Suturing Luanda after the boom. Recomposing associational life in a city on hold
Résumé
Following the end of the civil war in 2002, Luanda quickly became a buzzing building site fed by petrodollars and orchestrated by the uncontested oligarchic network that surrounded President dos Santos. Skyscrapers reshaped the skyline of the city centre while new settlements sprawled in the periphery, from luxury condominiums to minimalist self-built programmes. In that fragmented landscape, political dissent grew through social media and heavily-repressed marches but the streets of Luanda never became the theatre of mass protests, as fear and hope to get a share of the cake insured a minimal level of consent.
In 2014 however, falling oil prices brutally interrupted the scenario of the boom city tightly controlled by a 30-year-long ruling clan. Dos Santos stepped down in September 2017. His successor surprisingly launched a vehement anti-corruption campaign that ignited new hopes for democracy and transparency. The sudden economic crisis also shut down the engines of building cranes and fancy cars, the urban utopias (distopias?) hastily built around Luanda soon started to crumble.
Based on ethnographic material gathered through an on-going project mixing visual and participatory methods, this paper sketches the portrait of a city put on hold. It seeks to understand how a so-called ‘developmental state’ builds legitimacy when its redistribution channels are drying out but also how the heroic protesters of yesterday recalibrate their voice when their gatherings are suddenly tolerated. What are the real-and-imagined spaces of conviviality in Luanda today? Can the failing promise of urban renewal wire new collective identities?
Without providing definitive answers, the paper sheds light on the ambiguous production of political subjectivities shaped simultaneously by hopeful democratic aspirations and daily experiences of vulnerability and powerlessness.