The optimistic utopia: sacrifice and expectations of political transformation in the Angolan Revolutionary Movement
2021; Wiley; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1469-8676.12977
ISSN1469-8676
Autores Tópico(s)Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development
ResumoIn this paper, I propose an anthropological discussion of the correlation of utopia and optimism, in relation with ideas of personal and collective sacrifice. To do so, I will invoke my ethnographic research on political activism in Angola, particularly the so-called Revolutionary Movement – a group of young activists challenging Angola's authoritarian regime. During recent Luanda fieldwork, I observed how most of the 'Revús' engaged in self-sacrificial behaviour, exposing themselves to police brutality, imprisonment and social discrimination, in their struggle towards a brighter collective future. This optimistic and somewhat Gandhian stance marks a dramatic departure from the sense of fatalism and 'culture of fear' that seems otherwise to prevail in Angola. I will question if and in what terms such stances are 'utopian' and configure 'principles of hope', as Ernst Bloch would put it. In the process, I will perform a critical interrogation of the correlation of utopia, hope and optimism. Dans cet article, je propose une discussion anthropologique de la corrélation entre l'utopie et l'optimisme, en relation avec les idées de sacrifice personnel et collectif. Pour ce faire, j'invoquerai mes recherches ethnographiques sur l'activisme politique en Angola, en particulier le mouvement dit révolutionnaire, un groupe de jeunes militants qui contestent le regime autoritaire de l'Angola. Au cours de mes recherches sur le terrain à Luanda en 2015 et 2016, j'ai observé comment la plupart des « Revús » se sont livrés à un comportement d'abnégation, s'exposant à la brutalité policière, à l'emprisonnement et à la discrimination sociale, dans leur lutte pour un avenir collectif plus radieux. Cette position optimiste et quelque peu gandhienne marque un changement radical par rapport au fatalisme et à la « culture de la peur » qui semblent prévaloir en Angola. Je me demanderai si et en quels termes de telles positions sont « utopiques » et configurent des « principes d'espoir », comme le dirait Ernst Bloch. Ce faisant, je mènerai une interrogation critique sur la corrélation entre l'utopie, l'espoir et l'optimisme. The first time I met Adolfo Campos, in Luanda, Angola in October 2015, he was in a complicated situation: being severely beaten by the police and, along with two other men, dragged into a police van, with his white shirt spattered with blood (see Figure 1). A few moments before that, I had been briefly introduced to him by Claudio, a mutual friend. The encounter took place in front of the São Domingos church, where a group of activists had called for what was supposed to be a peaceful vigil in protest against the imprisonment of 17 members of an antigovernmental activist movement called Movimento Revolucionário earlier that year, demanding their immediate release. When I sat down with Adolfo a week later, in a bar a few hundred metres away from that same church, I learned from him that this was just the latest episode of a history of attempted demonstrations, violent encounters with the police and more or less extended sojourns in the prisons of Luanda, as a result of their open contestation of the Angolan regime. His own body was a visual illustration of this history: skull scars, missing teeth, persisting back aches. This paper addresses the politics of contemporary activism in Angola. I will discuss the motivations that move people like Adolfo, and the reasons why they engage in a self-sacrificial mode of political expression that, as I describe below, is more improvisational and reactive than strategic or prefigured. I argue that these 'tactics' embody a political utopia that is more than an ideology or worldview (see Maskens and Blanes 2018). In fact, it is a method towards the creation of a new space of thinking and interlocution that exceeds the logic of victimhood and instead relies on humour, optimism and provocation as gateways towards the fabrication of something 'new'. Below I discuss the relation between utopia, hope and optimism, framed within local discussions on fatalism and more generally in terms of an anti-Afro-pessimist narrative. The starting point for this discussion is similar to David Harvey's suggestion of 'spaces of hope' as material expressions of a 'dialectical utopianism' that embodies a spirit of active intervention towards new geographies of citizenship (2000). Here I work on a distinction between hope and optimism in order to expose a political activism that, more than engaging in mere abstract, hopeful expectations of change, promotes interventions through optimistic 'provocations'. The Movimento Revolucionário (Revolutionary Movement, henceforth 'Revús', as they are known in Angola) was formed in Luanda in 2011, in the aftermath of (and in many ways inspired by) the Arab Spring. Although demographically speaking a small movement, the Revús grew in notoriety in subsequent years mostly due to their outspoken defiance and contestation of the regime, demanding (primarily) the end of the everlasting rule of president José Eduardo dos Santos and his party (the MPLA).11 Emerging as a communist political and military movement that became, alongside the FNLA and UNITA, one of the protagonists of the liberation wars, the MPLA began by enforcing a Marxist-Leninist agenda. But the civil war that ensued (and lasted until 2002) and the end of the Cold War and subsequent reforms eventually gave way to a form of authoritarian state capitalism (see Oliveira 2014). Apart from the first president Agostinho Neto in the early days of independence (1975–1979), the country had only known one president up to the summer of 2017: José Eduardo dos Santos. Dos Santos would eventually step down voluntarily in 2017, after resigning from the party leadership and preparing a political transition, which, among other things, secured him lifetime immunity (see the Conclusion to this text). In a country with a de facto single-ruling party since its independence (1975) and with a terrible dictatorial track record with regard to democratic rule, human rights and freedom of speech (e.g. Marques 2011; Cruz 2015), this movement of open, public contestation was indeed a novelty at the time. More so if we consider the regime's history of violent reaction against internal opposition (massacres, torture, concentration camps, etc.), both from other political parties and within the ruling party itself, as well as its traditional totalising control of the mainstream media within their reiterated ambition of promoting what has been called the 'New Angola' (Schubert 2017) – the top-down imposition of a utopia of a modern, oil and diamond-fuelled country that evolved from a Marxist-Leninist, Soviet agenda in the 1970s to a neoliberal Dubai-inspired regime in the 2000s.22 This image of New Angola is a remnant of the post-independence, Marxist-Leninist revolutionary moment (Malaquias 2007), when the MPLA used a liberationist utopia (Pepetela 1992) to promote ideological and historiographical ruptures with the colonial regime and engage in an educational and philosophical apologetics towards a 'modern' Angolan nationhood and citizenship (e.g. Blanes and Paxe 2015). Today, as several authors have noted, the Marxist-Leninist agenda has been overtaken by a political pragmatics that is very much capitalist (Oliveira 2014). Thus the early independent, 'revolutionary utopia' of the 1960s and 1970s (as the Angolan novelist Pepetela once famously put it), imbued with an inherently optimistic socialist ontology, eventually became, through 'depoliticizing tactics' (Péclard 2013; Schubert 2017) that consistently produced a refraction between state and citizenship (Tomás 2012; Buire 2018), one of fear, resignation and fatalism for a majority of Angolans. While the optimistic stance that stems from the officialist New Angola narrative is still operative in the local public space, it is countered with a growing acknowledgement of its phantasmagorical character, exemplified in the regime's muscular tactics of repression of dissent (e.g. Gastrow 2017a). At the same time, the regime prefigures such movements of contestation as treasons against their developmentalist, modernising project (see Blanes 2019). Adolfo and other demonstrators being beaten by the police, 12 October 2015 Photo: Ruy Blanes [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] Dago, Agostinho and Adolfo protesting near the court, minutes before Agostinho was arrested, 23 November 2015 Photo: Coque Mukuta [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] Streets closed down near the Presidential Palace, during alleged activist vigil in nearby church, 18 October 2015 Photo: Ruy Blanes [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] Within this framework, the Revús' protest tactics have had an ambiguous outcome. On the one hand, they have been consistently rebuffed with police brutality, imprisonment and, on four occasions as of December 2020, deaths of activists. On the other hand, this violence has helped create, through new political movements and communication strategies, international awareness, stirring debates on human rights, equality, democratic culture, etc. One illustrative example was the demonstration of 7 March 2011, acknowledged today as the moment in which the Revú movement became, more than a spontaneous confluence of discontent, a 'thing' (Blanes 2017). What happened on that day? Well, according to journalists Mukuta and Claudio (2011), nothing happened: the proposed demonstration against the president José Eduardo dos Santos was dismantled on the spot by police arrests of its main organisers. It did, however, spark a movement of citizen mobilisation. Since that moment, the history of this movement has been one of successive attempted demonstrations and violent police crackdown (Blanes 2017), where activists like Adolfo have collected their bodily pains. This history of violence, however, has had the unexpected outcome of creating a space of identification and exposure of discontent in this country, or in other words of exposing the 'infrapolitics' of resistance (Scott 1990). Perhaps the best way to describe the kind of mobilisation behind the Revús movement is to speak of a 'confluence', in which people of several different backgrounds and socio-political trajectories – from music and artist collectives (mostly from the rap and hip hop scenes) to NGO and human rights activists, journalists, high school and university teachers and students, lawyers, etc. – began to network and collaborate in several different initiatives that ranged from organising debates, protest rallies and other events to promoting publication and media exposure. Despite their diverse backgrounds and heterogeneous political worldviews, the point of contact between such movements was precisely the protest against the regime's official narrative and the struggle for political change. At the same time, the 'confluential' character of the Revú movement, while enabling a horizontal, collaborative and egalitarian process that prevented the replication of the hierarchical political organisations they contested, also made it vulnerable to external interference.33 Many Revús acknowledged to me that they had several discussions concerning the relevance of tactics such as organising the movement into a formal entity such as a political party, electing leadership and instating membership, for instance. However, there was never a general consensus in this direction. In this respect, one could speak of a 'utopian confluence', in the sense that, if it is self-configured as what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004) called 'multitude' (an open, expansive network that counters mainstream pseudo-democratic rule), it also not only resists but embraces the cause of overarching transformation (revolution). However, if Hardt and Negri perceived a productive initiative behind the notion of multitude (2004: xv), what is observed in Angola incorporates, as we will describe below, several layers of reaction, improvisation, adaptation and finally provocation in its configuration. This is why I prefer to see it as an open-ended confluence. In this framework for instance, the arrest of the 15 Revús in June 2015, against which Adolfo protested at the moment I met him, was based on 'evidence' from an infiltrated agent – a videotaped meeting where strategies for future demonstrations and for a peaceful political transition were being discussed.44 After this detention, two other female activists were subsequently arrested and added to the same accusation, which is the reason why this process is often referred to as the '15+2 process'. These discussions were inspired by Gene Sharp's book From dictatorship to democracy (1993), which re-emerged in certain debates in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, and a translation of some of its principles into the Angolan context by one of the group's detainees, Domingos da Cruz (see Cruz 2015). The collective imprisonment initiated a juridical process, which several commentators described as a 'farce' and a 'comedy', due to the more than obvious manipulation of evidence towards the production of political scapegoats for the increasingly tense political environment. In April 2016, the 15+2 political prisoners were condemned to sentences ranging from two to eight years, for alleged conspiracy towards a coup d'état.55 A few months after the ruling, however, these sentences were overruled in the annual presidential amnesty, and the prisoners were released. They contested this decision because they felt it was an indirect acknowledgement of their guilt in the process. However, the contestation was unsuccessful. Since 2015, I have followed the story of the Revús, talking with several journalists, lawyers, activists, artists and academics who are part of, or sympathetic to, the movement, as well as with some of the people belonging to this group who were not part of the 15+2 who were arrested or on trial. I also attended several demonstrations (or attempted demonstrations; see Blanes and Paxe 2015a) and spent time around the courtroom where the trial of the 15+2 was taking place, talking to the families of the accused and being pushed around by the overwhelming police apparatus that circumvented the courtroom. Finally, in 2016 I met several of the 15+2, and had a chance to talk to them about their experiences before, during and after their arrest and trial. Adolfo was one such Revú, lucky enough to not have been at the wrong place and the wrong time in June 2015. However, since that moment he had been arrested on several occasions at attempted demonstrations and vigils organised by the remaining Revús, only to be released a few hours later. Meanwhile, in jail, several of the 15+2 prisoners staged hunger strikes and other forms of protest against what they considered to be violations of their basic rights. One such hunger strike, staged by the famous rapper Luaty Beirão, lasted 36 days, and brought an international spotlight to the situation of the 15+2 with the attention of international media, European and American diplomats and human rights organisations (Amnesty International, etc.). This spotlight, and the subsequent public outcry, did not prevent the mock trial and Luaty's unfair condemnation. But it did produce what we could call a 'martyrising aura' around him, the idea that he was willing to sacrifice for a 'greater cause', the possibility of a 'different Angola'. In the meantime, unbeknownst to him, Luaty's image began circulating in several international outlets as the icon of Angolan resistance (Siegert 2018). Rallies taking place across Europe and Brazil held images of Luaty and several of his fellow detainees, and eventually Luaty's prison memoirs were published to wide acclaim (Beirão 2017). On one occasion during Luaty's hunger strike, Adolfo, myself and a small group of friends met in the hospital where he was interned. At the time, most of us believed he would not survive, so our conversations were somewhat gloomy, alternating between Luaty's immediate future and that of the country in general. Adolfo talked about his own 'solution': in a moment at which the rule of the president José Eduardo dos Santos seemed to be reaching an end, something had to be done to address the main rumour at the time, which referred to a nepotistic move: naming president Dos Santos' son Filomeno as next chairman of the ruling party (and thus inevitably the next president of Angola). 'If that happens', Adolfo declared with a determined smile, 'I will go to the matas'. He was ready to start a new revolution, mimicking the same kind of liberationist logic as during the independence period.66 The matas or the 'jungle' refers to the rural areas in the Lower Congo and northern Angola regions where the liberation movements (MPLA, UNITA and UPA-FNLA) staged their guerrilla warfare against the Portuguese colony in the 1960s. They were also places of refuge for many Angolans fleeing from war fronts. Perhaps what struck me most throughout my interactions with Adolfo and other Revús was their open willingness to engage in these violent encounters with police and security forces, not only with the Angolan authorities, but also in other instances of their private and social lives. I heard stories of Revús who lost their jobs, who fell out with their own families, or who lived in a constant state of alert in their own neighbourhoods, convinced that they were being surveilled by the secret services. Others told me about attempted bribes on behalf of the regime, receiving offers of substantial amounts of money and stable jobs – bribes that they consistently refused, sometimes provoking criticism on behalf of their own families. Some even explained to me how to recognise how your phone was being tapped by third parties. Today, the families of the 15+2 are suffering severe financial deprivation due to their long-term sentences. Some of them have left Angola and sought exile or refuge elsewhere. In a certain sense, the 15+2 and other less notorious Revús became, at their own will, self-sacrificial figures, fighting for a cause that, at least from the outside, seemed very much hopeless: the downfall of an old, corrupt regime and the opening up of a process of democratic regeneration. But, as I will try to demonstrate below, this process of self-sacrifice is in fact a form of political performance that is more about creative interlocution than of passive subjection to external force. In a previous paper (Blanes 2014), I explored the problem of self-sacrifice beyond its traditional ritualistic and theological framing (e.g. Hubert and Mauss 1964 [1898]; de Heusch 1985), in a Christian prophetic and messianic movement of Angolan origin called the Tokoist Church. There, I noted that self-sacrificial regimes of martyrdom among prophetic leaders in places such as Angola and the DR Congo were deeply tied, in political and epistemological terms, to temporal conceptions, which affected both an eschatology, a memory and, in sum, a semantics of history (Koselleck 2002). In the case of the leader of the Tokoist Church (Simão Toko, 1918–1984), his life was generally perceived as one of suffering, motivated by countless episodes of persecution, imprisonment, exile and violence, which were counteracted with peaceful, dignified resistance, and could only be explained through a millennial belief in a future Angola that would be saved from (colonial and postcolonial) repression, injustice and suffering (Blanes 2014b). But in the case of the Revús, what are they sacrificing themselves for? To begin to answer this would imply plunging into their personal and ideological backgrounds. In this respect, while many Revús openly described themselves as religious (Catholic or Muslim, for instance), many others were (are) self-proclaimed atheists or agnostics. But in any case, their political strategies and expectations did not incorporate a theological sense of suffering and self-sacrifice, but instead a more secular version of peaceful resistance in a Gandhian sense (see Fox 1989). I got a sense of this when I asked the Revús and their sympathisers about 'the future': if you are contesting the present and fear the future it may produce, what is your alternative? The point of convergence in their responses was what could be called an anti-anomic solution. On the one hand, these activists recognised a situation of generalised moral breakdown of the regime, somewhat reminiscent of Chinua Achebe's famous novel, 'everything is falling apart, and the current regime is rotting away' (o regime está a cair de podre). The 'regime' that they had in mind played out on two planes: the specific regime of the governing party MPLA, but also the more generalised moral regime of independent Angola, that once began as a revolutionary utopia but experienced, throughout the decades, a process of political, social and cultural degeneration that led, among other things, to systemic corruption, conformity, self-censorship and living with fear of the government's authoritarian rule. This acknowledgement of an anomic state, however, was not what Durkheim would frame, in his study On suicide (1897), as a cause for social breakdown, but rather a consequence of a specific form of rule that was simultaneously a point of departure, the historical moment for a rupture, a new Angolan Revolution.77 For a development of this perspective, see Blanes (2019). In this respect, unlike the millennial expectation of prophetic religious movements in Angola, the Revús cultivated a proactive stance of challenging the present state of things and opening up new futures. On the other hand, the points of divergence in the Revú confluence emerged in what concerned the methods towards 'the future' of the new revolution. In my conversations with them, I heard of two different routes: an 'electoralist' trend, based on the conviction that the source of the 'problem' is located in the governing party and its ruler, and thus seeing the solution for Angola in partisan rotation and also a 'rupturist' trend, based on the conviction that, beyond the downfall of the current regime, there has to be a new social and political pedagogy (see also Dala 2016: 156), a new 'culture', as it were. The space of confluence between both trends is, interestingly enough, the Angolan Constitution, which they perceive simultaneously as one of the few jurisdictions that can protect them from the regime, and one of the sites that the regime chooses to attack in order to safeguard its self-perpetuation. This was particularly the case with the recent constitutional revision of 2010, which has been criticised for enabling the then president José Eduardo dos Santos' perpetual immunity and reducing the participation of civil society in the country's parliamentary politics to a virtual impossibility; but it has also been invoked as a guarantee of the Revús' rights to protests and to be treated with dignity in their sojourn in prison. Here, the question of legal rights becomes the object of struggle and contention (e.g. Kelly 2006). Through my conversations with the Revús, I perceived their motivation as a political utopia, based on ideas of true, horizontal democracy, egalitarianism and financial and constitutional justice. It was a utopia in a very traditional sense of seeking a social and political rupture with a specific present and hegemonic projection of the future in Angola, and promoting an encompassing change in 'culture' and 'mentality' based on principles of justice, solidarity and egalitarianism. In these conversations, the subject of utopia often emerged as a trope that enabled more concrete formulations: for some activists, their utopia for Angola was very simply 'a country without José Eduardo dos Santos', and thus its concretisation was a matter of a change in leadership. For others, it implied a more overarching and philosophical 'ibertar a consciência' ('freeing of the mind') from a conformist frustration to a proactive optimism. This was the discourse, for instance, of several members of the 3a Divisão (Third Division), an activist hip hop crew from Cacuaco (north Luanda), many of whose members were part of the Revú confluence and were involved in the 15+2 process. In an onjango (collective meeting) I held with them in 2016, they explained that their struggle, their utopia was to break the paradigms, to build consciousness and produce new (revolutionary) frames of mind. But this revolutionary frame of mind, however, was not a 'classic' guerrilla stance but instead a pacifist one that broke with Angola's history of repression, censorship and fear. Because, as one of its members explained to me, 'Angola é filha da violência' ('Angola is the daughter of violence').88 This was mentioned by Hata, one of the 15+2, in reference to an expression by the French historian René Pélissier. Hata was referring to the decades of war that marked Angola's independent history until 2002, and which still resonate in the regime's mentality. Thus, the argument was for an emancipation from that specific parenthood. These recognitions implied that they were struggling against a perceived historical 'situation' – the moment in which the once revolutionary and libertarian political leadership that struggled for Angolan independence in the 1960s and 1970s had now become a 'colony' in itself, exerting an authoritarian, nepotistic rule – and attempted to overcome the fatalism of its naturalisation and totalisation. From this perspective, the Revús were inherently optimistic, in the sense that, in contrast with hegemonic fatalist discourse ('if the current regime falls, chaos will ensue'), they engaged in the contemporary alter-global utopian slogan of 'another world is possible'. Sacrifice, or rather self-sacrifice, was part of the political tactic through which that 'other world' would be reached – the difference between talking the talk and walking the walk, as it were. Thus, optimism here was not just about hope or confidence, but more about engaging in constituent imaginations, as Erika Biddle et al. (2007) would put it – transforming theory and militancy into specific action towards social and political transformation. Here, an underlying yet relevant distinction emerged between optimism and hope. While both concepts are often understood as convergent – as an engagement with the future that emerges in contexts of present crises (Kleist and Jansen 2016) – in Angola I noticed how the narrative of hope appeared in its theological and teleological form, as a passive and somewhat abstract expectation (Zigon 2009) of future bliss that was relayed by the recurring yet never fully confirmed narrative of the New Angola. In this particular context, as I argued elsewhere (Blanes 2018), this never-ending expectation became a matter of fact in the everyday lives of Angolan citizens, and in particular of those living in Luanda – a city being overhauled by construction projects promising a new metropolis (although see Gastrow 2017a, 2017b). It produced a state-dependent 'yearning' (Jansen 2014) that discouraged political protest and contention. In this respect, the political optimism conveyed by the Revús was in fact an invitation to political initiative towards a radical political and societal change (a revolution, in its general sense): the struggle not only against the regime, but also and especially against conformism, passive expectation and dependence. This idea became clear to me on one occasion in 2016, when I sat in one of the buildings of the Agostinho Neto University's Faculty of Social Scienceswith Arante Kivuvu and Hitler Samussuku, two members of the 15+2. On that occasion, Arante described his tribulations in prison throughout 2015 and 2016, which, apart from physical diseases such as malaria, led him to a nervous breakdown and psychological trauma. However, immediately afterwards both he and Hitler described this experience as feeling 'livres na prisão': 'free in jail'. Considering the personal horrors that they had just shared, the statement came as a surprise to me. But they explained: knowing that they were innocent, and realising the repercussions of their arrest, they were aware that 'something new' was emerging in the process, something that would allow for an overarching change in Angolan society – the utopian 'change of consciousness'. Arante added that personally the time in prison strengthened his points of view, but also gave him new angles to think about things. He interrogated himself about citizenship and its meanings, especially when he saw himself surrounded in prison by Angolans who barely knew how to read and had no idea of what citizenship even meant. But this was an opportunity to learn and understand problems at the core, and to value and cultivate the importance of struggling for your rights. He even felt grateful for having lived such an experience (see also Blanes 2019: 34). This is where I perceived that the self-sacrificial stance of the Revús was based not on a logic of fatalist martyrdom but on a movement that departed from a diagnostic of an anomic state (Blanes 2019) into a hopeful formulation of a different society in the country. And this required an anthropological optimism – not a Leibnizian theological optimalism, nor a naïve Candidian optimism, nor a cruel optimism (Berlant 2011). It is an optimism based on an acknowledgement of the situation – a citation a l'ordre du jour that challenges totalising victorious marches, as Benjamin framed it in his understanding of the 'messianic moment' (1968) – and the possibilities available to change it. As David Harvey noted, it is an expression of a progressive politics that responds to what Gramsci once called the 'optimism of the intellect' (2000: 17). From this perspective, if, as Laurent Loty (2011) points out, there is a historical opposition
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