Stephen Henighan

Transcontinental Waters: the Anti-Postcolonial Tide in Angolan Fiction and Film 

Lusophone African intellectuals, like academics who work on Lusophone Africa, reject the inclusion of the five African countries where Portuguese is an official language under the “postcolonialism” banner. Robert Young’s classification of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe as part of Postcolonialism (2001) received a hostile reception from Lusophone Africans, who see “postcolonialism” as both an assimilationist Anglophone discourse and one that simply gets their history wrong. As Phillip Rothwell (2004) writes, “Despite being the first European power to subscribe to a process of global colonization, and the last to relinquish the dream that direct colonization could be made to work to its advantage, Portugal rarely controlled the rules of the colonial game, which became increasingly dictated by a normative colonialism designed with the interests of the British Empire in mind.” Former Angolan Minister of Culture Boaventura de Sousa Santos argues that Portugal brought its language, culture and genetic inheritance to countries like Angola and Mozambique, but afflicted them with a “deficiency” (2001) of both capitalism and colonialism, and finally retreated into internal upheaval in 1974, leaving its nominal colonies alone to face a global capitalism that had, in any event, been ravaging them for centuries.

For this reason, Marxist and neo-Marxist frameworks hostile to “postcolonial” discourse have dominated in Lusophone African, and, particularly, Angolan art. Fernando Arenas, in Lusophone Africa: Beyond Independence (2011), balances Marxist and postcolonial perspectives on Lusophone Africa, noting the unpopularity of the latter. Anne Garland Mahler, in From the Tricontinental to the Global South (2018), argues that the revolutionary discourse of tricontinentalism, which links Cuba, the most recently independent of Spanish American territories, to Angola and Guinea Bissau through Fidel Castro’s “Black Atlantic/ Marxist Atlantic” collaboration with these countries’ independence movements, which began at the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, offer a more fruitful framework for analysis.

The proposed paper will interpret the roles of oceans, rivers and, particularly, fishermen, in two Angolan novels, Pepetela’s A Geração da Utópia (1992) and Ondjaki’s Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret (2008), and Maria João Ganga’s film Na Cidade Vazia (Hollow City) (2004), as zones of potential succour, gleaned through either a return to cultures undisturbed by imperialism, or through rewarding mingling with other cultures (Black and White, Angolan and Cuban) that reinforces the nation’s mixed essence against the flattening degradations of imperialism.