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MIGRATION, DIASPORAS
AND CITIZENSHIP
Series Editors: Robin Cohen and
Zig Layton-Henry
POSTCOLONIAL
PORTUGUESE
MIGRATION
TO ANGOLA
Migrants or Masters?
Lisa Åkesson
Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship
Series editors
Robin Cohen
Department of International Development
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Zig Layton-Henry
Department of Politics and International Studies
University of Warwick
Coventry, UK
Editorial Board: Rainer Bauböck, European University Institute, Italy;
James F. Hollifield, Southern Methodist University, USA; Daniele Joly,
University of Warwick, UK; Jan Rath, University of Amsterdam, The
Netherlands.
The Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship series covers three important
aspects of the migration process: firstly, the determinants, dynamics and
characteristics of international migration. Secondly, the continuing attach-
ment of many contemporary migrants to their places of origin, signified by
the word ‘diaspora’, and thirdly the attempt, by contrast, to belong and
gain acceptance in places of settlement, signified by the word ‘citizenship’.
The series publishes work that shows engagement with and a lively appre-
ciation of the wider social and political issues that are influenced by inter-
national migration and encourages a comparative perspective.
Postcolonial
Portuguese Migration
to Angola
Migrants or Masters?
Lisa Åkesson
School of Global Studies
University of Gothenburg
Gothenburg, Sweden
This book draws on the support from many persons in Luanda. I owe a
great and profound gratitude to my three excellent female research assis-
tants, who provided me with invaluable contacts and many insights.
Academic colleagues and friends at Universidade Agostinho Neto as well
as friends outside the academic circles offered me great hospitality and
shared their visions about how to navigate life in contemporary Luanda. I
also want to thank my Angolan and Portuguese interviewees who patiently
answered my many questions during conversations that sometimes lasted
for many hours. I would have liked to mention all of you by name, but the
obscure workings of the Angolan party-state and the long history of wide-
spread state control and repression made me decide to preserve the ano-
nymity of everyone who resides in Angola.
During my research visits in Luanda I was accompanied by Pétur
Skúlason Waldorff, Reykjavík University, and his collegiality and kindness
made my work much more easy and fun. At the initial stages of fieldwork,
Erika Eckeskog and Lena Sundh at the Swedish Embassy in Luanda
opened up for important contacts. I wrote the main part of the book dur-
ing the last months of 2016, when I was a visiting research fellow at the
International Migration Institute, University of Oxford, and I want to
thank colleagues and staff at IMI for providing such a great environment
for concentrated writing. I finalized the text during a stay at The Swedish
Institute in Athen’s guest house in Kavala, and also here I encountered
many nice people and a fantastic environment.
vii
viii Acknowledgements
ix
x CONTENTS
3 Mobile Subjects 57
Migrants? 59
Expatriates? 60
Return? 63
Returnees and Newcomers 66
Return as a National Re-conquest 67
Integrated? 69
North-South Migration and the Familiar Concepts of Mobility 73
References 74
6 Identities at Work 113
“The Laid-Back Angolan” 114
Cultural Racism 116
“The Angolan Reality” 117
The Postcolonial Legacy and Beyond 119
CONTENTS
xi
References 141
Index 151
CHAPTER 1
c onsulate to open its doors. The majority of them have their hopes pinned
on acquiring an immigration document that would allow them to earn a
secure income in Angola. The queue outside the consulate indicates a
reversal of migration flows. Up until the early 2000s, many Angolans
moved to Portugal in search of personal security and a stable livelihood,
but now migrants move from the former metropole to the former colony.
An indication of the magnitude of this reversal is that in 2013 economic
remittances from Angola to Portugal were 16 times the remittance trans-
fers in the opposite direction (Observatório da Emigração 2016).
This unexpected event in European-African relations has its origins in
the accidental conjunction of Angola rising1 and Portugal falling. In 2008,
the North Atlantic financial crisis hit Portugal with the force of a gale.
Drastically decreased salaries, massive unemployment and deep uncer-
tainty soon overshadowed the life of many Portuguese, and a prolonged
recession begun. In 2013, one fifth of the population was unemployed,
the minimum salary was 485 euro and a normal age pension was less than
500 euro (Instituto Nacional de Eststística 2016; Portugal 2015). Most
Portuguese experienced a rapid decline in their social and economic situa-
tion, and many found it impossible to sustain themselves and dependent
family members. Simultaneously, a flow of international and Portuguese
media reports described a rapid economic development in the former col-
ony of Angola. Various sources made estimations of two-digit gross
domestic product (GDP) growth rates, and the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported a record macro-
economic growth of 27% for the year 2007 (OECD 2011: 52). The pro-
longed civil war had finally come to an end in 2002, and a few years later
the state had launched a comprehensive infrastructure reconstruction pro-
gramme. The oil-fuelled economy controlled by the party-state was char-
acterised by “turbo-capitalism” (Schubert 2016a), and in combination
with a lack of experienced professionals in most sectors the economic
boom created a high demand for skilled and semi-skilled labour. Owners
of Portuguese companies threatened by economic failure also came to see
Angola as an opening, and many of them hastened to develop trade and
business relations with Angolan economic interests. In a short period of
time, this development created new and fortified economic ties and depen-
dencies at multiple levels between the two countries.
Global discourses on migration as well as international migration
regimes tend to build on and reinforce the image of economic migrants’
border crossings as solely taking place in a South-North direction. This
INTRODUCTION: SETTING THE SCENE 3
Luso-Angolan History
In 1484, the first Portuguese expedition arrived in the territory of what
today is Angola. Nearly five hundred years later, in 1975, Angola gained
its independence. This event had been preceded by 13 years of colonial
liberation war, which came to an end in 1974 as a consequence of the left-
wing peaceful revolution in Portugal, the so-called “carnation revolu-
tion”. The revolution brought about the demise of Europe’s longest
continuous twentieth-century dictatorship, which between 1932 and
1968 was headed by the infamous António de Oliveira Salazar, who
founded and led the Estado Novo (“New State”). When Angola and the
other Portuguese colonies in Africa became independent, “Portugal was
the longest reigning colonial power of the world and the poorest nation of
Europe” (Feldman-Bianco 2001: 478). In line with this and borrowing
from the postcolonial vocabulary, Feldman-Bianco and other postcolonial
scholars describe colonial Portugal as a “subaltern empire”.
Among the five African colonies (Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau,
Mozambique, and São Tomé), the Portuguese came to consider Angola
the “crown jewel” because of the colony’s wealth in natural resources. Yet
the Portuguese presence in Angola developed slowly, and as late as 1904
Portugal controlled only 10% of the territory (Soares de Oliveira 2016).
The frontiers of the colony were not finally fixed until the 1920s. Up until
the twentieth century, the white population in Africa remained very small
and consisted mainly of male convicts who sometimes stayed on as com-
mercial agents and fathered mestiço children (Birmingham 2015). This
slow process reflects the fact that it was not until Salazar’s regime that an
actual Portuguese colonial enterprise was set up in Africa. And, paradoxi-
cally, the African colonies became fundamentally important for the econ-
omy and self-representation of Portugal only after the start of the African
independence movements in the years following World War II.
8 L. ÅKESSON
beginning of the 1960s when the first Angolan uprisings against the colo-
nial regime took place and it classified all black people as “native”, with the
exception of the few assimilados. “Natives” were required to pay a “head
tax” in Portuguese currency, and in order to be able to pay this tax, people
were forced to work for minimal salaries for a colonial employer. Moreover,
indígenas could easily be categorised as “vagrants” and then they were
subject to non-paid forced labour (Ball 2005). As I will discuss in Chap.
5, the workings of this colonial regime of forced labour still reverberate in
contemporary Luandan workplace relations.
The massive inflow of Portuguese settlers to Angola took place during
only the last two decades of colonial rule. In 1950, the population classi-
fied as “white” was less than 80,000 individuals, but in 1973 it amounted
to 324,000 persons (Castelo 2007: 143). From the 1950s onwards, the
colonial regime was pressured by mounting international critique as well
as by the Angolan anti-colonial uprising, which started in 1961. In
response to this, the Salazar regime started to promote Portuguese settle-
ment in order to “substantiate its 1951 proclamation that the colonies
were really ‘overseas provinces,’ while also coping with rising socio-
economic and demographic pressures within Portugal itself” (Lubkemann
2002: 192). Before that, the regime had counteracted the possibility of a
rapidly growing white population in Angola, as it wanted to prevent
Angola from becoming “a new Brazil” with a strong white population
demanding independence. In the 1960s, however, settlement became a
strategy to counteract Angolan liberation.
Many of the Portuguese migrants I met in Luanda were actually chil-
dren of the Portuguese settlers who arrived in the 1950s, 1960s and
1970s. These Portuguese settlers came from all over Portugal. Before the
mid-1960s, the majority were male, but as family migration successively
became more common, the numbers of males and females levelled (Castelo
2007). In a sense, the war for independence functioned as a kick-start for
the growing Portuguese settler community. Supported by the colonial
regime, the settlers developed and modernised the Angolan economy and
simultaneously kept black Angolans away from any form of influence or
professional work. When Angola finally became independent, the coun-
try’s private sector “ranging from multinational extractive industry to the
puniest of country stores, had been almost completely in the hands of
Europeans” (Soares de Oliveira 2015: 132). Thus, the lack of profession-
als was acute in all sectors and at all levels, and this lack was not remediated
during the 27 years of civil war that came after independence.
10 L. ÅKESSON
superpowers were involved in the Angolan war, they had very little notion
about what was happening on the ground.
The FNLA movement lost most its influence soon after independence,
while UNITA, led by the cunning Jonas Savimbi, became a long-lived
enemy to the MPLA government. In practice, Angola throughout many
years consisted of two distinct “societies” (Messiant 1994, 1995 in Soares
de Oliveira 2015) or “states” (Pearce 2015), governed by MPLA and
UNITA, respectively. Throughout the war, MPLA controlled Luanda and
the other major coastal cities, whereas UNITA dominated the southeast
and the rural parts of the central highlands. Other parts of the country
were under constant dispute, and in 1993, when UNITA was at the height
of its military influence, it controlled 80% of the Angolan territory (Soares
de Oliveira 2015: 15). With regard to the Luso-Angolan history, it is
important to note that UNITA based much of its ideological resistance on
a view of MPLA as led by Creole offspring of the former colonisers (Pearce
2015: 13). Savimbi portrayed the MPLA government as an elite regime
led by a “non-Angolan” minority and he built this upon “deep-seated
town-country divisions and a sense of victimhood and social resentment
against Luanda and its Europeanised elites” (Soares de Oliveira 2016: 74).
This division between a supposedly native and rural African movement
and an urban Luandan elite imagined as racially mixed and “portugicised”
arguably played a more important role in the civil war than the ethnic
dimensions, which during the war was foregrounded by many interna-
tional commentators (ibid.).
stadia, new airports, a new parliament, and, not the least, numerous glim-
mering high-rise buildings in the city of Luanda. These investments came
as a life saver to Portuguese construction companies, which by 2008 were
in acute crisis. In a short period of time, the major Portuguese construc-
tion companies redirected many of their activities to Angola and soon
Chinese and Brazilian companies followed them. This implied that the
first comprehensive wave of post-war Portuguese migration to Angola
consisted of construction workers.
The post-war development in Angola has been totally dominated by
the MPLA party, which has gained an absolute majority in four consecu-
tive elections in 1992, 2008, 2012 and 2017. To ordinary people in
Luanda, the MPLA party, the Angolan state and the heavy bureaucracy
constitute one unified body, which they sometimes call o sistema (the
system) and which many non-elite actors believe is run behind the scenes
by foreigners and mulattos. This body is headed by President José Eduardo
dos Santos, who has managed to stay in power since 1979.5 The govern-
ment’s grip is fundamentally based on its control of three key institutions:
the system of patronage supporting the economic activities of the Angolan
oligarchs, the army and security apparatus, and the state oil holding com-
pany Sonangol (Sogge 2011). The relations between the president, the
army and the MPLA party are stable, and members of the political-
economic-military elite seldom find it worthwhile to challenge the estab-
lished order. Outsiders with a voice in the public space are few, and the
party-state has managed to entice many of its opponents into more secure
and enriching positions. This is true, for example, with regard to former
UNITA military officers (Schubert 2016a; Soares de Oliveira 2015).
The oligarchs’ investments tend to focus on rapid profits rather than
long-term sustainable production, and many international economists
would characterise the Angolan capitalists’ businesses as “an evolved form
of rentierism” (Soares de Oliveira 2015: 137), but in Angolan official dis-
course, the clients of the patronage system are invariably termed “entre-
preneurs”. In a speech in 2013, the president defended the elite’s economic
activities by referring to these as “primitive accumulation” and arguing
that Angola was undergoing the same kind of economic transformations
which had occurred in Europe “hundreds of years ago” (dos Santos 2013);
thus, a Marxian rhetoric mixed with the colonial evolutionary idea that
Africa “lags behind”. The inner circle of Angolan investors consists of only
some hundred insiders plus their family members and friends (Soares de
Oliveira 2015: 140), and Portuguese business people and managers have
INTRODUCTION: SETTING THE SCENE 13
President José Eduardo dos Santos (JES) wrested control of the oil revenue
stream and carved out a parallel state centred on the presidency and the
country’s opaque yet capable oil company, Sonangol. In time, this gave rise
to an oil-driven, internationalized political economy and global networks of
support and patronage. This provided JES with an unprecedented degree of
discretionary power, allowing him to sideline the state administration, the
party apparatus and all other structures of potential influence across Angolan
society. (2015: 25)
The emergence of the strong oil industry represents a break with the
colonial past, as the recruitment of international managers and technical
staff into the industry has become globalized. Males from all over the
world flock to Luanda to reap benefits from the production of the black
gold. The oil sector’s importance for the Angolan economy is testified to
by the fact that, in 2014, oil represented around 95% of the total value of
exports and more than 65% of government revenue (International
Monetary Fund 2015). In 2013, the Sonangol group was ranked as
Africa’s second largest company (The Africa Report 2013). Yet develop-
14 L. ÅKESSON
ment benefitting the large majority of the Angolan population has never
been on the company’s agenda.
The oil revenue and, to a much lesser extent, the income from the dia-
mond business led to an extraordinary growth in Angola by the second
half of the 2000s. According to estimations from the OECD (2011: 52),
Angola was, for couple of years, one of the fastest-growing economies in
the world, and GDP growth rates were 20.6% in 2005, 18.6% in 2006 and
as much as 27% in 2007. For those who wanted to earn fast money, the
late 2000s and the early 2010s were golden years in Angola, and during
these years the inflow of Portuguese migrants grew rapidly.
The macro-economic boom in Angola came to a full stop by the end of
2014 when the international crude oil price drastically decreased. In the
beginning of 2015, the government cut public investment by 45%. The
same year, Bank of America halted its supply of dollars to Angola, presum-
ably in reaction to allegations about Angolan banks being used for financ-
ing “terror organisations”, among them Hamas. In consequence of this
development, projects financed by the state came to a standstill, the
Angolan currency (kwanza) was devaluated, the lack of hard currency
became acute and banks entered into crisis. For the Portuguese migrants,
this meant that salaries were paid with delay or not at all. Moreover, it
became increasingly difficult to send remittances to family members in
Portugal as access to hard currency became highly restricted. The golden
years appeared to be over this time around, and many Portuguese had to
return to Portugal, particularly those who had dependent family members
or debts (or both) in Portugal. Those who had their closest family mem-
bers in Angola as well as a reliable employment often chose to stay, as
conditions in Portugal continued to be bleak.
ing mainly of construction workers. The study also shows that the major-
ity of the Portuguese see their sojourn in Angola as temporary and that in
most cases they had secured a job in Angola before leaving Portugal.
Moreover, it demonstrates that some of the Portuguese have been moved
by their company, when it has downsized or closed its activities in Portugal
and instead tried to establish itself in the Angolan market. Thus, some of
the Portuguese have been sent abroad by their employer and thus not
migrated individually.
Some of the Portuguese in Luanda mentioned that they did not see
themselves as a member of a Portuguese “community”. They pointed out
that there were Portuguese working and living in many different neigh-
bourhoods in the logistically complicated megacity of Luanda and that
there were few natural meeting points. The only Portuguese association in
Luanda is the Associação 25 de Abril, which mainly attracts elderly people
with ideological roots in the Socialist Party and the Portuguese Carnation
Revolution in 1974. In fact, some of the Portuguese I met also talked
about an absence of solidarity among their compatriots and compared
themselves in a negative way to the Brazilians in Angola, whom they
believed were more supportive of each other. Yet, despite this alleged
absence of “a community”, people I interviewed often talked about their
impressions of other Portuguese in Luanda, and different groups some-
times criticised each other.
In general terms, internal divisions among the Portuguese migrants are
based on class differences. One group that constantly was pointed out by
members of the middle class as sharing certain, often negatively defined,
characteristics consisted of the construction workers. The first group
would criticise the second group for being uneducated and simple, and it
was quite clear that tensions based on socio-economic hierarchies were at
play. In particular, the construction workers’ relations to Angolan women
were criticised by middle-class people. A common belief was that all con-
struction workers had Angolan girlfriends and that they often preferred
young women. There was a lot of gossip about construction workers’
catorzinhas (“fourteen-year-old girls”) and also about workers having one
family in Angola and another in Portugal.7 Commonly, people working in
construction would not refute such rumours but rather insist on being
better integrated into the Angolan society than the “snobbish” middle-
and upper-class Portuguese. This attitude was common not only among
manual labourers but also among some of the highly educated males
working in the construction sector, who argued that they had more
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