The optimistic utopia - sacrifice and expectations of political transformation in the Angolan Revolutionary Movement

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Metadata	Details
Publication Date	2021-02-01
Journal	Social Anthropology
Authors	Ruy Llera Blanes
Citations	7

Abstract

In 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 the main at the time, which referred to a president Dos as of the ruling party (and the president of that Adolfo with a will to the was to a new the same kind of liberationist logic as during the independence The or the to the in the and Angola where the liberation movements and staged their against the in the They were also of for many from war Perhaps what me most my with Adolfo and other Revús was their open to engage in these violent encounters with police and not only with the Angolan but also in other of their and social I of Revús who their who with their own or who in a state of in their own that they were being by the me about attempted on of the regime, of of and - that they consistently on of their own to me how to how was being by Today, the families of the 15+2 are due to their of them have Angola and or In a certain the 15+2 and other less Revús became, at their own self-sacrificial for a cause that, at from the seemed very much the of an regime and the up of a process of democratic as I will to below, this process of is in a form of political that is more about interlocution than of to external In a paper (Blanes I the of its traditional and (e.g. and de in a and movement of Angolan called the I that self-sacrificial of among in such as Angola and the were in political and to which both an a and, in a of history In the of the of the his was generally perceived as one of by of and violence, which were with and could only be through a in a future Angola that would be from and and (Blanes But in the of the Revús, what are they themselves To to this would into their personal and ideological In this respect, while many Revús described themselves as or for many were or But in their political strategies and expectations did not a sense of and but instead a more of peaceful resistance in a Gandhian sense (see I a sense of this when I the Revús and their about if are the and the future it what is The point of in their was what could be called an On the one hand, these activists a situation of of the regime, somewhat of famous is and the regime is regime a de The that they had in on two the regime of the party but also the more regime of Angola, that once began as a revolutionary utopia but the a process of social and that among other things, to and with of the authoritarian This acknowledgement of an however, was not what would in his On as a cause for social but a of a form of rule that was a point of the moment for a a new Angolan a of this see Blanes In this respect, the of movements in Angola, the Revús a stance of challenging the state of and up new On the other hand, the of in the Revú confluence in what the towards of the new In my conversations with I of two different an based on the that the of the is in the party and its and the for Angola in and also a based on the that, the of the regime, there has to be a new social and political (see also a new as it The space of confluence between both the Angolan which they as one of the few that can them from the regime, and one of the that the regime to in order to its This was particularly the with the recent of which has been for enabling the president José Eduardo dos immunity and the of civil in the politics to a but it has also been as a of the Revús’ rights to and to be with in their in the question of rights the of struggle and (e.g. my conversations with the Revús, I perceived their as a political utopia, based on ideas of and and It was a utopia in a very traditional sense of a social and political with a and of the future in Angola, and promoting an in and based on principles of and In these the of utopia often as a that more for some activists, their utopia for Angola was very country José Eduardo dos and its was a of a in it a more overarching and philosophical a of the from a to a optimism. This was the for instance, of several members of the an activist hip hop from many of members were part of the Revú confluence and were in the 15+2 process. In an I held with them in 2016, they that their their utopia was to the to and produce new of But this revolutionary of however, was not a stance but instead a one that with Angola’s history of and as one of its members to da is the of This was by one of the 15+2, in to an expression by the was to the of war that Angola’s history until and which still in the regime’s the was for an from that These that they were against a perceived - the moment in which the once revolutionary and political leadership that for Angolan independence in the 1960s and 1970s had a in itself, an rule - and attempted to the fatalism of its and From this the Revús were inherently in the sense that, in with the regime will they engaged in the contemporary of is or was part of the political through which that would be - the between talking the talk and the as it optimism was not just about hope or but more about engaging in as et would put it - and into towards social and political an distinction between optimism and While both are often as - as an with the future that in of and - in Angola I how the narrative of hope in its and as a and somewhat of future that was by the never narrative of the New Angola. In this as I (Blanes 2018), this a of in the of Angolan and in of in Luanda - a being by a new see Gastrow It produced a that political protest and In this respect, the political optimism by the Revús was in an to political initiative towards a radical political and in its general the struggle not only against the regime, but also and against and This idea to me on one occasion in 2016, when I sat in one of the of the Agostinho Neto of and two members of the On that described his in prison 2015 and 2016, which, from such as him to a and However, both he and described this as in the personal that they had just the as a to But they that they were and the of their they were that was in the process, something that would for an overarching in Angolan - the of added that the time in prison his of but also gave him new to about about citizenship and its when he in prison by who how to and had idea of what citizenship But this was an to and at the and to and the of for rights. felt for such an (see also Blanes This is where I perceived that the self-sacrificial stance of the Revús was based not on a logic of but on a movement that from a of an state (Blanes into a hopeful of a different in the this an anthropological optimism - not a a optimism, a optimism It is an optimism based on an acknowledgement of the situation - a a that totalising as framed it in his of the - and the to it. David noted, it is an expression of a politics that to what once called the of the From this as there is a opposition

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12977

References

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