Black women saving white masculinities: the masculinizing effects of Portuguese migration to Angola

Abstract

Informed by an ethnographic study on the recent Portuguese work migration to Angola, this article starts from the observation that a specific type of intimate relations between migrants and hosts was subject to intense social scrutiny within the migrant community: the one composed by middle-aged Portuguese men and younger Angolan women. This type of relation or, more precisely, the chatter it generated among Portuguese migrants, serves here as entry point to think about the discursive remodulation of white masculinities in the migratory context. Building on literature on post/colonialism, cross-border intimacy, and the interrelation between international mobilities and masculinities, I interrogate what race, nationality, economic class and age did to the social (re)construction of what it means to be a (white/Portuguese) man in this particular time-space. I further argue that the identity configuration as white Portuguese is constructed as meaningful in relation to three subject positions – Portuguese/white women, Angolan/black women and Angolan/black men – that play either a complementary or a contrapuntal role with it. The article makes two main points: that the chatter analysed hints at the masculinizing effect of contemporary Portuguese migration to Angola; and that this revalorization of white/Portuguese masculinities is done with an eye on the past, i.e. on colonial scripts and imaginaries.

Keywords:

• Angola
• love
• Luso-tropicalism
• masculinities
• North-South migration
• Portugal
• whiteness

Introduction

They start working at seven; at noon they return to have lunch at the Base de Vida [workers lodges], and go back to work again. At five, ends the working day; they take a shower and go to the roulottes [food trucks] to have some Cucas [Angolan beer] and meet girls. Then, they come back to have dinner in the canteen, and afterwards go out again, back to their schemes. (…) Their things with the women, that is what keeps them going, in Angola! (…) Men in their forties, fifties, sixties with girls that could be their daughters! Heck, their grand-daughters! And it’s all of them – all-of-them!

In the quote above, Pedro, a young Portuguese civil engineer who in the year 2014 had worked in a construction project in Angola’s hinterland, narrates to me the lives of his older colleagues down there, in ‘the middle of nowhere’. His words are part of a migrants’ social chatter about the intimacy between middle-aged Portuguese males and younger Angolan women. A chatter which is the primary focus of analysis in this paper.

During the last decade (circa 2006-2015), an estimated number of 150 thousand Portuguese workers migrated to Angola (a Portuguese colony until 1975), impelled by the simultaneous conjunctures of the Eurozone crisis and the economic boom in the oil-rich African state. From August 2015 to February 2016, I have conducted ethnographic research among some of these migrant subjects settled in the Angolan city of Benguela. During this time, I came to understand that the intimate couple composed by a Portuguese male and a female Angolan partner had acquired a sort of emblematic position in the discourse and imaginaries concerning ‘the new Portuguese presence in Angola’ (Valente Cardoso 2019). A somewhat ludicrous emblem, common target of daily gossip and derision, but in no way perceived as disruptive enough to generate dynamics of social exclusion or estrangement from the national (Portuguese) communality.

This article focuses specifically the white male figure in these relations and takes the social chatter surrounding them as empirical case to think about the mutual effects of migration and masculinities.

Research dealing with sexuality and intimacy has often sustained that migration can be felt and represented as an emasculating experience (Mai and King 2009; Kukreja 2021). In contrast to this, the literature on privileged mobilities, has taught us that whiteness and masculinity conflate into the constitution of ‘the skilled migrant, [who] continues to be highly valued and remitted’ (Leonard 2010, 508). Corroborating the latter body of work, I advance that Portuguese/white men were perceived to have a successful emplacement in Angola. I argue furthermore that the context of arrival functioned as arena for the revalorisation of Portuguese/white masculinities that had been devalued in the place of origin, due to factors such as work precarity or perceived undesirability in the market of intimate relations. This is what I designate as the masculinizing effect of migration. While I focus primarily on the intimate relationships with Angolan women as starting point for my observations, I proceed to show how these effects exceed the realm of the intimate and extend to other domains, having a broader impact on the perception of self-worth within the community of arrival.

Through the analysis of the chatter about both this type of intimate relations and Portuguese male behaviour more broadly, I explanate how white masculinities are revalorized in relation to femininities (both Portuguese and Angolan), and Angolan/black masculinities. Additionally, I make the point that these revamped white/Portuguese masculinities echo scripts from the colonial past, resonating the literature relating cross-cultural sexual intimacy and colonialism(s).

The article proceeds as follows. First, I situate my conceptual arguments within two interrelated fields of literature: one interested in the mutual effects of masculinities and international mobilities, the other interested in the intersection between cross-cultural intimacy and colonialism(s), with an eye on the effects on masculinities. Then, I delve on the details of the recent North-South migration from Portugal to Angola, before I make some methodological remarks describing what I understand by the concept of chatter, how did I access it and analyse it. Finally, I advance my core arguments substantiated by empirical material. These are organised in three sections that (re)present how, in the chatter analysed, Portuguese masculinities are revalorised in relation to (1) Portuguese femininities, (2) Angolan femininities and (3) Angolan masculinities.

Studying masculinities and mobilities in a postcolonial setting

Masculinities and contemporary mobilities

Masculinities have been conceptualized as a social and cultural construct that is variable across space, time, and practice. The literature not only recognizes the plurality of masculinities but also the hierarchical disposition in which they appear and foregrounds ‘the layering [and] the potential internal contradiction, within all practices that construct masculinities’ (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 852). The concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ - defined as a loosely coherent form of masculinity which legitimizes unequal gender relations and dominates over multiple and dynamic masculinities not through force, but through consent - gained an unquestionable centrality and has been used in a wide variety of contexts (Duncanson 2015, 232). While the model of hegemonic masculinity has suffered reformulations and adaptions (see e.g. Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; Messerschmidt 2019), certain aspects have been consistently retained. Namely, and quoting Messerschmidt, ‘the relational nature of the concept (among hegemonic masculinity, emphasized femininity, and nonhegemonic masculinities) and the idea that this relationship is a pattern of hegemony—not a pattern of simple domination—that legitimates unequal gender relations’ (2019, 88). These insights are particularly valuable when applied to situations in which factors like race and nationality cut across the categories of gender in significant ways.

The field of critical studies of man and masculinities has dedicated mounting attention to the formative role of colonialism in contemporary masculinities (Connell 2014) and many authors have combined the concept of hegemonic masculinity with an intersectional approach that attends to racial or ethnic factors, or else explores the relations between masculinities and nationhood (Christensen and Jensen 2014; Donaldson 2009; Palmer 2018).

In parallel, empirical work on the juncture between international mobilities and masculinities, has identified that the former are commonly ‘linked to the production of new hegemonies between men (and men and women, men and other genders; as well as formulation of new groups or individuals who either benefit from the demarcation process, or are marginalized by it’ (Wojnicka and Pustułka 2017, 90; see also Noble and Tabar 2014). Whereas studies on South-North migration have tended to concur on the emasculating effect of migration, the opposite has been observed in North-South mobilities (Toivanen 2014) – an assertion which this paper corroborates.

Cross-cultural intimacies, colonialisms and masculinities

The body of research devoted to cross-cultural or cross-ethnic sexual relations departs from the broad notion that desire is not a ‘natural given’ but shaped by social, economic, and historical forces, and that ‘the production of desires is not just a matter of physical bodies, but also of the imaginaries associated with them’ (Fechter 2016, 74). In these debates, North-South relationships of intimacy, in particular, have received considerable scholarly attention (see e.g. Frohlick, Dragojlovic, and Piscitelli 2016; Malam 2008; Rivers-Moore 2012).

This literature has since long established that race and sex interact, dynamize, and magnify one another, and co-produce what Joane Nagel has called ‘ethnosexual frontiers’, ‘racialized depictions of sexual purity, dangerousness, appetites, desirability, perversion [which] are part of the performative construction of sexual respectability and disreputability, normalcy and deviance’ (2003, 55) and which are often agonistic and prone to violent eruptions. Pinning such ‘ethnosexual frontiers’ to concrete time-space frameworks, Anne McClintock has classified the imaginary developed in the West about the sexuality of the inhabitants of the tropical regions as ‘a fantastic magic lantern of the mind onto which Europe projected its forbidden sexual desires and fears’, something she named the ‘porno-tropics’ (1995, 22). As the course of history unfolded, this porno-tropics imaginary has been re-dynamized and complicated by the processes of colonization and colonial domination, so that sexual desire ‘in colonial and postcolonial contexts [became] a crucial transfer point of power, tangled with racial exclusions in complicated ways’ (Stoler 2003, 40-44). As a result, the mutually reinforcing triad of colonialism, whiteness and masculinity, has been thoroughly scrutinized (see e.g. and for distinct geographical contexts Pujolràs-Noguer 2019; Young 2005; Sinha 1995).

When addressing cross-ethnic intimacy in the Portuguese-speaking post/colonial complex, one is bound to complement the above with the specific discursive construct of Luso-tropicalism, a theory that preconised the Portuguese ‘singular predisposition […] to the hybrid, slave-exploiting colonization of the tropics’ (Freyre 2001, 33, my empahsis).

The political instrumentalization of Luso-tropicalism by the Portuguese corporatist-fascist regime of Estado Novo, as well as its logical inconsistencies and historical inaccuracies have been debunked at large (see among many possible Boxer 1963; Castelo 1998; Vale de Almeida 2004; Bastos 2019). Nevertheless, upon analysing Portuguese cultural identities in the postcolonial context, many have detected the persistence of Luso-tropicalist tropes until this day. This endurance is perceptible in the manifestation of two myths regarding the colonial past, and a third one, corollary of the firsts, extending its validity into the present: i) the myth of a softer colonialism - when compared with other European colonial regimes; ii) the myth of miscegenation (sexual and cultural) and closer relationships between colonizers and colonized; iii) and the myth of a non-racist (or, comparatively, less racist) people (Ferreira Marques 2007; Oppenheimer 1997).

Although the three myths have interrelated trajectories, the second one is specifically central for the arguments advanced in this paper. The result of the lingering notion of a supposed higher propensity for ‘mixing up’ with the colonized peoples, is that the porno-tropical imaginary co-exists, both historically and presently, with what Klobucka calls the idea of a ‘philoxenic character of the Portuguese people’ (2014), part and parcel of the Luso-tropical discourse.

I was often confronted with a paradox that manifests this co-existence. On the one hand, my interlocutors would naturalize the intimacy between Portuguese men and Angolan women on the accounts of the supposed Portuguese character, in phrases like ‘You know how the Portuguese are, we get easily mixed here’ (see also Åkesson 2018: 69–70). And, on the other hand, they would reveal a feeling of puzzlement, perhaps even discomfort, with the frequency of such relations – which is aligned with Nagel’s assertion that ‘all sexual ethnic boundary crossing has the capacity to generate controversy since ethnic groups almost always encourage members to ‘stick to your own kind’, and since ethnic ideologies often contained negative stereotypes of outsiders’ (2003:15).

Hence, I advance, the discourse produced about the contemporary heterosexual relationships between Portuguese men and Angolan women is grounded on a tension between a porno-tropics imaginary which tends to exoticize and eroticize the female, racialised Other, generating at once attraction and repulsion, fascination and fear; and the ‘affective exceptionalism’ (Klobucka 2014) supposedly built into the Portuguese character and (inter)actions, which, contrarily, would tend towards the normalization of these cross-cultural relations.

Contemporary portuguese migration to Angola: between continuity and change

Although the Portuguese community I have encountered in the region of Benguela was diverse in terms of age, professional background, and acquired economic and cultural capital, a strong predominance of male workers linked to the construction industry was evident. These observations resonate with the scant literature on the topic of recent Portuguese migration to Angola at large (Candeias et al. 2016; Sangreman, Sousa Galito, and Lopes 2015; Åkesson 2018; Valente Cardoso 2019).

Other than that, an expectation common to most migrants was that they would experience some sort of socio-economic upward mobility associated with the geographical one. This expectation was due to the fact that they were offered higher work positions and higher salaries than the ones they had previously held or could aspire to hold back in Portugal. As a consequence, more often than not, they would be in charge of leading Angolan subordinates in (at least, but not necessarily circumscribed to) the workplace.

In order to understand what I describe as the masculinizing effect of migration, it is important to retain that moving to Angola shed a new light on the professional competences of the Portuguese workers. While the economic crisis made many unemployed or employed in unsatisfactory conditions, in the African country, the work of Portuguese men was considered necessary and hard to replace.

With the Portuguese migrants occupying comparatively higher labour positions, the social landscape of many workplaces in contemporary Angola resembled, on the surface at least, the racialised economy of colonial times. This would generate grievances on the part of Angolans manifested in assertions such as ‘the Portuguese came to steal our jobs’, ‘the Portuguese are arrogant’’ or ‘they still think we are living in the colonial times’. In these phrases, the term ‘Portuguese’ could be replaced by the term ‘whites’, with race and nationality functioning often as interchangeable categories.

While fully enjoying the structural edge that the fact of being white/Portuguese seemed to endow them with, the subjects of this research experienced it as well as a daily hindrance. Allegations from Angolans such as the ones mentioned above, as well as various practices perceived by the Portuguese as discriminatory (for instance, the feeling that they were preferred targets for police or bureaucratic harassment aiming at the payment of a bribe) impended over their migratory experiences and were a frequent theme of concern and grumbling.

In parallel, and contrary to what was the situation in colonial times, the Portuguese workers would most times have to respond to an Angolan national who was further up in the local social hierarchy – either a direct boss or a representative of the government. They were required to work with the Angolan political system – ‘o sistema’ (Schubert 2017) or ‘the party-state’ (De Oliveira 2015) – the ultimate enabler (or, possibly, inhibitor) of their presence and initiatives and, in their eyes, a mystifying, unpredictable and therefore anxiogenic hovering presence.

While the postcolonial Portuguese migration to Angola symbolically evokes the settler colonial project of a past era, it is induced and moulded in its motives and forms, by two cycles of historical change: the end of colonialism proper in 1975, and the on-going re-shuffling of power positions in the organization of the capitalist global system – of which the concomitance of the Portuguese economic crisis and the Angolan boom is a case. It can be read, thus, as both embodiment of colonial continuity and token of postcolonial change. Such underlying paradox is to be kept in mind when observing the intricacies of the masculinizing effects of this migration.

Ethnography-ing a chatter: methodological notes

My attention in this study is not channelled to the specifics of any singular sexual or love arrangement that the Portuguese might have had with Angolans, but rather to the ways in which such arrangements were discursively constructed and socio-culturally inscribed. In other words, how they were made sense of by the diverse Portuguese subjectivities encountered during my fieldwork. Accordingly, the empirical material that I produced and present, is composed not only of observations and utterances communicated to me directly by individuals who were themselves intimately involved with Angolans, but also of accounts, reflections and judgments about either the relations and male behaviour at broad, emitted by any other migrant.

This is what I call the social chatter about intimate relations and masculinities: the multifarious, everyday talk made of jokes, anecdotes, and casual comments, as well as deeper reflections and personal stories. I take this chatter as a genre of social discourse where meanings are (re)produced and challenged.

Rather than a coherent and cohesive type of discourse, the chatter is full of innuendos, contradictions, and ruptures that warrant my voice as researcher to aggregate, weigh them against each other, and interpret them. This is done against the backdrop of the literature discussed above and on the basis of an acquaintance acquired through long-term fieldwork.

Analytically, thus, the established trait of masculinity’s relationality to femininities and other masculinities, allowed me to understand the process of masculinization unfurling in different directions as it reflects or is shaped by the relations – real and symbolic – with the other relevant subject positions.

The co-production of empirical insights was achieved through participant observation and informal conversations in different types of social gatherings (lunches, dinners, parties, day trips) which involved both regular interlocutors and sporadic ones. As what started to be an open-ended ethnographic research progressed into more precise interests and queries, I made sure to include questions related to masculinities and intimate relations to my everyday conversations. Taking advantage of the familiarity that I had gained with the interlocutors - enabled both by my identity markers as a Portuguese, white cisgender young(ish) woman, and the repeated, personal and informal character of our encounters – I participated in this chatter by listening carefully and steering the direction of the conversation. Often, I would do this by reproducing the type of comments, exclamations, facial expressions, that I had observed in others, during previous instances.

Finally, important is to underline that from the analysis of this chatter I do not presume conclusions on the nature of the relations in themselves, but solely on the way they were appreciated by the interlocutors. Likewise, the ethnographic research conducted was delimited to focus the subjectivities of the mobile subjects, and does not include the discourse of Angolan hosts regarding their incoming. Thus, when I describe the role of Angolan masculinities and femininities for the remodulation of Portuguese/white masculinities, the reader is asked to bear in mind that this is done within the limits of the discourse of the Portuguese interlocutors, and does not pretend in any way to reflect the opinions held and expressed by Angolans.

Interlude: José in the ‘perfect patriarchal scenario’ or luso-tropicalism 2.0

José was forty-five years old when I met him in 2015, in Benguela. At that point, he had been working in the country for more than five years as construction sight over-seer [encarregado de obra]. Back in Portugal, he was one more middle-aged, under-educated construction worker with no real social or educational capital to face up to the dramatic dwindling of the job sector in which he had laboured his entire life. As I will show, his portrayal touches upon several dimensions of the revalorization of masculinity central to this article, encapsulating the complex, multi-layered way in which this revalorization unfolds in a context marked by extreme inequalities of class, race, gender. For this reason, it opens up for the empirical part that follows, in an emblematic way .

I was put in contact with José by a mutual acquaintance who had informed me that he lived and had a little child together with an Angolan woman and also that he ‘had wife and kids, back in Portugal’. When we met for an informal conversation and I let him know that I was particularly keen in hearing from him about his intimate life and this relationship, he didn’t manifest any particular reservation about it and responded openly to my questions.

His Angolan partner was twenty-four years old (coincidentally, the same age of the daughter that he had in Portugal; he also had a son, a bit younger). They had met four years before; he made sure to let me know she was the one ‘who chased after [him]’. The two of them, plus their baby daughter, were living together in the bairro [neighbourhood; in the context of Benguela, it denotes an informal construction settlement], in a dwelling where he ‘had built everything, even the sewage system’ - as he put it, proudly.

José was happy with the relationship with his Angolan partner, as he illustrated: ‘I arrive home, the food is ready, and it is all good, it is as if I was at home. She prepares the food the way I like it, the Portuguese way’, he smiles, ‘and takes good care of the house. It is good’.

In fact, he was so content with her that ‘she even deserved to go to Portugal with him’. The problem was the Portuguese wife. She was ‘mentally unstable’, and even if they were separated for years - though not legally divorced -, she would not react well, he predicted, to the coming of his Angolan partner. Contrariwise, his Portuguese children, by now fully grown-up, were supportive of the new liaison and were eager to meet their little Angolan half-sister.

He also shared with me: ‘Sometimes she [his Angolan partner] gets sad when she thinks about the future, but I was honest. I told her that I would eventually go away, that I am Portuguese and am here on a working contract; and she was the one saying that we should live each day at a time’. I ask him if he worries about her future, once he’s gone. He answers that he does; because of that, he encourages her to pursue her studies and to find a ‘good job – not one of those jobs that exist around here, that entail sleeping with the boss’.

He also tells me about an eleven-year-old female neighbour, ‘very poor’, who the couple had ‘sort of adopted’, she used to come to their place and spend a lot of time around, helping taking care of the baby. With her assistance continuing that way – he projected – the mother of the child would be able to go back to school, in the near future. About this girl he adds, somewhat out of the blue: ‘Sometimes she is doing her homework, and I take a look at it, and I have often to correct what the teacher wrote! And I was in school only until the 9th grade, you see!? The school system is very bad here, they don’t learn anything, not even how to read, almost!… Here you can get a job as a teacher through contacts and bribery [cunhas e gasosas]’.

On the top of being an intimate partner to an Angolan woman, José performed as well as a paternal boss figure to the neighbour, and by both partner and neighbour, he was seen as a sort of teacher/mentor – someone that, even having only what he himself classified as a low level of education (‘I only have the 9th grade!’), was considered – or rather thought himself to be considered - by his closest Angolan relations to be a source of valuable wisdom and knowledge.

In parallel, living in the informal settlement seemed to represent for him the determination and, more than that, the capactiy, to integrate in the country in a way that most other whites would not engage in. It revealed a motivation to take part of the Angolan reality ‘as it was lived by the Angolans’ – as opposed to the guarded lives of many whites, who inhabiting villas in the ‘cement city’, protected themselves from said reality with fence, guard and watch dog. Masculinity indexed to resourcefulness, shined through in the account of how he had managed to build a sewage system by himself, and thus bring – with his own hands – order and efficiency to this astoundingly deprived place.

A perfect-as-they-get embodiment of the type of masculinity performance to in the spotlight of this paper, José’s narration substantiates a patriarchal scenario that closely resembles the Luso-tropicalist narrative above mentioned, where the Portuguese male – exceptionally adaptable and resourceful in tropical contexts – is depicted as main agent of colonialism, exercising domination through ‘soft’ authoritarianism, technical/knowledge superiority, and love (Klobucka 2014). Or, even, to put in Barbeitos terms, ‘Luso-tropicalism as patriarchy in its most accomplished state’ (1997, 321).

Estranged from his wife and with no dependent descendants holding him to Portugal, José’s job opportunity in Angola was redemptive in more than one way: in economic terms, unquestionably, but also in terms of his sense of identity and purpose. Beyond an employment, he found an intimate partner (one that ‘chased him’) and a socio-cultural setting in which his professional experience and acquired knowledge were valued well beyond what happened in his context of origin. This placed him in an unprecedented hegemonic position which, in turn, had a masculinizing effect. One can further observe that this masculinization is given shape by the roles played by the different women in his life (the Portuguese partner, the Angolan one, the neighbour) as well as by an implicit comparison with the present-absent Angolan men (mentioned by his Angolan partner).

The revamping of white/Portuguese masculinities in relation to other subject positions is unpacked in the following section with the help of empirical examples. Specifically, I describe how the chatter on femininities, both white/Portuguese and black/Angolan shaped the remodulation of Portuguese/white masculinities; and, likewise, in which ways Angolan/black masculinities and Portuguese/white ones were (re)constructed in direct competition and opposition with the other.

Unfolding white/portuguese masculinization in relation to…

…Portuguese women: between moralism and disinterest

The discursive figure of Portuguese women had a number of positions in the chatter analysed. A first role was the one taken in a story of marital relationships with a white/Portuguese women and illicit ones with a black/Angolan one – composing a triad which in itself configures a colonial archetype, reflected for instance in a corpus of national literature (Klobucka and Owen 2014). This was a theme of recurrent social scrutiny, facetiously or otherwise, by many groups of interlocutors. While most concurred on the idea that the men were honest about their marital status to their Angolan partners, the full disclosure often seemed to not be symmetrical on the Portuguese side. Therefore, gossip on Portuguese wives suspecting, enquiring, and eventually finding out about their husbands’ love affairs, abounded around dinner tables. As an example, the next anecdote is to me particularly expressive, as I recall the immense laughter it provoked in the audience. It was told to a group of friends at a restaurant by a high-level cadre in a construction company. The two protagonists (here called Pedro and Tiago) were employees of his company:

Pedro, normally very good friends with Tiago, was pissed off with him today. It happened that Tiago went to Portugal on vacation; his Angolan girlfriend packed his suitcase. Once he arrived home, it was his Portuguese wife that unpacked it, and while doing it, he found a photo of the Angolan woman and their kid, where it was written: ‘Don’t you forget about your child’. As it happens, Pedro also had a wife in Portugal. Learning what had happened with Tiago, she became suspicious that he as well could have wife and kids in Angola, and gave him a harsh time for that. Fed up with it, Pedro blamed his colleague for having, inadvertently put him in that situation, yelling at him: ‘For God’s sake, man! Couldn’t you at least have packed your own traveling bag?!’

I believe its comical effect was due in part to how extremely clichéd were the gender roles performed: the Angolan and Portuguese women that successively pack and unpack the man’s traveling bag. And this, in the end, was exactly what Pedro blamed Tiago for: not the actual act of infidelity, but his carelessness, the fact that he embodied so perfectly the masculine stereotype – waiting to be served by the housework of his two women -, that he neglected to take measures to prevent conjugal drama.

While this vignette suggests an implicit, perceived competition between Portuguese and Angolan women, with the Portuguese wife put in a position of victimhood, other common social narrativization threads foregrounded instead the newly found attractiveness of the Portuguese men, in comparison to the disinterest they were object of, back in Portugal. In the following excerpt from a conversation I had with a middle-aged engineer in charge of a large group of Portuguese workers, this aspect was outstanding:

They come here and suddenly they feel attractive again! These men in their forties, fifties, sixties, that had quit being looked at thirty years ago; their wives don’t look at them anymore, and suddenly they arrive here and there is a bunch of girls that pay attention to them and they just loose it!

As we can see in the passage, these men were portrayed as ‘not/no longer desirable, not even by their wives’ in their context of origin. The fact that they would acquire an unanticipated appeal in Angola was seen as transformative – ‘They just loose it!’. While the appeal of white skin was taken for granted by the interlocutors of all genders and ages, this quote points to another - eventually more surprising, but still often-commented - aspect: by emphasizing that they were no longer considered attractive back in Portugal, it reveals that the specific attractiveness of white middle-aged males was considered perplexing. As we have also seen in José’s account previously presented, many Portuguese men felt to be besought by Angolan women to an extent that was either unprecedented or long-forgotten. This teaches us that it was not only the attractiveness in itself, but its unanticipated character, that was transformative and produced, ultimately, masculinizing effects.

Another side to white/Portuguese femininities frequently emerging in the migrants’ chatter was the proclivity to a feeling of superiority and the exercise of moral judgment on male behaviour - something identified in other colonial (Stoler 2003) and postcolonial contexts (Fechter 2016). If the intimate relations between Portuguese men and Angolan women were often evoked as the very illustration of the ‘good/easy’ integration of the Portuguese in the country (reproducing the Luso-tropical myth referred to previously), one particular conversation about the issue with Inês, a women in her late thirties working in a small local company, revealed another facet of this common opinion. When she answered: ‘If we are well integrated? Oh, hell yes! Maybe even too well!’, and continued referring to the sexual/intimate behaviour of Portuguese men, I came to understand that this ‘too well’, spoken in an unequivocally sarcastic way, pointed not only at a nexus established between (social) integration and sexual partnerships but also hinted - by the use of the adverb ‘too’ [demais] - at a normative depreciation of that fact.

The perdition of the Portuguese men, as outcome of an over-integration in Angola was further detailed to me in the following terms, by the same interlocutor:

They come, meet a woman, then afterwards they are already living in the kimbo [rural settlement], then their working contracts come to an end, but they still stay, illegally even, then sometimes they decide to become ‘entrepreneurs’, set up a business on their own; and often, the needed national partner is the ‘girlfriend’. And they never come back to Portugal, forget all about their wives and children.

In the migrant chatter, and particularly the chatter from female interlocutors, Portuguese men involved with Angolan women were often infantilized, spoken of as if they were affected by some sort of adolescent cluelessness that made them take foolish attitudes, which were recognisable, inasmuch as they pertained to a familiar behavioural repertoire, but not considered entirely rational or mature. This repertoire included for instance exhibiting their romantic relations in public, entering into conflict with their work colleagues and housemates over beds and private space in their shared houses, or inaccurately evaluating their financial capability to support two families - all of them comportments that I have seen being scrutinized at different occasions. While among other men, a playful, scornful tone was dominant, among Portuguese female interlocutors, as I have shown above, this was often the object of a more reproachful posture condemning the men’s actions, signalling thus a propensity for the ‘(re)production of a moral discourse which is critical of Western men, and casts Western women as bearers of moral virtue’, which Fechter identified in her research in Indonesia (2016, 77–78).

…Angolan women: reciprocal relations and projected agency

Even though they were portrayed has ‘having lost their sense’ (over being so coveted), my perception of Portuguese male interlocutors was that they were at least on a first level, nothing but lucid and even cynical when it came to evaluate the causes behind their sudden attractivity. As such, they aligned with the common Portuguese discourse describing Angolan women as being drawn to white males, to whom they would bestow their attention in exchange for some kind of counter-benefit, which most of the time was assumed to be material. For instance, José told me, at a certain moment in our conversation, that women in Angola were in general very flirtatious with him; to the point that his partner was jealous when he spent long periods of time outside the house. Since he shared this with, what felt to me, like a hint of vanity, I was surprised when, to my query about why would that happen, he answered bluntly and without hesitation: ‘Oh, that’s because they think: ‘white guy, must have money - my life will improve’’.

In a word then, the contentment with the magnetism which they felt to have acquired in Angola, appeared to co-exist with the perception that the attention received was to be accounted on their ‘race’ – which, in turn, was broadly equated with larger economic possibilities – rather than on their discrete, individual attributes. Yet, as transpires in the following story - told to me by a younger work colleague of the protagonist, who found it hilarious - this cynicism was not kept at all instances:

My colleague Fernando convinced himself that his girlfriend was different: ‘this one is not like the other self-serving ones [interesseiras]’, he used to say. At a certain point he had to go to Portugal, and when he returned he found out - at her surprise birthday party, for which he had bought the cake and had paid for the entrance of several of her girlfriends!! - that she had already ‘arranged’ another Portuguese. Oh man! You wouldn’t believe how sad he was! He kept repeating, ‘I thought that 95 percent of the Angolan women were whores, but that this one was different… But I was wrong…’.

Independently of these considerations, what was dominant in the chatter of my interlocutors was that they would foreground what was perceived to be the agency of Angolan women, instead of an often-assumed predator posture of the white man. As such, interpretations about Angolan women’s conduct oscillated between or superposed two themes: on the one hand, the essentialist cultural-racial characterization of a different kind of sexuality (different from the Portuguese/white women), on the other hand, rational choice.

Whereas the first was commented upon in typically Othering utterances – for instance when a male interlocutor tried to convince me that ‘Angolan women were faster at reaching the orgasm’ -, the second one was generally received with comprehension by the Portuguese encountered; particularly, if they were women. Expressing frequently genuine shock at the social conditions imposed on their Angolan counterparts, female interlocutors would voice consternation, for instance, at the fact that Angolan women – according to their own impression - were seldomly willing to use contraceptive methods, which was attributed to backward ‘religious and cultural reasons’. Given what were considered to be the very harsh social, economic, and cultural circumstances in which Angolan women lived, it was only natural, for many of the Portuguese female informers, that the former would use their intimate relationships as an emancipatory strategy to improve their lives – and even the lives of their offspring.

Hence, though not seen as symmetrical, the intimate relations between middle-aged Portuguese and younger Angolan women, were mostly perceived to be symbiotic: it was assumed that both sides accrued some kind of benefit, even if not of the same type, and both kept a certain degree of independence and freewill.

To add a layer of complexity to the matter, given the specificities of the socio-economic context, this was not a simple case (if ever there is one) of ‘commodification of intimacy’ (Constable 2009) whereby the economic underprivileged traded (sexual and emotional) intimacy for financial support. But instead, a rather complex system of trade-offs that involved not only the exchange of (sexual/affective) intimacy against money or goods, but also legal rights, in which the Portuguese party was not always considered the enabler but, quite often, the benefitting one. This is because, in this precise socio-economic conjuncture, frequently it was not the Portuguese citizenship or residency permit the most coveted, but rather the Angolan one, inasmuch to marry an Angolan citizen provided a juridical anchor that could be useful when contending for one’s prolonged presence in the country. In fact, although increasingly rare at the time of my fieldwork, it had been possible at a certain point in recent times, to obtain Angolan naturalization through matrimony with an Angolan citizen. Hence, the idea that ‘Portuguese migrants wedded for the papers’ was still common currency among both Angolans and Portuguese.

Another possible bureaucratic benefit for the Portuguese partner, was the possibility of ‘using’ the Angolan intimate partner as the mandatory national citizen to concretize business ventures in the country. In the realm of business and economic entrepreneurship, as it was patent in the stories about individuals that were allegedly scammed by Angolan business partners (also sometimes sexual partners), holding the Angolan citizenship was seen as a clear-cut advantage on the face of which – in spite of any considerations of economic or cultural capital - the migrants would always feel most vulnerable.

If we are to take this chatter seriously, given the emphasis that it puts on the strategic actions of Angolan women, the susceptibility of men in face of the women’s skilful pandering, and the perceived symbiotic character of their relationships, we are forced to move beyond a dualistic emphasis on oppression and agency (Fechter 2016; Meszaros 2018). Instead, in the eyes of the Portuguese interlocutors, Angolan women were quite understandably drawn to Portuguese men, with whom they would freely and strategically choose to build relations that were perceived to be conducive to an improvement of their life conditions.

…Angolan men: colonial dichotomies, gendered dichotomies

Speaking from his Angolan partner’s point of view and repeating what she had (allegedly) told him, José conveys to me: ‘She says ‘Young Angolan males? I don’t want one! They drink, only want to get laid, they beat us up… At least like this [i.e., being with José], I have someone to talk to!’’.

As in this example, a common explanation for the appeal of white/Portuguese males, beyond that of their economic resources, were their perceived advantages in comparison to Angolan ones, which would put the emphasis on the assumed irresponsibility and unreliability of the latter (cf. Rivers-Moore 2012). ‘Angolan males’ were often conceived as a reified cultural Others in the chatter of Portuguese migrants, who were prompt at isolating character traits that would collectively define them and set them apart from the in-group. Closely replicating the paternalism of colonial discourse, Angolans were ascribed both the positive and negative attributes traditionally associated with children: considered ‘charming’ in their own way – ‘the warmth’, the ‘sense of humour’, the ‘festive spirit’ - they were, on the other hand, depicted as fundamentally reckless: ‘lazy’, ‘sloppy’, ‘lacking the sense of planning’, ‘responsibility’ or ‘work ethic’.

In a variation that manifests the sui generis characteristics of this case - in which an important facet of the narrative on contemporary relations between the countries and their peoples emphasizes the richness of Angola and Angolans, and the relative poorness of Portugal and the Portuguese - the indolence attached to Angolans was occasionally coupled with arrogance. As in the following quote from a male interlocutor, forty years old, working in the health sector:

One of the reasons why I want to go back [to Portugal] is that I don’t see this as a country with a future. I don’t see in these people the will to learn, they are too arrogant to think that they have to learn anything, that they have to work. They convinced themselves [during the last years] that the country was rich and that therefore they didn’t have to work.

In this case, accused by the Portuguese of lacking modesty and restraint, Angolans were criticized for being naively marvelled by the economic growth of the latest period. Interestingly, from the stance of Portuguese subjectivities, this would resonate as something at once old and new. The alleged unwillingness to work resonated with the child-like attributes commonly associated with Africans in the broad colonial discourse. But, it also was presented as an effect of post-colonial transformation and geo-economic re-arrangement: ‘They have convinced themselves that their country is rich’ [given the oil-driven economic boom], as the reason behind their (supposed) current lethargy.

On more than one occasion, I heard a ‘gag’ that went as following: ‘Angolans have the genitals [o sexo] in their hands, because they screw everything that they touch on’. One of these instances, was a conversation between me and two males, one in his early twenties, the other in his forties. The older one went: ‘The good thing is that here we [the Portuguese] will always find a job, because these guys ruin everything, they break everything’; and the former responded: ‘Yeah… And now with the [economic] crisis, it’s more complicated to buy new, so they need someone to fix things up [i.e. repair things], and here we are, to do exactly that’. The comparison between Angolan and Portuguese masculinities, central to this section, is here quite vibrant. Angolan recklessness was directly counterpointed with Portuguese competence to fix things, to re-establish normal functioning; the functionality or appeal of the latter, only gaining shape through the absences or misconducts of the former.

In these examples, Palmer’s concept of ‘ineffective masculinities’, defined as: ‘simultaneously hypermasculine, that is, motivated by anger, violence, or idealism and hypomasculine or displaying inadequacies in either their professional efforts and/or their physical characteristics’ (2018, 455), adequately captures how the Angolan ones were perceived. Here, Angolan men are certainly not represented as effeminate - if anything, it is their hypermasculinity (in the sense of brutish, careless or over-sexualized character) that is isolated as problematic, a type of masculinity deemed inadequate.

In contrast to this, in my last empirical point, I describe a case of subliminal comparison between white/Portuguese and black/Angolan masculinities in terms of embodied subjectivity. In it, black/Angolan masculinities are associated with a characteristic pertaining to the feminine – beauty, physical attractiveness – and the tensions between sense of superiority and ‘(unnamed) desire’ (Hendriks 2014, 225) shine through.

In an article exploring discourses and practices of interracial sex along the racial divide, Hendriks observes in his white interlocutors a fascination for black male bodies which involves the implicit recognition of the undesirability of their own bodies (2014). For him, ‘this often underexposed aspect further modifies McClintock’s concept of the porno-tropics, as not just a field of sexual opportunities to live out one’s hidden desires, but also a space of frustration and even imagined emasculation that can profoundly destabilize established masculinities’ (2014, 225).

In a similar vein, among my interlocutors, men and women alike, admiring comments about male black bodies – how ‘fit and lean’ they looked, how ‘their skin and flesh are so different, have a different texture and elasticity’; ‘how flexible and in shape’ – were commonly heard. In a non-explicit way, these utterances betrayed a similar kind of fascination with black bodies that Hendriks, drawing on Franz Fanon, alludes to. As such, they suggest that also among Portuguese migrants in Angola, the black male body could constitute ‘a phobogenic object, a stimulus to anxiety’, and ‘an object of white male mimetic desire’ (Hendriks 2014, 225).

On other occasions, though, this aestheticization of male blackness was countered by another criterion for the evaluation of bodies: sheer strength. For instance, in the following exchange between me and two construction workers commenting upon the fact, seemingly very amusing for them, that although the white workers seemed to be much less fit (‘older, shorter, chubbier’) than the Angolans, they were actually stronger.

They [the Angolans] look all muscles and all, but in fact they are weak! The other day on the construction site, an Angolan guy was trying to carry some heavy weight and couldn’t, and then came the short encarregado [overseer] and did it in his place, as if it was nothing! [laughs]’.

Here, the suggestion of emasculation induced by the observation of ostensibly fitter black bodies seemed to be counterweighed by the decoupling of appearance of strength from the performance of strength. This connects to traditional masculinity norms, in which the power to actually do something with the body overruns being a good-looking body. In this sense, emphasizing the lack of strength of the black body – eye-catching façade notwithstanding – would counter the menacing ideation of the ultra-virile black man (see e.g. Sawyer and Agrawal 2000).

Conclusion

In this paper, I have described how the migrant chatter re-appreciated middle aged, lower/middle class white Portuguese in Angola in their masculinity. Starting from the central idea of their acquired attractiveness in the market of heterosexual relations, I showed that the scope of this appeal was understood beyond the realm of (sexual) intimacy and I have emphasized how this assessment was to be approached from a relational perspective.

The chatter analysed suggests that white/Portuguese men thought of themselves to be needed and valued in Angola, in ways and to an extent to which Portugal - i.e. both the Portuguese economy and the Portuguese women - didn’t seem to (anymore). At the same time, Angola - again, both its economic development and its women – were constructed as if in need of the Portuguese men to fill in the gaps left by the Angolan men. According to this, a sort of metonymization of women is produced: beyond themselves, white/Portuguese women represent here the Portuguese economy and job market. Likewise, Angolan women stand for the Angolan economic and social development. Where the former duplet did not seem to need white/Portuguese men, the latter one (at least) performed as if it did. The chief argument here is that the masculinizing effect of this migration emerges out of the transition between one and the other.

The revamping of white masculinities was also considered as resulting from the contrast with projections of the Angolan male Other, reproducing colonial commonplace pairs of opposites: the indolent native versus the industrious white; the un-dependable versus the consistent, the careless versus the reliable, the clumsy versus the handy.

In conclusion, the characteristics of this migration made it into a way of rescuing fragilized masculinities that did not involve a change in masculinity norms, but rather established a revalorization of traditional ones. This revalorization resonated with the colonial narrative of Luso-tropicalism in astounding ways in that it points to a specifically Portuguese (male) propensity and adaptability to contexts like the Angolan one.

Aknowledgements

The author would like to thank Anja Franck and Richard Georgi for reading and commenting on early drafts of the paper and offering unyielding encouragement. A note of gratitude is due as well to the two anonymous reviewers that with their thoughtful comments and suggestions helped improve it substantially. This article was written while Carolina Valente Cardoso was being supported in her research by the Swedish Research Council (grant no.Vetenskapsrådet 2020-06469).

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Carolina Valente Cardoso

Carolina Valente Cardoso is a post-doctoral researcher at the School of Global Studies, Gothenburg University. She has obtained the Ph.D degree in Anthropology by the same institution with a thesis on the contemporary Portuguese migration to Angola. Her research interests include postcolonial perspectives on and from Europe, critical heritage studies and post-ethnographic museums.