The language of land: Ngoya, or the Benjamin of Angolan languages and ethnic identities
No doubt human history is a story of the development of emergent forms, both of cultures and societies. [1]
António Tomás
In the presentation of this project, I intend to do three things: to describe two events, to ask three questions, and to rehearse a hypothesis that links the events to the questions.
The first event is as simple as this. In 2004, for the first time, Angolans in general became aware of the existence of one more language in the pantheon of Angolan languages: Ngoya. The event was the program in national languages of the National Broadcast of Angola. Not that the language had not been spoken before. In fact, this specific language had already been spoken in shows in local languages of the branch of the National Broadcast of Angola. However, in the microphones of the local radio, the language could simply be called Kimbundu. That made perfect sense to everyone, even if the Kimbundu then spoken was a variant of the third language most spoken in the entire country (after Portuguese and Umbundu). But once in the national arena, there was the need to make a stark distinction between Kimbundu and this local variant of Kimbundu. So this is when the language was baptized as Ngoya.
Among the many native speakers of this variant of Kimbundu I had the opportunity to talk to, there is not doubt that the vocabulary and linguistic structure of Ngoya differs significantly from that of Kimbundu. For those people, many of them members of ASNAC,[2] the main problem resides in the designation itself. According to Bernardo Castro, for instance, who has written and organized an event on the subject, the term Ngoya is not appropriate since it denigrates the identity of the people of this region. Ngoya is a neologism that was attributed to a small community run by a ‘paterfamilias’ who, “for reasons of security and integrity of his community” established himself and his group in a place, which was at the crossroads of a very active commerce among many products such as slaves, salt and later rubber. It was then in this space of cultural contact that the terminology Ngoya came into being, to characterize the people and the place they inhabit.
Bernardo Castro is also aware that many languages were named in such ways that demean the people who speak them. According to him, for instance, Kimbundu means “preto”, “black people,” or language spoken by black people.[3] For him, the name of African languages should be more akin to what happens in Europe, where language names tend to indicate the places where the speakers come from. Accordingly, he suggests that Ngoya should rather be called Cela, the name of the region where its speakers are from, or, perhaps more appropriately, Kisoko. The term Kisoko comes to designate a lineage that “diverges [from a larger one] for reasons of traditional political power, even though it [the lineage] stays united for being part of the same genealogical root or same mythic ancestor.”[4] So for de Castro Kisoko should be for convention not only the name of the people who claim this common ancestor, and who happen to be the autochthons of Cela, but this term should also originate the formation of a political unity led by a Colégio de Sobas Grandes [Directorate of Big Sobas].
The second event is the approval in the same year, 2004, of the controversial Land Act. This important piece of legislation was promulgated in the context of the end of 27 years of civil war, when it was clear to everyone that land disputes would be become the next focus of social unrest. There were not only millions of demobilized soldiers and IDP’s (Internal Displaced People) returning to their lands, but there were also a significant number of members of political and military elites seeking land for investment. In the run-up to the approval of the law, there was, for the first time, some optimism that the Land Act would reflect people’s hopes – in term of a more equitable distribution of land. That was the first time that a piece of legislation was openly discussed. Debates were very productive, including the intervention of a number of ‘civil society’ organizations, such as NGOs and peasants cooperatives. On the other hand, however, there were not any debates in a parliament overwhelmingly dominated by the ruling party, MPLA, which easily approved the law without the support of the majority of the opposition parties.
In the Land Act (2004), the state is posited as the “original owner of land” (article 5). The law also puts a special premium on the profitability of land (article 7). The juxtaposition of these two legal principles, as many observers have noted, is open to discordant interpretations. On the one hand, it seemingly protects peasants from encroachment of non-autochthones’ interests. For land seems to be beyond the reach of commoditization. However, as the emphasis is on the use of land for profitable activities it is up to the state to define the meaning of profitability. In this sense, as Jenny Clover has written, the law endows the state with a very dangerous discretionary power.[5]
So the point here that deserves some attention is whether or not the law that should protect people’s property rights in terms of access to land is it itself creating a sort of legal limbo.[6] The purpose of this project, then, is to interrogate the conditions of possibility of this space opened up by the law, and the forms of life that are here engendered. My main hypothesis is that there is analytical purchase in looking at the formation of Ngoya identity in the context of land disputes. And this becomes even more relevant if we think of this problematic in the geographic context of this place.
The province of Kwanza Sul does not only link the cultural enclave of Luanda to the interior of the country, but it also borders the two provinces of Malange and Huambo. These provinces were not only some of the few provinces with the strongest pre-colonial political structures, namely of Kingdom of Ndongo and the Kingdom of Bailundo, but they are still some of the provinces with very particular indigenous logics. Cela, then, one of the most important municipalities of Kwanza Sul is a valley (at about 1000 meters above the level of the sea) with some of the most fertile lands in the whole country. After World War II, with the valorization of primary goods (such as cotton and coffee) the Portuguese developed a number of private and public agricultural projects (the most well known of which was the Colonato da Cela) in this province. For this, a number of Cela natives were evicted from their lands.
With independence, in 1975, the Angolan government decided to collectivize land by creating peasant cooperatives.[7] When the civil war started, agricultural production was almost wiped away, with the country becoming heavily dependent on oil, and the peasants occupying the land they claim belong to their ancestors. During the war, Kwanza Sul was relatively peaceful, so many people from other places, especially those from the Central Plateau (Huambo and Bié) emigrated there. The people built their houses and occupied land. With the end of war, the government decided to reactivate the Colonato da Cela, re-baptized as Aldeia Nova, and for this a new wave of evictions were conducted. This is context in which these new claims on land are based on an indigenous discourse. It is common to hear in that part of the country that the people of Cela are hospitable, that they received everyone during the long years of Civil war, but, that now, that there is peace in the country, it is time for those who do not belong there to move back to their land. Curiously, these claims are made more against members of supposedly other ethnic groups than against the agricultural projects brought about by the government.
Before developing my hypothesis with more theoretical depth I will develop the three main questions that frame my project.
First question: What has been the impact of agro-industry on small-scale agriculture?
When the civil war finished, in 2002, the imperative of diversifying the Angolan economy, overwhelmingly dependent on oil extraction became the main focus of development policies. One of the places singled out for the prosecution of these goals was the municipality of Cela. This part of the country, called in colonial literature, the ‘granary’ of Angola, was the one picked up for the implementation of colonatos (white settlements), the most important of which was Colonato da Cela. The idea was to link agricultural development and the urgency of white settlement in Angola, when this was believed to be a way to delay nationalistic claims in Angola.[8] In the late 1950s, many local communities were evicted, and the first 15 rustic villages, with 349 houses, were built in place. Although the purpose was to settle one million Portuguese rural workers in Angola in places like this, the colonato da Cela only received around 200 hundred families, most of which from the island of Azores. These families, besides the houses, were also given animals and plots of land. However, the profit made by these families was far below what had been expected. In 1963, only 234 families were still occupying the villages. In 1967, there were only 192 people. In April 1970, the houses started to be auctioned off.[9] The colonato da Cela, then, was a colonial failure.
And yet, when there were conditions for the diversification of Angolan economy, through agricultural development, the Colonato da Cela was singled out to jump start this process. And here come the Israelis. The Israelis had become the best allies of Angola toward the end of the war in circumventing the embargo imposed by the UN on both sides of the conflict by providing the Angola state with personal and military personnel. So after the war the Israelis, this time behind a consortium called LR Group, were given the remains of Cela, then called Aldeia Nova, to develop there a kibbutz kind of agriculture. The plan was to bring demobilized families to occupy the rebuilt houses once left by the Portuguese. In form, Aldeia Nova was not a project of easy classification. The project was implemented by the Israelis and financed by the government, who nominated an Angolan administrator, the economist José Cerqueira.
According to the documents that were prepared by LR Group, the idea was to privatize Aldeia Nova as soon as possible. The state money was there simply as an investment that any private enterprise, let alone a foreign one, could not make. In this case it was not the recuperation of Cela’s infrastructures, but the re-construction of roads and bridges, the clean up of the system of drainage, the construction of granary, factory, nurseries and stoves, and more importantly the provision of the tools for the development of mechanized agriculture. However, in 2010 the government recognized that in the form that it was implemented Aldeia Nova project had failed. That was the opportunity for the LR Group to get rid of the Angolan state and privatize the initiative taking advantage of the monumental investment made by the Angolan government.
Over the ruins of Aldeia Nova a number of questions can be asked of the relationship between agri-business and small-scale agriculture. Besides Aldeia Nova, there are a number of other state-financed projects, or ventures between the state and privates, such as SEDIAC (Sociedade de Estudos, Desenvolvimento, Industrial, Agrícola, Comercial). It is true that these projects either have encroached on the natives’ land, or they have occupied the land taken by the Portuguese from the natives. However, to understand the relationship between these two forms of agriculture requires a more complex theoretical framework.
In fact, my preliminary observation does not allow for the conclusion that there is any sort of competition between agri-business and small scale agriculture. First of all, agriculture in this part of Angola is a very expensive investment. A great part of soils were what the local populations called ‘areia da Damba [Damba’s sand],’ and which are not valued. For the Portuguese these soils, blackened with organic matter, were highly fertile, and it was only due to laziness that they did not have any use in the hands of the natives.[10] However, these soils are only profitable after a significant investment in terms of fertilizers and labor. Secondly, the region is a valley, with very rich reservoirs of subterranean waters. But in the dry season these waters have to be pumped up to the soil by irrigation systems.
So my general and very preliminary conclusion is that there is space for the co-existence of agriculture. Agribusiness brought to the peasant access to the machinery that can be rented through the cooperatives, and also an easier access to fertilizers and other agricultural inputs. On the other hand, the markets for which these forms of agriculture produce are different. And here also there is a sort of replication of colonial agriculture.[11] Agri-business does not produce for the region. Maize produced by SEDIAC is either turned into [ ] or it is directly sold in Luanda. The local markets are to a great extent supplied with agricultural products of the small-scale agriculture. This process of proletarianization of peasants has been studied in many other African and other contexts. The question here is more about which local and historically situated form this process might take.[12]
Second question: what is the relationship between land and traditional and local power?
The Angolan juridical system does not recognize traditional power as sovereign. Colonialism eroded the power of the chiefs not only by leveling to more or less the same category (irrespective of the hierarchical differences that they might have to differentiate the ones from the others), but, more importantly, by turning them into functionaries of the state.[13] Sobas have a monthly salary paid by the municipal administrations, and they have to wear a uniform, especially for the official events of the state. However, the place of traditional authorities in the fabric of the Angolan state has never been an easy problem. The socialist state that took power after the war for national liberation attempted to ward off traditional authorities by not recognizing any other form of power than the one instituted by the state. The rationale was that traditional authorities were a legacy of colonialism. Things have changed recently. Traditional power has been defined as auxiliary to the state,[14] and, curiously, this is not unrelated to the introduction in Angola of competitive politics.