Luanda is known for its late-night parties (or farras) that trail into the wee hours and include a bowl of muzongue (fish broth with pieces of cassava, fish, and chili peppers eaten in order to counteract the impending exhaustion and hangover). On November 11, 2001, the twenty-sixth anniversary of Angola's independence, I was invited to an event called Caldo de Dipanda (Independence Broth) that was to begin at 7 a.m. at the National Radio Station. It was a special independence day version of a bi-monthly live broadcast event hosted by a Sunday morning radio show (Caldo de Poeira, or Dust Broth) where they invite musicians of the older generation to gather, play music together, eat, and reminisce. My fiance (now husband) and I and a friend, tambourine in hand, arrived half an hour after the scheduled beginning to find some 30 people already gathered. We were directed to a table and served typical Angolan dishes-beans with palm oil, muzongue, boiled cassava and sweet potato-and our choice of beverage. The emcee was already playing a variety of old tunes and inviting various musicians up to the stage to sing their golden oldies. Enthusiastic hugs and hellos abounded in the audience and people were obviously quite pleased to be together. Almost all the guests in attendance were musicians in their 50s or 60s and, with a few exceptions, they were all men. Younger women employees of the radio station were also present, but they were not guests-they served the food and danced with the band for particular songs. Of the eight well-known female singers and dancers' from this generation of artists four are still alive and in Luanda. But where were they? It was a national holiday, the national holiday after all, and this event was meant to celebrate the conjunction between this older generation of artists and independence. The point is not to commit the crime of anachronism, i.e., to draw any conclusions about what happened historically from this recent event. Women singers and dancers certainly existed in the 1960s and 1970s, even if fewer in number than their male counterparts. But the absence of these women artists might easily have overshadowed the male artists very happy to be there and to be together. So while I considered what I knew would be Susan Geiger's question for me (Where are the women?),2 my attention also came to settle on these men not as genderless representatives of the Angolan nation but specifically as Angolanos (Angolan men). What was the relation between masculinity, music, and the nation? How were musical production and the music scene gendered? What was the relationship between this gendered musical production and the nation, given that music from this period was and is deemed typically Angolan? This article explores the relationship between gender and the musical production of the nation in Luanda's musseques (urban shantytowns). Urban Africans took advantage of reforms in colonial policy instituted between 1961 and 1974 to improve their daily lives, carve out new cultural spaces, and create new artistic practices. The production of a local form of urban popular music, called semba, was at the forefront of this process. In the clubs where music was performed, at the parties where it was played, and in the production of the music itself, urban youth rearranged relations not only between themselves and the colonial state but between urban and rural societies, between members of the urban milieu, and between and among men and women. In so doing, they shaped the cultural basis of nation and thus implicated themselves in the political project of nationalism after 1974. I argue that the gendered dynamic of musical production and of the music scene helps account for a shift in the involvement of women as cultural producers and the ascendancy of a masculinist ethic at the moment when music became the salient cultural practice. In the mid- to late 1950s young women were actively involved in the politico-cultural groups that returned to local cultural roots and themes in order to spark political consciousness. …