theworldismine13
God Emperor of SOHH
Race relations in Angola
http://thisisafrica.me/race-relations-angola/
http://thisisafrica.me/race-relations-angola/
“Angolan women don’t like the Portuguese,” says Amelia (30, office cleaner) in a matter-of-fact manner to This is Africa. If you’re not familiar with Angola you might expect this to be the start of a rant against her racist ex-colonisers, but it is, instead, more about aesthetics, as she goes on to explain that the Portuguese are “ugly, impolite and arrogant”. “They’re hideous and short, with fat stomachs, and their asses are turned inwards,” she says with a broad, naughty smile, hilariously imitating their allegedly inelegant walking style and funny accents. “Of course some of them are nice,” she adds.
The jokey way in which she says all this is illustrative of the relaxed way the various races in Angola interact.
“Race relations in Angola are amazing. Amazing,” said dark-skinned Angolan Kelse (30), logistics coordinator at an international oil company, in one of Luanda’s mixed bars. His English is fluent, his accent American. Kelse has many white, black and mixed-race friends and relatives, and has been together with his white Angolan girlfriend for two years. “I’ve been to South Africa more than once and there I see this big separatism: white people in one place, black people in another.” He saw the same during his holiday in Kenya and Uganda. “It made me sad.” In Kenya and Uganda, Kelse experienced discrimination. “I stood out because I was in between these white guys. The black guys were like ‘Why is he hanging with them?’ They just assumed I was American. I was so happy to be back in my home country where you see everyone mixing, no matter the colour of your skin.”
And indeed they do, everywhere, clubs, restaurants, on the work floor. As in many former Portuguese colonies, racial mixing was actively encouraged during the early years of colonisation, in contrast to how things worked in the French and British colonies.
During colonial times, it was very common for lonely white Portuguese colonisers to [unofficially] marry a black woman.
Black Angolan Ico (60) is married to white, Portuguese-Angolan Ana Bela (61). They have been together for 25 years, married for 18 years and have two kids. Ana has three more children from her previous marriage with a Portuguese army official, with whom she moved to Angola during the country’s independence war (1961-1974) when she was 21. Three of the mixed couple’s kids live in Portugal, two in Luanda. “I think racism exists in Angola, like in any other place in the world,” Ico told This is Africa over a morning coffee. “But it’s weak and infrequent. The majority of Angolans aren’t racist.”
Ana Bela and Ico had experiences similar to Kelse’s in South Africa in the year apartheid was abolished and Mandela became president. Traveling by subway from Johannesburg to Pretoria, Ana Bela insisted on traveling second class, which up until that year had been for blacks only. She was the only white passenger. “A group of people timidly approached us: ‘I’m sorry, where are you from?’” Ana Bela laughs out loud. “‘We’re from Angola,’ we said. They went: “Ahaaaaaaa!”
The happy elderly couple had to challenge South Africans on more than one occasion. “On Eastern Sunday,” they both recall, “we went to dine in a really posh restaurant filled with white customers only. Everyone kept staring at us as if we were extraterrestrials.”
Mestiço envy
There have been interracial relationships in Angola since the early days of Portuguese colonisation, resulting in the ‘mestiços,’ or ‘mulatos’; mixed race people. Angola is said to have the largest non-English-speaking mestiço community in Africa, even though they constitute only between 2 percent and 3 percent of Angola’s estimated population of 21 million. The European population is said to have never surpassed 1 percent. In Luanda, mestiços can be seen everywhere, especially in high positions within companies and in the city’s priciest clubs and restaurants.
Mestiços are traditionally Roman Catholic, speak Portuguese, live in coastal cities and have access to good education. When Angola was declared a Portuguese province in 1951, most mestiços were able to register as Portuguese citizens. Most ethnic Angolans did not have that opportunity. “The mestiços are an undefined class,” Ico said. “We call them the bats among the birds. They are the wealthiest and best connected individuals in Angola, up to the extent that we use the popular expression ‘I want a mulato life’.
The fact that the mestiços are seen as a privileged group arouses widespread envy in Angola. “White people’s kids generally get a good education. Unfortunately many black people don’t have that opportunity,” Kelse explained. “If you’re gonna do a job interview and you have the choice between a black guy and a mulato, the mulato speaks better and knows more. That’s not racism, it’s a fact. Unfortunately. Overall, mulatos have better jobs, better salaries, better everything. And when people start saying, ‘The mulatos get all the privileges,’ that’s where racism begins.”
Whites and the Angolan political class
Many mestiços fought in Angola’s war for independence (1961-1974) and dominated the ruling MPLA’s hierarchy well into the 1980s. “But there are few mestiços in the government nowadays,” Ico said. “If the government accepts too many of them, people will say Angola’s rulers are favouring the privileged. The masses don’t support the mestiços.”
Surprising as it may be, during first Angolan President Agostinho Neto’s rule (1975-1979), there were plenty of white faces in the government. That quickly changed during the 1980s, under Angola’s current President José Eduardo Dos Santos. There are, however, still dozens of white and mestiço generals in the army.
“Agostinho Neto wanted to compensate all those who had fought in the bush for Angolan independence, which included quite a number of white Portuguese Angolans,” Ico explained. He said that politically speaking, many whites have been “in a bit of a sad situation”. “The party that managed to attract the greatest number of whites before and even after independence was apartheid South-Africa backed UNITA. UNITA deceived then in a way, by soon afterwards [temporarily] denying them membership. Many whites now prefer not to belong to any party.”
Ana is not one of them. She has been an MPLA member since before independence. “When I’m invited to local MPLA meetings, I’m often put forward as an example – to show that the MPLA also welcomes white people. But I want to be respected for who I am, not for the colour of my skin. So I always find an excuse not to go.” Outside these meetings however, Ana does not feel she’s treated any differently from her fellow black MPLA members. “I am called ‘camarada,’ [comrade] like everyone else.”
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Silent street artists performing at Luanda Bay
World-famous, brilliant Angolan writer Pepetela (who is white) is a living encyclopedia on Angolan history. He fought alongside the MPLA during Angola’s struggle against colonialism, served as vice minister of education under Angola’s first president Agostinho Neto, and then went on to become a sociology professor at Luanda’s Agostinho Neto University. The reason why the government changed from mixed to black is education, he said. “The whites and mestiços had opportunities to study during colonial times, the blacks didn’t. That’s why they were relatively numerous during Angola’s first government; they offered better guarantees of competence. Over time, as more and more blacks received education, the demographic weight of that shift was felt in the choice of leadership positions.”
Pepetela does not believe that this shift had anything to do with a change of presidency. “It was a natural process,” he said. “In my case, I’ve always said that I was educating people so that they could eventually substitute me. Not only in a personal sense, but in a sociological – group – sense.” According to Pepetela, the ‘darkening’ of Angola’s political leadership was well accepted by all Angolans, but racism has since increased. “It [the 80s] was a period of very little racism,” Pepetela recalls, “as opposed to today, with the immigration of people fleeing the bankrupt countries of the North and their colonial mentality.”