History of Lusophone Africa

Camarades, Clientes and Compadres é uma adição bem-vinda à literatura obre África lusófona. Também é um livro que os africanistas acharão útil por causa da sua cuidadosa construção analítica comparativa. Seibert escreveu um livro sólido, bem investigado e analiticamente astucioso obre um dos países meno conhecidos de África. Patrick Chabal

This paper deals with the background, role players, sequence of events, geopolitical considerations and history of the Angolan War which took place from 1975 to 1990 between the Soviet Union and its allies & proxies on the one hand, and the Republic of South Africa and its allies on the other. It also has a section presenting a rebuttal of previously published material on this subject, and a section on disinformation techniques used in and by the Soviet Union.

Among historical factors leading to state dysfunctionality phenomenon on the African continent, colonial legacy is most often indicated. It is a common perception that colonialism understood not only as colonial rule but also as colonial legacy is the main responsible for today’s African crises of statehood. The study focuses on Luso-African continental states (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau) that have quite a similar historical experience, not only the difficult and long war for independence, but also lack of political stability in the postcolonial period (civil wars, coups d’état, experiments with socialism and one-party system). The article is an attempt to reflect on the hypothesis that the Portuguese colonial legacy can be perceived as a historical factor leading to state dysfunctionality, however its evaluation should be more complex, as from today’s perspective it could bring some benefits that derive most of all from the common official language, similar historical experience and some sense of the Luso-African or Lusophone identity.
The paper is based on the qualitative analysis of the already existing data, critical reading of the literature of the subject, as well as qualitative data gathered during author’s study visits to Portugal, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau.

The greed-and-grievance debate has been one of the major focuses of interest in the study of civil wars, but many pitfalls have arisen from the limitations of a highly ‘economics-driven’ model. Departing from a critique of this literature, this study revisits the debate on security-driven analysis of civil war dynamics. It does so by looking at the process of the outbreak of armed violence within a state and calling upon a cornerstone theoretical landmark: the security dilemma. The argument engages concurring explanations for civil wars, trying to uncover whether (in)security begets dynamics that are present in, or are part of other previously highlighted mechanisms. It departs from a specific concept of anarchy emergence — state shattering/implosion (or colonial retreat) — and focuses on evaluating the performance of the security dilemma logic as an explanation for the outbreak and dynamics of violence in each situation. After presenting the theoretical considerations, I discuss some preliminary empirical evidence from a plausibility probe, analysing the outbreak of armed conflict that followed the decolonisation process in Angola between 1974 and 1976.

This book showcases new research by emerging and established scholars on white workers and the white poor in Southern Africa.

Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa challenges the geographical and chronological limitations of existing scholarship by presenting case studies from Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe that track the fortunes of nonhegemonic whites during the era of white minority rule. Arguing against prevalent understandings of white society as uniformly wealthy or culturally homogeneous during this period, it demonstrates that social class remained a salient element throughout the twentieth century, how Southern Africa’s white societies were often divided and riven with tension and how the resulting social, political and economic complexities animated white minority regimes in the region. Addressing themes such as the class-based disruption of racial norms and practices, state surveillance and interventions – and their failures – towards nonhegemonic whites, and the opportunities and limitations of physical and social mobility, the book mounts a forceful argument for the regional consideration of white societies in this historical context. Centrally, it extends the path-breaking insights emanating from scholarship on racialized class identities from North America to the African context to argue that race and class cannot be considered independently in Southern Africa.

This book will be of interest to scholars and students of southern African studies, African history, and the history of race.

Em Fevereiro de 1953, a ordem do governador Carlos Gorgulho (1945-1953), o Corpo da Policia Indígena (CPI) e voluntários civís desencadearam uma onda de violência contra a população nativa em São Tomé. Neste artigo exploro as causas do massacre, em seguida descrevo o decurso dos acontecimentos e, finalmente considero o seu impacto sob o nacionalismo santomense.

The West African nation of Guinea-Bissau won independence in 1973-1974, the first Portuguese non-island state in continental Africa to achieve this goal. Its success owed much to the able orchestration of the rebels’ internal and external strategy by Amílcar Cabral, an internationally well-connected socialist intellectual and revolutionary theorist, whose assassination in January 1973 failed to prevent the insurgents unilaterally declaring then Portuguese Guinea an independent nation the following September, a status that Portugal accepted one year later. When Cape Verde became independent in 1975, it was expected that ultimately the two nations would become one state, a vision that proved shortlived, as each chose to follow different political trajectories. By the late 1970s, entrenched divisions within Guinea-Bissau between indigenous inhabitants and those—like Cabral—of Cape Verdean extraction prompted bitter infighting within the ruling elite. Yet despite these faultlines, links between both nations still existed, demonstrated most strongly in times of turmoil, with Cape Verde repeatedly serving as a mediator as Guinea-Bissau experienced civil war and several military coups, helping to negotiate diplomatic solutions to end violent crises. For decades, moreover, pervasive respect for Cabral’s fabled memory offered Guinea-Bissau an extra level of international viability in surviving multiple political crises.

Capeverdean (CV) is the mother tongue of more than a million people living in, or
originating from, the archipelago of Cape Verde, situated about 500 km west of Dakar
(Senegal). As a Portuguese-based Creole, this language obviously has many Portuguesederived
items in its vocabulary, although there are often significant phonetic changes (see Quint 2000a: 53-139) such as:
CV obi  ‘to hear’ < Port. ouvir
CV nabidja ‘heifer’ < Port. novilha.
Nevertheless, not all CV words derive from Portuguese; indeed, some quite common CV
words can be traced back to diverse African languages, e.g.
CV djobi ‘to look at’ < Mandinka juubee.
CV djáki ‘bull calf’ < Wolof yëkk.
In this article, I examine the importance of this African stratum and explore what African
words and expressions in CV can tell us about the origins of this language and, more
generally, about the formation of Afro-European creoles.

Les découvreurs portugais ont emporté dans leurs vaisseaux leur langue romane et l'ont fait voyager des côtes ibériques aux plus lointains océans. Mais l'idiome lusitanien, au contact des peuples et des habitudes rencontrés, s'est modifié, métissé et renouvelé. Les créoles modernes à base portugaise sont une conséquence (parmi d'autres) vivante et chatoyante des multiples échanges que le peuple portugais sut tisser avec les autres régions du monde. Le cas cap-verdien sera ici privilégié pour illustrer le phénomène de la créolisation dans l'univers lusophone, son intérêt linguistique et historique et la question de la prise en compte du fait créole dans le cadre scolaire et institutionnel des sociétés concernées.

After independence in 1975 São Tomé and Príncipe became a socialist one-party state. The regime nationalized the cocoa plantations and the entire economy. As the country lacked adequately trained people, within a few years the local economy was run down. Due to economic failure, in 1990 the regime introduced multiparty democracy and a free-market economy. Despite political instability provoked by consecutive changes of government, democracy has done relatively well. However, the economy has been ailing, since consecutive governments failed to recover the cocoa sector and diversify the economy. Prospects of becoming an oil producer that emerged in the 1990s have not materialized either, since commercially viable oil has not been discovered. Consequently, for many years the small country has become completely dependent on international aid. The article analyses the archipelago´s politics and economy over the past forty years.

In this paper, I demonstrate how studios producing the Angolan electronic dance music
(EDM) kuduro (‘hard arse’) in the capital Luanda are usefully investigated as social
spaces of collective creativity. I triangulate interviews, observations, close listening and
ethnographic participation. Researchers often portray kuduro and other EDM styles in
the Global South using what I name the ‘scarcity-resilience narrative’. This narrative
gives short shrift to the rich cultural resources that feed into EDM styles. It perpetuates
problematic stereotypes about African people and occludes the deliberate labour that
kuduro practitioners (‘kuduristas’) invest in their craft. As kuduristas routinely affirm
that sociability drives their interpersonal creative processes I portray kuduro studios as
social spaces and construe kuduro’s collective creativity through Extended Mind Theory
(EMT). In my analysis, I first introduce kuduro studios in Luanda broadly and then
focus on two influential kuduro studios: JUPSON and Guetto Produções. I show how
kuduristas mobilise their collective creativity inside the studio by tapping into aesthetic
strategies and conventions of the rich popular culture that surrounds them. Via EMT,
I portray aesthetic duelling, puto-kota (‘elder-younger’) relationships, call-andresponse
and urban vocal strategies as collectively maintained social institutions. Inside
the studio, kuduristas translate these rich resources into the sonic materiality of kuduro
tracks which, in turn, are designed to achieve maximum audience response through
mobilising the social institutions when radiating out into the world. This paper
provides the first, fine-grained study of kuduro studios in Luanda. It de-centres the
‘scarcity-resilience narrative’ of Global South EDM by focusing on collective creativity
and, as such, offers a fresh epistemological position on the study of music studios,
Global South EDM and popular music in Angola.

Keywords: Kuduro; Luanda; Music Studio as Social Space; Collective Creativity;
Extended Mind Theory

This paper addresses the news exchange between Brazil and Portuguese-speaking countries of Africa, as operated by each country's national news agencies. The main goal in this study is to understand how the information flow is carried by those news agencies. For this, a quantitative and comparative survey through content analysis is conducted on the usage of news from each agency in every other, by means of replication or attribution as source among the contents in their respective websites, within the timespan of May 2016 to May 2017. In spite of the great international exposure to developments in Brazil during that period, the exchange was recorded as minimal. In order to analyze this news exchange, we make use of the perspectives from the political economy of news agencies (Boyd-Barrett, 1980), and the circulation of news (Machado, 2008; Medina, 1998.) The paper applies the concept of network-territory to the analysis of news exchange and focuses on analyzing the structures of news production. The geocultural sphere of the Portuguese language is understood as a space of information circulation and an interlocution between the Geographies of Communication and Journalism studies is hereby proposed.

Religious Revival in Mozambique: between Continuity, Rupture and Historicity Research on religion in Africa has focused ever more in the last twenty years on the question of the “religious revival”, and it has usually focused on the question  of the ruptures and innovations that resulted from it. This article questions the reality of the “religious revival” in Africa and explores, on the basis of a case study, the issue of change and continuity in religious change. In a first section, the text looks at the nature of the religious revival in Mozambique; it then examines the historical and denominational continuities which exist in the revival; a last section investigates the impact religious transformations have had on the political realm. The conclusion tries to unpack the question of ruptures and continuities and to think the question of a religious revival beyond this dichotomy.

En 1434, le navigateur portugais Gil Eanes double le Cap Bojador (également appelé Boujdour), situé dans l’actuel Sahara occidental et qui, à l’époque, marquait pour les Européens de l’Ouest les limites méridionales du monde connu. Dans les années qui suivent, les marins lusitaniens, cherchant à ouvrir une route maritime vers les Indes, vont progressivement reconnaître les côtes de la partie occidentale de l’Afrique subsaharienne, atteignant finalement le Cap de Bonne Espérance (à l’extrémité Sud du continent) en 1488. Tout au long de ce parcours, les Portugais entrent en contact pour la première fois avec de nombreux peuples et cultures, fondent des comptoirs sur les côtes africaines et développent des relations politiques et commerciales avec maints Etats locaux, qui leur fournissent notamment ivoire et esclaves en échange de produits manufacturés (tels que perles de verre ou pagnes tissés).
Ces échanges commerciaux et ces contacts désormais réguliers entre Portugais et habitants de l’Afrique subsaharienne conduisent à l’apparition d’une série de langues nouvelles, les créoles afro-portugais, qui constituent finalement un prolongement de la Romania en terre africaine. Ces langues créoles se sont probablement formées entre 1450 et 1550, à partir du portugais (dont elles tirent la majeure partie de leur vocabulaire courant) et de diverses langues africaines (généralement qualifiées de ‘substrats’ et dont l’influence est particulièrement forte au niveau de la grammaire des créoles résultants). Il existe aujourd’hui deux familles de créoles afro-portugais, pratiquées au quotidien par près de trois millions d’êtres humains.

"A Verbalis desenvolveu para este dicionário uma base de dados relacional para armazenamento e gestão dos dados lexicais Caboverdiano-Francês fornecidos pelo autor em suporte Microsoft Word. Esta base de dados foi em seguida ampliada para uma base trilingue Caboverdiano-Francês-Português, na qual foi desenvolvido na Verbalis todo o trabalho de tradução e adaptação que deu origem à versão portuguesa da obra. Esta base de dados constitui o acervo de informação de suporte tanto do dicionário electrónico como do dicionário em formato de livro.
Mais de 4 000 palavras do Caboverdiano falado na ilha de Santiago
5 000 expressões exemplificativas do uso dessas palavras
Mais de 10 000 sentidos em Português
3 684 etimologias propostas
Transcrição fonética
Breve descrição do sistema gramatical do Caboverdiano e dos critérios de base à grafia utilizada"

FULLTEXT http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:352-0-347156

The essay analyses Estas são as armas (1978), the first full-length documentary produced by the Instituto Nacional de Cinema (INC) in Mozambique. In a first step, the text provides background information regarding film productions in and about Mozambique as well as its historical frame considering both the colonial and postcolonial period. Then, the essay discusses the interplay between voice and image with regard to documentary films. The contextualization and theoretical reflection is followed by an in-depth study of Estas são as armas. By scrutinizing the different ways of dealing with archival material it becomes possible to reflect upon filmic memory politics and their relation to a historical master narrative developed by Frelimo as well as to shed light on the cultural dimensions of decolonization.

A Verbalis desenvolveu para este dicionário uma base de dados relacional para armazenamento e gestão dos dados lexicais Caboverdiano-Francês fornecidos pelo autor em suporte Microsoft Word. Esta base de dados foi em seguida ampliada para uma base trilingue Caboverdiano-Francês-Português, na qual foi desenvolvido na Verbalis todo o trabalho de tradução e adaptação que deu origem à versão portuguesa da obra. Esta base de dados constitui o acervo de informação de suporte tanto do dicionário electrónico como do dicionário em formato de livro.
Mais de 4 000 palavras do Caboverdiano falado na ilha de Santiago
5 000 expressões exemplificativas do uso dessas palavras
Mais de 10 000 sentidos em Português
3 684 etimologias propostas
Transcrição fonética
Breve descrição do sistema gramatical do Caboverdiano e dos critérios de base à grafia utilizada