Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0012/00120.txt

Text File | 1991-06-24 | 38KB | 607 lines

$Unique_ID{COW00120}
$Pretitle{259}
$Title{Angola
Chapter 2B.   Ethnic Groups and Languages}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Irving Kaplan}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{groups
portuguese
mbundu
ovimbundu
angola
lunda
century
chokwe
kongo
political}
$Date{1978}
$Log{Figure 5.*0012001.scf
}
Country:     Angola
Book:        Angola, A Country Study
Author:      Irving Kaplan
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1978

Chapter 2B.   Ethnic Groups and Languages

     The great majority of Angolans (perhaps 98 percent of the total) speak
languages of the Bantu family-some closely related, others remotely so-spoken
by most Africans living south of the equator and by substantial numbers north
of it. The remaining indigenous peoples fall into two quite disparate
categories. A small number, all to be found in southern Angola, formerly lived
in small nomadic or seminomadic hunting and gathering bands. Most speak
so-called Click languages (after a variety of sounds characteristic of them)
and differ physically from local African populations, sharing characteristics
(small stature and lighter skin color among others) linking them to the
hunting and gathering bands of southern Africa sometimes referred to by
Europeans as Bushmen. The second category consists of mesticos, largely urban
and living in western Angola; most speak Portuguese although some also are
acquainted with African tongues, and a few may use such a language
exclusively.

The Definition of Ethnicity

     Bantu languages have been categorized by scholars into a number of sets
of related tongues. Some of the languages in any set may be more or less
mutually intelligible, especially in the areas where speakers of a dialect of
one language have come into sustained contact with speakers of a dialect of
another. Given the mobility and interpenetration of communities of Bantu
speakers over the centuries, transitional languages, i.e., those that share
characteristics of two tongues, have come into being on the border between
them. Frequently the languages of a set, particularly those with many widely
distributed speakers, are divided into several dialects. In principle (by
definition) dialects of the same language are mutually intelligible, but they
are sometimes not so in fact. For example, the historian Joseph C. Miller
notes that "outlying Mbundu groups have at least as much in common with their
nearest non-Mbundu neighbors as they share with distant Kimbundu-speakers."

     The existence of marginal or transitional communities between any two
sets of communities considered to constitute separate ethnolinguistic groups
and the occurrence of mutually unintelligible dialects among those who are
thought to be or think of themselves as one people suggests that language
alone does not define an ethnic group. On the one hand a set of communities
lacking mutually intelligible dialects may for one reason or another come to
share a sense of identity in any given historical period. On the other hand
groups sharing a common language or mutually intelligible ones do not
necessarily constitute a single group. Thus the Suku-most of them in Zaire but
some in Angola-have a language mutually intelligible with at least some
dialects of the Kongo, but their historical experience, including a period of
domination by Lunda speakers, makes them a separate group.

     The same caveats apply to the significance of other aspects of culture
for ethnicity. Miller notes that "despite the paucity of ethnographic data,
available evidence shows that the most basic features of Mbundu culture and
society have always occurred in non-congruent distributions which overlap with
other people on all sides." The absence of clear cultural boundaries between
putatively different groups holds elsewhere as well.

     Although common language and culture do not automatically make for common
identity, they provide a framework within which such an identity can be forged
given other historical experience. If nothing else, insofar as common culture
implies a set of common perceptions of the way the world works, it permits
individuals and groups sharing it to communicate more easily with one another
than with those who lack that culture.

     Historically, however, most Angolan groups had, as part of that common
culture, the experience and expectation of political fragmentation and
intergroup rivalry. That is, because one community shared language and culture
with another, political unity or even nonbelligerence did not follow, nor did
either community assume that it should.

     With the exception of the Kongo and the Lunda, none had experienced
political cohesion overriding smaller political units (chiefdoms or, at best,
small kingdoms). In the Kongo case an early kingdom encompassing most
Kongo-speaking communities had given way by the eighteenth century to
politically fragmented entities. Nominally a king continued to exist in Sao
Salvador (formerly and again since independence Mbanza Kongo), but he was
unimportant except that succession to the throne became a point of conflict
between the Portuguese and some Kongo in the twentieth century. In the Lunda
case the empire had been so dispersed and internal conflict so great by the
nineteenth century that political cohesion was limited.

     Very often the name by which a people has come to be known was given them
by outsiders. For example, the name Mbundu was first used by Kongo. Until such
naming, and sometimes long after, the various communities or sections of a set
sharing a language and culture are likely to call themselves by other terms,
and even when they come to use the all-encompassing name, they tend to reserve
it for a limited number of situations. In virtually all colonial territories,
Angola included, the naming process and the tendency to treat the named people
as a fixed entity differing from all others became pervasive, carried out by
the colonial authorities-sometimes with the help of scholars and
missionaries-as part of the effort to understand, deal with, and control local
populations. Among other things, the Portuguese tended to assimilate smaller,
essentially autonomous groups into larger entities. As time went on, these
populations, and particularly the more educated among them, seized upon these
names and the communities presumably covered by them as a basis for organizing
to improve their status and later for anticolonial agitation. Among the first
to do so were mesticos in the Luanda area. Although most spoke Portuguese and
had a Portuguese (male) ancestor in their genealogies, they often spoke
kiMbundu as a home language. It is they who, in time, initiated the
development of a common Mbundu identity.

     In the Kongo case, the experience of the Zairian segment in what was then
the Belgian Congo led to the development of a degree of Kongo cohesiveness
there. Angolan Kongo, many of whom had gone to work in Belgian territory, were
inspired by the sense of cohesion they encountered to the point that, in the
early days of anticolonial political agitation, Holden Roberto and his
colleagues talked in terms of an all-Kongo state rather than all-Angola
independence.

     Angolan Kongo identity was further enhanced by more concrete experience
in the economy. Many Kongo in the part of Uige District devoted to coffee
production were deeply affected by the ways in which production was organized,
including as it did Europeans taking African-held land and the requirement
that Africans work on the coffee estates. Other groups, particularly Mbundu of
Cunza Norte, were similarly affected, and the result was an agrarian rebellion
in the two districts in 1961 (see The Beginning of Revolution, 1961, ch. 1).
The sociologist Jeffery M. Paige has argued persuasively that the rebellion
was primarily a peasant response to specific social, economic, and political
conditions rather than based on or organized in terms of ethnicity.
Nevertheless this experience helped reinforce a sense of Kongo identity that
had other s