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University of Bayreuth
African Studies
WORKING PAPERS
Disputed Meanings of
Women’s Liberation
Social Tensions and
Symbolic Struggles During
Angolan Independence
Fábio Baqueiro Figueiredo, 2022
academy reflects 6
30
University of Bayreuth
African Studies
WORKING PAPERS
Disputed Meanings of
Women's Liberation
Social Tensions and Symbolic Struggles
During Angolan Independence
Fábio Baqueiro Figueiredo, 2022
CC BY 4.0
Disputed Meanings of Women's Liberation
iii
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Disputed Meanings of Women's Liberation
v
Academy reflects 6
About the Author
Fábio Baqueiro Figueiredo is a professor of African History at University for International
Integration of the Afro-Brazilian Lusophony (UNILAB), a federal Brazilian university created to
foster Africa-Brazil academic exchanges. He is one of the editors of Afro-Asia, the older and most
influential Brazilian academic journal specialized on African Studies and race relations. He is
actively engaged in the ongoing institutionalization of African Studies in Brazil, both in the African
History Workgroup of the Brazilian National History Association (GT-África/ANPUH), and in the
Brazilian African Studies Association (ABEÁfrica). His research focuses on the relation of politics,
intellectual and cultural production, and social identity in Angola, both during the nationalist
struggle and after independence. In particular, he is interested in observing how formulations
about nationhood, race, ethnicity, urban-rural spectrum, class, and gender – in nationalist
propaganda, public education, government cultural policy, the press, scholarship, music, cinema,
literature, comics – influence and are influenced by the political struggle to define the future of
the nation in the making.
Figueiredo was an International Fellow at the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies
from February 1 to July 31, 2021.
fabiobaq@unilab.edu.br
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my colleagues at the Research Section Moralities at the Bayreuth Academy
on Advanced African Studies, and at the Graduate Program of African Studies at Bahia Federal
University for careful reading and commenting on the manuscript. I am greatly indebted to Maria
Cristina Pinto and João Pedro Lourenço, who helped me find my ways in Luanda through this
research, and also to Ermelinda Liberato and Margarida Paredes for sharing ideas and valuable
insights.
This Working Paper is the outcome of research conducted within the Africa Multiple Cluster of
Excellence at the University of Bayreuth, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG,
German Research Foundation) under Germany ́s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2052/1 – 390713894.
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University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers 30
Contents
University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers
iii
Academy reflects
iv
About the Author, Acknowledgments
v
Disputed Meanings of Women's Liberation:
Social Tensions and Symbolic Struggles During Angolan Independence
1 Introduction
1
2 Women and Nationalism
4
3 Women and Late Colonialism
9
4 Women and Revolution
14
5 New Man’s Wife?
20
6 Sources
24
7 References
25
8 Latest Publications in the Academy reflects Working Paper Series
28
Disputed Meanings of Women's Liberation
1
Disputed Meanings of Women's
Liberation
Social Tensions and Symbolic Struggles During Angolan
Independence
Fábio Baqueiro Figueiredo
1 Introduction
The years around independence in Angola were marked by a proliferation of projects regarding
the future society to be built after the demise of colonial rule. Not only have three different anti-
colonial armed movements claimed legitimacy to govern, but also many ideological trends could
be observed within and around the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the
organization that ultimately secured control of the capital city by November 11, 1975, when the
last Portuguese troops and civilian personnel withdrew. The black urban youth in Luanda
wholeheartedly supported MPLA at first and were instrumental in expelling the rival National
Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) and National Union for the Total Independence of
Angola (UNITA) once the transitional government collapsed and skirmishes in Luanda streets
prefigured the protracted civil war that ensued. However, very keen differences of perceptions
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University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers 30
Academy reflects 6
and perspectives about what independence should actually mean soon emerged between the
urban youth and the MPLA historical leadership, with momentous consequences for the future of
the newborn nation.
The MPLA cadres now in charge of their government found themselves amid a multifold crisis.
The rival nationalist movements had been expelled from Luanda but still controlled much of the
national territory; most of the whites occupying technical and managerial posts both within the
State and private companies had left. In the countryside, cultivation, harvest, and outflow came to
a halt; in the cities, factories and offices closed or faltered. The new rulers were left to reconcile a
massive disruption of economic activity (and the sharp fall in state revenue it entailed) with the
urge to deliver on their promises, such as dignified housing, sanitation, electric power supply,
public transportation, health services, schools, and kindergartens. At the same time, they had to
put up a national army to reclaim sovereignty over all Angolan provinces. In this context, a far-
fetched discussion around unproductive uses of the body emerged in the public arena,
encompassing alcohol and marijuana, dancing parties and electric guitars, platform shoes and
bell-bottom pants, casual sex, and family responsibilities. The socialist-inspired “New Man” was
boosted by government-aligned media as a role model for citizenship, fashioning a patriotic,
unselfish, community-oriented hard worker that would follow suit with government instructions
in all regards. Conversely, reprehensible behavior was embodied in the trope of the “kazucuteiro”
— the alleged counter-revolutionary, petty-bourgeois saboteur, named after a satirical carnival
performance, that mimicked colonists' ways.1
In previous research on Angolan intellectuals during guerrilla days, I have noticed how social
categories mobilized to describe Angolan society, tell its history, and envision its future had both
a descriptive and a normative component (F. B. Figueiredo 2012). That is to say, when Angolan
intellectuals talked about race, or class, or ethnicity (the main contentious fields to the legitimacy
disputes within the Nationalist circles), they were not just stating what these were and how they
worked, but also what they should become, or how they should be superseded by the nation — as
the inexorable result of history itself. To no surprise, a post-Enlightenment, evolutionist albeit
intrinsically contradictory theory of modernization served as the underlying philosophy of history
to these formulations (Chatterjee 1995; see also Mbembe 2001). More interesting for the goals of
my current research is to perceive how this normative component of social categories articulates
historical laws and moral injunctions, something that gains particular importance after
independence, around the “New Man” and a host of associated social personae (the worker, the
peasant, the student, and so on), all of which were defined by a set of moral qualities individuals
1 The “New Man” (or “New Human Being”) has been part of mass politics in both rightwing and leftwing versions since
the 1920s, especially in Europe (Fritzsche and Hellbeck 2009). While most scholars believe projects of the like were
abandoned after World War II, recent research have shown that they persisted, in different forms, in places like Africa,
South Asia, and the Middle East (Bromber and Krais 2018), in the context of decolonization, under the influence of
transnational “moral Empires” such as the Scouts movement, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) or the Red
Cross. Angolan “New Man” seems to have a different genealogy though, shared with other nationalist movements in
Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. It can be traced back to Frantz Fanon (1963, 36) who understood the creation of a
“new man” as the ultimate goal of African decolonization, and by Ernesto Che Guevara (1965), who used it to embody
the human transformations which should result from, but at the same time were needed to enforce, the implementation
of socialism in Cuba. Brazilian educator Paulo Freire also resorted to the “new man” (Freire 1987, 16–32) as the final
term of a Hegelian oppressed-oppressor dialectics. The expression was first used by nationalists fighting Portuguese
colonialism in 1970, in a speech by the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) leader Samora Machel (1973).
Disputed Meanings of Women's Liberation
3
were expected to comply with if they wanted to qualify as legitimate actors in the making of
independent Angola.
Coming from a discipline that has taken pains to distance itself from moral concerns in order to
warrant its status as a social science rather than a form of literature, I must confess I do not
approach the topic with a previous coherent theoretical framework on moralities or ethics.
Engaging a bit in epistemological anarchism, but also drawing from canonical and counter-
canonical critiques of “Western universals”, I am taking moralities not as a discrete sphere of the
human experience but as an analytical grid, one that concerns discourses and actions broadly
related to the (social) valuation of (social) behavior, assuming that these discourses patrol the
boundaries of social groups and help structure their internal arrangement. In this sense, looking
at moralities à la Bourdieu, as a particular symbolic capital in the field of nation-building, may be
productive. In order to do this, some particular features must be taken into account. First, the
nation is an absolute field, in the sense that there is no “outside” for most of the agents, for obvious
reasons. Second, the nation-in-the-making is constituted and intersected by every other social
hierarchy that may function somewhat autonomously as fields of their own, but their intersection
defines roles and categories of agents, assigning their places and credentials. Moves can be
individual or collective, but the latter have more overarching effects, as they may either reinforce
or challenge the criteria that simultaneously constitute the groups of agents and increase or
decrease their collective moral capital, shifting the geometry of the field and in some cases
creating new categories of agents or conversely making some of them irrelevant. Third, the State
is not an external, neutral entity, though it may usually represent itself as such, in its claim to be
the sole guardian and enforcer of the rules, in its capacity as the legitimate representative of the
whole people. The State may be better conceived of as a topological space within the field, the only
place from where certain special moves are possible. But it also assumes an identity as a player
endowed with especial powers, especially when it engages in modernization projects that involve
all-encompassing social engineering.
That was the case in Angola, where the newly independent State vowed to crush colonial-legacy
hierarchies and bring about a nation of new, equal, decolonized men. In order to achieve this, it
pushed to establish the social personae associated with the “New Man” semantic universe as the
only category of agents admitted in the moral economy of nation-building. In the next pages, I will
focus on one of the most relevant of these personae: “the Angolan woman.” I will explore the
changing and disputed meanings associated with the trope of “women's liberation” and the place
attributed to women in public and domestic spaces, from the onset of the armed struggle up to the
first years after independence. In doing so, I underline how different groups of women conceived
their place in the building of the new nation, and fought for it, as well as how the State tried to
“domesticate” the possibilities of women's activism as such, in symbolic as well as practical ways.
It should be stressed that concerns with gender relations, patterns, roles, and discourses in Angola
have been expressed for a while now, in the work of female scholars. Breaking ground, Angolan
sociologist Maria do Céu Carmo Reis (1987) called into question the representation of women in
literature and nationalist discourse from the 1950s, that coded and delimited a set of symbolic
functions and social spaces for women. Dutch historian Inge Brinkman (2003), dealing with
witchcraft accusations in guerrilla-controlled zones in the 1970s, and, more consistently, United
States historian Marissa Moorman (2008), investigating the creation of Angolan popular music
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Academy reflects 6
from the 1950s throughout the 1970s, brought gender to the center of their analysis. More
recently, Portuguese anthropologist Margarida Paredes (2015) conducted extensive research on
the participation of women in the military, both during the armed struggle (1961–1974) and the
civil war (1974–2002).
This paper seeks to dialogue with the propositions of this small but fundamental bibliographical
corpus, as it moves through a set of historical sources marked for its diversity as well as for its
partiality. Due to their archival history and conditions of production, the sources used here tend
to disproportionately convey MPLA and MPLA-affiliated Organization of Angolan Women (OMA)
points of view, lending these entities a centrality they probably did not enjoy to such a great extent
in the daily lives of most Angolan women — even for the ones living in Luanda, closer to the
political center of the newborn country. This is the case for internal documents and public
manifestations of both organizations, but also for the press, especially Jornal de Angola, which
served as a regular newspaper but also as a sort of government mouthpiece, its news reporting
being strictly aligned with the MPLA leadership political line. Yet, in the deaf counterpoint of
official and unofficial voices, divergent stances and discourses can be inferred. It is by way of this
counter-reading that I try to pinpoint the tensions and disputes I mention in the title, assuming
the risk (inherent in the writing of all social history) that most of the collective experience that I
seek to understand remains inexorably beyond reach from the sources that are available to us.
2 Women and Nationalism
In 1961, when the MPLA published its Major Program, provisions aimed explicitly at Angolan
women were included in the chapter on Justice and Progress Social Policies. The independent
nation was to be guided by “total equality of rights without distinction of sex on all levels —
political, economic, social and cultural.” The authors believed it was important to insist that
“women should have strictly the same rights as men.” They also proposed “State assistance to
women during pregnancy and childhood,” and, here and there, the expression “without distinction
of sex” appeared whenever rights to which all future citizens should be entitled were specified
(Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola 2008, vol. 1, p. 496). In the following year, the
movement informed its militants not only of the need to “rapidly engage Angolan women” in the
fields of “social and health assistance” and “schooling” but also of “political-military framing and
participation in the governing bodies” and “political and technical training” (Lara 2006, vol. 2, p.
526–531). In the following year, the movement informed its militants not only of the need to
“rapidly engage Angolan women” on the fields of “social and health assistance” and “schooling”
but also of “political-military framing and participation in the governing bodies” and “political and
technical training.” Shortly, the newly founded OMA would urge countrywomen to join to
contribute “simultaneously to the struggle for Angola's independence and our liberation.” The
latter would depend on the “establishment of a society in which Angolan women are in an equal
position in the nation's life” and no longer “referred to the lower social scale” by colonialist
oppression (Lara 2006, vol. 2, p. 536).2
2 A history of the OMA is yet to be written. Official accounts stress continuity from its creation in Leopoldville around
1962 up to current times. However, a more critical appraisal of the available sources suggests at least three very
Disputed Meanings of Women's Liberation
5
The creation of “mass organizations” to foster support among women, students, and workers was
a standard strategy of left-leaning political parties since the Bolshevik Revolution. However, it is
possible to distinguish the outline of an autonomous agenda and an independent strategy from
the first OMA documents, such as the organization chart and structuring principles, written in
Brazzaville, in 1965. Traces of an internal debate whether the organization should remain
independent or merge with MPLA are noticeable. While the affiliation was inevitable due to the
characteristic segmentation of Angolan nationalism and to the overlapping sociability networks
of OMA and MPLA founders, it was nevertheless justified in programmatic terms:
OMA fights alongside MPLA because the victory of the Angolan woman's fight
depends on fulfilling the principles enunciated in the MPLA program. MPLA is, in fact,
the only Angolan organization that defends in its program the right of women to
participate in the solution of the country's problems, in both the struggle for national
independence and the struggle for the construction of Angola, in the full equality of
rights with men (ATD d3182.OrgEstrtOMA.6510-11).
Established by women with mostly urban livingness and often with study and work experience in
other countries, OMA soon realized the need to reach out to a different audience that continuously
crossed the borders into both Congos to escape Portuguese brutal counterinsurgency measures.
If the “women's liberation” trope was enough to communicate with women from the cities, a
conscious effort was necessary to win the rural female public over to the cause. However, once
those women joined the OMA, they would find “the most efficient means to liberate themselves
and be useful to our country” (ATD d3182.OrgEstrtOMA.6510-11).
The OMA founders dreamed of reaching every small village throughout Angola. This responded to
the urge to set up local networks to assist the guerrillas that MPLA intended to infiltrate in the
interior. During a seminar held in October–November 1965, the participation of Vietnamese
women in the anti-colonial war was presented as a case study, illustrating the tasks women were
expected to assume in Angola:
Young women took part in battles, joined the regular army the same as men, and did
internal work, such as making sandals, looking for good water to drink, transporting
and healing the wounded, growing and preparing food for the guerrillas, encouraging
guerrillas who had personal difficulties. (…) When men left for the maquis, women
took care of production for the guerrillas, the elderly, and children in the villages.
They took care of the sick whom they helped with firewood, food, etc. (ATD
d3372.ProgOMA.6510-11).
Vietnamese first aid teams, composed almost exclusively of women, were also evoked:
different phases. The formal constitution in Léopoldville in 1962 seems to have been inconsequential. The first moves
to organize beyond a small circle started in Brazzaville, in 1965; these came to a halt in the following year due to the
death of some of its main articulators. The second phase follows a clean restart in Dar es Salaam, in the early 1970s, in
touch with international women movements. It is only during the third phase, after its arrival at Luanda in 1975 and its
subsequent implantation throughout Angola, that OMA assumes the features that would come to characterize it more
lastingly.
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During aerial attacks, they risk their own lives to tend to wounded guerrillas and
civilians and use every spare moment to transport ammunition to guerrillas. After the
enemy planes are gone, they cook and wash the guerrillas' clothes (ATD
d3372.ProgOMA.6510-11).
OMA's militants were supposed to engage in grassroots mobilization and enhance their fellow
villagers' political consciousness. They were also urged to work in social assistance, visiting
hospitals, nursing homes, and schools, and waging “war against flies.” They should take care of
“sewing, patching, washing and ironing” guerrillas' uniforms, dedicate themselves to crafts,
making “baskets, mats, clay pots, lace, hats, etc.,” beyond providing food: “crops, gardens,
livestock, milk” (ATD d3372.ProgOMA.6510-11). Besides, the seminar featured conversations on
the body, food, and house hygiene, first aid, childcare, and child health, attesting to a sanitary
concern that would mark the organization's trajectory over the following decades (ATD
d3373.DoctoHigieneCorp.651010-1107;
d3374.HigAlimtr.6510-11;
d3375.HigHabitacoes.
6510-11; d3376.PrimSocorros. 6510-11; d3377.SaudePuericult.6510-11; d3378.Puericultura.
6510-11).
These examples allow us to infer that the practical needs of OMA's adherence to MPLA ended up
boosting an understanding of primary female roles as ones of care, help, and encouragement of
men, who remained the symbolic agents of the (military) work of national liberation. Nonetheless,
there seemed to be a quite keen awareness of the political weight an OMA could attain if it
achieved the massive enrollment and territorial spread intended. Also, equitable occupation of
spaces in the public arena was already conceived as a way to keep women's problems in the
spotlight and ensure that they were taken into account in political decisions at various levels (ATD
d3182.OrgEstrtOMA.6510-11).
MPLA did provide for the inclusion of women as a specific public in several areas of its activity,
before and after the independence. Undoubtedly, the role of many women within the movement
— and in particular those who had acquired new skills in technical or university training in
socialist countries, and who “drove trucks, worked in logistics and telecommunications,
transported hidden arms, fed and hid soldiers, worked as spies, and fought in the armed struggle”
— strained the dominant conceptions about masculinity and femininity and “produced new
gendered dynamics in the maquis” (Moorman 2016, pp. 193–194). Prime among them and
essential for the development of later symbolic struggles, was Deolinda Rodrigues, one of OMA
founders and the first woman to be appointed to MPLA's Steering Committee, in May 1962.
Deolinda stood for involving women in combat actions and was part of the first group of women
to receive military training. In January 1966, she was assigned to Convoy Kamy, setting Angola to
an ill-fated supply mission, resulting in the arrest and subsequent death by firing squad of
Deolinda and four other female guerrillas (Paredes 2015; Paredes 2019).
About the place of women in the liberation struggle, it is noteworthy how OMA's narrative about
its own history, written some years after independence (and regardless of its empirical fidelity),
is construed around an articulation of two distinct scopes of female experience:
OMA started to develop a large mobilization campaign (…) to engage women in the
tasks of health and education organs within the movement (…). Thus, nursing
Disputed Meanings of Women's Liberation
7
assistants were trained, education was provided for many Angolan children not
allowed in Congolese schools, and political courses were promoted, which helped
enhance our militants' skills.
(…) With the development of the national liberation struggle, Angolan women began
to operate as guerrillas, arms in hand, thus contributing to the country's
independence (Organização da Mulher Angolana 1978).
This articulated tension between roles traditionally conceived as male and female was a constant
during the guerrilla war. Aside from the noticeable number of women fighting in the woods, sent
for university schooling abroad, or in charge of political positions, the female work within MPLA
during the liberation struggle was predominantly linked to social services and logistic support.
Women served as nurses, rescuers, or teachers and worked the fields that supported the militants
and refugees in the borders where the movement had its main bases. In this sense, the formal
equality championed in the official documents provided some leeway for women within the
nationalist organization. Still, it was not enough to craft new gender roles in Angolan society's
microcosm unfolding in Congo-Brazzaville, Zambia, or in the Eastern Front bush — spaces where
the sexual division of labor previously in force was, to a great extent, maintained (Paredes 2015,
p. 209; see also: Reis 1987).
In a more intimate level of experience, the MPLA military hierarchy sought to preside over sexual
intercourse and marriages between guerrillas and between guerrillas and civilians, at least in the
Eastern Front. Some reports seem to indicate a degree of interference over sexual and affection
practices of the rural populations living in the zones controlled by the movement, such as the
repression of arranged marriages and material retribution to a family in exchange for sexual
favors provided by one of its single women. That did not stop some male military commanders
from requesting such favors from their female subordinates, with no other retribution than the
purported honor of having been picked (Paredes 2015, pp. 209–210). In other cases, commanders
sought to advise their male underlings on the accepted ways to relate to women in villages. They
tried to repress polygamy or out-of-wedlock sexual intercourse in a bid to “shape male sexuality
and craft a new masculinity that (…) was sexually disciplined, monogamous, educated, politically
conscious, and obedient to movement authority” (Moorman 2016, p. 196).
In regions under its control, the MPLA sought to posit itself as the only legitimate authority to
sanction marriage — and by extension, sex and family formation.3 Unions between guerrillas,
often physically removed from their kinship networks, granted the movement's bureaucracy the
perfect opportunity to replace the customary social mediation and exercise statehood. Moreover,
these marriages represented national unity in the making, especially when crossing regional,
ethnic, or religious lines. On the contrary, the unions of male soldiers to civilian women were
celebrated to the detriment of other men, specifically the bride's older male relatives. These men
were forced to relinquish their authority to negotiate weddings, and their material and symbolic
3 At least one intervention in a case of domestic violence has been recorded, also in the Eastern Front. In June 1970, a
male cadre was formally reprimanded by MPLA's Steering Committee for “committing physical violence against his
wife”, something that was “absolutely forbidden by the Combatants' Disciplinary Regulations and contrary to
revolutionary ethics” (ATD d5190.OrdemServiCarreira.700601).
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University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers 30
Academy reflects 6
compensation usually required to yield one of the women in their family. That contributed to the
emergence of conflicts between different forms of masculinity in the maquis. However, it did not
challenge the male prominence in seeking, initiating, formalizing, and regulating sexual
relationships (Moorman 2016, pp. 193–197). Part of these conflicts, especially concerning the
control over women and their sexual and affective choices, took the form of witchcraft and treason
accusations (Brinkman 2003, pp. 321–322).
The OMA was being rebuilt around the same time after some inactive years. Counting on the
Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF) support, a seminar was held in the Eastern
Front in 1971 (Organização da Mulher Angolana 1978). Soon after, the organization opened a
representation at Dar es Salaam. The OMA began to send delegates to international African and
Afro-Asian solidarity meetings and launched a quarterly newsletter, in French and English, to
publicize its actions and garner international support. The flagship project was the construction
of a Deolinda Rodrigues Center, dedicated to female staff training to be later sent to work in the
areas controlled by the MPLA in the countryside. Besides these outward-looking activities, a
second seminar held in 1972 discussed the organization's goals. Among such, unsurprisingly,
were the “involvement of women in the armed struggle for national liberation” and the “cultural
and social education of women.” The novelty was the topic “Angolan women from tradition to
revolution” heading the list (Organização da Mulher Angolana 1972).
It is true that since 1965 the OMA had already dealt with issues that would later be encompassed
by the semantic universe of “tradition,” such as polygamy or exclusive female responsibility for
agricultural work. The oppression felt by Angolan women was, at that early stage, understood in
intertwined keys: in their condition as exploited workers and their situation of discriminated
(black) women. However, one can observe an explicit discursive subordination of gender and race
to class discrimination. The demoting of women was shaped by the evolutionary succession of
historical phases characteristic of the vulgar Marxism in vogue back then: primitive society,
slavery, colonialism, and capitalism — all were held responsible to some extent. The term
“traditional” was associated with the “primitive society,” remitted to the past immemorial, but
also considered to be still in place, to a given extent, in some regions of rural Angola. In the urban
milieu, deemed more “contemporary,” occupational discrimination and wage differences in the
labor market were seen as a result of structural inequalities in schooling and professional
qualification between men and women, exacerbated by colonial exploitation's unfair conditions.
It follows that this inequality would be easily overcome with the fulfillment of the MPLA's
nationalist program and that women's real enemy was the mentality of each historical stage —
not men. While it was still necessary for women themselves to look after their inclusion, external
obstacles
would
no
longer
be
present
once
independence
was
achieved
(ATD
d3369.EvolHistMulher.6510-11; d3370.EvolHistMulher.6510-11; d3371.PapelMulher. 6510-11).
In the half-decade that followed these first formulations, sexuality control and conjugal mores,
linked to social reproduction and women's role in it, started gaining practical and symbolic
relevance for the liberation struggle. Such topics eventually became crucial to a broader public
debate on national culture construction based on the local, peasant, and popular cultures (seen as
“tradition”). Thus, within MPLA-related nationalist discourse, “women liberation” progressively
Disputed Meanings of Women's Liberation
9
had its semantic outlines delimited by a contrasting relationship with two other nuclei of meaning:
“colonization” and “tradition.”
Inge Brinkman describes a formal MPLA discourse depicting tradition as the “‘the old world’,
oppressive for women, and filled with dictatorial chiefs installed by colonialism, as well as ‘foolish
witchdoctors’ with ineffective magic”. The sources that support this claim were all produced
between 1969 and 1972, notably a 1970 discourse by MPLA leader Agostinho Neto, defining the
nationalist task in Angola as to “free and modernize our people by a dual revolution — against
their traditional structures which can no longer serve them, and against colonial rule” (Brinkman
2003, p. 307). It may well be the case that these sources mark “tradition's” inflection from a
fundamentally positive to a negative value. The nativist imagination from the 1940s and 1950s
concerning the primordial sources of culture and identity lost its traction, as “tradition” was now
experienced as rural livelihoods that the MPLA leadership struggled to cope with over the 1960s.
In the meantime, the movement was also dealing with the arrival of a flock of military, technical,
and university cadres trained abroad, mostly in socialist countries, imbued with a universalist
modernizing eagerness often conveyed by the adjective “progressive.” Conflicts arose from the
differences between who peasant Angolans should be and who they actually were, being later
repackaged by an understanding of tradition as the venue for “superstition” and “obscurantism.”4
These developments shaped a particular approach to gender and women's liberation that found
its way into official discourses built jointly by men and women who shared very similar
cosmopolitan backgrounds, characterized by an inside–outside–inside movement. However
different the departing points and initiatory pathways abroad might be (Luanda, Benguela,
Huambo, or the Northern rural zones, and then Lisbon, Paris, London, Frankfurt, Washington, or
Prague, Moscow, Peking, Havana, or even Algiers, Rabat, Cairo, Conakry), the arrival was always
at the Eastern bush and its rural societies. These called for new reflections on nation-building, and
the necessary social and cultural engineering — including gender patterns. However, deep down
in the woods or working beyond the borders, these women and men had no clue of the momentous
changes that were taking place in the Angolan capital, where another kind of cosmopolitanism
was gaining ground, along with new trends in social relations in general, and gender roles in
particular (Moorman 2016, p. 187).
3 Women and Late Colonialism
The Portuguese responded to the challenge posed by the 1961 uprisings with a double move:
military repression and economic development (Bender 2013, pp. 281–347; Pélissier and
Wheeler 2011, pp. 327–336; Bittencourt 2008, vol. 1, pp. 52–58). The main legislative change was
4 Far from being anomalous, generalizing historicist interpretations that assumed the subordination of women instead
of examining their social, economic and political roles have long marked African and Africanist historiography.
“Tradition” could be rendered in two opposite ways in these writings: as a golden era of complementary, harmonious
gender roles, or as the ground zero of utter oppression (Zeleza 1997). In Angola, as we will see, “tradition” gained a
marked ambivalence as the former rendering subsisted, related to a domestic universe, under the general public
dominance of the latter.
10
University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers 30
Academy reflects 6
the end of statutory discrimination between “citizens,” “natives,” and “assimilated.” Although the
social and racial distinctions that loosely corresponded to these categories kept orienting daily
social interactions and administrative practice, a range of new opportunities opened for the
majority of the Angolan population. Another significant by-product of the metropolitan response
was the increase in formal schooling, reinforcing a trend that started in the 1950s when three new
lyceums (one of them female-only) and two professional schools were added to the two lyceums
already functioning. Before the end of 1961, a plan to open official elementary schools in the
countryside was unveiled. It served as a trial balloon for a reform approved in 1964, which
instituted free, compulsory elementary schooling in all Portuguese colonial territories. Also, in
1963 the University General Studies (later University of Luanda) opened its first classes (Liberato
2014, pp. 1010–1013; Neto 2014, pp. 173–174; L. Figueiredo 2011; see also Messiant 1989;
MPLA-PT 1978).
While these measures intended to disseminate ideals of “Portugality,” their practical effects
included a boom in enrollment and a change in classroom demographics. Even though the number
of vacancies remained remarkably short of demand, and the percentage of black students declined
as education levels rose, in time, these changes resulted in increased participation of the urban
non-white population in a vigorously expanding, although not entirely stable, formal labor
market. In Luanda, the existence of a female-only lyceum indicates that young women gradually
took part in the available clerk positions throughout the 1960s and in the early 1970s.
The extent of the transformations experienced over this timespan can be inferred from the
employment patterns of the non-white population, especially males. Although job stability
remained uncommon throughout the period, in the 1950s, most men worked as servants, dockers,
and railroad porters, in the less qualified functions of commerce, or as artisans and apprentices.
At the beginning of the 1970s, a sample survey in musseques (peripheral neighborhoods with
precarious urbanization, home to the mostly black most impoverished strata) found only 10% of
the heads of families unemployed. Most had jobs in the private sector (with lower wages and a
higher risk of dismissal than in the public sector). There was also an increase of tailors, mechanics,
barbers, carpenters, and watchmakers, who had their own workshops and often hired helpers.
Women, at both points of the temporal range, worked mostly as washerwomen and greengrocers
(Moorman 2008, pp. 34–36; Messiant 1989, pp. 132–141). However, in 1968 Portuguese
sociologist Ilídio do Amaral found that although almost 80% of employed women in Luanda did
work in “personal and other services” or in “commercial activities,” about 7% were in the public
sector, and a similar number found jobs in the factories installed on the outskirts of the city.
Moreover, among women employed in commerce (almost one-quarter of the total) and alongside
the probable majority of greengrocers, a small portion could be working in offices or stores in
consolidated central neighborhoods (Amaral 2015).5 The insertion in the labor market was, on
5 Ilídio do Amaral (2015 [1968], p. 94) gives around 27,000 women and 81,500 men as the economically active
population in Luanda, an approximate ratio of 1:3. His data refers to the whole population, irrespective of race. Other
data presented in this paragraph refer either to musseque households or to people considered not civilized or not white.
Musseque residents and non-white population are overlapping but otherwise very different cohorts — 75% of Luanda
residents in 1960 were black or mixed-race, but only one third lived in musseques in 1964 (Amaral 2015, pp. 82, 85–
91). In any case, taken as rough estimates, these numbers suffice to support the point made here concerning occupation
patterns.
Disputed Meanings of Women's Liberation
11
the other hand, mediated by a set of social prejudices that affected the least able to appropriate
the codes of conduct required by employers, and low schooling remained one of the biggest
obstacles to the aspirations of the majority of citizens (Moorman 2008, pp. 35–36; Amaral 2015,
pp. 91–96).
In themselves, the aspirations were important, and the marginal improvement of living conditions
verified in the last years of colonialism induced intense and creative outcomes. Unequally
distributed as the economic surpluses were, musseque residents “developed common desires
about how to spend their free time and escape the poor material conditions that continued to
characterize their neighborhoods,” which moved them closer to an idea of “Angolanness” and
away from the colonial state (Moorman 2008, p. 90). The emergence of a vibrant cultural scene
around semba throughout the 1960s gave the residents of Luanda's peripheries a certain degree
of “cultural sovereignty” that allowed them to imagine a future nation (Moorman 2008, p. 80).6
That put into place another kind of cosmopolitanism, mixing up musical influences from rural
Angola with influxes of the global boom of Atlantic black culture, filtered through Congolese radio
stations. Electric instruments and Afro-American musical hues combined with certain ways of
dressing and hairstyles inaugurated new definitions of leisure that encompassed consumption
patterns, the collective enjoyment of free time beyond the extended family, as well as non-
productive uses of the body (some public, others not so much), in a context where work, in one
way or another, was synonymous with colonial exploitation. There was certainly room to defy
dominant gender roles in this frenzied ambiance, even though the ensembles were mostly male.
The attendance at nightclubs represented an ambivalent space for women, implying both freedom
and risk (Moorman 2008, pp. 81–109).
Angolan musician David Zé captured an aspect of this ambivalence in an early-1970s great hit, in
which he admonishes a recalcitrant mother:
Eye u manji
You mother
Wa vualele o monanga
Who gave birth to this child
O muimbo koka paleye
This music is for you
Mona muxisa kubata
You leave the child back home
Weza mukina kizomba kye
Come dance your kizomba
Mukuvutuka kumakwake
Only go back when the sun rises
Amba kweza je conjunto
Now that her band has arrived
Kumwiva:
She says:
“chê, ninguém me aguenta!
“hey, no one can stand me!
Meu namorado é do conjunto”
My boyfriend is in the band”
Mona kubata yudila hanji
The child is crying back home
6 According to Moorman (2008, pp. 7–10), the word semba can refer both to the musical rhythm and to the broader
movement that gave birth to a characteristically Angolan popular music. Its origin dates back to a nativist impulse that
emerged in Luanda in the second half of the 1940s, and had its first major expression in the Ngola Ritmos ensemble (see
also: Ole 1978).
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University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers 30
Academy reflects 6
Mweneze udinanza:
Then she boasts:
“Meu namorado é um artista,
“My boyfriend is an artist
Terça está no Kudissanga,
On Tuesday he’s at Kudissanga,
Sábado é no Desportivo
On Saturday he’s at Desportivo
E no domingo
And on Sunday,
vamos dar o show”
we’re gonna give the show”
Maka ma Sofia
Trouble with Sofia
O moma maka
Look at that trouble
man Bernardo
with Bernardo
Mona muxisa kubata
You leave the child back home
Uia ukina kizomba kye
Go dance your kizomba7
Though moralizing, at first sight, the singing performance and the sensual dancing musical
arrangement point in another direction. The lyrics portray (from a male viewpoint) a social type
observed in nightclubs — the “band girlfriend,” as stated in the song title — as a woman who does
not fit into the role of a “mother.” The reference to one only child suggests youth. Since the child-
rearing responsibilities she refuses to assume would not fall on the father, but rather on other
women in her extended family, there is no way to state whether she lives with him. She is likely
not engaged, as she gets involved in altercations suggesting an aggressive role in the competitive
dating pool that marked Luanda nightlife. Moorman notes that having many girlfriends was a
significant measure of a musician's notoriety. Apparently, it was commonplace to invite more than
one girlfriend to a show, inducing disputes that were seen (by men) not as an inconvenience but
rather as part of an agitated, vibrant, and probably somewhat subversive scene (Moorman 2008,
pp. 98–99). There is no reason to think that this kind of relationship was private to musicians,
which points to a broader spread of weakly regulated relationships, not necessarily exclusive,
with varying duration and intensity.
The emergence of laxer patterns of sexuality in the environment surrounding the Angolan music
scene might be met with reservations in other social ambiances. For women, evading parental
oversight and intermittently suspending social expectations over the exercise of their affections
and sexuality could be one of the main reasons to join the kizomba. However, for their older
relatives, nightclubs' attendance jeopardized the family social capital in a market of matrimonial
alliances guided by stricter gender patterns. Sexually proactive female behaviors were patently
inadequate to the most valued models of a wife-to-be. Risks involved the association of nightclubs
with prostitution or even the complication of early pregnancy (Moorman 2008, pp. 101–108). The
relative value of this capital fluctuated according to race and income — we can assume that
matrimonial alliances were not readily available as an upward social strategy for newly-arrived
7 David Zé, ca.1972 (available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVnFrfjeTlA). Lyrics are in Kimbundu, with
interspersed Portuguese phrases. I am indebted to my colleagues and students at UNILAB who helped to transcribe and
translate the song — remaining inaccuracies are my responsibility only. Kizomba was not the name, then, of a particular
musical rhythm, but simply the Kimbundu word for “playing”, “dancing” or “merriment”, with a generic sense of “fun”.
Kudissanga Kwamakamba (“meeting with friends”, in Kimbundu) and União Desportivo de São Paulo (São Paulo Sports
Union) were two of the nightclubs where semba ensembles used to play.
Disputed Meanings of Women's Liberation
13
rural families and highly relevant for long-established mixed-race and black “assimilated”
households. An out-of-wedlock pregnancy did not necessarily prevent, as David Zé showed,
intense and continued participation in kizomba.
Another group of people concerned with Angolan youth's moral shortcomings was that of the
Portuguese colonial authorities. In a lengthy confidential report written in February 1974,
Portuguese officials analyzed (with a great deal of perplexity, but not without some sociological
sense) the threats to the perpetuation of Portuguese sovereignty represented by a “state of mind
of non-conformity and consequent opposition, on the part of the youth, to the world and mentality
of adults.” Although blaming external influences conveyed by the press and the movies, the
authors did point out endogenous reasons, and leading among them the “crisis experienced by the
institution of family, especially its inability to frame young people from adolescence.” Other
converging factors were the spread of hedonistic consumption habits, a fragile moral and civic
formation, the widening gap between the Catholic Church and the people, and the covert
nationalist propaganda (ANTT SCCIA 006, book 188). This report seems to indicate that the rules
governing gender relations, especially concerning sex, marriage, and family arrangements (and
therefore social reproduction), were getting loose at large, beyond semba’s immediate ecosystem.
The report stated that “external influences” impacted more powerfully on the more educated and
more affluent urban strata, among which whites were vastly over-represented. It is not by chance
that the white youth and university students were highlighted as two specific groups to be closely
supervised. Younger white women had benefited greatly from the new educational opportunities.
They probably enjoyed a greater chance to be hired for jobs in schools, bureaus, and offices —
although, in the wealthier families, this was not a necessity and could even be seen as a little bit
degrading. It is impossible to know precisely how this particular group of women experienced this
relative slackening of gender patterns. More likely, the accumulated racial, educational, and
financial capital lent some of them a greater leeway regarding their fruition of free time, affections,
and sexual choices, even exempting them from the obligation of marriage. Others could have
undergone a far tighter control from their parents or have had their moves restrained by their
lack of familiarity with the musseques and the Angolan culture nurtured there.
In any case, two months upon the completion of the report, the perspectives of regaining the youth
for the Portuguese colonial project faded under loads of carnations in Lisbon streets. The demise
of the dictatorship in Portugal inaugurated an extremely hectic period in Angola, full of
uncertainty and violence, but also of hope, euphoria, and fresh possibilities. Luanda's urban youth,
which enthusiastically took sides with the MPLA, could finally be reunited with the movement's
cadres, who arrived from the bush after ten, eleven, or more years of exile. Convergences and
divergences of this encounter shaped a revolutionary phase that lasted from April 1974 to May
1977, when everything seemed to be hanging by a thread. At the same time, every transformation
seemed possible and for today. In this whirlwind of history, “women's liberation” jumped to the
center of public debate.
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Academy reflects 6
4 Women and Revolution
After the Carnation Revolution, an array of social and political groupings in Luanda set in motion
mobilization and negotiation strategies to boost their agendas and help shape the territory's
political future. Complete independence under a majority government was not guaranteed at first.
Still, it was secured by an agreement, in the form of a transitional government, involving the
Portuguese military and the three major liberation movements. With the government's
subsequent implosion and an open war between nationalist organizations, the MPLA ensured
control of Luanda (and almost nothing else) on the date stipulated for independence, proclaiming
a People's Republic of Angola that progressively achieved international recognition (MacQueen
1998, pp. 91–127, 195–246; Pinto 2001, pp. 65–83; Tali 2001, vol. 2, pp. 101–147; Bittencourt
2008, vol. 2, pp. 153–272; Gleijeses 2002, pp. 230–327; Movimento Popular de Libertação de
Angola 2008, vol. 2, pp. 143–254).
Throughout this period, Luanda's urban youth actively engaged in the political process, acting
almost always on behalf of MPLA, but often without any coordination or even contact with its
leadership. The main fields of activity were around schools and musseques, and were articulated
with unionization efforts of seaport dockers, truck drivers and railroad porters. The student
movement and the teachers' unions gained prominence due to their intense and creative
opposition to the UNITA-appointed transitional minister of education. Student strikes paralyzed
the school year demanding immediate reform of curricula and exams, freedom of speech, and
democratization of school management. Also, adult literacy initiatives began to sprout in factories
on the outskirts of the city. In the musseques, residents had to organize themselves to contain the
possibility of massacres staged by white militias, such as those that had occurred in 1961. Indeed,
in June 1974, the murder of a white taxi driver was followed by armed raids on musseques that
left an estimated 200 dead. Students living in peripheral neighborhoods, who were already the
majority in both mixed-gender lyceums and especially in professional schools, often served as
liaisons between these two universes. When the official MPLA delegation finally made it to
Luanda, they found the city taken over by “People's Power”: a self-managed melting pot structured
by a web of revolutionary cells that was progressively taking charge of the daily matters in
neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces, acting on the movement's behalf but not necessarily
according to its guidance (L. Figueiredo 2011; Tali 2001, vol. 2, pp. 45–95).
Young women in Luanda found themselves within a space where social pressures for compliance
with previously hegemonic gender roles could be promptly dismissed in revolutionary wording
so that their participation in public space met much less resistance.8 The female-only lyceum
played a catalytic role in this process, both in practical and symbolic terms. Although most of its
2,000 students came from the highest social strata, it was occupied in July 1974 and started to
serve as a headquarters for the whole Luanda student movement — including the students of
professional schools, of significantly more popular attendance (L. Figueiredo 2011, pp. 28–32).
8 Literature related to the global sexual revolution in course — especially Wilhelm Reich's writings, which conceived
sexual repression as a capitalist control device and portrayed the free enjoyment of sexual pleasure as an instrument of
class emancipation — circulated among students (L. Figueiredo 2011, 82–83), though it is impossible to ascertain how
widely.
Disputed Meanings of Women's Liberation
15
Like many other urban landmarks, the lyceum was rechristened at the initiative of the students
themselves. A Portuguese queen gave way to an African one, Nzinga Mbandi — an undeniable
Angolan national heroine, who, probably not by chance, did not fit into a pattern of subordinate
femininity linked to family and the condition of wife and mother.
As a topic of debate, women emerged in the Luanda press even before independence. The United
Nations had proclaimed 1975 as the International Women's Year. From 19 June to 2 July, 133
delegations drew up an action program in Mexico City to eliminate discrimination against women
and promote their social advancement. In October, Diário de Luanda echoed a United Nations
Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) white paper, which addressed the particular conditions
of women on the continent and intended to guide governments in implementing a set of suggested
policies. Under the provocative title “African women accumulate economic tasks and social
functions,” the article stressed that most economic activities in Africa depended on women’s labor,
yet that was not acknowledged “by a society where men make the law.” The lack of government
policies aimed at women throughout the continent was noted, and the overlapping of economic
and social tasks, particularly the exclusive female responsibility for raising children, in the context
of large families. The newspaper defended all African states' need to commit to a minimum set of
measures, such as “maternity leave, job protection, creation of daycare centers, eliminating
discrimination in employment against young and fertile women, and health services aimed
especially at women and children” (Diário de Luanda, 1 October 1975, p. 16).
Once in government, MPLA acted twofold: revamping family law and boosting OMA branches'
inauguration throughout the territory under its control. As for the former, changes started soon.
In the Provisional Government Fundamental Law, enacted in June 1975, some clauses equaled the
rights of “legitimate and illegitimate children,” established the state’s duty to protect both “the
family” and “the single mother,” in addition to specifying absolute equality of rights between men
and women “in the fields of private, political, economic and social life,” adding that “for equal work,
women are entitled to the same payment as men” (Angola 1975a, articles 28–29). Interestingly
enough, the Constitutional Law of the People's Republic of Angola, in force since 11 November
1975, lacked specific provisions on women's rights. Exceptions were the prohibition of
discrimination of “color, race, ethnicity, sex, place of birth, religion, education level, social
condition or income,” and the entitlement of all citizens to “assistance in childhood, motherhood,
disability, old age and any incapability for work” (Angola 1975b, articles 18, 27). Yet, a bit later,
divorce for religious marriages became legal, and the civil registry was revamped, depriving the
Catholic Church of the notary powers it had enjoyed so far (Angola. Conselho da Revolução 1976;
Angola. Conselho da Revolução 1977). The statute provided full equal rights between legitimate
and natural children, banning the record and disclosure of the quality of legitimate and
illegitimate child, and suppressing the designations “father unknown” or “mother unknown.”
Paternity and maternity declarations could be made together or separately, regardless of the
parents' marital status. The child's name could be formed with up to two forenames and up to two
surnames belonging to the family of the mother, father, or both.
Despite limited practical consequences, these legislative changes were significant symbolically,
especially for mixed-race families in Luanda. The justifications presented along the laws spoke of
“moral mystification and injustice,” as well as “vexatious situations between citizens of the same
country” and “major social problems.” Indeed, the image of a settler grabbing a black female body
for his enjoyment, through raw brutality or imbalance of economic capacity, was repeatedly used
16
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Academy reflects 6
in literary works as a metonym for colonial oppression. It is also noteworthy that, since the 1940s,
scholarship in Angola linked poverty, delinquency, prostitution, and general immorality in
musseques with the offspring of informal unions of Portuguese men and African women, excluded
from inheritance and devoid of upward mobility opportunities because of their illegitimate status
(Moorman 2008, pp. 48–51). Regardless of these representations' sociological accuracy, the
changes in family law were probably felt by an important part of Luanda society's middle strata
as a significant reckoning with hypocritical colonial morality standards.
The structuring of the OMA had, on its part, a much more comprehensive, profound, and lasting
impact. Having been taken to accept People's Power as a constitutive principle of the new order,
the MPLA leadership saw the OMA as instrumental in its efforts to constrain the revolutionary
enthusiasm that inspired it, alongside with its juvenile mass organization, the MPLA Youth
(JMPLA), and a range of new grassroots organs — such as neighborhood commissions, the place
action committees and the Organization of Popular Self-Defense (ODP) — which sought to better
organize, supervise and, whenever possible, control the small groups, cells and spontaneous self-
managed initiatives that had bloomed over the wrecks of the colonial order. Thus, as the first OMA
Regional Seminar in Luanda was being prepared, chairwoman Luísa Inglês took to the press and
introduced a tension that would dominate much of the subsequent debate:
Misinterpretations of women's liberation, the petty-bourgeois conception that the
OMA is for the less educated strata, and even the counter-revolutionary propaganda
that certain individuals launch in our midst, are some of the reasons why many
comrades abandon the Organization of Angolan Women. It turns out that most of the
women in the city do not participate in the struggle, in the Revolution, interpreting
their own emancipation in their own way, forgetting that the liberation of women
involves destroying the exploitation system (Diário de Luanda, 4 December 1975,
p. 15).
Organized at the end of that same month, the seminar brought into Luanda that corpus of
representations that had been developed in the maquis, based on an evolutionist conception of
history according to which a succession of phases, from primitive communism to colonialism, had
generated in Angola a three-layered class division: the white bourgeoisie, the black bourgeoisie,
and the exploited (peasants and workers), as well as an oppressive sexual division of labor (Diário
de Luanda, 27 December 1975, pp. 3, 5; see also 29 December 1975, p. 7). Such rationale
supported the thesis, later repeated until exhaustion, that many women — especially urban young
women — were either misled about the meaning of women's liberation or opportunistically using
the concept to justify licentious behavior and a petty-bourgeois way of life.
The OMA leadership, mostly Protestant and conformed by the rural guerrilla daily life of the
Eastern Front, distrusted urban women due to the belief that those women had not engaged in the
struggle (and “struggle,” in this context, had a strong military component, which overstressed
discipline and ethics of ordeal). In the face of that, to get a chance to have their voices properly
heard, women living in the cities had to claim very particular credentials, as illustrated by this
editorial in Diário de Luanda:
Disputed Meanings of Women's Liberation
17
while on the fronts, many Angolan women suffered the harshness and hardships of
war directly, in the cities, other women were repressed because of family ties with
patriots devoted to the national cause. Nor should it be forgotten that many women,
whose husbands were in hiding or in colonial jails, had to take over as head of their
respective households (so many times quite numerous) and its maintenance — these
Angolan women are owed, in fact, as warm a tribute as all the others whose part in
the liberation struggle was more direct (Diário de Luanda, 29 December 1975, p. 3).
Necessary as it was to underline their capacity as wives and mothers of the male protagonists of
liberation to ascertain their legitimacy as interlocutors, Luanda women nevertheless did get to
convey their demands and proposals, which found their way into the seminars’ final resolutions.
While, before the meeting, Luísa Inglês posited OMA in the vanguard of the fight against
“superstition” and “witchcraft” (that is, popular “traditional” healing practices in conflict with
“progressive” hygienist worries), the final document pointed to another set of concerns. The focus
was on double shifts imposed upon women and the sexual division of housework, singled out as
the main obstacle to their engagement in national reconstruction. They proposed a working group
where experts should join OMA and government deputies to create a collectivization project for
domestic tasks, which should involve the establishment of “public, collective laundries,” “common
dining halls,” “daycare centers, and other collective benefits.” These should be matched by
measures of “enlightenment and education,” as these efforts would be to no avail unless “conjugal
cooperation” was addressed. Men should commit to “watching and tending to children” and take
part in “some of the household chores, considered as a woman's exclusive domain” (Diário de
Luanda, 29 December 1975, p. 14).
Very few mentions of women, their organization efforts, or women's liberation could be read in
the Luanda press throughout the following year.9 In 1973, the OMA had proposed to
commemorate every 2 March as the Angolan Women's Day to honor the imprisonment of
Deolinda Rodrigues and her sisters in arms. Still, there is no record of specific celebrations or
public statements around the date in 1976, except for some commemorative posters (Organização
da Mulher Angolana 1973; Associação Tchiweka de Documentação 2017, p. 65). The year was fully
employed in planning the first practical measures that could signal an effective change in
Angolans' living conditions. With military threats still very much alive, a sharp disruption of
economic activity, on the verge of a severe shortage crisis, and amid a turbulent political
environment in the capital — involving both elections for the People's Power local councils and
the repression of political trends that threatened to escape any control — the new rulers were
reasonably busy.
1977, on the contrary, attested to a discursive explosion about women's liberation. In February,
Jornal de Angola announced the inauguration of two daycare centers, with a capacity for 250
children in total, built through a partnership between the State Secretariat for Social Affairs and
OMA. Albeit short, the article stamped two associated cores of meaning that would later become
commonplace: the female engagement in the “tasks of production” and the “nurturing of the new
9 Diário de Luanda was closed in December 1975, leaving Jornal de Angola as Luanda's only daily newspaper. Control
by the MPLA increased after the writer Fernando da Costa Andrade (Ndunduma) was appointed director, in early 1976.
18
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man” (Jornal de Angola, 11 February 1977, p. 1). The newspaper returned to the subject two weeks
later and insisted on the importance of daycare centers for creating the “New Man” and as “one of
the stages of women liberation.” Leaving the “total inactivity” they lived in when they dedicated
themselves “only to domestic work,” “due to the number of children that they usually have,”
women could give, at last, “their valid contribution (…) for the construction of Socialism” (Jornal
de Angola, 22 February 1977, p. 3).
Beyond the bombast conferred by the ceremonial use of capital letters, this statement signaled an
unambiguous push-back concerning the conclusions of the OMA regional seminar held just over a
year before. Housework was no longer considered proper work, and the women-only
responsibility for child-rearing and housekeeping was taken for granted and associated with
inactivity. The poor sensitivity of this piece to the reality of women in Luanda can be better
assessed in the interviews collected to accompany the article and published along with two issues
(Jornal de Angola, 22 February 1977, p. 3; 23 February 1977, p. 3). Reporters talked to two fathers
and eight mothers. Among the women, one was 19, another 20, and the rest were between 24 and
37 years old. Only one was not formally employed. Five of them worked in offices or the civil
service, another in a hotel, and the last one was part of the long-established fishing community on
the Island of Luanda. Frustrating current representations, only the latter had many children —
nine, compared to one, two, or three in the other cases. In their turn, both men were older (40 and
60 years old) and had large families (six and eight children). These figures suggest that a sharp
decrease in birth rate matched female participation in the formal labor market.
The interviews demonstrate that the new daycare centers were pretty much welcomed but
insufficient. While all parents expressed the desire to enroll their children in the new institutions,
two of them had already recurred to private daycare centers (which charged expensive and rising
tuition fees). Two others had been waiting for vacancies for over a year. Some revealed a daily life
in which children were left alone at home, the older children took care of the younger, improvised
arrangements were made within the extended family, or other unemployed women were hired to
look after children during working hours. The shadow of shortages loomed large in the figure of
lines to buy food, in which almost all interviewees claimed to spend a good part of their days. The
rising cost of living was another worry. Prices were fixed in consumer cooperatives organized in
neighborhoods, but due to its increasingly empty shelves, people had to resort to a parallel
market, that became all the more ubiquitous the more authorities denounced it as work of
“middlewomen” and “imperialist agents infiltrated among our comrade workers” (Jornal de
Angola, 2 March 1977, p. 3).10
The interval from 25 February to 31 March, when both Angolan and International Women's Day
were celebrated, served as an opportunity for the OMA and MPLA to reassert their agency in
directing the symbolical contents of nation-building concerning the disputed trope of women's
liberation. The OMA espoused a close association between emancipation and work in the frame
10 It is noteworthy that, while the street reporting was likely conducted by a woman (taking from a gendered deictic in
one of the interviewees' transcribed statements), the newsroom was exclusively male. 15 men were listed as editors,
plus two collaborators, the director, and his assistant — making up 19 male journalists. The name of one sole woman
appears as part of the Union Board (Jornal de Angola, 22 February 1977, p. 8). I could not establish whether the
newspaper had other female workers or the name of the person who did the interviews.
Disputed Meanings of Women's Liberation
19
of “National Reconstruction.” A series of “days of struggle” was scheduled, in which “in keeping
with the watchword: Production, Production, Production, Angolan women will work an extra
hour.” Decisively abandoning the debate on double shifts and child-rearing responsibilities, OMA
stated that “the voluntary work (…) in which all Angolan women should consciously take part”
was that at state farms, as well as literacy and sanitary education campaigns (Jornal de Angola, 24
February 1977, p. 3). OMA considered that International Women’s Day celebrations should have
different contents depending on if one lived in “countries whose people are still engaged in a life-
or-death struggle against extreme poverty and obscurantism,” or in “countries where the
nefarious grip of the capital has already been abolished,” where “women live and feel free as any
other fellow citizen.” In Angola, “where the time of emancipation has already arrived for the whole
people,” and where there were no longer statutory differences between men and women, the
latter would strive “with the greatest revolutionary enthusiasm” in the realms of formally paid
labor, on which the state depended so much to make true the promises of independence. Thus,
under the watchword “Unity. Unity. Unity”, urban young women's particular claims were pushed
into a swamp of counter-revolutionary trends and suspicions of factionalism (Jornal de Angola, 27
February 1977, p. 7). Gender relations then came to be subsumed into an undifferentiated
collective of workers, as in this message by the Angolan Workers National Union (UNTA): “we who
live side by side, in the same factory and the same office, men and women, we who feel every day
the quiet joy of building a Homeland of Workers” (Jornal de Angola, 2 March 1977, p. 1). Blaming
capitalism and colonial rule for gender imbalances in the formal labor market, where women
“occupy the lowest paid most humiliating jobs” and “are more easily subject to unemployment
and social neglect,” the message excused men from any responsibility that should be bared instead
by an exploitative social system, where men “get used to brutality and humiliation towards
women and see it as normal, or do not even realize it” (Jornal de Angola, 2 March 1977, p. 2).
At the rally held to celebrate Angolan Women's Day, it would be President Agostinho Neto's turn
to affirm, in front of the usual crowd that followed his pronouncements:
In the history of all our People's struggle, against centuries-old colonialism and the
invaders, the puppets, the traitors of all shades, (…) the woman was always at the
side of her companion, against the common enemy.
And if the names of Deolinda, Irene, Teresa, Engrácia, Lucrécia, Carlota and so
many others are today a symbol of courage, determination, love for life and for
their People, they are also the symbol of the Angolan Woman, our mother, our wife,
our daughter, our sister, our companion of all time in suffering, in the struggle, in
victory.11
Integrated with the OMA, disciplined in structures, guided by our MPLA, it is much
easier for the Angolan Woman to realize that, from Cabinda to Cunene, the same
11 Engrácia dos Santos, Irene Cohen, Lucrécia Paim and Teresa Afonso were the other women in Convoy Kamy seized
by UPA on 2 March 1966, along with Deolinda Rodrigues. Carlota was the war name of a young military woman
photographed in October 1975 by the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski near Benguela, who died just a few hours
later in a UNITA counterattack on the village of Balombo (Paredes 2019; Paredes 2015, 124–126).
20
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desire unites her with all her compatriots, men, and women, in her Country (Jornal
de Angola, 3 March 1977, p. 1).
It is hard to exaggerate the amount of symbolic capital Agostinho Neto was imbued throughout
those early years of independence. With the force of law, his speech not only ascribed a mere
supporting role to women who participated in winning independence but also made female
citizenship dependent on family and marital relationships maintained with the men who were
publicly represented as the protagonists of emancipation. Moreover, as a metonym of the nation
in the making, Agostinho Neto implied that the legitimate place of enunciation of this future was
fundamentally masculine, enacting an appropriation of the “Angolan Woman” using the
reiteration of the possessive adjective “our” in the face of the successive domestic roles that,
through this rhetorical operation, were authorized to women, ultimately delimiting their space of
social agency, and imposing onto this being that inexplicably seemed to have her own
perspectives, needs, and demands, constant intellectual supervision — the need to be integrated,
disciplined and oriented, to be Angolan.
It is significant that, on the same occasion, the speech of the first lady, Eugénia Neto, pointed to
the issue of domestic work, recognizing the odds of being “wife and revolutionary at the same
time.” According to her, “husbands shout the watchwords, but when it comes to their wife, they
react in the sense of possession and do not like to come home and not find their wife, or even
divide, harmoniously and humanly, the duties of the home.” Yet, far from defending the inclusion
of these issues in state planning, as called for in the UNECA white paper and the conclusions of the
1975 OMA regional seminar, Eugénia Neto demanded adherence to the ethics of ordeal which
underpinned the conceptions of struggle in the maquis. Accepting “the inherent sacrifices” meant
“accepting Revolution,” and that would make women feel “connected to the struggle of our
People,” sensing as theirs “the greatest problems of our Country” (Jornal de Angola, 3 March 1977,
p. 7). Once again, it is a future uttered in the masculine, since women's problems had a lower
ontological statute — neither were they people nor were their problems among the greatest in
the country.
5 New Man’s Wife?
The government did not relent on its discursive assault on the meaning of women's liberation
during the whole commemorative period. At the same time, OMA endeavored to spread its
presence throughout the territory. Inaugurations of “OMA houses” in the most diverse
neighborhoods of Luanda and provincial capitals were systematically reported, as much as pleas
for women's mobilization in initiatives bolstered by the organization, such as the National Literacy
Campaign. Gradually, the OMA consolidated itself as the only way for female participation in the
public space, acquiring, on the other hand, more constituency, in line with its original expectations
already expressed back in the first guerrilla days. These developments were matched by the
elevation of a particular narrative about women's part in the liberation struggle, revolving around
Deolinda Rodrigues and her comrades' martyrdoms. This fostered the ordeal ethics mentioned
above and sought to tame into a more manageable set of representations the contradictory and
many-sided historical character Deolinda was.
Disputed Meanings of Women's Liberation
21
It is in this context that the former “comrades” will become the “moms” of the OMA and that the
guerrillas of the Convoy Kamy honored with a monument in downtown Luanda in 1986 will be
dressed in “traditional” attires and not with the camouflaged military uniforms they effectively
used (Paredes 2015, p. 72; Paredes 2019; Paredes 2010). As a matter of fact, Deolinda's
iconography started to morph well before this monument, closer to the period covered by this
research. In 1979, an OMA postcard portrayed Deolinda covered in “traditional” headscarf and
cloth, without weapons or any other allusion to military equipment (Associação Tchiweka de
Documentação 2017, p. 106). With unassigned authorship, the drawing seems to be based on
photographs taken in the Methodist mission she attended as a teenager. The operation here was
not as much of falsification as of selection: of all possible Deolindas (guerrilla combatant, party
board member, anti-racist activist, intersectional feminist avant la lettre), the choice fell on a
figure that could be more easily integrated into a domestic realm, where “tradition” acquired, once
again, a positive sign. Margarida Paredes argues that the notion of “family” moved into the MPLA
symbolic universe from the Methodist community in which many of its leaders had been trained,
reinforcing paternalistic, gerontocratic, and authoritarian trends that concurred to a patent
conservatism in customs, justified by a moralizing reading of the domestic aspects of African
tradition (Paredes 2010).
Furthermore, in singling out Deolinda (as a metonym for Irene, Engrácia, Teresa, and Lucrécia,
and ultimately for all MPLA guerrilla women), this narrative also conveyed false exceptionalism
of women in combat actions (Moorman 2016, pp. 199–200). And, while this reshaping of the
“Angolan Woman” did no justice to the living experience of many women who had been in the
maquis, hindering the very enunciation of their perspectives and practical demands, it was even
more complicated for young Luanda women who had tracked an entirely different path towards
liberation.
A good example may be found in an article published on 3 March 1977, in Jornal de Angola. In the
upper half of its central pages, a featured frame was printed to denounce the “misconceptions” on
women's liberation:
It is often thought that women's liberation means “the man and the woman do the
housekeeping together.” Other compatriots think on their turn that the
emancipated woman is “the woman [who] resembles the man,” in habits, in
dressing, and in assimilating his vices (Jornal de Angola, 3 March 1977, p. 4).
Thus, both the demands for an equitable re-division of housework and child-rearing, as well as
certain types of non-productive uses of the body, associated with those new forms of leisure and
consumption that had emerged in the peripheries of Luanda in the late colonial years, were
outright pronounced unacceptable. In addition to repeating the litany that the enemy of women
was not men and that Angolan women could only seek their emancipation integrated with a mass
organization, the article insisted:
There are compatriots — women — who say they “have no time to think about this
liberation stuff.” Others say that housework duties prevent women from engaging
in political and social activities, that the combination of both tasks impairs their
22
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Academy reflects 6
condition as mother and wife. All this cannot be an obstacle to women's
participation in political life and activities alongside housekeeping. (…)
“Women are not just fit to be at home.” It is clear that some women who make such
a statement intentionally find an excuse to get away from their homes. (…)
Consequently, they start to dress in a more or less bold way; they are led to attend
the so-called men-only places and absorb men's negative qualities. This is a liberal
way — which distorts the contents of true liberation — and which always
manifests itself in cities (Jornal de Angola, 3 March 1977, p. 5).
This rhetorical opposition between an urban ambiance, tainted by a myriad of liberal and petty-
bourgeois vices that must be uprooted at any cost, and a rural space idealized as the matrix of
national culture, as much as of resistance to colonial oppression, was not exclusive to Angolan
history, though it ultimately carried especially tragic meanings to the peripheral youth in
Luanda.12 By that time, when the MPLA leadership was parting ways with the group of cadres
surrounding the Minister of Interior Administration Nito Alves (who had based his meteoric rise
on party hierarchy precisely on the support of the cosmopolitan youth in the musseques), some
ways of dressing, hair styling, and behaving in public came to compose a negatively stereotyped
portrait in cartoons and official statements of diverse kinds. Besides, these images pushed into the
realm of “profligacy” more erratic or unregulated affective and sexual behaviors, as well as the
very possibility of women to move freely in specific public spaces. If men already had their vices
and attended unsavory places, that should not warrant letting women do the same. The “band
girlfriend” hardly fitted the expectations of austerity, discipline, and work commitment required
to prove irreproachable Angolanness. Women were asked to engage in the various initiatives that
comprised the economic recovery effort and, simultaneously, to accept with revolutionary
forbearance the fact that housekeeping and child-rearing would remain under their primary
responsibility, in a scenario in which shortages were becoming a chronic issue.
Maria do Céu Carmo Reis proposed through four categories an interesting typology of female
characters brought to life by the anti-colonial literary discourse from the 1950s: the “founding
woman,” builder of the creole society where the first autonomic and nativist impulses emerged,
omnipresent and omniscient as a founding myth of nationality; the “nurturing woman”, in both
biological and cultural senses, invoked to stand for the “organic safety of the social group” and
associated with networks of acquaintances and social influence, organizer of domestic rituals and
commercial strategies; the “conspiring woman”, active in forming alliances and mutual assistance
12 Something of the like was happening at the same time in Mozambique, for example. The speech was given by
President Samora Machel on 4 March 1977, celebrating the Mozambican Women's Day, was fully printed in Jornal de
Angola. Machel made a long analysis on the situation of women in traditional society, during colonialism and the
liberation war — dissociating, in the last two phases, the situation in the countryside and in the city. The themes and
the structure of its semantic organization are very similar to the official discourses circulating in Angola, with the
advantage of being exemplarily formulated. For example, Machel considered “fashion” to be a vector “of penetration of
the moral and aesthetic values of the colonialist bourgeoisie and a factor of depersonalization”, “especially directed at
women”. In defining the proper orientation for the Organization of Mozambican Women, Machel charged against young
women in the cities, especially those who had formal jobs in offices, attributing to them a “petty-bourgeois radicalism”
which allegedly had “as a fundamental objective to conquer the social liberalism and the sexual profligacy that
characterize a man in developed capitalist society” (Jornal de Angola, 7 March 1977, pp. 4–5).
Disputed Meanings of Women's Liberation
23
schemes, endowed with strategic capacity in affective life and incantatory powers; and finally the
“indefinable woman”, always portrayed as a negative film, “to the extent she is seen as a subject
that desires, and in her relation to the public space”, in virginity check rituals, in eulogies of
conjugal fidelity, and in her exclusion of the city’s affairs. The outbreak of armed struggle entailed
the need for a more explicit discourse on women, adding new meanings to each of the categories
above without modifying their general lines. Thus, upon the “nurturing woman” was bestowed
the responsibility for tending to combatants; upon the “founding woman,” the duty to forge the
“new man”; while within OMA, to the “conspiring woman” was ascribed the struggle for social
change, which conferred on her a superior quality. Yet, the “undefinable woman” remained just
like that: in her capacity as a subsidiary component of “the people,” her condition as a woman was
always devoid (Reis 1987).
In fact, as subjects with their own perspectives, problems, and agendas, women in Luanda
vanished from the press soon after 8 March 1977, at the same time as the institutionalization of
OMA gained pace. In the face of perceived internal and external threats (respectively Nito Alves'
challenge to the MPLA leadership and the purported plans of invasion by Mobutu's Congo), this
institutionalization was matched by the choking of public debate. The II OMA National Meeting,
held in May that same year, just before the regime closure, praised the inauguration of
headquarters in all provinces and the creation of an information flow system, and set as an
immediate goal the framing of women in defense and security organizations, as well as their
engagement in the “Battle for Literacy” (Jornal de Angola, 15 May 1977; 16 May 1977). Up to March
1978, OMA-related articles in the press focused only on literacy and sanitary education efforts or
pledges of allegiance to the MPLA (Jornal de Angola, 10 July 1977; 6 January 1978; 21 January
1978; 16 February 1978). There was only one exception: a small text that called for the building
of daycare centers since Angola needed “specialized” and “semi-specialized” female workers. The
text also urged women to commit to motherhood to increase the country's population, as the low
figures allegedly encumbered development (Jornal de Angola, 25 May 1977, p. 3).
In 1978, the Angolan and the International Women's Day were celebrated with more pomp and in
more places throughout Angola, but seem to have put in discussion an expressively smaller
number of topics. Speeches, motions, and newspaper articles revolved around the need to follow
“the example of Deolinda Rodrigues,” used, among other things, to criticize the claim for a
“mechanical equality” between men and women — that is, both “doing exactly the same tasks,
dividing even the housekeeping” — and the “misconception” that “the liberated woman is only the
one who drinks, smokes, or wears pants and miniskirts,” or either the one who “piles up diplomas”
in seek of economic, social and cultural rise (Jornal de Angola, 5 March 1978, p. 3; see also 1–9
March 1978). Thus, the woman subject to her own will, in whatever scope of experience — from
affections and sex and family arrangements to formal education, not to mention the labor market
and political participation — remained undefinable.
In their plethora of social trajectories, Angolan women built after independence a history beyond
the narrow subordinate representations uttered by government officials. In that sense, they kept
establishing shared social meanings in the face of the many challenges that the following decades
imposed, nurturing — though not precisely what they were expected to nurture — and conspiring,
in and out of the endorsed structures, in defense of their own goals and from their own
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Academy reflects 6
perspectives. The “new man” was never forged, but new men and women forged themselves and
in relation to each other under the contexts they faced, and, more often than not, far beyond the
reach of the sources available for professional historians. As both Marissa Moorman and
Margarida Paredes argue, a narrative of contained freedom and return to prior mores does not
accurately describe women's living experience in Angola. As always, they remain defying gender
roles in public and private spaces and claiming themselves their own voices.
6 Sources
The original sources are in Portuguese. Quotations in the text were translated by the author.
6.1 Archives
ATD
Associação Tchiweka de Documentação, Luanda
d3182.OrgEstrtOMA.6510-11. Organização e Estrutura da OMA, Brazzaville, 1965.
d3372.ProgOMA.6510-11. Programa de Actividades da OMA, Brazzaville, 1965.
d3373.DoctoHigieneCorp.651010-1107. Tema: Higiene Corporal, Brazzaville, 1965.
d3374.HigAlimtr.6510-11. Tema: Higiene Alimentar, Brazzaville, 1965.
d3375.HigHabitacoes.6510-11. Tema: Higiene das Habitações, Brazzaville, 1965.
d3376.PrimSocorros. 6510-11. Tema: Primeiros Socorros, Brazzaville, 1965.
d3377.SaudePuericult.6510-11. Saúde — Puericultura, Brazzaville, 1965
d3378.Puericultura.6510-11. Tema: Puericultura, II Conferência, Brazzaville, 1965.
d3369.EvolHistMulher.6510-11. Evolução Histórica da Mulher nas Sociedades, Brazzaville,
1965.
d3370.EvolHistMulher.6510-11. Evolução Histórica da Mulher nas Sociedades, Brazzaville,
1965.
d3371.PapelMulher.6510-11. O Papel da Mulher na Luta Armada, Brazzaville, 1965.
d5190.OrdemServiCarreira.700601. Ordem de Serviço 13/70, Lusaka, 1 June 1970.
ANTT Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo, Lisbon
Serviço de Coordenação e Centralização das Informações de Angola (SCCIA), Relatórios
especiais de informação (006), book 188. A juventude de Angola perante o momento actual,
Luanda, February 1974.
6.2 Newspapers
Diário de Luanda, June–December 1975.
Disputed Meanings of Women's Liberation
25
Jornal de Angola, January 1976–December 1978.
6.3 Printed Sources
Angola. 1975a. Lei fundamental. Luanda: Imprensa Nacional.
Angola. 1975b. Lei constitucional — Lei da nacionalidade. Luanda: INA.
Angola. Conselho da Revolução. 1976. Lei no 53/76. Luanda: INA.
Angola. Conselho da Revolução. 1977. Lei no 10/77. Luanda: INA.
Associação Tchiweka de Documentação. 2017. Arte e combate: cartazes e postais do acervo da ATD.
Luanda: ATD.
Lara, Lúcio. 2006. Um amplo movimento… Itinerário do MPLA através dos documentos de Lúcio
Lara. vol 2. Luanda: Lúcio Lara.
Machel, Samora. 1973. Educar o homem para vencer a guerra, criar uma sociedade nova e
desenvolver a pátria. Maputo: FRELIMO.
MPLA-PT. 1978. Teses e resoluções – 1o Congresso. Luanda: INA.
Organização da Mulher Angolana. 1972. [The first Seminar of OMA Branches…]. Organisation of
Angolan Women Bulletin.
Organização da Mulher Angolana. 1973. The heroes are allways with us. Organisation of Angolan
Women Bulletin: 1.
Organização da Mulher Angolana. 1978. Data on the history of OMA. Organisation of Angolan
Women Bulletin.
6.4 Music
Zé, David (no year). Namorada do conjunto. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVnFrfjeTlA, last
acessed December 10 2021.
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28
University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers 28
8 Latest Publications in the Academy reflects Working Paper Series
Title
Editor(s)
Year of
Publication
Issue
Disputed Meanings of Women's
Liberation: Social Tensions and
Symbolic Struggles During Angolan
Independence
Fábio Baqueiro Figueiredo
2022
30(6)
The Committee and the
Uncommitted Material: Assistance
to Members in Need at a
Pentecostal Church in Western
Kenya
Lena Kroeker and Yonatan
N. Gez
2022
28(5)
The Kenya we want! From the
post-colonial Departure to recent
Hopes
Dieter Neubert and Achim
von Oppen
2018
20(4)
NGO Visions of Development in the
Changing Contexts of Ethiopia:
1960s-2015
Aychegrew H. Hailu
2018
19(3)
Themenfelder
sozialanthropologischer
Mittelschichtsforschung: Eine
Vorstellung Bayreuther Projekte
Lena Kroeker and Maike
Voigt
2017
16(2)
Socio-Cultural Diversity of the
African Middle Class: The Case of
urban Kenya
Dieter Neubert and Florian
Stoll
2015
14(1)
Figueiredo, Fábio Baqueiro. 2022. Disputed Meanings of Women’s Liberation: Social
Tensions and Symbolic Struggles During Angolan Independence. University of
Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers 30, Academy Reflects 6. Bayreuth: Institute
of African Studies.
https://doi.org/10.15495/EPub_UBT_00005986
