Third World Historical: Where is the “New Woman”? Gender and the revolution in Angolan literature.
Dorothée Boulanger
Image courtesy of Hajime Narukawa
Third World Historical articulates a research agenda for a project suggestively housed as a special section in the pages of CSSAAME (42.2). The editor’s community webpage on Borderlines features experimental writings that enact the project’s attention to questions of form. Here, the intention is to engage in a collaborative project that is its own form of archive building, a portal that speaks to the wider themes of the Third World Historical. The essays in Borderlines highlight the visceral and the relational as distinct from abstract concepts of revolution as complete breaks. The words in these pieces are never failure, or defeat but stories of complicity, compromise, and fragmentation. By emphasizing relationality, movement, and complicity we aim to think concretely about moving between a world overwhelmed by structural forces that preclude action and an imagined world filled with boundless agents detached from history, an equally self-defeating proposition.
In 1973, Artur Pestana, better known under his guerrilla pen name Pepetela, was a guerrilla fighter and instructor in Eastern Angola when he wrote As aventuras de Ngunga (The adventures of Ngunga). At the time, three hundred copies of the short story were published by the MPLA, the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, one of the three nationalist parties waging armed conflict in Angola against Portuguese colonial occupation. (P.62) The aim was to distribute the book among MPLA guerrilla factions within the Eastern region, to serve both as a linguistic and literacy device, while disseminating the core values of the movement’s revolutionary ethos. The short novel tells the adventures of an orphan teenager called Ngunga, who joins the MPLA and the anticolonial struggle. Ngunga heroically fights the Portuguese colonizers, even freeing himself from prison after stealing his jailers’ weapons. When Ngunga discovers that the girl he loves has already been given away by her parents to an “old,” “mean,” and “ugly” village chief (P.52), his resolve to transform the social order is only strengthened
Almost forty years later, having become one of the most celebrated writers from Portuguese-speaking Africa, Pepetela wrote O planalto e a estepe (The highlands and the steppe), a revolutionary internationalist, Romeo-and-Juliet-type love story. The romance between Júlio and Sarangel, respectively Angolan and Mongolian students, starts in Moscow in the 1960s at the People’s Friendship University of Russia. When Sarangel becomes pregnant, her father, the minister of defense of the People’s Republic of Mongolia, organizes her kidnapping. Because of Sarangel’s father’s refusal to let his daughter marry a foreigner, let alone an African, the couple is separated for over thirty years, before being reunited in Cuba after the end of the Cold War.
While the first text is didactic and pedagogic, conceived of as training material that could define the role of the revolutionary vanguard in the context of anti-colonial warfare, the latter is more nostalgic, looking back at revolutionary activism to offer a counter-map of love, friendship, and intimacy within wider and often ambivalent networks of struggle and solidarity. Focusing on heroic male characters whose commitment to the revolutionary struggle is complicated by their thwarted love for an unattainable woman, both novels highlighted persistent patriarchal control over women’s bodies and sexualities during and after the revolution. By portraying female characters as victims, while continuously erasing the participation of women in the anticolonial struggle for liberation in Angola, the novels also replicated patriarchal structures by centering (young) men as the only agents of the revolution. Thus, while fiction was conceived of as “a weapon of liberation” in Angola’s struggle against the Portuguese, the novels espoused highly gendered narratives, inscribing revolution in the masculine.
As most African colonies gained their independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Salazarist dictatorship in Portugal refused to let go of what it misleadingly called its “overseas provinces” (in Africa, these were Angola, Mozambique, São Tomé e Principe, Cape Verde, and Guinea Bissau). The authoritarian and repressive regime censored expressions of discontent from the colonies, prohibited the creation of nationalist parties, rejected negotiations, and considered anti-colonial activists terrorists to be neutralized by the secret police. As Patrick Chabal has shown, this political terrain prompted a powerful cultural and literary response, with songs, poetry, and fiction becoming major vectors of nationalist sentiment. Before armed struggle erupted against the Portuguese colonizers in 1961, dozens of Angolan nationalist intellectuals, writers, and poets had either fled in exile or been arrested by the Portuguese police and sent to the Cape Verdean concentration camp Tarrafal de Santiago.
Pepetela was one of those who went into exile, where he managed to join the MPLA leadership, and later the guerrilla forces. Born from these dramatic circumstances, As aventuras de Ngunga connected culture and politics in a way that was consistent with the MPLA’s revolutionary project to create “o homem novo” (the new man) (P.85). The main character, Ngunga, poses a lucid gaze on the adults surrounding him: he sees the vanity or cruelty of certain guerrilla commanders, and the unreliability and reactionary views of the traditional leaders on whom the MPLA relied to obtain support from the rural populations.
This severe portrayal of African chiefs echoed the MPLA’s distrust and contempt for African traditional authorities, deemed antagonistic to the revolutionary modernization of Angola. (P.44) The treatment of women in African societies, especially, was criticized by the MPLA, who condemned bridewealth and polygamy. The MPLA’s support of women, however, was deeply ambivalent. The party leadership remained unequivocally male, and women were expected to support the guerrillas by performing feminine tasks.
In As aventuras de Ngunga, the bodies of African women form the battleground over which the MPLA’s modernity and the African chiefs’ conservatism is enacted: Ngunga has to renounce his love for the young Uassamba, the fourth wife of the village chief Chipoya. Similarly, Ngunga’s childhood friend, Imba, is sold by her father to a guerrilla commander to buy his fourth wife (P. 58). Women are primarily constructed as narrative devices opposing a senior, traditional type of masculinity, backward and predatory, against a subaltern, revolutionary masculinity, for whom romantic love is emancipatory and subversive. Women allegorically figure the young Angolan nation, which needs to be rescued from colonialism and from African traditionalism.
It is striking how, writing O planalto e a estepe (2007) over three decades later, Pepetela still centers his story on the voices and experiences of men, opposing the despotic and brutal Mongolian patriarch to the romantic and principled Angolan “new man.” Unable or unwilling to retrieve and echo women’s voices and experiences of a revolution they actively participated in, (P.318) the writer continues to present the anticolonial MPLA of the 1960s and 1970s as an entirely masculine beacon of equality and progressivism. The MPLA’s support of Júlio’s relationship with, and later quest for, Sarangel, is described at length. On the other hand, the fact that female MPLA militants sent abroad to study were closely surveilled by their male comrades, and actively prohibited from engaging in romantic liaisons with foreigners, is never acknowledged. (P.257)
Beyond the MPLA, O planalto e a estepe locates Júlio and Sarangel’s story at the intersection of socialist and Third-World solidarities. Mongolian chauvinism and racism is denounced, while Soviet hypocrisy is bitterly lamented. Morocco, Algeria, and Cuba, on the other hand, are authentic bearers of the revolutionary torch. At a time when the Angolan regime adopted a neoliberal agenda and played down Cuba’s essential role in securing the MPLA’s hold over state power during the civil war (1975–2002), Pepetela’s voice subverts the official narrative by recalling their former alliance.[1] Through the story of Júlio and Sarangel, Pepetela contrasts the authentic solidarity connecting Third World countries with the imperialist and paternalist undertones of the Soviet superpower. O planalto e a estepe recasts gender oppression within global, racialized power relations: the socialist bloc is divided between an imperial power tainted by geopolitical interests and subaltern countries who hold on to revolutionary idealism, replicating the dichotomy of senior vs. revolutionary masculinities. Meanwhile, subaltern countries’ internal contradictions and shortcomings regarding women’s emancipation and participation in revolutionary politics are silenced entirely.
Pepetela’s novels capture the MPLA’s ambivalent stance in the 1960s and 1970s: forming a vibrant revolutionary archive, they also betray the patriarchal unconscious that animated highly gendered narratives of emancipation. A contrapuntal reading reveals the generational and cultural divide that led MPLA revolutionaries, mostly young men from the cities, to forcefully reject African traditional authorities. It also highlights how women’s emancipation was weaponized by the nationalist movement: while many women supported the movement, the MPLA leadership always maintained them in subordinate positions. Struggling to acknowledge and convey the participation of women in the struggle, MPLA writers constructed instead highly gendered, male-centric narratives of heroism.
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[1] Angolan president José Eduardo dos Santos barely acknowledged Cuba’s role in postcolonial Angola in a 2015 discourse that focused on Angola’s history and traditions of resistance.
Dorothée Boulanger is Junior Research Fellow in Modern Languages at Jesus College, Oxford. In 2018, she graduated with a PhD in History from King’s College London.