$Unique_ID{COW00121} $Pretitle{259} $Title{Angola Chapter 2C. Local (Rural) Social Systems} $Subtitle{} $Author{Irving Kaplan} $Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army} $Subject{groups party portuguese ovimbundu descent lineage group africans community mbundu} $Date{1978} $Log{} Country: Angola Book: Angola, A Country Study Author: Irving Kaplan Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army Date: 1978 Chapter 2C. Local (Rural) Social Systems In the absence of extensive and intensive modern research of high quality, it is difficult to determine the significant social arrangements in Angola even in the late years of the Portuguese period, let alone in the postindependence era. A few broad generalizations may be made, however. Kingship and chieftainship over territorially organized polities, characteristic in some form of the Mbundu and Ovimbundu until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of the Kongo earlier, and of other groups on a smaller scale, had for all practical purposes been destroyed by the mid-twentieth century. A king of the Kongo was recognized by the Portuguese; his office was largely symbolic, and for that reason, succession to it was a focus of conflict in the 1950s among various Kongo groups oriented to ethnic nationalism and between some of these and the Portuguese. The office, however, was of no practical significance for the ordinary Kongo villager. In some other groups the Portuguese also permitted the retention of chiefs (sobas) chosen on a more or less traditional basis, and some of these played an administrative role. Elsewhere incumbents of such roles were chosen without reference to local criteria. At the level of the local community (a village or group of villages) a headman was appointed, again sometimes from among those who would have been chosen by local standards but who also met Portuguese criteria. Sometimes, however, a quite different person was appointed, and in this case activities of the more traditional leader and the elders of the community were carried on to some extent even if formal authority was held by the man chosen by the colonial regime. Chiefs and headmen (regedores) had, among other tasks, those of collecting taxes, helping to maintain order, and recruiting labor. In most cases in the early 1960s and later, after the outbreak of African opposition to colonial rule, most chiefs and headmen were, if not loyal to the Portuguese, reluctant to support the anticolonial movements. Given this history, the dislocations of parts of the countryside before independence and since, and the insistence of the MPLA-Labor Party on local administrators loyal to it, it is unlikely that former chiefs and headmen have a significant role. On at least one occasion, however, a party leader suggested that where chiefs still have the trust of their people and are willing to cooperate with the regime, some use for them will be found. How this situation will in fact develop cannot be foreseen. The crucial, and in some form continuing, units in local social systems are villages (or other form of local community) and groups based on common descent, actual or putative. These were basic entities, even if subject to change in form and function in the period preceding the Portuguese incursion and during the centuries when they exercised only indirect influence in the interior. Throughout these hundreds of years changes in the structure of local political systems and the influence of trade, slave raiding, and the like had their impact on local communities and kin groups, as did urban migration, forced labor, African involvement in cash cropping, and specific legal measures after the establishment of full Portuguese control; but local community organization and the organization of kin groups, often linked, remained the most significant elements in the lives of ordinary Africans. In general, the connection between a local community and a descent group (or some other kin-based set of persons) lay in the fact that the core of each community consisted of a descent group of some kind. The other persons in the community were tied to the members of the group by marriage or, in an earlier period, by a slave or client relationship, the effects of which may well have survived the formal abolition of slavery as they have elsewhere. Except for the village in which a king or major chief resided, the village was usually small, and even the community in which a king lived was not very large. Partial exceptions were some of the major trading towns of the Ovimbundu in the late nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century. Typically neighboring villages were tied together either by virtue of the fact that their core groups were made up of members of related descent groups (or different segments of a larger descent group) or, in some cases, by fairly frequent intermarriage among members of a limited set of villages. Ordinarily descent groups in Angola are matrilineal; that is, they include all persons descended from a common female ancestor through females, although the individuals holding authority are, with rare exceptions, males; in some cases junior males inherit from (or succeed to a position held by) older brothers; in others males inherit from their mother's brother. Descent groups, the members of which are descended from a male ancestor through males (hence patrilineal), apparently occur in only a few groups in Angola and have been reported only in conjunction with matrilineal groups, a comparatively rare phenomenon referred to as a double descent system. It must be heavily emphasized that even where double descent systems did not exist, kin traced through the father were important as individuals in systems in which group formation was based on matrilineal descent. In some cases, e.g., the Kongo, an individual was tied through his father to the latter's matrilineage, appropriate members of which had an important say in aspects of that individual's life. Broadly speaking, matrilineal descent groups alone have been reported for the Kongo (but well described only for some of the Zairian Kongo), the Mbundu, the Chokwe, and the Ambo, but it is probable that they occur elsewhere. A double descent system has been reported for Angola's largest ethnolinguistic group, the Ovimbundu, and may also be found among some of the southern groups. The way in which the double descent system of the Ovimbundu was structured and worked has not been adequately described. In any case ethnography done about the middle of the twentieth century suggests that patrilineal groups as such (as opposed to links with the father and some of his kin) had virtually disappeared and that matrilineal groups had, by and large, lost most of this significance in response to major changes in patterns of economic activity. Descent groups vary in size, degree of localization, function, and degree of internal segmentation. In the kinds of groups commonly called clans the links between a putative common ancestor and the living cannot be traced, and no effort is made to do so. Such groups are larger in scope than the units into which they are divided, although they need not have many members in absolute terms. They are rarely localized, and their members may be widely dispersed. Clans have not been widely reported in Angola. The only large ethnic category in which they have been said to exist is the Kongo. Even there they do not seem to have political or economic functions. More typical of Angolan communities are the kinds of descent groups usually called lineages, in most cases matrilineages. Here the common ancestor is not so remote, and genealogical links can be traced to her. Structurally lineages of greater depth (for example, those five to seven generations in depth from ancestor to most recent generation) may be further segmented into shallower lineages (perhaps three to four generations in depth), lineages at each level having different functions. This seems to have been the case among the Kongo. There the deeper unit controlled the allocation of land and had tasks connected with that crucial function, whereas shallower lineages controlled such matters as marriage. In the Ovimbundu case the precise structure of the matrilineage is not clear. Early ethnographers referred to it as large and very widely dispersed, sometimes extending across the boundaries between kingdoms. One source, however, describes the unit as the descendants through females of a common great-great grandmother; that is, five generations from ancestor to youngest adult generation. The patrilineage appears to have been localized in a number of related villages. Typically males lived with their fathers, women going to live with their husbands. The senior male in the local community was the head both of the village and of that section of the patrilineage living in it. There seems to have been no head of the patrilineage as a whole, except in the case of the royal patrilineage. Political authority at all levels was inherited patrilineally, and land was allocated and rights to land inherited within the patrilineal descent group. The group also had certain ritual functions. The dispersed matrilineage was the entity in which movable property was inherited. It also provided mutual aid, including financial aid in connection with the caravan trade in which the Ovimbundu were so heavily involved in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The period of the rubber trade (which ended abruptly in 1912 with the sudden availability of rubber from sources elsewhere) led to a diminution in the importance of the patrilineage and an enhancement of the significance of the matrilineage. It also led to the development of social differences based on wealth; some of the most successful traders were men who, under the earlier economic system based on agriculture and hunting, would not necessarily have acquired the degree of wealth and power that-temporarily at least-came to them because of their entrepreneurial talents. With the end of the caravan trade the Ovimbundu became cultivators again, this time of cash crops. (Subsistence cultivation had never disappeared, simply become less salient.) But having become cultivators they were confronted with the fact that much of their highland territory was attractive to European settlers. Their mode of cultivation and the loss of some good land to Europeans led to a land hunger and commercialization of land. The lineage, matrilineal or patrilineal, had less and less control over what had become the primary resource in the Ovimbundu economy. A study in 1968 showed that most of the holdings had been acquired by direct inheritance from father to son, purchase, and tenancy or lease, all without the involvement of the community. Even earlier (in the mid-1950s) an anthropological study of one (admittedly peripheral) Ovimbundu area had suggested that there was no significant trace of either the matrilineal or the patrilineal lineage, and this in a reputedly conservative community. The village consisted of persons related in a variety of ways but not forming a group, unilineal or otherwise. The terms formerly used for the patrilineal and matrilineal descent groups were still heard, but they did not refer to a cohesive group. They were applied instead to patrilineal and matrilineal relatives seen as individuals. Moreover the Portuguese term familia was often used. Later data seem to confirm this picture. The development of cash-crop agriculture and changes in land tenure, given often inadequate soils and Ovimbundu agricultural techniques, led to soil depletion and the need for fairly extensive holdings to support a nuclear family. Nucleated villages became less and less feasible. Increasingly, particularly in the coffee-growing area, the homestead was no longer part of the nucleated village, although dispersed homesteads in a given area were defined as constituting a village. The degree of dispersal varied, but the individual family, detached from the traditional community, tended to become the crucial unit. Where either Protestants or Roman Catholics were sufficiently numerous, the church and school rather than the descent group became the focus of social and sometimes of political life. In at least one study of a section of the Ovimbundu, it was found that each entity defined as a village consisted almost exclusively of either Protestants or Roman Catholics. But given the problems of soil depletion and, in some areas, of land shortage, not all Ovimbundu could succeed as cash-crop farmers. Substantial numbers of them thus found it necessary to go to other regions (and even other countries) as wage workers, so that some households came to consist of women and children for long periods. In 1967 the colonial authorities, concerned by the political situation east of the Ovimbundu and fearing the spread of rebellion to the highlands, gathered the people into large villages in order better to control them and, in theory at least, to provide better social and economic services. The Ovimbundu, accustomed to dispersed settlement, strongly resented the practice, among other things fearing that the land they were forced to abandon would be taken over by Europeans (and some of that in fact happened). According to the German agronomist Hermann Possinger, the only supporters of the move were the chiefs who had lost whatever power they still retained as the increasingly individualistic Ovimbundu became dispersed. By 1970 compulsory resettlement had been abolished in part of Ovimbundu territory and reduced elsewhere. A rural advisory service was instituted, and the formation of what the Portuguese called agricultural clubs was encouraged. The old term for matrilineal descent group was sometimes applied to these organizations, which were intended to manage credits for Ovimbundu peasants. These units, however, were based on common interest, although traces of kin connections sometimes affected their operation, as did the relations between ordinary Ovimbundu and chiefs. Moreover conflict within the group of ten took the form of accusations of sorcery. At the time of Possinger's observations these units had been functioning for two or three years, and the effects on them of independence, the stripping away of the advisory service, and the conflict between the MPLA-Labor Party regime and UNITA were unknown. What comes through, on the basis of the observations of Possinger and others, however, is that the Ovimbundu are not likely to take to enforced cooperation or collectivization easily. Among the Mbundu, according to Miller, the matrilineage (ngundu; pl, jingundu) survived centuries of change in other institutions. Membership in and loyalty to it was of great importance. The lineage supported the individual in material and non-material ways: because most land was lineage domain, access to it required lineage membership, and communication between the living and their ancestors, crucial to traditional religion, was mediated through the lineage. To be a slave or a pawn was to lack the protection offered by one's natal lineage and to be attached as a dependent to a lineage not one's own. Much of Miller's data, however, was gathered in the course of historical research and focused on the Mbundu's theory of the matrilineage rather than on its actual functioning. Moreover much of his work was done among the people of the old state of Kasanje at the eastern edge of Mbundu territory and was perhaps not wholly representative of all of the Mbundu even in earlier times-and less so given the greater impact of social and economic change on the western Mbundu. Nevertheless a summary of Miller's description of Mbundu lineages provides some indication of what may be found. The Mbundu lineage differed from Kongo and Ovimbundu groups in its underlying theory; it consisted not of individuals but of statuses or titles filled by living persons. The relations between these offices or titles were conceptualized in terms of kinship, and the individual occupying, for example, two statuses defined as bearing the relationship of brothers would treat each other as such whether or not they were brothers biologically. In this system a Mbundu could move from one status to another, thus acquiring a different set of relationships. How in fact this theoretical system affected interpersonal relationships between biological kin has not been described, however. The Mbundu matrilineage was in some respects a dispersed unit, but a core group maintained a lineage village to which its members returned, either at a particular stage in their lives or for brief visits. Women went to the villages of their husbands, and their children were raised there, the girls, like their mothers, then joining their husbands. The young men, however, went to the lineage village to join their mothers' brothers. The latter and their sisters' sons formed the more or less permanent core of the lineage community, visited from time to time by the women of the lineage who, as they grew old, might come to live the rest of their lives there. After a time, when the senior mother's brother who headed the matrilineage died, some of the younger men would go off to found their own villages. A man then became the senior male in a new lineage, the members of which would be his sisters and his sisters' sons. One of these younger men might, however, remain in the old village and succeed the senior mother's brother in the latter's status and take on his role completely, thus perpetuating the older lineage. This account suggests that the functioning lineage has a genealogical depth of three to four generations; a man, his fully adult sister's sons, and the latter's younger but married sister's sons. How this unit encompasses the range of statuses characteristic of the matrilineage in Mbundu theory is not altogether clear. Formerly a variety of groups or relations cut across the lineage system in addition to the institutions of the state organization (kingdom). Among these were witch finding or witch eradication movements and cults devoted to healing. The consequences of affiliation with either the Protestant or the Roman Catholic church have not been adequately described, but one report suggests that the Methodist organization characteristic of a minority of Mbundu was hierarchically structured and may have served as a way of bringing lineages together at least for some purposes. Whatever the kind and degree of change in the workings of lineage and community in rural Angola, research in the musseques of Luanda shows that the lineage system has little significance there. The musseques are the settlements in and around Luanda (and some of the other big towns) in which poor Africans (and in the preindependence period some poor whites) live. Residents of these settlements are, in great majority, of Mbundu origin; there were also some Ovimbundu and Kongo and a scattering of Africans of other origin in the late 1960s and early 1970s. (Many of the non-Mbundu may have left with the onset of the postindependence civil war.) Some of the inhabitants of the musseques at the time of research worked regularly in manual jobs, but others were employed only intermittently, and still others had been unemployed for some time. The variation in the material circumstances of (particularly) the males in the population sampled affected the composition of the households; but ideally, and often in fact, the household consisted of a man and a woman living in a union legally sanctioned or otherwise and their children. Occasionally another kinsman or woman would be part of the unit. The man was expected to assume the primary responsibility for supporting the household and to provide, if possible, for the education of the children, although others sometimes made some contribution. Given the economic circumstances of most of these men, the burden sometimes became overwhelming, and some men reacted by leaving the household. This accounts, with some exceptions, for the presence of women heads of households. The effects of more extended kinship ties were felt largely in the expectation of immigrants from rural areas that they could turn first to their kin already in place for at least temporary housing and other aid. The tendency was to look to heads of households who were of the same matrilineage, but that practice was not universal. Moreover it did not signify that the matrilineage had been transplanted to the musseques. The relationship between the head of the household and the newly arrived immigrant was that between two individuals. The urban situation does not provide the conditions for the functioning of the matrilineage as a social, political, and economic unit. Given the combination of the nuclear family household, the absence of matrilineages, and the relative ethnic homogeneity of the musseques of Luanda, the organization of permanent or temporary groups engaged in social or political activity and the formation of interpersonal relationships are likely to be based directly on economic concerns or on other common interest arising out of the urban situation. Elsewhere such concerns and interests are often mediated by or couched in terms of considerations of ethnicity or kinship. In Luanda that is less likely to be the case. Angolan Society After Independence Whatever national society existed in Angola before independence was imposed and largely defined by the Portuguese presence. On their withdrawal and the ensuing civil war there was a tendency to fragmentation, not wholly overcome in the late 1970s. Replacing the earlier ruling group was a Marxist-Leninist party, confronted in its first three years not only by the civil war but also by a variety of internal economic and other problems. Beginning in late 1977 with the First Congress of the MPLA, at which the conversion of the movement to a so-called vanguard party was announced, the party leaders attempted to define the kind of society and economy they wished to develop in the near future. The process of definition was by no means systematic and often simply drew on well-worn Marxist-Leninist cliches. Nevertheless from time to time statements of either purpose or criticism focused on specific features and problems of Angolan society as these leaders saw them. Sometimes the solutions offered appeared to have conflicting implications. Because most writing, journalistic or scholarly, has been concerned with internal politics and economic or international problems, these party utterances provide the few clues to postindependence developments and to intentions (if not to actual programs). Running through the statements of leaders and editorials in the Jornal de Angola and other party and state publications are frequent and strong references to the need to eliminate all signs of tribalism, regionalism, and racism. On several occasions it is asserted that tribalism and regionalism are not the same thing, but the differences are not spelled out. Because there is a link between ethnolinguistic category and place, the differential effects on behavior of tribalism and regionalism are often difficult to determine. In principle, however, a focus on the economic and other interests of those living in a given region as opposed to common culture and language does distinguish the two. Any of these three modes of social and political alignment runs counter to the ruling party's insistence on the putative common interests of workers, peasants, and revolutionary intellectuals as against the so-called petty bourgeoisie and all others, foreign and domestic, opposed to the establishment of a socialist society. The reference to race no longer speaks to the activities and attitudes of a dominant European minority but to those of a vast African majority, to the remaining Portuguese, and to the mestico population. The role of these Portuguese and some mesticos in the anticolonial cause notwithstanding, the behavior of those physically and socially like them in the colonial era predisposes many, if not most Africans, to look at them askance. It is also probable that, for some Africans, Portuguese and mesticos are visible obstacles to their own advancement. From the point of view of Africans in the ruling group, however, the Portuguese and mesticos in the MPLA-Labor Party have, on the one hand, the appropriate skills and ideology; on the other hand they have no alternative but to be loyal, inasmuch as they have no base in the country other than the party. A somewhat different kind of potential for conflict may arise with the return to Angola of Portuguese and mesticos who fled the country after independence and, unable to find a place in Portugal, were seeking to return, according to reports in mid-1978. The total number is not likely to be very large, but they are likely to be in direct competition with Africans for the kinds of jobs to which the latter aspire. At the same time that the party cautions against racism, it also seems to consider it necessary to say that old attitudes of superiority must go, presumably an allusion not only to the preindependence attitudes of Portuguese and mesticos, but also to those shown by urban educated Africans who would in former times have been called assimilados. In fact it is unlikely that the Portuguese in the party would act in the style of the Portuguese colonial official or settler, but some mesticos, uncommitted ideologically, might act in such a way; and educated Africans, secure in their racial situation, are even more likely to exhibit a sense of superiority to ordinary Africans. Related to these warnings about untoward attitudes are references to the tendency for urban Africans to ignore the needs of and look down on those living in rural areas. Thus an editorial in the Jornal de Angola notes that the "petty bourgeoisie [of the urban areas] will have nothing to do with the problems of the countryside-in other words with the majority of the Angolan people. Proof of this can be seen in the unwillingness to go into the interior to work, in the bureaucratic methods of many public employees, and in the calumnies and rumors that are constantly being put into circulation." (The meaning of the last accusation is not known.) The category "petty bourgeoisie" is widely and pejoratively used and seems to refer not to a class with a certain range and source of income but to those with a given set of attitudes and proclivities, the central one of which is material self-aggrandizement at the expense of others. That self-aggrandizement is directed toward the establishment of a style of life in which what are considered luxuries, given the circumstances of most of Angola's people, play a great part. A set of people singled out for occasional castigation are the bureaucrats who are accused of obstructing productive work by failing to perform the duties necessary to maintain the flow of permits and materials and by avoiding the making of quick decisions. This criticism applies largely to low- and middle-level workers in the state apparatus who refuse to take responsibility in the absence of their superiors. To the extent that these criticisms have a foundation in fact, the behavior involved may be attributed in part to patterns established in the colonial era, when middle- and low-level African bureaucrats were not expected to take responsibility for significant decisions. Some of it, however, may be attributed to the fact that party directives may not always be clear, and the wrong decision may bring an accusation not of simple error, but of counterrevolutionary intention. A further example of acting to serve "selfish interests" (the term petty bourgeoisie was not used but easily could have been) was the attempt of segments of the urban population-who they were in socioeconomic terms is not mentioned-to acquire as many material items and as much housing as they could by posing as militants and volunteering to participate actively in Neighborhood People's Commissions. These people were accused of "desiring to become a new elite." What seems to be at issue here is not simple egalitarianism, but the fact that corrupt means were used to acquire material goods and that those who were seeking to accumulate did not deserve what they obtained, having performed no useful function as the party defined it. The party's rhetoric and some of its actions seem to be directed to the widest distribution of the facilities for a minimum level of health and welfare, but its slogan is "from each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution." A certain inequality of rewards is thus foreseen. What is to be counted as a worthwhile contribution remains unclear. The party stresses the equal value of "intellectual" and manual labor but, given the shortage of educated Angolans and the history of contempt for manual labor exhibited by both Portuguese and assimilados, it is unlikely that-equal dignity or no-compensation and prestige will be equal. Further the party, in its discussion of important goals, names among them the development of an Angolan scientific establishment and suggests that adequate incentive be given to those whose scientific work contributes to the development of the economy. Differences in income and status between very well-educated Angolans in highly technical or central political roles on the one hand and urban workers and peasants on the other may not give rise to conflict, in part because the rate of interaction between these intellectuals and ordinary Africans is not likely to be very high. If, however, the category of intellectuals includes, as it probably does, the whole range of white-collar workers, most of them part of a bureaucracy, then the level of conflict over rewards may be high. From the point of view of the party, the existence of intellectuals, scientific or otherwise, in salaried government positions may give rise to one or more elite groups (at a minimum a political/bureaucratic elite and a scientific/technical elite), but they would be fully dependent on it. But the party has also apparently decided to permit the development of what may be called an entrepreneurial bourgeoisie. Confronted by a fragmented distribution network and the lack of a wide range of necessary goods, the MPLA-Labor Party will allow small businessmen to operate in the economy (in addition, of course, to state-owned enterprises on a larger scale and cooperatives) as long as these businessmen do not demonstrate counterrevolutionary or petty bourgeoisie tendencies, to use the party jargon. Less than a century ago, however, before the implantation of Portuguese rule and the immigration of Portuguese who took over most trading in Angola, many Africans had shown themselves to be capable of entrepreneurial activity, and there is no guarantee that all Africans who engage in trade and small-scale manufacturing will be content to be tame entrepreneurs. It is possible therefore that the party's efforts to develop the country and come to grips with its economic and technical problems will generate not only a bureaucratic middle class and elite, very common in African states, socialist and other, but a business middle class less amenable to control than a salaried state bourgeoisie. When the MPLA-Labor Party leaders turn from dealing with specific problems and irritants to projecting the ultimate nature of the state and society, they insist on using the standard language of many Marxist-Leninist groups, culled almost verbatim from early twentieth-century rhetoric and modified only by the inescapable recognition that the bulk of Angolans are rural. Thus the party was to be a vanguard party of the workers, for only they had the potential for revolutionary consciousness and revolutionary elan, but the peasants must be in close alliance with the workers-not only because there were simply not enough workers to do the job but also because, realistically, it was acknowledged that Angola was essentially rural and would remain so for a long time. Unacknowledged (publicly at least) is the possibility that urban workers and peasants may not have the same interests.