Dynamics of change in a ‘female farming system’, Mbanza Kongo/Northern Angola

Abstract

The inhabitants of the Zaire Province of northern Angola, belonging to different subgroups of the Bakongo, offer an interesting case to study social and agricultural change in what Boserup would call a traditional ‘female farming system’. Since the 1930s, several factors have produced multiple dynamics of change – sometimes abrupt and other times gradual – in both livelihoods and the gender relations of agricultural production. Of these, the paper is going to highlight late colonial intervention, the anticolonial war, the long civil war, the economic boom after the end of the war and the recent economic crisis. While colonial interventions reinforced women’s role as food producers, the wars acted in the opposite direction by increasing the participation of (non-conscripted into the military) men in agriculture for those who took refuge in the then Republic of Congo. The economic boom that followed the end of the civil war opened income-earning opportunities out of agriculture for young men, but the recent fall in the international oil price reversed this trend, and agriculture – as a sole occupation or combined with casual off-farm jobs – became again a way out of hunger and poverty.

Keywords:

• gender relations of production
• post-war reconstruction
• livelihoods
• reagrarianization
• food security

Acknowledgements

In Angola we would like to thank Professor Fátima Viegas and Paulo and Carlos Monteiro for their support, our translators Lando (Grandão) and Blaise Matondo, Frei Danilo of the Capuchin mission, and all the people who kindly accepted to collaborate in this research. A draft of the paper was presented at the ‘VII Conference of Gender and Development’, Lleida, Spain, 28–29 November 2016, and received insightful comments from Albert Roca, Bridget O’Laughlin, Faranina Rajaonah and Rokhaya Cisse. Comments were also made by Ramon Sarró, Deborah Bryceson, Ana Novais Carlos Cabral and the three reviewers of JPS.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Marina Padrão Temudo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8254-4233

Pedro Talhinhas http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6694-7502

Notes

1 The religious landscape in the region was, until recently, mainly composed of Catholics, Baptists, Kimbanguists, and Tokoists, together with many smaller prophetic churches linked to historical prophets of the Kongo. Today, Catholic and Baptist churches still dominate in the countryside, but in the urban centre of Mbanza Kongo religious pluralism is exponentially increasing and incorporating more and more prophetic churches (mostly arriving from the DRC), as well as Pentecostal ones.

2 The DRC, independent from 1960, was first named Republic of Congo, and in 1971 renamed Zaire (thus sharing its name with the Angolan province of which Mbanza Kongo is the capital). It changed its name again, in 1997, to Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), to distinguish itself from the other African country also called Republic of Congo (Brazzaville). To avoid further confusions, in this article we will only use DRC to refer to that nation-state.

3 In Kikongo, men and women often used the term kinkole, ‘captivity’, instead of contrato, to refer to forced labour. Many explicitly explained that from their point of view, there was no difference between our categories of ‘forced labour’ and ‘slavery’. It was all part of the Tandu dia kinkole, ‘the time of captivity’.

4 Angolan refugees in DRC amounted to more than 100,000 people in June 1961 and over half a million in 1972 (Wheeler and Pélissier 1971, 187).

5 Interviewees stated that the majority of people still living between Makela do Zombo and Matadi are Angolan refugees and their descendants.

6 Important factors in the creation of a land market around the city and along the main roads that link it to Luanda and to the DRC border are the ongoing appropriation of large tracts of land by members of the political and military elite, and the application of Mbanza Kongo for nomination as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

7 China is the main economic partner of Angola and, since the end of the war, a ‘resources-for-infrastructures deal’ was made between the countries (Soares de Oliveira 2014, 56).

Additional information

Funding

Research in Angola was conducted within the framework of the AHRC project ‘Heritage and landscapes transformation in Northern Angola: between the value of the past and the value of the land’, partner of the Joint Research Programme ‘Currents of faith, places of history’ and funded by the EU consortium HERA (Humanities European Research Area) in 2013–2016. CEF and LEAF are research units funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia I.P. (FCT), Portugal [UID/AGR/00239/2013 and UID/AGR/04129/2013, respectively].

Notes on contributors

Marina Padrão Temudo

Marina Padrão Temudo is a senior research fellow at CEF, Department of Natural Resources, Environment and Land, School of Agriculture, University of Lisbon, Portugal. She has conducted extensive ethnographic field research on development and conservation in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique, S. Tomé and Príncipe, and in the Republic of Guinea. Some of her most recent articles have been published in Human Ecology, Development and Change, the Journal of Agrarian Change, Agroforestry Systems and Conservation & Society.

Pedro Talhinhas

Pedro Talhinhas is a senior research fellow at LEAF, School of Agriculture, University of Lisbon, Portugal. He has conducted work on plant genetic resources, plant breeding, plant pathology and mycology. Some of his most recent articles have been published in Molecular Plant Pathology, PLoS One, Plant Disease, Frontiers in Plant Science and Plant Pathology.