The good and the bad of the same: On the political value of historical repetition in Angola

ABSTRACT

In this article I discuss processes of investment in historicity as an ideological, political and moral problem. Focusing on the study of religious and political movements in Angola, I address the problem of historical repetition as a form of ‘acting upon time’ which, in similar terms to Walter Benjamin’s citation a l’ordre du jour, contests the idea of temporal irreversibility. I propose that this contestation is multiplex and can produce ‘good’ as well as ‘bad’ historical repetitions.

KEYWORDS:

• Temporality
• historical repetition
• Angola
• religion
• politics

Introduction: Re-remembering in Angola

It is not easy to remember in Angola. With its record of authoritarian rule, the country is populated by ‘places of no history’ (Blanes 2019), zones of epistemological abandonment (Biehl 2005) that are left out of the ruling regime’s victorious version of the past. Perhaps this situation explains why history and memory so easily become objects of political contention, and why remembering becomes an act of ‘emphasis’ or enhancement of some sort. For instance, in 2012, I interviewed a 90-year-old man who was one of the first followers of the Christian prophet Simão Toko’s Church, known as the Tokoists. My friends from the Church kept insisting that I talk to this man because he was not in good health, and it was important that his memories were registered before it was ‘too late’. I spent a full afternoon in the neighbourhood of Palanca in Luanda, listening to the details of the founding moments of the Church in the 1940s in what was then Léopoldville (today Kinshasa). To this day, I am still amazed at the level of detail of his story, how he was able to recall conversations held in 1946 with Belgian Baptist missionaries, or the name of the street where they held Bible studies. But if a reflection on this autobiographical moment would deserve an article in itself, here I suggest to focus on the ‘emphatic’ dimensions of the act of historical remembrance.

This emphasis is an example of what the members of this religious movement call relembrança, a double investment in both a past temporality and the actual, physical act of remembering. However, such an investment is not exclusive to this prophetic movement, but instead signals one of many concurrent methods of acting upon history in Angola. In this article I will focus on two of them: those of the Tokoists and of the secular activist Revolutionary Movement. Before I do so, I will explore the conceptual implications of the notion of historical repetition, within and beyond the religious sphere.

Contesting time’s arrow

As the editors of this issue point out (Bandak and Coleman, this issue), engagement with the problem of repetition is fruitful inasmuch as it exposes particular values attributed to social forms of reiteration, redundancy, revisitation and perpetuation. As a philosophical statement, the idea of historical repetition appears in counterpoint to hegemonic understandings of time as a linear progression – the notion of time’s arrow¹ – which can be considered a perception prevalent in modern Western thought, part of our everyday common sense, mediated by the overwhelming sensation of inexorable calendrical advancement (see also Jameson 2005; Nora 1989). From the perspective of political history, this view can be seen as rooted equally in liberal and Marxist outlooks, both of which maintain ontological stances based on ideas of human progress and development.²

Walter Benjamin, however, was famously critical of both Marxist and liberal understandings of temporal progression. In his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1968), he exposes historical materialism – the conception of history through and within material contexts and modes of production – as a fraud, a puppet that engages in teleology as recourse for its self-presentation as an inevitability (the ‘automaton’). In doing so, he questions the ideology of the past as a continuum or a progression and invokes the necessity of a temporal redemption – what he called the ‘messianic moments’ of citation a l’ordre du jour of history, its fundamental questioning.

Thus, as critiques of history such as that of Benjamin have shown us, the notion of a linear historical time is not only a heuristics towards a diachronic understanding of the world, but is itself a product of a ‘conceptual history’, as Koselleck would have it (2002), an acting upon temporality. From this perspective, anthropology itself can be said to have traditionally acted upon historical thinking, through its proposition of evolutionary, diffusionist, and other developmental and teleological theories of the human condition.³ As Johannes Fabian noted in his seminal Time and the Other (1983), this engagement has had a ‘naturalizing effect’ on anthropological conceptions of history whereby Western ‘others’ (e.g. primitives, savages, etc.) are removed from the possibility of coevalness. In a similar vein, Nicholas Thomas exposed this denial of coevalness as a ‘dehistoricization’ of the anthropological subject, which thus becomes ‘out of time’ (1989).

More recently, however, we have observed different qualities of time (James and Mills 2005) at work, which have not only questioned hegemonic perceptions but also anthropology’s own epistemological configurations concerning temporality and historicity. As Nancy Munn famously put it (1992, 93), the anthropological study of time is like reading Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Book of Sand’: there is no beginning and no end. Munn’s review essay was concomitant to Alfred Gell’s programmatic The Anthropology of Time (1992), in which he attempted a critical review of anthropological and philosophical conceptions of time. In that book, he addresses what he calls ‘time-maps’ (1992, 242), which represent, once again quoting Borges, a ‘garden of forking paths’ (ibid.): the perception of temporality and historicity as a process of charting through logic, consensus and co-ordination.

What emerges therefore is a critique of the notion of temporal recurrence. In her recent article on ‘critical times’, Bryant (2016) discusses the experience of a ‘temporality of crisis’ in Cyprus, one through which a sense of uncertainty, change and reconfiguration is conveyed, resulting in a sense of ‘uncanny present’. In this present, the future becomes a future past (see Koselleck 2004), and the temporal continuum is inevitably questioned: ‘the uncanny present appears to portend the future to the extent that it is either a repetition or a return of the past’ (Bryant 2016, 21). What is observed, in sum, is what Nancy Munn had called ‘spatiotemporalizing practices’ (2013) towards a specific anamnesis (see Blanes 2017a).

It is precisely through the conceptual deconstruction of linear time (See Hodges 2008) that another notion often emerges: the idea of ‘history repeating itself’. Usually, this concept also appears as a commonsense temporal statement, enveloped with a moralizing stance, along the lines of ‘we have learnt nothing from history, which is why we repeat the same mistakes’. This point follows from what Gustavo Lins Ribeiro called a ‘developmentalist utopia’ (1991), the idea of human progress through time as a given, to the extent that its denial becomes a heresy of sorts. However, beyond the commonsense, what seems most interesting is precisely the idea of a moral investment in historicity, its enveloping in a theory of value through which the idea or experience of repetition becomes an ‘issue’. From this perspective, one could say that there are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ historicities at stake, and it is our task as anthropologists to understand why and in what terms. As I will try to demonstrate in this article, such positive and negative values attributed to historical repetition are inherently tied to conservative and progressive modes of thinking in Angola.

The second point I want to make here stems from the first: this moralized time is much more than a mere passive judgment on the current state of things, a discourse on the present. It is an active occupation of temporality as a historical process, in an attempt to change it. Throughout this text, I will use my ethnography in two distinct Angolan contexts to describe these opposing configurations, and critically engage in the problem of repetition as a (political) value: prophetic/messianic Christianity, and secular political activisms. In their own way each case reveals a recognition of historical repetition but identifies diverging causes and consequences. Ultimately, as I will conclude, these two cases of moralizing ‘acting upon’ temporality provide a critique of the present, which is perceived as a negative time.

Going back to original times

In Christianity, the notion of temporal and historical repetition is, to say the least, a complex issue. If, on the one hand, the idea of reincarnation – as a process of ‘repetition of the soul’ – is commonly rejected in terms of dogma and doctrine, in practical terms it appears in many Christian cultures around the world, namely among messianic and millennial cultures (see e.g. Sarró 2015). Likewise, Christian eschatology can be initially understood as a progressive framework, one that partakes of time’s arrow, centred on the idea of a future salvation in the Kingdom of God, which in turn may adopt more literal or metaphorical distances and latitudes according to the theology at stake. Recent literature in the anthropology of Christianity has empirically illustrated a sense of progression through different analyses of the concept of conversion: from ideas of rupturism (e.g. Meyer 1998) to ideas of dis/continuity in Christian culture (e.g. Robbins 2004). Despite relying on linear conceptions, such approaches have pluralized both autochthonous and anthropological understandings and experiences of time. They have also debated the possibility of temporal concomitance or disjuncture – from ‘everyday millennarianisms’ (Robbins 2001) to ‘incomplete eschatologies’ (Bialecki 2009) or ‘old apocalypticisms’ (Naumescu 2016), for instance.

On the other hand, Christianity is populated by acts and ideologies of temporal repetition. In fact, as David Berliner and Ramon Sarró have pointed out in their debate on religious learning (2008, 3 and ff.), there is a reiterative dimension to religion – expressed in its etymology relego, religio – that is constitutive of its experience, both in individual and collective terms: ‘No matter how it is defined, religion has to do with reiteration: of words, actions, intentions or memories’ (ibid.). Reading the Bible, giving testimony, partaking liturgy, and uttering prayer: such acts rely on forms of material or intellectual repetition. In this framework, ritual, and its usual cyclicity, are a case in point.

an From ideological perspective, one specific version of this is what could be overarchingly called literalism, understood here as the hermeneutic emphasis in a particular moment in the past, one that is object of attempted repetition, be it by invocation, mimesis, re-enactment or recurrence.⁴ This form of hermeneutics necessarily begins in the act of reading the Bible, succeeded by the act of ‘understanding’ it (Berliner and Sarró 2008, 1). Within this framework, biblical literalism is commonly understood as a a practical effort towards exactitude, an attempt to reduce metaphor, allegory and figurativeness in the act of reading the Bible and performing its exegesis.

Throughout global Christianity, we find several efforts towards literalist ‘living out’ the Bible through different forms of mimetic engagement. Fundamentalism, for instance, is based on the idea of biblical inerrancy, established through an (often Manichean) epistemological irreducibility and a subsequent politics of conviction (Harding 2000). For many Christian fundamentalists, the ‘fundamentals’ of life can only be found in the Bible, and we must seek to ‘go back’ to it in our everyday lives.⁵ The key, precisely, relies on how this ‘going back’ is effected. From this perspective, literalism attempts a return to an original ideal, performed with a copy through repetition, a replication. Here, one must be reminded of Søren Kierkegaard’s distinction, through his fictionized pseudonym Constantin Constantius, between ‘recollection’ and ‘repetition’ (1946): they are part of the same movement, but if recollection is a backward-looking repetition, repetition itself is a way of acting upon the temporal, and thus creating something new. Thus, replication becomes the mode upon which the repetition is attempted. In his attempt to propose a new philosophical category with the notion of repetition, Kierkegaard delved in between the ethical and the aesthetic; in the case we explore below in this section, we observe this same balance between the moral and the liturgical.

But in its limit, this attempted replication of an age-old content is, more than a conservative or backward worldview, an act of protest and separation, in particular against the present and the future – in particular, modernity (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993). Perhaps the most notorious contemporary versions of such anti-modernist movements of separation are the austere traditionalist modes of experience, such as those displayed by the Amish or Mennonites in the American continent, or the Israelites movement in Peru, who have created ‘New Jerusalem’ compounds in the Amazonian forest, where they ‘live according to the Old Testament’ (González Hacha 2017), in a ritualized performance and enactment of biblical texts, to the extent that it becomes a ‘way of living’.

Such attempts towards a physical replication of biblical times can be considered, as I called them above, ‘temporal occupations’. They are explicit attempts to re-create temporal punctuations, in the sense advocated by Guyer (2007): active interventions that affect the rhythm of a conceived temporality and establish new, different markers towards the understanding of that same temporality. In a sense, they are also chronotopic representations and languages, to use Bakhtin’s famous conception (1981): configurations that address the spaces of time.

Let us look at a concrete, empirical example in Angola. I am thinking specifically of the Tokoist Church, one of the most important Christian movements in present-day Angola, with an estimated one million followers spread throughout the country and the Angolan diaspora (Blanes 2014). The founder of the church, Simão Gonçalves Toko (1918–1984) studied and worked in the Baptist missions in the north of the then Portuguese colony, until he decided to migrate to Leopoldville (today Kinshasa) in the Belgian Congo and founded an autochthonous movement, based on several prophecies and spiritual gifts he had received. Despite the stark persecution it suffered on behalf of the colonial (Belgian, Portuguese) and postcolonial (Angolan) regimes, the movement endured and became one of the most successful religious institutions in Angola (ibid.). The Tokoists are recognized by their famous white garments, but also by an austere ethics and discrete posture, far from the flamboyance of other Christian movements (although see Blanes 2015a). This stance is conceived endogenously as a result of the decades of political persecution the movement have experienced, which reverberated into an ideology of suffering and martyrdom.

In contrast, from an exogenous perspective, in present-day Angola such austere modes have a recognizable public space. Against more ‘modern’ worldviews stemming from the Pentecostal sphere, movements such as the Tokoists and the Kimbanguists represent what is often described as ‘backward’, ‘conservative’ or even ‘traditionalist’ Christian experience in Angola. Within this framework, ‘traditionalism’ appears as a complex, ambiguous adjective, tainted with negativity. From a political perspective, ‘traditional’ appears equally under a negative envelope, associated with lack of education, moral ambiguity and even sorcery (Blanes 2017a). This distinction emerges from the political history of governance in Angola since independence, in which the all-time ruling party MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) has advocated a constant rejection of what is generally conceived as ‘backward’ (see Blanes 2015b). This ‘backwardness’ is a sort of container of the ‘becoming-past’ (Munn 2013) in which several, diverse phenomena can be located: lack of education, wrong belief, rural livelihoods, poverty, witchcraft, and so on. Since the beginning of independence, the MPLA has advocated an explicit policy of creating a ‘new man’ in a ‘New Angola’ (ibid.; Schubert 2017), released from the shackles of colonial history and imbued with the Marxist-Leninist ontology of collective liberation.⁶ In this ontology, which has in many ways replicated Benjamin’s idea of a ‘victorious history’ (1968), there is no room for ideas of tradition or nostalgia.

Furthermore, as discussed elsewhere (Sarró, Blanes, and Viegas 2008; Blanes 2014), this state-sponsored accusation towards traditionalism has an ethnic bias, specifically directed towards the Bakongo ethnicity, in which both Kimbanguists and Tokoists are inscribed.⁷ The Bakongo are an ethnic group that inhabited the space of the ancient Kingdom of Kongo, which spans the north of Angola, the Lower Congo region and areas of Congo-Brazzaville and Gabon. In Angola, as a non-hegemonic ethnic group (unlike in the DR Congo), the Bakongo have been an object of suspicion owing to their ambiguous relationship to the MPLA and its nationalist project. They are also known to cultivate ‘traditionalist’ beliefs that are framed as an impediment to the hegemonic developmentalist rhetoric (see e.g. Pereira 2015). Within this framework, churches such as the Kimbanguists and Tokoists, although they are not necessarily the targets of public accusation,⁸ are identified with a conservative, anti-modernist stances (although see Blanes and Paxe 2015; Blanes 2017b). But the Tokoists themselves, for instance, prefer to see themselves as anti-traditional, in the sense that they favour Christian culture instead of Bakongo tradition, but at the same time traditional, in the ways in which they choose what could be called a ‘rearview theology’ (see below). From this perspective, the Christian template appears as ambiguous, simultaneously looking backwards and frontwards, temporally speaking.

By ‘rearview theology’ I am thinking of a particular austere self-conception – one that places a particular emphasis and moral investment on the past. Within this framework, perhaps the Tokoists’ main theological tenet is the concept of ‘remembrance’ (relembrança). The English translation of this concept, however, does not capture the epistemological density of the Portuguese version, which includes a prefix (re-) that is an act of repetition over the noun lembrança (remembrance).⁹ In this respect, it can mean both ‘to remember something that has been forgotten’ and ‘to enhance an already existing memory’. Such associations exemplify a specific emphasis on a temporal mode (the past), but also on the actual, physical act of remembering.

This concept emerged in the very moment of foundation of the movement, which occurred on 25 July 1949 (see Blanes 2014). According to church records, on that day Toko assembled a group of 36 followers and began a prayer session intended to summon God, in response to an earlier public address performed by Simão Toko in a missionary conference in 1936, where he had requested that ‘the Holy spirit descend and save Africa from darkness’ (ibid.). That night, the Holy Spirit descended upon the leader and his followers, and, according to Toko himself, ‘Many of us began to shake, others spoke in tongues. Many things happened that night’, and ‘many secrets were discovered thanks to the power of the Holy Spirit’ (ibid., 132; Grenfell 1998).

Interestingly, despite the charismatic profusion, Toko himself did not speak in tongues, heal or prophesy. Instead, he was given the gift of knowledge pertaining to specific biblical passages, which he would subsequently use in the development of an autochthonous theology: Joel 2: 28–30; Psalms 121: 1–8 and Acts 2: 1–21. Such passages were understood via this act of re-reading provoked by the Holy Spirit as interpretive keys, through which the relembrança of the ‘true church’ would be reached. Thus, re-remembrance emerges as a ‘going back to history’ – the history of Christianity, the history of Africa, the history of Angola – in order to re-signify it.

Furthermore, the last passage of Acts 2 refers to the well-known narrative of the descent of the Holy Spirit to the Apostles in the day of Pentecost, which inaugurated the theology of charismatic gifts (see Coleman 2004). For the Tokoists, the events of 1949 not only inaugurated a charismatic regime, one of dispensation and spiritual interlocution, but also what can be called a ‘prophetic tradition’, one through which certain Tokoists are inhabited by spirits of ancient biblical prophets and deliver messages to the church concerning the past, present and future (see Blanes 2014). These prophets are known as corpos vates, ‘foreseeing bodies’, and in many ways become a bridge between past, present and future, for which they offer spiritually transmitted knowledge. This knowledge ultimately contributes towards the act of re-remembrance.

Within this framework, from a theological perspective relembrança emerges out of a charismatic operation that implies not only an outlook towards the past – i.e. looking back towards the history of Christianity – but also a more literalist stance, in which a permanent analogy is constructed between biblical and contemporary times: what Ramon Sarró, in reference to the Kimbanguist Church’s theodicy, has recently (2014) called a ‘photocopy’ in theological terms. Thus, the Tokoist theodicy is one of historical repetition, of repeating biblical times. Manzambi, a church leader in Luanda once explained that relembrança ‘is a revision of things past’. Other Tokoists referred to it as ‘a revision of the divine work’. Toko himself would explain this revision in subsequent writings:

My brothers, the gospel began in Jerusalem and Samaria, and finally Christ said that the gospel should reach the end of the earth, not to make everyone believe, but to serve as witness to everyone, and if one day the power of the Holy Spirit given to the apostles were obstructed, the stones will cry out. What does this mean, the end of the earth and that the stones will cry out? If stones are mineral, how can they talk? The end of the earth is the world’s most backward continent, Africa (Letter by Simão Toko, 30 January 1967)

The church of Christ has already come to the world three times. The first time, it arrived to the prophets, but was destroyed by the devil. The second time, Christ came to edify his church on top of the stone where Saint Peter sat, and the devil began to chase his disciples or apostles (in Neves Álvaro 2011)

Here we understand how, according to the Tokoists, God's divine work on earth required a repetition: a new Pentecost, a new discipleship, a new liberation, and so on. This repetition is, in turn, a chronotope, a temporality cast into a specific geographical configuration: Africa. In one of the first histories of the Tokoist movement, published by one of its members, Pedro Agostinho, it is explained:

“It was necessary that the Creator used a genuine African person so that the promise made by His son would be fulfilled for all humanity. In every era, God always chooses a prophet, through which He transmits his will to the men of the world” (n.d., 91).

This divine revision has two ideological and practical consequences: an ideology of historiographic rewriting and also what we could call a performative temporal mimesis, in other words a constant reenacting of things past, in ritual and posture.

Regarding the first stance, Neves, a Tokoist historian who is one of my main interlocutors and best friends in Angola, used the word reatar (in Portuguese, to resume or re-bind) to explain what the consequences of the relembrança were: ‘an Israeli-Judaic reality was reatada in an Afro-Christian context’ (Neves Álvaro 2011). In his analysis, he used the concepts of dupla contextualidade (double context) and paralelismo (parallel) in order to frame the collapsing and synthesis between two different temporalities and territorialities: biblical Israel and contemporary Africa (Angola). This ideology of temporal repetition has two fundamental consequences for the understanding of the church’s ideology: the ‘purification’ of negligent histories, as it were – the history of white, European Christianity, stolen from the Africans; and the ability of making biblical times ‘alive’, current and situated through spiritual mediation through the work of the corpos vates mentioned above.

The second consequence is detected in the liturgical space-time of the Tokoist church. As I described elsewhere (2014), the religious services in the Tokoist Church are permeated throughout by a constant act of recollection: of Simão Toko’s biography, of his deeds, of his words. In every religious service those present recall a moment in his life, a hymn he composed, a speech he made, the biblical passages he recommended. They also dress and behave liturgically according to the longue durée of the establishment of a particular ‘Tokoist praxis’ devised and promoted by the leader. Such ritual operations function very explicitly as mementoes that, from a diachronic perspective, become cyclical and repetitive as the years pass by. These mementoes appear in the form of calendarized celebratory events, but also on details and dispositions such as symbols (the eight-pointed star) and aesthetic codes such as colours. Within this framework, it is through the ritual praxis that a Tokoist pedagogy regarding history (Tokoist, Angolan, African, global) emerges. Thus, for instance, youth groups and choirs stage this repeated mnemonics through the singing of hymns that connect, as speech acts, to Tokoist history: either through the story they tell or through their connection to specific historical moments or protagonists present in the moment of their creation. This connection, as a conjunction of locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts of communication, enables processes of replication.

Thus, as a mnemonics, the Tokoist ritual calendar is punctuated by implicit and explicit acts of replication, which in turn become a form of repetition as they are displayed in church contexts.

Oh no, not history again!

As I have described elsewhere (Blanes 2014; Blanes 2015a), this tenet of re-remembrance is also the axis upon which Tokoists develop a critical temporalizing stance, which speaks as much to Christendom as it does to Angolan and African political affairs. From this perspective, if during the colonial period there was an explicit ideological stance against the ‘colonial situation’ (Balandier 1955; Blanes 2009), in post-colonial times the idea of relembrança became a form of critique of the secular, atheist present (Blanes 2015a). From this point of view, it is precisely the moral corruption of the present which pushes Tokoists to ‘back in history’, to biblical times, in order to repeat them again.

However, in other contexts of post-independence and post-war Angola, the idea of historical repetition, or its necessity, does not enjoy the same kind of positive value. In fact, beyond the Christian prophetic sphere, there is a recurrent perception that we are in a moment in which, politically speaking, ‘history repeats itself’, returning, decades after the country’s independence, to a situation of ‘colony’.

As I mentioned above, since the declaration of independence in November 1975, Angola has only known one ruling party: the MPLA. This party’s advocacy of an onward-looking political ontology has resulted in a progressive policy that has become more and more authoritarian, to the extent of punishing any kind of political thought or praxis that contests it. The fact that the country, just a few months after its independence, embarked on a civil war that would last until 2002 partially explains this situation. The war was fought by two main parties: the MPLA, which leaned on the Soviet and then former Soviet bloc and professed a Marxist-Leninist ideology; and the UNITA, who progressively became associated to a rightwing ideology. However, in the aftermath of the accords that followed Angolan independence, Angolan rule was granted to the MPLA, which never stepped down and has governed literally every instance of power in the forty plus years of Angolan independence. This situation has prompted a progressive promotion of Angolan independent history from the viewpoint of the MPLA (see also Blanes and Paxe 2015), which has successfully obscured the leadership role of non-MPLA actors in the process and simultaneously promoted this group’s leaders as heroes of independence. We can therefore understand, for instance, why the generais (former military leaders of the independence or civil war) are a recognizable status in Angola, and enjoy a privileged position in terms of the hegemonic ‘oligarchic capitalism’ (Oliveira 2015) that rules the country (see especially Marques 2011). This point is specifically illustrated in their access to strategic areas of Angolan economy, such as the oil and diamond business, large-scale agricultural ventures, and public construction. However, it is precisely these generais, as icons of the perpetuation of a regime of corrupt patronage, who become the gauge of historical repetition.

This last point is best illustrated with the invocation of one of Angola’s most prized and consensual fiction author, Pepetela. In 1992, a year that was of hope for most Angolans,¹⁰ he published the novel A Geração da Utopia (The Generation of Utopia), in which describes the vital trajectories of a group of Angolans that fought for their country’s independence in the 1960s, and later experienced diverse, often contradictory, experiences of ‘Angolan independent life’ in the decades that followed the political transition in 1974/1975. Some of these characters would become ‘big men’ in Angola – people who, if not necessarily generais, gravitated around the circle of power and extracted significant financial benefit from it, living a life of luxury in an otherwise poor and devastated country. The composite portrait reveals a process of personal and collective disenchantment after what began as a utopian moment of liberation and independency for many Angolans. The general tone of the narrative is one of a moral corruption of the liberationist project, to the extent that today some people refer to this process as the ‘degeneration of utopia’ in an interesting wordplay with the concept of generation as a temporalizing distinction as well as a modality of creation/destruction. In other words, the idea is that the protagonists of the generation of utopia are today embarked in a dystopian process of degeneration, which in many ways results in ‘going back’ to the inequalities, injustice and exploitation proper of colonial times, in becoming the very thing they fought against in the liberation wars. A friend who works as a journalist in a foreign media outlet, and is highly critical of the current regime, framed this to me in a very explicit fashion: ‘It isn’t possible to expect that these people think the way we do now, they still believe that we owe them obedience because they did us the favour of liberating Angola – a sort of debt.’

The invocation of temporal repetition in terms of Angolan rulership – comparing the current government to that of colonial times – is for the most formulated by movements that contest the current regime, such as the well-known ‘Revú’ movement. The movement is politically highly significant, inasmuch as it defies the hegemonic framework that still relies on a Marxist, dialectical configuration of history. The Revú movement – – its name an abbreviation of Movimento Revolucionário, ‘Revolutionary Movement’ – was formed in Luanda in 2011, in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Although small, demographically speaking, the Revús – a group of young artists, teachers, journalists, etc. – have grown in notoriety over the past years mostly because of their outspoken defiance and contestation of the regime, demanding (primarily) the end of the everlasting rule of president José Eduardo dos Santos and the MPLA (see e.g. Blanes 2015b, 2017). In a country with a dictatorial track record, this movement of open, public contestation was indeed a novelty. More so, considering the regime’s history of violent reaction against internal opposition (massacres, tortures, concentration camps), both from other political parties and within the ruling party itself, as well as its traditional totalizing control of the mainstream media in accordance with an ambition of promoting the ‘New Angola’ – the top-down imposition of a utopia of a modern, prosperous country that evolved from a Marxist-Leninist, Soviet agenda (in the 1970s) towards a neoliberal, Dubai-inspired regime (in the 2000s). But the early independent, ‘revolutionary utopia’ (as Pepetela once put it) of the 1970s, imbued with an inherently optimistic socialist ontology, eventually became one of resignation and fatalism through the ‘depoliticizing tactics’ (Péclard 2013) that consistently produced a refraction between state and citizenship (Tomás 2012).

Within this framework, the Revús’ protest tactics have had an ambiguous outcome. On the one hand, they have been consistently rebuffed by police brutality, imprisonment, and, on three occasions, the deaths of their activists. On the other hand, this violence has helped create international awareness and stirring debates on human rights and democratic governance. Another journalist I met from one of the few existing opposition media outlets in Angola once talked to me about what he considered to be the ‘repeated massacre’ of the Angolan youth, and in particular the young Revús. He felt that the government was making the same mistakes as the Portuguese colonial regime in its repression of the liberation movements,¹¹ but also, as I describe below, throughout the history of independent rule. From this perspective, there was a history of massacres of Angolans that seemed to be replicated beyond the political transition, and explained why things never seemed to move forward in Angola.

When I talked to some of the members of the Revú movement about this same subject, I was struck by how, in their political statements, two temporalizing arguments were focal: on the one hand, the idea of a ‘historical combat’, the struggle against the obliteration of memory effected by the regime’s authoritarian narrative of the ‘New Angola’ (see Blanes 2017a). In this respect, many of the vindications they set forth were an archaeology of sorts, which uncovered previously buried violent episodes of Angolan history. One case in point is the moment referred to in Angola as fraccionismo (factionalism) which took place on 27 May 1977, in which an internal movement of opposition within the MPLA and an attempted coup d’état culminated in the killing of thousands of Angolans and the subsequent witch-hunt of dozens of thousands more (Birmingham 1978; Mateus and Mateus 2007; Pawson 2014). Today, this episode is common knowledge among Angolans; driving through Luandan neighbourhoods such as Cazenga, for instance, one’s attention is immediately alerted to where mass executions took place on those days. However, the fraccionismo does not appear in the public space of historical commemoration or debate (see e.g. Pawson 2014), and is only ‘remembered’ in the framework of a politics of marginal denunciation of hegemonic record. In this respect, the fraccionismo does not fit into the Angolan victorious history. Other episodes are also invoked, such as the post-1992 election massacre of UNITA supporters in Huambo, the sexta-feira sangrenta (‘bloody Friday’) of 1993, in which thousands of Angolans of Bakongo ethnicity were chased, tortured and killed in Luanda (see Mabeko-Tali 1995), and the unexplained execution of Mfulumpinga Lando Vítor, the leader of a small oppositionist party (PDP-ANA) in 2004. In our conversation, my friend the journalist eventually asked, rhetorically: ‘Why don’t they learn from history? All this seems like a repeated soap opera. Only in a dictatorship can a government believe that they can rule with blood’ (October 2015).

These last thoughts indicate a somewhat different understanding of history from the previous example of the Tokoists: one in which the advancement of time is unfortunately punctuated by acts of repetition that do not allow for a sense of progression – an entrapment or ‘stuckedness’ of sorts (Hage 2009) that demobilizes (and simultaneously immobilizes) the possibilities of hope (Kleist and Jansen 2016). This sense of progression refers to temporality, but also and especially to morality, to the idea that ‘staying in the same place’ and ‘repeating oneself’ is first and foremost a problem of (personal and political) selfishness and lack of respect for the common good. In this regard, while the act of cultivating historical memory is conceived from within this marginal movement of contestation as a positive value (an ‘exercise in/of democracy’), it can also be imbued with negative value, once it is overtaken by Benjamin’s ‘automaton’ of political memory (Blanes 2017a).

Conclusion: Repetition and the production of presence

The two examples I explored in this text – the Tokoist Church and the Revolutionary Movement – reveal stances of recognition of processes of historical repetition through which the overarching, politically informed idea of temporal progression is challenged. Despite their diverse approaches to the problem of historical repetition, these cases share some common ground in their critique of what Hans Gumbrecht would call ‘our broad present’ (2011), the stimmung (mood) that turns things tangible, material and sensible in a specific contemporary understanding of the world. Within this framework, the recognition of historical repetition effected by both Tokoists and Revús reveals a discourse that is ultimately ‘of the present’, one that is framed in a negative fashion from a moral point of view. Within this framework, one could question to what extent the processes of historical repetition (either by replication or mere recognition), framed as acts of moral investment, are indeed (going back to Gumbrecht) part of a ‘production of presence’, an overarching understanding of ‘things as they are’.

However, if in the Tokoist case the idea of historical repetition was imbued with a positive value – the possibility of going back to a state of spiritual purity, owing to a prophetically revealed ‘nostalgia for the absolute’ (Steiner 1997) – for the Revús it was indicative of a process of moral corruption, one through which the absence of progression, the ‘staying in the same place’, was simultaneously equivalent to a sense of ‘degeneration’.

This Tokoist and Revú emphatic evaluation of repetition, either through acts of re-remembrance or redemption, exemplifies a form of ‘acting upon time’ in similar terms to Walter Benjamin’s citation a l’ordre du jour: contesting the idea of irreversibility, determinism or fatalism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Beyond the classical formulations by Zeno of Elea, the modern notion of time’s arrow emerged as a concept in the field of physics, through the astronomer Eddington (1928) to assert the asymmetry of time, or its irreversibility – an idea later resumed by the physiologist Harold Blum in his treatise on evolutionary biology Time’s Arrow and Evolution (1951) – and in Henri Bergson’s formulations on creativity (see Hodges 2008).

2. In this respect, for instance, we are familiar with Friedrich Nietzsche’s engagement, through Schoppenhauer, with the philosophy of eternal return as a physical concept (thus devoid of supernaturality) and the subsequent problems of individual agency, fate and will. Nietzsche’s notion of recurrence and repetition echoes in that of cyclicality of existence, i.e. of temporal circles that bring us back to the previously existing points, thus denying the very Christian notion of salvation. Perhaps the most notorious example of this is the Saṃsāra doctrine of cyclicality and karma, which Nietzsche had in mind in his own considerations.

3. On the other hand, as in other scientific endeavours, anthropology has also traditionally grounded itself upon the study of (social, cultural) repetitions and recurrences, in order to qualify them as ‘empirical facts’.

4. Vincent Crapanzano, in his study of literalism in America (2000), explores it as an ‘interpretive style’ that invokes problems of ‘law’ and ‘truth’, exceeding the religious and theological realm. Inspired by this approach, here I am more concerned with the temporalizing effect of literalist thinking.

5. I am thinking specifically of the fundamentalist thought that emerged in particular in North American Evangelical Christianity in the early twentieth century, after the Niagara Bible Conference (1876–1897) and the publication of the Fundamentals books, on behalf of the Los Angeles Bible Society.

6. Emerging as a communist political and military endeavor that became one of the protagonists of the liberation wars, the MPLA began by enforcing a Marxist- Leninist agenda. But the civil war that ensued (and lasted until 2002), and the end of the Cold War eventually gave way to a form of authoritarian state capitalism (see Oliveira 2015).

7. The Tokoist churched emerged within the Bakongo context, but later grew to acquire a pan-Angolan, multiethnic condition (Blanes 2014).

8. Other kinds of Bakongo-based movements appear more often targeted in the Angolan public sphere, such as the mpeve ya n’longo (‘Holy Spirit’) churches, accused of corruption, moral backwardness and sorcery (see Blanes 2017a).

9. Although see the introduction to this issue for a discussion of the ‘notion of the “re-”’ (Bandak and Coleman, this issue).

10. After 17 years of civil war, in 1992 UNITA and MPLA managed to establish a peace accord (signed in Bicesse, Portugal) to reform the political system and promote elections for the first time in the country’s history. However, the elections were contested and very soon the country returned to the civil war.

11. One particularly striking event became the consensual ‘genesis’ of the liberation movement, in 4 February 1961: the attempted uprising that attacked the military prison of São Paulo, in Luanda, where several political prisoners were detained.