A crack in everything: Violence in soldiers’ narratives about the Portuguese colonial war in Angola

ABSTRACT

How do soldiers recall and voice their wartime experiences when the war they fought is under scrutiny? How do they inscribe the recollection of private affairs in a potentially contested colonial past? Drawing from an ethnography of war memory and focusing on an artillery unit’s deployment in the Portuguese colonial war in Angola, in 1971, this article tackles both the soldiers’ memories and the military reports about the unit’s length of service. It articulates and contrasts the formulaic order of the official account with the veterans’ affective storytelling, to unearth the cracks that run beneath the reconfiguration of colonial war violence in Angola. Soldiers’ narratives, it will be argued, avoid the wars’ dystopic potential by dislocating attention to the affective reverberation of the past and by silencing accounts of bloodshed. And yet, they are unable to fully de-politicize their wartime stories, as soldiers unwittingly disclose episodes of sexual violence against African women, hence exposing the enduring entanglements of sexuality, race and colonialism.

KEYWORDS:

• Portuguese colonial war
• memory
• violence
• military archives
• Angola

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Inês Ponte, João Vasconcelos, José Manuel Sobral, Sandra Araújo, and Vera Marques Alves for reading and commenting on previous versions of this text. I would also like to thank Duarte, Isabel, Joan, Margarida, and Paula, who have assisted me muddling through English.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 I borrow the term ‘memorable irruptions’ from Michael Lambek’s analysis of spirit possession in Madagascar, and its multiple connections to memory as an intersubjective and moral practice (Lambek 1996).

2 The way this war is designated is not irrelevant. Seen from the Portuguese side, it can either be referred to as guerra do ultramar (overseas war) – a term that denotes political proximity to the former regime –, or it can be addressed as guerra colonial (colonial war), a wording that recognizes the colonial nature of the conflict. From the African standpoint, the ‘liberation wars’ are the events that preceded independence from Portuguese rule.

3 I belong to a generation whose parents were drafted to war or fled the country to escape it. My father was sent to Angola as a medical second lieutenant with Artillery Battalion 3835. CART 3313 was one of the operational companies of Battalion 3835. When deciding to do an ethnography of war memory centering on a company’s deployment, no criteria of military or strategic relevance was used to select it; instead, I chose to work about a military unit that I was familiar with, and whose veterans I knew were willing to participate in the research. See Antunes 2015.

4 Unit Histories were originally assigned different levels of secrecy in accordance with their content, but by default they were classified as ‘restricted’. Unit Histories have been deposited and made available for consultation at the Military Historical Archive in Lisbon since the late nineties. Law 6/94 of 7 April 1994 determined that all secrets of state dated prior to the 1974 revolution should either be revised or would automatically expire in 1995. See Tavares 2013.

5 A recent example comes from the heated discussion that surrounded the mayor of Lisbon’s project for a ‘museum of discoveries’, which spilled over from academia to the public (Barchfield 2018), and was at the centre of a debate with a live audience on a very popular television show (Prós e Contras). More recently, a member of the board of directors of a police union was forced to resign after having publicly stated that racism exists within the police force (Marcelino 2019).

6 The Unit History was written in fascicles and numeration was attributed inside each chapter. Quotations will, henceforth, use the acronym HU and refer to both the chapter number in Roman numerals and the page number in Arabic numerals.

7 PIDE/DGS nominated Flechas for decorations such as the Cruz de Guerra (the War Cross) and the Prémio Governador de Angola (the Governor of Angola medal). Biographies of the Flechas were written and sent by the political police to the press, and later reproduced by newspapers in both the ‘metropolis’ and the colonies, emphasizing the Portugueseness and ‘patriotism’ of ‘auxiliary troops’ – see PIDE/DGS Angola 1970.

8 Other dates and operations, however, were located. See for instance PIDE/DGS Angola 1971a and PIDE/DGS 1971c for information reports that describe Flechas’ operations in CART 3313’s zone of action.

9 Second lieutenant R. died some years ago. I have decided not to refer to him by name, as it was impossible to verify his version of events.

10 Bataclan was the name of a brothel in the novel Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, by Brazilian author Jorge Amado. The novel and its characters were very popular in Portugal in the late 1970s. Gabriela was adapted to television by the Brazilian television network Rede Globo in 1975 and aired in 1977 by RTP, the Portuguese public broadcasting TV station.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was funded by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation, I.P. via a postdoctoral fellowship (SFRH/BPD/116134/2016) and through strategic funding UID/SOC/50013/2019.