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“No caminho das Estrelas”: How Socialism Created a Framework for the Emergence of Postindependence Modern Art in Angola

2021; UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center; Volume: 54; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/afar_a_00598

1937-2108

Nadine Siegert,

Cuban History and Society

The emerging contemporary African art scenes that, since the 1990s, have become so visible in the global biennials, international art exhibitions, and auction houses are framed by specific historical paradigms. One of the most important moments of inflection for these art scenes was the liberation era and its implementation of cultural emancipation—often guided by government cultural policies that promoted selective ideas about the role of arts and culture within the newly liberated country and its society. These policies often aimed for cultural emancipation and the decolonization of aesthetic practices. Research on these processes, however, has tended to reflect the patterns of colonial distribution on the African continent—with little attention paid to the former Portuguese empire and the art scenes that emerged from it. More transcontinental, transnational, and transregional research that also crosses former colonial language borders is needed. This article, which is based on an extensive literature review, work in archives, and on-the-ground research conducted since 2005 in Angola, focuses on that country's postindependence art world. The first portion contextualizes Angolan modern art under the cultural-political framework of socialism and relates this to the cultural ideology of Angolanidade as a concept of cultural indigeneity. The second portion examines the visuality of art produced in that context—including public art that is visible in the urban space of Luanda even today. In presenting this understudied moment in the history of African modern art, my aim is to prepare the field for future research.In devising its program for constructing a national identity based on culture, many African countries favored a productive interplay between, on the one hand, universalizing modernist ideologies and, on the other hand, selected local traditions (Okeke 1982; Enwezor 2001). From the early twentieth century, Black intellectual concepts such Négritude, as well as the radical writings of Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin, focused on the decolonization of the mind and were important inspirations for emerging modern artists in the liberated African countries. In some cases, this meant a rejection of Western categorizations of art and a turn toward local traditions—often highly stylized, reconstructed, or reinvented to better enable their integration into the national canon-building effort and to foster an aesthetic nationalism.Another gesture was more future-oriented: newly independent states promoted cultural policies that embraced socialist and utopian visions of an African modernity (Mudimbe 1994: 38). Some emerging nations—such as Ghana, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and the former Portuguese colonies Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and Sao Tomé and Principe—drew upon Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Maoist China for ideological inspiration, and socialist aesthetics thus became part of their decolonizing practice. With its anticolonial stance and promises of progress and equality, socialism was an attractive philosophy for many African states in the era of Cold War binaries (Babu 1981; Keller 1987; Pitcher and Askew 2006). Artists could draw from a variety of ideological role models and combine them with diverse regional and local ethnic cultures to manufacture a national culture.Artists such as Teresa Gama in Angola, José Craveirinha in Mozambique, and Eshetu Tiruneh and Tadesse Mesfin in Ethiopia were commissioned to produce “art for the people” by the socialist governments of their nations. Artists in the Soviet sphere were expected to create work that met Aleksandr Gerasimov's 1932 aesthetic conception of socialist realism; it had to be “realistic in form and socialist in content” (Ozerov 1948; Heller 1997). Furthermore, socialist realist works were expected to adhere to the movement's four principles: works must be 1) proletarian and thus relevant to the working class; 2) realistic in a representational sense; 3) partisan and support the aims of state and party; and 4) representative of recognizable, “typical” issues (Groys 2013: 141). In creating such works, artists often drew from a common stock of motifs, which recur throughout the movement and its various media (e.g., posters, monuments, murals). Artists in socialist Africa also drew from other sources and translated them to their specific contexts. This is visible, for example, in the public art of the period. Posters such as those produced by Tadesse Mesfin in the 1970s in Ethiopia adopted Marxist and Soviet historical prototypes and were similar to earlier East European “lumpen” socialist realist political cartoons. In Angola and Mozambique, the poster production of the late 1970s and early 1980s was inspired by both the bold, revolutionary graphics of Emory Douglas, who designed for the US Black Panther Party (Doss 1999), and the bright, celebratory colors and pop art–inspired graphic aesthetics of the Cuba-based Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL). That organization's visual promotion of anti-imperialism served as a form of cultural transfer for Cuba's tricontinentalist ideology (Camnitzer 2003; Cushing 2003; Fernandes 2006; Mahler 2018).1 In the 1960s, OSPAAAL's style laid the groundwork for what visual forms of anticolonialism and anticapitalism could look like, even serving as a main reference for the visual culture of anti-imperialist solidarity movements in the West (Fig. 1).The liberation movements fighting for independence in the Portuguese Oversee Territories were considered to be “revolutionary” because the political and societal change they pursued was both violent and radical. The effort in Angola, which began in earnest in the early 1960s, trailed the independence movements of other African countries, many of which had already achieved independence. The violent colonial war that would rage during the regime of fascist dictator António de Oliveira Salazar and his successor, Marcello Caetano, would not conclude until Portugal's Carnation Revolution of 1975. Many Portuguese then left Angola, and the country's postindependence society was rebuilt from the ground up (Venter 2013).In all of the former Portuguese colonies, the postindependence period was framed by anti-imperialist ideology, which led to the adoption of Marxist politics by the ruling governments of the late 1970s and 1980s. During the struggle for independence, the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA)—one of three liberation movements in Angola—adhered to the principles of socialist internationalism, and after independence in 1975 it adopted a Marxist-Leninist political ideology under the leadership of the country's first president, the poet-politician Agostinho Neto. The adoption of socialism led to the outbreak of civil war between the former independence movements. Socialist “brother states” (primarily Cuba and the Soviet Union) supported the MPLA, and South Africa, backed by liberal Western states, supported the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA). The war lasted until 2002, and the devastation it wrought on Angolan society is still being felt in the country's social, economic, and cultural spheres (Chabal and Vidal 2007; Newitt 2008; Oliveira 2015).To understand aesthetic practice in Angola in the days since independence, one must consider the discourse developed by the anticolonial movement, a discourse embedded in socialist aesthetic theory. After independence, visual art was not only regarded as an important tool of political propaganda but was considered a powerful instrument for shaping political thought and practice (Collier 2016; Siegert 2016). Art had played an essential role in the decolonization process and the anti-imperialist struggle—as both a link to the past and a powerful strategy for commenting on the present and for imagining a future. The latter was manifested both in the political project of the MPLA and in the poetic anticipation of artists; in fact, political nationalism was preceded by cultural nationalism (Martinho 1979). When Neto wrote poetically of “o caminho das estrelas” (a path of the stars), he was imagining a nation to come, one based on Marxist-Leninist principles (Neto 1981). In his poem of the same name—written after independence—he praises the beauty and strength of African culture while also celebrating the movement out of an oppressive past and into a future of freedom: “A liberdade nos olhos / o som nos ouvidos” (freedom in the eyes / the sound in the ears). Neto began writing poetry long before independence, however. “O içar da bandeira” (The hoisting of the flag), written in the late 1950s after he had spent time in a Portuguese prison for his political activities, already imagines an independent Angola (Neto and Mea 1975). His writings would become a reference for various Angolan cultural productions, including No caminho das Estrelas, a cinematic tribute to Angola and its first president, directed by Antonio Ole (1981).Modern art in Angola—specifically, the formation of a modern, decolonial artistic subjectivity (Okeke-Agulu 2015)—emerged comparatively late. Before independence most practicing modern artists in the colony's capital, Luanda, were European emigrants or short-term residents (e.g., Portuguese military personnel). From the 1950s until independence in 1975, fine art exhibitions in the capital had sporadically included Angolan artists such as António Ole, whose early work Sobre o consuma da pilula (About the pill consumption) (1970) was exhibited at the IV Salão de Arte Moderna de Luanda. Shown amid works by more established Portuguese artists, Sobre o consuma da pilula scandalized the conservative cultural elite thanks to its provocative content: it depicts Pope Paul VI taking a birth control pill (Fig. 2).The European artists in the capital were trained in the classic modernist styles, which also became the educational background of the first generation of Angolan artists after independence. Artists such as Gama, Ole, and Vítor Manuel Teixeira (better known as “Viteix”), had their first contacts with modern art in this rather bourgeois context that favored the styles of Portuguese modernism, such as Albano Neves e Sousa's (1921–1995) exoticized cubist and figurative paintings of “the people” of Angola (Correia and Neves e Sousa 2008) (Fig. 3), or Cruzeiro Seixas's (1920–2020) surrealist works (Martins 2006).The new Angolan artists, however, were also influenced by Négritude, Pan-Africanism, and Fanonism (Harney 2004; Alessandrini 2005; Irele 2011; Al-Abbood 2012), as well as the writings of Nigerian author Chinua Achebe and Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. Marxism at this time was a global phenomenon and probably the most popular political philosophy among artistic circles globally. In the years before independence, artists in Luanda relied on the underground radio station Angola Combatente for news about the liberation war being fought in the country's periphery (Moorman 2019). Artists met at Teresa Gama's artist studio near Kinaxixi, a central square in the capital. After independence, Gama would work closely with the governing MPLA. In a personal conversation, Ole recounted the informal meetings at Gama's studio, where progressive and left-leaning intellectuals exchanged views on Marxist ideology and current political and cultural events.2 Little, however, is known about artistic practices in the field of visual arts in the years just before independence.Proponents of the cultural philosophy of Négritude emphasized the particularities of Black cultures and their specific cultural expressions. In contrast, Pan-Africanists were more radically outspoken against neocolonialism and often had an affinity for socialist politics.The first postindependence generation of cultural practitioners in Angola thus drew from various cultural and aesthetic concepts to develop their own cultural philosophy. In the field of fine arts, Bantuism, a form of “Africanized national art” conceptualized by Viteix, one of Angola's most prominent intellectuals of the late 1970s and 1980s (Teixeira 1983), was promoted as a major aesthetic mode for decolonizing mind and culture. It was discernible in and can be understood as a form of “postcolonial nativism” (Fanon 1963; Mbembe 2001), part of the formulation of a modern artistic subjectivity. Angolan nativism can further be understood in the context of the intellectual discourse on Angolanidade. Artistic objects and practices such as the ideographs (Fig. 4) of the Chokwe people of northeastern Angola epitomized the movement, encapsulating Angolan cultural identity (Kubik 2006; Collier 2010a).This “utopian generation” (Pepetela 2000) relied intellectually on its predecessors, the “generation of the 1950s,” which, in turn, was intellectually rooted in the “patriotic cosmopolitanism” of the powerful late-nineteenth-century cultural elite (Cheah and Robbins 1998; Peixoto 2006). The ideology of Angolanidade was thus both nostalgic and cosmopolitan, recognizing aspects of traditional cultures and combining them with the ideas of socialist modernity (see, e.g., Tomás 2010).3 As a cultural ideology, Angolanidade was drafted by Angolan students who met in Lisbon with students from other Portuguese colonies. As with their contemporaries from the French and British colonies, who met in Paris and London respectively, the students from the Portuguese colonies formed revolutionary cells that later provided the intellectual basis for anticolonial movements (Rocha 1997). The students' slogan, “Vamos descobrir Angola” (Let's discover Angola), was later adopted by postindependence artists. The idea of a return to the homeland—even if only in a metaphorical sense—formed a strand of nostalgia that ran parallel to the modernizing tendencies of nation-building. In this context, the increasing interest in traditional culture was a decolonizing practice.4 By reintegrating—both physically and metaphorically—a supposedly “lost” Angolan countryside and its cultures, intellectuals were redrawing the borders of the new nation-state and securing its cultural richness, defining their notion of pátria.But Angolanidade was also a cosmopolitan movement. In the early postindependence years, the intellectually rich atmosphere of the capital and its multiple expressions of cosmopolitan culture proved to be fertile soil for the growth of a strong belief in a transethnic, egalitarian, and universalist modernism. The building of a “utopian generation” was an intellectual project of national identity formation, and art was thought to play an essential part in the process. Both state administrators and party militants considered visual art an important tool of political propaganda and popular education and a powerful instrument with which to shape political thought and practice. In socialist Angola, art thus contributed to the cohesiveness of public interpretations of past and future generations. In addition to the localized concept of Angolanidade, socialism provided an aesthetic ideology in the decolonization process and shaped the official discourse on art and national programs.The implementation of the socialist political project in Angola after 1975 also impacted the art scene. Not only did colonial art history have to be rewritten, but new forms of art education and practice had to be established. Internationalism was not only a cultural-political agenda but a lived practice of exchange that included exhibitions in the Angolan embassies of the socialist countries, participation in international exhibitions and biennials, and education abroad.Aesthetic discourse drew from a register of revolutionary aesthetics connected to anti-imperialist ideology. Socialist terminology and artistic concepts such as the “artist as cultural worker” were translated from socialist aesthetic theory.The Angolan government framed artists' education around a socialist discourse on the role of art in society and encouraged exchanges with other socialist countries, such as the Soviet Union and Cuba (Teferra and Knight 2008; Savage 2016). In these years, not only artists traveled between the socialist countries; so, too, did ideas and aesthetic concepts, which then shaped national art policies in the context of international Cold War politics.Among the Angolan artists who studied in the Soviet Union or East Germany were João Ingles, Custodio Silva, António Salo, Fernando Mosquito, and João Lumingo. Cuba was uniquely supportive of its “brother state” Angola, offering scholarships to the Academy of Fine Arts in Havana for Angolan artists Jorge Gumbe (Fig. 5) and Francisco van Dúnem, as well as for students in theater and dance.In Havana, the artists reconnected with Cuban art teachers who formerly had taught in Luanda's first ateliers (Siegert 2016: 143). In addition to attending courses in painting, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking, the students heard lectures on Western aesthetic philosophy, Marxism-Leninism, the history of African arts, and on more focused topics such as fantastic realism. They also read modern African nonfiction texts by authors such as Uche Okeke (on African arts), novels by Achebe and Thiong'o, and plays by Wole Soyinka. Socialist realism per se was not taught to the African students at the Fine Arts Academy in Havana. Instead, as Jorge Gumbe noted,5 they were encouraged to follow their interest in exploring their indigenous cultures.In Luanda, the art school Barracão, which predated independence (Siegert 2016: 137), continued to offer art courses. The school had been established in the early 1970s by the Portuguese artist Mariana Quito, who left Angola for Brazil during the independence struggle. Together with the Portuguese architect José Fava, she offered free art education to the public. Her aim was to enhance the levels of artistic practice and knowledge of the arts in Luanda. After independence, the school continued to exist as the Escola de Artes para os Pioneiros e Órfãos de Guerra (Art School for the Pioneers and Orphans of the War), focusing on art education for disadvantaged children (Siegert 2016: 138). Cuban teachers such as Eduardo Roca Salazar (a.k.a. “Choco”) and Nelson Dominguez were sent from the National Art School in Havana to guest teach for several months each. The school emphasized artistic practice rather than aesthetic theory. Choco and Dominguez taught print techniques and supported the installation of a print workshop at the União Nacional de Artistas Plásticos (National Union of Plastic Artists, UNAP).6 They also integrated their Angolan experiences into their personal artistic practices. Choco, for example, developed a series of graphic works and prints during his time in Luanda, titled Mujeres angolanas (Angolan women) (Figs. 6–7).7 In these works, his appreciation for Angolan culture can be seen in his celebration of the sophisticated hairstyles of Angolan women.In 1978, a group of young artists was invited to a youth conference for visual artists and writers in Havana (Collier 2013: 187). Upon their return from the festival, the newly formed UNAP wrote a manifesto conceived around the ideology of the “New Man” as a powerful framework for the development of a national art scene (Collier 2013: 191). Historically, UNAP has been the most important artists' association in Angola, and it remains an important and relatively well-respected institution.UNAP's primary functions entailed supporting artists, organizing exhibitions, and providing studio space. The union's founding statement, written in 1978, three years after the proclamation of independence, had a strong political impetus and is infused with revolutionary rhetoric. Art—as an antibourgeois and antiformalist aesthetic practice—is conceptualized as being part of the cultural struggle that follows military struggle—thus also linking it to the original meaning of the avant-garde: “art is one of the fronts of combat of the Angolan People in this critical phase of the Angolan Revolution … art is a natural necessity of the human being and not simply an activity of leisure or luxury” (UNAP 1978).The manifesto centers the people of Angola as both subject and object of artistic production. UNAP linked Angolan aesthetic ideology to the construction of Angolan identity (through the conceptualization of Angolanidade), as well as to internationalism through a strong commitment to a socialist art ideology (Collier 2013: 189). Precisely what such art should look like was less important than how it was ideologically framed. UNAP's role in this regard was to support the transformation of the Angolan mentality by taking the “bourgeois good” of heritage and progressively remaking it to serve a new society. Internationalism came into play here, since Viteix (one of the founding members and, from 1987 to 1989, general director of UNAP) planned not only to host international conferences but to exhibit artists from countries such as Nigeria, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Cape Verde, Italy, Romania, Portugal, Mozambique, and Congo (Teixeira 1983: 217; see also Teixeira 1990; Margarido 2006).Born in Angola with a Portuguese background, Viteix (1940–1993) had studied art in Angola and Portugal (Fig. 8). Before independence, he was a political exile in Paris, where he completed a doctorate on aesthetic theory in the visual arts of Angola at the University of Paris (Teixeira 1983). His dissertation, published after independence, was the only comprehensive volume on Angolan visual art at that time. As such, it was also a response to President Neto's call for Angolan intellectuals to explore their own culture. Viteix not only outlined a historiography of Angolan artistic practices but described their underlying ideology—a combined descriptive and prescriptive approach. He drew from a variety of sources, including ethnographic approaches to traditional Angolan art, and combined these descriptions with Marxist art theory, such as Ernst Fischer's The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach (2010). He advocated for the creation of a socialist culture based on Angola's rich traditional culture, which he described as having been always in resistance to colonialism. Visual arts, for Viteix, had to lose their exclusive and decorative character and instead restore their social function by becoming part of the ideological superstructure of social education (Teixeira 1983: 213).In both his writing and his artwork, Viteix tried to relate cultural traditions to the emerging Angolan society. Like other African artists of the postindependence years, he tried to combine modern art techniques with “authentic” subject matter, representing Angolanidade in both form and content. Viteix's references to Angolan cultural traditions are more obscure than those of other artists, however. In most of his works, for example, he frames the center image with a border of abstract symbols. Although these do not resemble Chokwe ideograms in any way, they can still be understood as a reference to African symbolism. Within the country's socialist political framework after independence, the strong interest in indigenous cultures (especially Chokwe art) can also be read as a revolutionary approach—since this art was seen as popular and thus antibourgeois (Collier 2010a).How were the ideologies swirling in postindependence Angola manifested as artworks? What stylistic choices did artists and other cultural producers make in this setting?In the process of appropriating and adapting socialism as a cultural-political framework for art making, socialist iconography traveled widely thanks to South–South and South–East cultural exchanges. Artists were especially engaged in the development of visual propaganda as a major form of communicating political agendas. The state commissioned artists to conceptualize and construct monuments, murals, and commemoration sites. Some, such as Gama and Ole, worked closely with the MPLA in the art and film sectors in the late 1970s, briefly dedicating their work to the building of the young nation. Some of the resultant works, such as the documentaries Ole produced for the national television station, TPA, observed socialist realist principles. They communicated the political values of the MPLA by focusing on the history of Angolan struggle in cultural terms. O ritmo do Ngola ritmos (1978), for example, documents the history of one of Angola's most popular bands of the time before independence and the political involvement of the musicians in the anticolonial struggle (Moorman 2008). Carnaval da Vitória (1978) celebrates the new nation's first carnival (Prussat 2009). Adhering to the principles of socialist realism, the film portrays the workers', fishermen's, and peasants' preparations for the eponymous carnival as a manifestation of the cultural power of the people. Other cultural projects were also largely public in nature. However, socialist aesthetics were not implemented as an artistic style on a broad scale.Bronze monuments depicting President Neto and a monument commemorating the Battle of Quifangondo are among the earliest examples of Angolan public art commissions after independence (Ball 2019) (Fig. 9).They were produced by the North Korean factory Mansudae Overseas Projects and epitomize the socialist realist style that is typical of this workshop's production. Mansudae has produced stylized neosocialist monuments and memorials for several African countries, including Zimbabwe, Namibia, Senegal, and Uganda (Becker 2011; de Jong and Foucher 2012; Riel, Faccio, and Sasse 2013).Most of the new statues were installed on the pedestals of Portuguese colonial monuments that had been toppled by revolutionary forces after Luanda was captured. The most radical toppling took place on Kinaxixi Square (formerly Largo Mario do Fonte) in 1974, when a victory monument by Portuguese artist Henrique Moreira (1937) was dynamited and replaced by a Soviet tank—supposedly the very tank that had brought President Neto into the city to claim independence. Later, to mark the victory over the colonial power, the tank was replaced by a sculpture of the historical Queen Ginga (1582–1663; Siegert 2017) (Fig. 10).8Beside monuments, mural art is one of the major forms associated with socialist realism throughout the world. Often used for propaganda purposes, murals depict socialist values and visions and were an important tool of agitprop groups seeking to mobilize the masses. Such murals were commonly used in China, North Korea, and several of the socialist countries in Africa. A second important reference for African muralists was the Latin American muralism of Mexico, Nicaragua, Chile, and Cuba (Kunzle 1995; Zander 2004; Indych-López 2009; Anreus, Folgarait, and Greeley 2012; Mainero del Castillo 2012). More idealistic than realistic, Latin American murals visualized the ideal socialist society or the struggle leading to it. Alongside such obvious figures as the soldier, the peasant, and the worker, murals also depicted teachers, technicians, and intellectuals, often both male and female. As such, the mural as a medium for agitation depicted not only what socialist society had already achieved but what it aspired to become (Zander 2004).Angolan mural art—or what Viteix called “Peinture murale révolutionnaire” (revolutionary mural painting) (Teixeira 1983: 222)—has mostly disappeared. For Viteix, the murals represented authentic historical and cultural documents of the Angolan revolution and the realization of independence. Already by 1975 a mural had been created in celebration of workers' days by students and teachers of the Bula-Matadi technical school (Teixeira 1983: 222). One of the best-preserved murals remaining in Luanda is the one that that Gama created at the city's military hospital in 1979 (Teixeira 1983: 223) (Figs. 11–14). During a later “renovation” by local artists, however, some of the original images were painted over. The mural today is a palimpsest, hiding its initial form and content and revealing a contemporary interpretation of outdated socialist aesthetics.Unlike most public artworks of the period, the mural was produced by a group of Angolan artists rather than by socialist brother states such as North Korea. It is also one of the few known works made by a female artist during the Angolan socialist period. Gama, whose art making and political activism began during colonial times (Viteix mentions a 1963 exhibition, for example; Teixeira 1983: 258), was also eager to support the independent state with her artistic skills. A guerilla fighter in the People's Armed Forces of Liberation of Angola before independence, she later taught at the Barracão art school (Paredes 2015). Her studio in central Luanda had been a meeting point for artists with anticolonial and radical leftist positions even before independence. After 1978, according to Margarida Paredes9 she received a state commission to paint the mural with a group of art students, among them Garção and Cilita Martins.The mural conveys the euphoria of independence and the birth of the new nation with celebratory banners and the emblems of the MPLA, but it also communicates new values and visions in the form of a history of the MPLA's political agitation. Considered in light of the four principles of socialist realism, the figurative scenes of the mural are closer to propaganda than to revolutionary art. Three elements dominate the mural: figurative scenes depicting the typical protagonists of a socialist revolution; elements of landscapes, such as rainbows and waves; and a decorative, abstract background rendered in bright colors that enhance the nonrealist style. This pop art style of the background is found in other African murals of the period, such as em honra dos nossos heróis (In honor of our heroes) at the Praça dos Heróis Moçambicanos (Mozambican Heroes Square)