The invisible labor of the “New Angola”: Kilamba’s domestic workers

ABSTRACT

Kilamba, the first of the new centralities in Angola, is increasingly visible in recent urban scholarship about Luanda, further establishing it as the symbol of both this “new” post-war city and the “New Angola.” Within local discourses of progress, its emergence from within “petro-urbanism,” and its size and modern aesthetics are emphasized, while little attention has been directed towards understanding the actual contributions of its workers, particularly the women who spend a significant part of their day cleaning Kilamba’s apartments. In this paper, we combine a social reproduction framework with infrastructure studies to trace the labor of Kilamba’s female domestic workers, in order to demonstrate how their everyday practices uphold the status and materiality of this centrality, even as their work is invisibilized. In doing so, we understand their commentaries about this space, often refracted through descriptions of their homes, as critiques of the infrastructural priorities of the “New Angola.”

KEYWORDS:

• Domestic work
• Kilamba
• Luanda
• Angola
• Infrastructure‌

Introduction

Central to the media portrayals of Kilamba are handshakes between men. This massive housing project of 20,000 apartments, situated 30 kilometers outside Luanda, the capital city of Angola, is one of several concrete products that have emerged from the selling of Angolan oil to China in exchange for housing and infrastructure over the last two decades. Such Sino-Angolan bilateral agreements, which see oil flow in one direction and machines, workers, and cement in the other (Cardoso, 2016; Schubert, 2017), have often been sealed, captured, and framed by the handshakes of politicians in suits, turning “high-level negotiations” (Corkin, 2012) into concrete and masculine visions of the architectures for the “New Angola.” Without a doubt, since the end of the Angolan civil war in 2002, these buildings, as elsewhere, are representational; they convey the particular “political, social and cultural values of dominant classes and elite social groupings” (Rendell et al., 2000, p. 10), engendering a “distinct new consciousness” (Mercer, 2014, p. 17) in both space and society. At the same time, and as much feminist work has shown, they are also shaped by a systemic gender bias that orients both the immaterial and material practices in and of the built environment (Rendell et al., 2000).

In contrast to the usual media stories about this place, a rare news article about daily labor in Kilamba appeared in 2013, two years after the first phase of the project was concluded. It narrated a tale of the

hundreds of women who are waking up early in the morning to go to the city of Kilamba to wash walls in exchange for ten thousand kwanza [17 USD]. The new residents of Kilamba’s centrality are being approached by women who offer their labor to clean the newly acquired houses. They are professionals and in less than two hours they let the apartments shine. (Jornal de Angola, 2013)¹

Building on this uncommon account that foregrounds female domestic workers’ experiences, and against the hegemonic masculinity that orients national discussions about the “New Luanda” and the “New Angola,” we argue in this paper for a gendered way of understanding the everyday (re)production of Kilamba, and merge this feminist perspective with a user-centred idea of architecture. Rendell et al. (2000, pp. 4–5) propose that:

Architecture continues after the moment of its design and construction. The experience, perception, use, appropriation and occupation of architecture need to be considered in two ways: first, as the temporal activity which takes place after the “completion” of the building, and which fundamentally alters the meaning of architecture, displacing it away from the architect and builder towards the active user; second, as the reconceptualisation of architectural production, such that different activities reproduce different architectures over time and space.

Informed by these observations—the recognition that buildings are continuously constituted by the occupants and activities within them after their “completion,” we foreground how female domestic workers from the margins of Luanda sustain Kilamba both materially and symbolically, enabling it to simultaneously uphold both household middle-class and national aspirations.

By merging social reproduction theory and situated approaches from infrastructure studies, we privilege the “world of female subjects” (Federici, 2004; see also Fortunati, 1995 [1981]; Bohrer, 2019), and those of a “minor” key (Katz, 1996), to answer two central questions. These are: How do the gendered labors performed by domestic workers within Kilamba’s apartments contribute to the material and immaterial reproduction of a “new” Luanda? And, in what ways do their negotiations within and commentary about this centrality challenge official narratives of the “New Angola”?

Figure 1. A “welcome” billboard at the entrance of Kilamba depicting its landscape. Photo by Jia-Ching Chen (2018), used with permission.

We argue that the spatialization of oil-centred geo-political arrangements in Angola––through which discussions about progress and modernity are choreographed by local elites within and without intercountry negotiations (Croese, 2012) ––is co-produced by the labors of, principally, female domestic workers, even while these efforts are not given due recognition. Certainly, these architectures appear to have been conceived, inaugurated, and are customarily spoken of without reference to them (Figure 1).²

In short, by tracing the everyday practices that take place in Kilamba's domestic realm—this “constitutive outside” (cf. Federici, 2004; see also Roskamm, 2019), we detail the granular ways through which domestic workers sustain the “dream” of this centrality as “the shop window of the Angolan miracle” (Buire, 2014, p. 300), despite the invisibilization of these and other women’s labor within the discourses that perpetuate the iconicity of these architectures. We also highlight and understand their commentaries about this space, often refracted through comparisons of Kilamba with where they live, as critiques of the infrastructural priorities of the “New Angola,” which, though “physically imposed on the urban cityscape,” has not changed basic material living conditions for the urban poor (Cardoso, 2016; Schubert, 2015, p. 1). Instead, official gains are “measured in purely material terms of the built environment” (Schubert, 2015, p. 1)—in kilometers of asphalted roads, number of bridges installed, or the amount of housing units built—from which domestic workers are largely excluded.³

Even as we center invisibilized labor, this paper channels “major” analyses about infrastructures and social reproduction in Angola through a “minor” or subaltern subject position. Our account is situated within similar efforts to understand political authority, housing, and infrastructure in Angola (Buire, 2014, 2017; Cardoso, 2015; Croese & Pitcher, 2019; Gastrow, 2014, 2020) and its political economy more broadly (Blanes, 2019; De Oliveira, 2015; Lazaro, 2020; Schubert, 2017). We nuance these approaches by centering the everyday labors of female domestic workers in Kilamba. This perspective, we argue, contributes to critical reflections on national infrastructure(s) by way of speaking from an “off-staged” social position (Henao Castro & Ernstson, 2019; Swyngedouw & Ernstson, 2018), all while upholding the important role of those taken for granted within these spatialized geopolitical configurations.

Feminist scholars have for decades been arguing for the centrality of women’s labor in sustaining life and economies across multiple scales (see, as but a few examples, Mullings, 2014; Bohrer, 2019; Barca, 2021; Fortunati, 1995 [1981]; Federici, 2004; Katz, 2001; Peake, 2016). If we understand social reproduction as “the activities and attitudes, behaviors and emotions, responsibilities and relationships directly involved in the maintenance of life on a daily basis and intergenerationally” (Laslett & Brenner, 1989, p. 382), and also consider, akin to Winders and Smith (2019, p. 5), that “social reproduction, in its material manifestations and conceptual formulations, is a profoundly spatial phenomenon” (see also Peake, 2016), then the importance of domestic work in Kilamba and for the “New Angola” is upheld. Therefore, by inserting domestic workers into the ongoing infrastructural equations of Luanda, we aim to show the undervalued and undertheorized role they play in reproducing life in and of recent urban developments in Angola, of which Kilamba is the most well-known and iconified. To be sure, everyday domestic labor buttresses the national discursive practices about the aesthetics and materialities of this new centrality. One can suggest, therefore, that which Kilamba is seen to index—whether political efficiency, “modernity,” new forms of urbanism, South-South collaborations, or, even, personal and national distinction—is contributed to by this taken for granted workforce, namely the invisibilized domestic staff that attend to its architectures every day. By extension, we argue that domestic worker narratives about Kilamba offer more complex, grounded, and gendered understandings of the infrastructural articulations of post-war reconciliation and reconstruction in Angola—its national and city “newness” (see Schubert, 2015, 2017). Our argument echoes Sekeráková Búriková’s (2021, p. 13), whose observation that the “gossip” about their employers that Slovak au pairs in London engaged in also functioned to transmit information about their working environment (2021, p. 13); speech acts that, while mundane, conferred critical “minor” analyses about structural conditions. This paper, then, is a female-centred and granular reflection on both infrastructure and the structural politics that shapes the physical, geopolitical, and discursive architectures of post-war Angola. Here, we value and make visible domestic work(ers) since the “mundane,” as Dyck (2005) argues in her analysis of how globalization shapes caregiving, offers a critical site from which to view how complex international relations unfold and are reproduced in everyday gendered life.

Methods

Our arguments derive from a mixed methods approach that included interviews, conversations and ethnographic field notetaking over four months in 2019, during which the first author lived with two Kilamba households. This data was corroborated and expanded by two focus groups in September and October 2019; each session had the participation of eight domestic workers. Focus group participants were asked to provide a brief life history, so as to help us understand their lives beyond their present role as domestic workers and assist us in mapping out the dynamics shaping their choice of work. Thereafter, these interlocutors discussed their activities in Kilamba: what they did every day, their conditions of employment, challenges within the workplace, and their reflections on this centrality as a place to live vis-a-vis official narratives of post-war reconstruction in the country. These two sessions of collective listening and sharing were, certainly, critical fora to hear personal ideas and critiques of the national infrastructure agenda.

The focus groups were supplemented by interviews with 30 people, derived from a larger research project into Luanda’s “petro-urbanism”—an inquiry into how petroleum exports are used as currency to capitalize urban development in the city (authors submitted). Outside of these formal research methods, we engaged in conversations with dozens of locals living within Kilamba and its immediate periphery, in particular the low-income settlement of Sector 5 Fios where a significant number of Kilamba’s domestic workers live.

The female workers included in the two focus group discussions mirrored a sample employed by a Catholic University of Angola (UCAN) research project on gender and inclusion launched in 2015. In our study, participants had an average age of 34 years, five children each, and had worked in Kilamba as domestic workers—whether full or part-time—for between two to three years. Furthermore, more than half were migrants from rural areas, who confirmed that they had entered this profession because of the need to provide for personal or household needs. Similarly, the participants of the UCAN study were between 18 - 40 years of age, were also migrants, and were prompted by their precarious social positioning to engage in this work to bolster family income (Nangacovie et al., 2017, p. 99).⁴

As a research team composed of a foreign and middle-class African woman and a White European man, we were cognizant of how the power we embodied could shape our research inquiry. Conscious that these dynamics could never fully be erased despite one’s best efforts, we sought to engage in practices that would be consistently reflective of the uneven class and race power present in conventional research processes, including our own. While our research brings no direct returns to these interlocutors who generously shared their experiences and knowledge with us, our paper provides a small way to channel their grounded critique of Angola’s current infrastructural priorities, articulated through post-war “master narratives” (Schubert, 2015), and to (re)inscribe these female workers into the central metabolisms of Kilamba life.

To build context for our interpretations, the next section offers a brief history of Kilamba anchored within the country’s post-war (re)construction efforts. Following this, we document the labor of this centrality’s domestic workers towards making visible their invisibilized work and channeling their “minor” critiques of the material and discursive practices of the “New Angola.”

Kilamba

“The New Centrality of Kilamba” or, in Portuguese, Centralidade do Kilamba,⁵ is a Chinese built development of 720 tenement buildings, commercial areas and schools, roughly 30 kilometers outside Luanda. Construction for this city, which was prompted by the then President Dos Santos’s electoral promise to build one million houses (see Croese, 2012), began in 2008, and it was inaugurated in 2011 (Buire, 2017). The China International Trust Investment Corporation (CITIC), a Chinese state-owned company (SOC), constructed the 20,000 apartments in roughly three years, creating the “largest housing project built in Angola” to date (President Dos Santos, quoted in Marques De Morais, 2011), and, likely, the most extensive and expensive project of its kind in Africa. Bénazéraf and Alves (2014, p. 3) capture the scale of this satellite city:

Kilamba [Phase 1] is spread over 5 km². It is divided into 28 blocks of about 16 hectares each in a checked urban grid. There are three types of apartments (from two to four bedrooms) in three types of buildings ranging from five to 11 storeys. The project includes 24 kindergartens, nine elementary schools and eight middle schools. CITIC Construction has also erected the supporting infrastructure consisting of two high voltage transformers, 77 power sub-stations, 400 km of water pipes, a water sewage plant, traffic lights, and bus stops.

Beyond its size, service infrastructure and amenities, an intentional middle-class aesthetic was enrolled to further distinguish it from the rest of the city (Gastrow, 2020), and informs the “boundary work” (Mercer, 2020) engaged in by those who demarcate it from other neighborhoods in Luanda. While, as Pitcher and Moorman (2015, pp. 123–125) state, “close to three quarters of the city live in informal settlements with poor housing and sanitation,” in contrast, Kilamba “mimics China’s many pop-up cities in its configuration” and reflects a “modernist aesthetic.” They add that:

the presence of carefully laid out, orderly buildings, manicured lawns, broad boulevards, clean sidewalks, covered bus stops and working streetlights contrasts sharply with the “old city” of Luanda, which, despite a stately beauty dating back to the sixteenth century and much ongoing construction, displays the scars of conflict and neglect. (Pitcher & Moorman, 2015, pp. 123–125)

Even as the presidential declaration to build one million houses played a key role in the ruling party electoral script proclaimed in the context of the 2008 elections and broad post-war⁶ national reconstruction efforts (Croese, 2012; Schubert, 2017), the impetus for this and other centralities lies in numerous intersecting local motivations (Cardoso, 2015, 2016; Croese, 2017; Pitcher & Moorman, 2015). These include a bid to decongest the center of Luanda and the city broadly, the need to house a growing population and invest in infrastructure development practically halted during the long civil war, and a political scheme, condensed in mainstream discussions into a narrative about the “New Angola” or the “New Luanda,” to show that “first, the government has a vision for the future and, second, it can deliver on that vision” (Pitcher & Moorman, 2015, p. 130).

However, despite initial claims that Kilamba would be “social housing,” this centrality ended up serving, primarily, the middle class with state-sector jobs or connections (Buire, 2014; Croese, 2016; Gastrow, 2020; Gilson Lazaro, personal communication). What's more, its construction prompted the eviction of many subsistence farmers who lived or planted agriculture in the area, and who continue to pursue yet unresolved compensation claims.⁷ Correspondingly, the population segment who were initially hinted as the likely beneficiaries of this new urban area, namely “Luanda’s urban poor, who cannot afford its apartments and who do not fit the ideal model of a nuclear household with formal sector employment that the apartments were designed for,” were, ultimately, side-lined (Croese, 2016, p. 20).⁸

To be sure, in a city that was one of the most expensive in the world at the turn of the century, subsidized housing and improved services were welcomed by the small but powerful middle-class demographic who managed to acquire Kilamba apartments, even as this project steered development funds away from those who were most in need (Buire, 2014; Croese & Pitcher, 2019; Cain, 2013; Cardoso, 2016, p. 105; De Oliveira, 2015; Gastrow, 2020; Schubert, 2017). Without a doubt, the constant electricity supply, planned recreational spaces and much improved though more expensive water and sewage services have prompted many of its residents to refer to their new homes and lives in Kilamba as an improvement from their previous abodes – even more “tranquil”⁹ (Croese, 2016; Gastrow, 2020).

That it was financed by a Chinese credit line and paid for by oil backed loans of up to US$3.5 billion (Bénazéraf & Alves, 2014; Schmitz, 2018) makes Kilamba an important manifestation of “petro-urbanism,” or what Cardoso (2015) refers to as the “crude urban revolution” in Luanda.¹⁰ Both of these terms reference the assemblage of oil transactions that animate desires for a “new” country and city. The success of these visions is measured, as Schubert (2015, 2017) asserts, by the proliferation of concrete infrastructures. What’s more, this author (2015, p. 10) adds:

Because the war has been equated with the “senseless” destruction of infrastructures, large-scale reconstruction projects have since been one of the government’s top priorities, thereby depoliticizing the question of “national reconciliation” as national reconstruction. In the same way that the “destruction of war” is quantified in billions of dollars in speeches allusive to the anniversary of peace or of national independence, “peace” is conceived in GDP growth figures, numbers of roads rebuilt, kilometres of rails laid, classrooms reconstructed. Posters exhort the population to “build the future together” (juntos constrúımos o futuro) […].

Kilamba is, without a doubt, a much-cited signifier of China–Africa relations and variously referred to as the “flagship” and “prime example of Sino-Angola partnership at work" [sic].¹¹ Simultaneously, some scholars argue that it is a central “spectacle” in the “material and symbolic production of the New Angola” (Buire, 2017, p. 5) and its envisioned “topography” (Schubert, 2015, p. 10). This site, thus, functions as the territorial ground zero of where “[we start to] build the future together.” But from the international to the local scale, neither the tangible nor discursive regimes that govern Kilamba make evident a collaborative assembling that features the intricate, intimate, and everyday work that maintains it as a place of social distinction (Buire, 2014; Cardoso, 2016; Pitcher & Moorman, 2015). It is precisely here, between the hard materiality of habitually male and now concrete visions of a “New Angola,” and the soft power of the shining spectacle of middle-class households, that the concealed labor of women workers is required and channeled towards ideological work for the nation. For these reasons, we contend that the social reproduction efforts of the domestic workers who clean and organize Kilamba’s apartments and shops, often for very low wages, emplace them as important actors in the political and tangible co-constitution of this centrality, even when their efforts may go unrecognized.

Kilamba’s invisibilized labor

The International Labor Organization (ILO) reports that one in twenty-five workers is a domestic worker, and in 2015 it was estimated that their number came to, roughly, 67.1 million domestic workers worldwide (ILO, 2020). Against the enduring feminization of this labor (Lutz, 2011), most of domestic work is carried out by women: certainly, women are the overwhelming constitutive element of the “global care chain” that functions to monetize and extract their “emotional surplus value” (Hochschild, 2000).

Regionally, statistics show that of all “female paid employees in Africa, 13.6% are domestic workers,” which, given the informality that typifies domestic labor relations, provides a conservative estimate of roughly 5.2 million domestic workers on the continent (ILO, 2016). In Angola, the informal sector accounted for 66.2% of the workforce with a share of 73% for women between 2009 and 2011 (Nangacovie et al., 2017, pp. 62–63; see also Van Klaveren et al., 2009, p.10). While comprehensive statistics are scarce (Van Klaveren et al., 2009), we can, thus, still conclude that a significant number of Angolan women work as informal street traders, or as domestic workers—as zungueiras or empregadas, as the work histories of our interlocutors make evident. Against this background, one can read the recent Presidential Decree 155 of August 9, 2016, which mandated employers of domestic workers to pay their social security deductions, offer maternity leave and sign a contract with them among other gains, as recognition of the size of this labor force demographic, as well as the poor conditions within which they have been working (Ferreira, 2011, p. 2016; see also Fernandes, 2011).

When asked about these new social protection provisions for domestic workers in 2017, Manuel Moreira, the national coordinator of the Social Security Sustainability Plan, said that these inclusive measures were prompted because “the Angolan people aspire to a modern and socially just state” (Adriano, 2017). Interviews with domestic workers in Kilamba, however, make evident that while these aspirations persist, and despite progressive legislation such as that mentioned above, “modernity” is primarily established as a “merely technical issue,” resolvable not through a substantive inclusion, but, rather, via an ahistorical “reconstruction of infrastructures” (Schubert, 2015, p. 17).

This technical position notwithstanding, and as the experiences from Kilamba’s domestic workers convey, “the built environment could potentially become the site of contestations over history and meaning” (Schubert, 2015, p. 17), allowing not only for the recentring of the gendered “minor” labor that we argue co-sustains this built environment, but, also, for an interrogation of the master narratives and actions from which this centrality is propelled. In the following section, both the chronicles and practices of female domestic workers are privileged in ways that center their “minor” contestations of Kilamba’s infrastructures. Their commentaries about this space highlight not only concern with the need to provide for their families or to improve their working conditions, but, akin to the “gossip” of Slovak au pairs in London (Sekeráková Búriková, 2021), also function as critiques of the infrastructural priorities deemed central to the post–war moment in Angola.

“We do everything”

Our first focus group was conducted in the Comissão de Moradores do Sector 5 Fios, which is a formalized association of residents of the low-income neighborhood adjacent to Kilamba (see Figure 2). Though established as a council ostensibly representing the interests of all residents, the Comissão is a formation canalized through ruling party structures and similar patronage networks (Tomás, 2014; for more on Comissões see Croese, 2015). Sector 5 Fios shares an informal, non-marked, but spatially distinct border with the second phase of Kilamba referred to as KK5000. This is a collection of shorter and less elaborately built tenement buildings also governed by the Kilamba administration. KK5000's buildings end abruptly to give way to dry grassland vegetation, which, on the border with Sector 5 Fios, is dotted with small uneven shack housing. A singular water station was built for this community by the contractors of Kilamba and sits meters away from the last row of KK5000's structures. Since it is the only water source for this community of roughly 1200 families, throngs of mostly women endure long lines every day to access this resource. In contrast, in Kilamba, a piped network connects over 20,000 apartments to water.

Figure 2. The Comissão de Moradores in Sector 5 Fios. Photo by the first author.

The eight domestic workers who came to the first focus group were from the community of Sector 5 Fios, and, therefore, their statements about Kilamba were inevitably refracted through the experience of living in an “informal” and gravely underserviced periferia always under threat of eviction, but situated next to a model of urbanization they also desired for themselves.¹² Our second focus group, also with eight participants, was conducted in a local school within KK5000. While this group of domestic workers did not live in Sector 5 Fios, they lived in similar conditions, which also brought into stark relief the inequity immanent to the infrastructural priorities of the “New Angola.”

In analyzing the focus group transcriptions alongside fieldwork notes and interviews, we discerned three interrelated themes that the domestic workers referenced. These are: (1) "the crisis," or what Angolans habitually refer to in Portuguese as a crise, which may reference increasing socio-economic precarity in general, but also indexes national economic conditions since the fall of oil prices from 2014; (2) poor working conditions as domestic workers; and (3) infrastructural inequity.

These themes, in particular a crise and infrastructural inequity, inform personal reasons for taking up jobs as domestic workers' in Kilamba; our findings indicate that their job choices are conditioned by the livelihood challenges they and their families face, coupled with their own marginal subject position in the political economy (Nangacovie et al., 2017). It is also important to note that most of our interlocutors were migrants to the city and thus without a large kinship network in Luanda. Consequently, as Sassen (2003) argues, that they are women and migrants makes them further vulnerable to accepting poorly paid jobs with precarious working conditions, and especially at the stage of their lives when they are having and caring for young children.

Equally, a significant number of our interlocutors had worked previously as zungueiras (hawkers) or sellers in the market, and turned to jobs in Kilamba as it got populated since it is close to their homes and meant they could save on transport costs. Despite this, employment in Kilamba barely improved the lives of these women, all of whom lived in houses made from chapa [corrugated iron] and without basic services, as the long lines at the sole water post in Sector 5 Fios made evident. However, even in a context of grave economic deprivation and poor working conditions, an interviewee shared laconically: “we cannot complain because it is difficult for everyone.”

When asked about what they did at work, the focus group participants customarily answered “tudo,” everything. For Regina,¹³ the domestic worker in the Kilamba household where the first author lived for a month, this meant arriving between 8 - 9 am, when the owner of the house would have joined the large daily migration, manifest in the steady stream of cars exiting the centrality, headed West towards downtown Luanda. Akin to her peers who “get up early to wash the walls of Kilamba” (Jornal de Angola, 2013), on arrival, Regina would clean up the dishes from the night before and plan her time so that she could do laundry in between mopping and tidying all the four rooms in the house. At around one in the afternoon, she would stop to make lunch for herself and anyone in the house, and, thereafter, continue with her limpeza—hanging clothes, taking garbage to the communal dumpsters, cleaning surfaces and collective areas outside the house; all for her and her employer’s satisfaction, and towards the goal of upholding the aesthetics of what a Kilamba household should look like. These tasks were usually concluded between 5 and 6 pm, and, depending on the arrangement with one's employer, the worker could then leave. In Angela’s case, another domestic worker who took care of a child with a disability, on Tuesdays and Thursdays she was required to arrive at work at 6 am and leave at 6 pm because the child had to be taken to therapy. Gloria, another worker, “enter[s] at 7 am and leaves at 6 pm. But when the patroa [employer] wants to go out, you can only leave when she comes back [late in the evening]. So, you have to call your husband to let him know.”

Ensuring the required level of household cleanliness and order was not easy against the increasingly frequent water shortages in Kilamba (Kilamba News, 2022 ). Speaking to this, Elsa shared in the focus group: “When there is no electricity it makes my life hard, and when there is no water it makes my life hard. The water can disappear for one week. I must get it from other condominiums.” Similarly, another partcipant, Juliana, observed: “If you are on the 8th floor, and you have no water reserve, you have to go down to the garden and climb the stairs with your buckets.”

As is evident from the preceding descriptions of everyday labor in Kilamba’s apartments, domestic workers took up any number of tasks deemed paramount by their employer. Certainly, they cleaned indoor and outdoor areas, washed dishes, cooked, took care of children, did laundry and ironed clothes, and this was done over long hours and poorly compensated. Regrettably, the ongoing economic recession (ADBG, 2022, p. 136) made it so that there was always surplus labor readily available to fill domestic worker positions; the Marxian insight that this kept wages low and prevented job security was not lost on them—they knew they could be replaced at any time should their employer choose to do so (Jornal de Angola, 2011).

Cited together with a crise and poor working conditions, our interlocutors highlighted the infrastructural inequity symbolized by Kilamba. We interpret these speech acts as critiques of the material and discursive articulations of the “New Angola,” and by extension the “new” Luanda, by “minor” subjects. The following longer excerpts, chosen from the two focus groups, highlight the centrality of domestic workers in sustaining these buildings through their “daily and long-term reproduction” (Katz, 2001, p. 711), which functions to perpetuate “culture and society, and the social standing and lifestyle of households” (Anderson, 2001, p. 25). At the same time, their narratives eloquently and at times quite viscerally connect all three themes––the crisis, poor working conditions, and infrastructural inequity––and, by channeling these reflections through the built environment of Kilamba, they contest a project that while “good,” did not democratize access to the promised materialities of post-war reconstruction.

Excerpt 1

I am 26 years old. Before [I worked in] Kilamba I didn’t work. [In Kilamba] I only work to be able to take care of my kids. There is no school and so we only work to pay school fees for our kids because our kids are not accepted in the Kilamba school. I have also worked in Benfica [a coastal neighborhood] in a shop as a receptionist. But Kilamba is closer. I get a bus, but the money I get is not enough. I only get 20,000 Kwanza [per month; USD 35] and I rest on Sunday. I work from Monday to Saturday. There are lights and water in the building so this makes life easier, for example, to wash things. What makes it hard is that transport is hard. And the money is not enough to buy everything. There is a lot of abuse […].

Kilamba is good and helps with some things. I work in Block H. I have been working for one year. I have four kids. I came to Sector 5 Fios because of my parents and husband. All my family is here in Sector 5 Fios. I have worked in two houses [in Kilamba], and I left the first house because she [the owner, the patroa] told me she could not afford to have a domestic worker anymore. So, I then went to another house. We can’t complain because it is difficult for everyone. The patroa will only help sometimes. And our husbands help. Our houses in Sector 5 Fios are not good. I kill snakes in my house these days. Our neighborhood is not good. (Maria, September 7, 2019)

Excerpt 2

I am from the province of Uige [in the rural northeast]. I work in Kilamba as a domestic worker and live in Sector 5 Fios. Before Kilamba I did not work. There is no advantage from Kilamba for us who live in the bairro. If we had benefits, we would have lived better, but they are not here. There is no benefit of Kilamba being here. The salary we get there is not enough, does not make sense, but it also does not make sense for me to go to and work far away. (Juliana, September 7, 2019)

Excerpt 3

I was working in KK5000 [the second phase of Kilamba]. I was born in Rangel [a more central neighborhood of Luanda]. I am 29 years old, and I have four children. I worked in Kilamba until two months ago when my employer travelled out of the country. I live in Bita [which lies southeast of Kilamba] and walking here takes about 30 minutes. I leave my house at 6 am. It is my friend from church who got me this job. I worked here for two months only. Before this I would sell [at the market]. Why would I come here? Because I must work. And here the salary is better than selling. It makes sense to work here because I don’t have to take money for bus fare, and I can save money. And my patroa was good: Dona Bela. God sent me here. When she left, she gave me many things. She is coming back in six months. In the house I washed things and took care of them. I used to get 25,000 Kwanza [per month; 44 USD]. Now I am looking for jobs that pay daily [in Kilamba], but it is not easy to get work that is day to day. When I work, I mostly look for work to wash clothes. I wash the clothes inside the house, and I charge 2,000 Kwanza [per wash: 3.5 USD]. Kilamba is a big reference in Angola, and it makes sense. But Kilamba should be for everyone, people have rights. Where I live, I am in a bairro that has no lights and no water. (Gloria, September 7, 2019)

While socio-economic precarity and poor working conditions are articulated directly in the accounts of the participants––that life is hard and that work, adequate remuneration and job security are difficult to come by, infrastructural inequity is often implicit in the descriptions of the materialities of the own households; commentary about Kilamba’s infrastructure, access to water, electricity and schools, for example, are placed in contrast to their own living conditions. Maria’s speech, the first of the three excerpts, talks about her own house that “is not good” and where she “kills snakes every day.” Gloria expresses that she lives in a bairro with no lights or water, unlike in Kilamba. Juliana, more forthright, asserts that she gains no benefit from Kilamba being there, despite employment in this centrality, and adds: “if we had benefits [from Kilamba], we would have lived better.”

The above narratives bring together several crucial themes, including the differences between the living conditions of Kilamba’s residents and those who work within its households. We understand these contrasts, highlighted consecutively by our interlocutors, as speech acts that contest the exclusionary nature of the infrastructural priorities of the “New Angola.”

The labors of Maria, Regina, Juliana, Gloria and their peers confirm their vital status in the maintenance of Kilamba as both discourse and materiality. They spend hours doing “tudo” that their employers require; contribute both immediate labor power and embody the enduring raw materials necessary to ensure that its residents can continue to frame their houses within the prevalent narratives of progress and the aesthetics of middle-class infrastructural modernity – that their apartments can resemble “global aspirational houses” (Mercer, 2014). Yet, despite this recurring and longstanding work, they are habitually excluded from the dominant practices and accounts that construct this centrality. This notwithstanding, the domestic workers interviewed were not afraid to comment on the disparities these architectures entrench, and this commentary was often channeled through quotidian contrasts with their own living conditions. And, while constituting invisibilized labor, they use the built environment they work in to express critical reflections that invalidate master narratives and attendant infrastructural practices, in this way re-politicizing “depoliticized” (Schubert, 2015) architectures. Assuredly, in their own distinct ways, each of the participants asserted, as Gloria did, that “Kilamba should be for everyone, people have rights.”

Conclusion

The questions that orient this paper are: How do the gendered labors performed by domestic workers within Kilamba’s apartments contribute to the material and immaterial reproduction of a “new” Luanda? And, in what ways do their negotiations within and commentary about this centrality challenge official narratives of the “New Angola”? We have sought to make evident how their daily and long-term work is crucial to the reproduction of Kilamba, even while it may be taken for granted. Without a doubt, through their multiple household tasks—from cleaning apartment walls to fetching water to caring for children— they help cement Kilamba’s status as the symbol of post-war reconstruction, often a stand in for “national reconciliation” (Schubert, 2015). Despite their tangible practices for this landscape, in their reflections about this centrality, conveyed, primarily, through descriptions of their own homes, they narrativize it as, ultimately, entrenching inequality: the “New Luanda” signified by recent infrastructure projects has not democratized the “progress” and “development” that has been promised, and is, instead, rendering exclusive topographies. Evidently, their lives with snakes, no water, and no lights are both the material and symbolic articulations of the incompleteness of these “new” projects.

We privileged the commentaries of domestic workers in order to analyze Kilamba’s infrastructures from a gendered and “minor” subject position, a perspective consistently invisibilized by the predominantly masculine negotiations and visions that structure discussions about post-war reconstruction in Angola (cf. Mouzinho & Sizaltina, 2017). For us, these workers embody the “impossible domestic” position described by Moten (2014, p. 51): “the commodity, the impossible domestic, the interdicted/contradictive mother. Dangerously embedded in the home from which she is excluded, she is more and less than one.”

Against the reality that they are “embedded in the home” from which they are “excluded,” we argue that domestic workers are critical labor for the materialization of the “New Angola,” despite being prohibited from that precise vision, and that their gendered experiences provide potent critique of elite male urban plans in Luanda and beyond. Invisibility, here, is used to register their effacement from national discourses that focus on the concrete articulations of a “modern” state, and to concomitantly highlight their disempowerment when it comes to their rights before the law, specifically in terms of remuneration, working conditions and job security. This status is informed and compounded by their corporealities as women, poor and, often, migrants with limited work opportunities.

It is important to note, however, that “the relationship between visibility and empowerment is neither direct nor straightforward” (Sekeráková Búriková, 2021, p. 5). Certainly, as the domestic workers privileged within this paper make evident, they can “decompose the major” (Katz, 1996, p. 487); while still engaged in their multiple everyday labors for Kilamba, they think through their “minor” experiences to offer complex, gendered, and grounded critiques and understandings of post-war infrastructure, and the political economy that continues to emerge the exclusive architectures of the “new Angola” (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Periphery path to Kilamba. Photo by Jia-Ching Chen (2018).

Acknowledgement

We thank the interviewees who shared their knowledge and time with us, and greatly appreciate the support of Rafael Morais, Cláudio Tomás and Gilson Lazaro during fieldwork and beyond. We thank Ricardo Cardoso, Jia-Ching Chen and Tiffany Liu from our project for lively discussions and continuous feedback on this article. We are also grateful to Linda J. Peake, Darren Patrick, Elsa Koleth and colleagues for convening this special issue, and for their patient and constructive critique of our manuscript. Two anonymous reviewers further helped us clarify our argument, and we appreciate their insightful and generous comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research has received support from the AXA Research Foundation, through the following AXA Award: "Grounding and Worlding Urban Infrastructures: Situated Challenges, Risks and Contraditions of Sustainability though African Cities (GROWL)". Research for this project was carried out by a core team led by Henrik Ernstson (PI), and with support from Ricardo Cardoso, Wangui Kimari and Jia-Ching Chen.

Notes

1 All Angolan newspaper quotes and excerpts from focus group interviews are our translations from Portuguese.

2 For similar case study accounts, see Pérez (2021) and Lutz (2011) in Peru and Europe, respectively.

3 Without a doubt, the multifaceted endeavors of male gardeners, security guards, and building caretakers also contribute to sustaining the materialities and immaterialities of Kilamba. Nevertheless, we privilege female domestic workers as key actors in maintaining these households taken to represent both national and personal middle-class prestige within ongoing post-war reconstruction efforts. Such a privileging recognizes the sheer quantity of “inside” and “hidden” domestic work required, compared to the “outside” work that habitually relies on men’s efforts, while also highlighting the fact that domestic work is a continuous and everyday task, and one that is rarely accorded the same value as work routinely done by men in public spaces.

4 The earlier study was carried out by researchers at the Catholic University of Angola (UCAN), with whom we were in contact with before designing our study. The age span in our groups was similar to this earlier study and we hope to develop comparative results in future papers.

5 We use centrality and city interchangeably throughout the paper; these terms are are used synonymously in both Portuguese and English sources.

6 The civil war in Angola lasted from 1975-2002.

7 We heard of these claims from several sources, including activists, planners, government workers and those who continue to live on the outskirts of Kilamba.

8 A 2014 survey conducted by Cain and colleagues found that “a third of the centrality’s residents were employed in the private sector and another third in the civil service” (cited in Croese, 2016, p. 20).

9 A few young interlocutors described Kilamba to me as tranquil, in comparison to their previous areas of residence.

10 Like the concept of petro-urbanism, Cardoso (2015, p. 36) coined this expression “as a placeholder for the decisive role played by oil in shaping some of Luanda’s urban transformations. In contemporary Angola, oil is not just central to the making of modernity. It is also a crucial configuring element of the urban form. The notion of the “crude urban revolution” denotes the pivotal part that oil has played in shaping emerging forms of official urbanism in contemporary Luanda.”

11 See https://kilamba-info.com/history/, accessed 15 March 2021.

12 Sector 5 Fios residents had already suffered at least two large-scale house demolitions since 2014. This is because their area, as several of them testified, is seen as a “reserve of the state” to be used for the extension of the centrality, even if many residents have claims to the land that extend back to the 1970s and 1980s.

13 Please note that we have used pseudonyms for all of our interlocutors.