer, not of colonial subjects, in its advocacy of Portuguese affability. The second chapter deals with the long-term relationship between the church and the colonial state and portrays the Portuguese New State as ‘Catholaicist’, i.e., marked by a separation of church and state in which the Catholic church was awarded privileges and funding in exchange for providing health and education services to Africans and promoting their ‘nationalization’ and ‘civilization’. Péclard relativizes the view according to which the Catholic Church is considered an extension of the colonial state by revealing the tensions that marked their relation; he also argues that while North American Protestant missionaries tended to be viewed as ‘denationalizing’, the Congregational mission’s diplomatic relations with the colonial state could ease tensions. The third chapter focuses on the implementation of the Congregational project from 1920 to 1950, a period in which the Highlands transitioned from caravan trade to agriculture. According to Péclard, the Congregational mission took advantage of the historical circumstances of sedentarization to build Reviews 267 ‘rural bastions’ relatively isolated from urban colonial society and undertake its work of ‘culturalist modernization’. The process of subjectification that ensued included transformations in agriculture, education, and the domestic space while retaining part of what was understood to be Umbundu tradition. The fourth chapter describes the challenges faced by Congregational missions from 1940 to 1960, a time of pauperization and proletarianization of the Highlands due to contract labour and the arrival of white settlers. The author describes the transformations in the Protestant project as a rural exodus and the inevitability of urbanization challenged its main pillars, rural life and relative isolation from the colonial world; he compares it with the Catholic missions, already inserted in urban areas and intimately connected to colonial society. The last chapter dwells both on the delayed participation of the Highlands in the uprisings and movements that challenged the colonial state from 1961 and on the repressive apparatus in the region, whose main targets were ‘assimilated’ subjects, especially Protestant ones. Repression and prosperity went hand in hand, as the ‘native statute’ was abolished in 1961 and economic growth provided opportunities for educated Africans. Péclard argues that while the Christian elite benefited from the colonial system that granted it privilege and status, the main opponents of the regime would nonetheless come from their ranks, given that education and...