This edited volume invites the reader to rethink ‘nationalism’ and the ‘nation-state’ in historical perspective and their meaning today in the three largest Lusophone African countries. Morier-Genoud's introduction reminds us not to conflate nationalism with anti-colonialism, and probes the analytical value of these concepts. Cahen's argument about Marxism as an ‘ideology adapted to a habitus’ (p. 16) then offers a convincing explanation of why the liberation movements chose Marxism, an ‘operational tool’ for authoritarian modernisation, to face the challenges of nation-building after independence.
Most chapters take a more historical perspective, such as Basto's chapter on Frelimo's ‘combat poetry’, or Tavares Pimenta's piece on ‘Euro-African’ (white) nationalism in colonial Angola. Havik's inquiry into the interplay of nationalist thinking and local cosmologies in mobilising Guinea-Bissau's population for armed struggle explains why violence ‘became part and parcel of the nationalist creed’ and, indirectly, why it continues to mar politics in the country today (p. 45). Péclard's masterful analysis of the processes and narratives that constructed UNITA's legitimacy during the Angolan liberation struggle and the subsequent civil wars complicates linear explanatory models based on ‘ethnicity’ or religious denominations. UNITA were not simply ‘traditionalists’ tapping into the ‘natural’ affiliation of their Ovimbundu constituency; rather, UNITA's was an alternative, ‘culturalist modernisation’ project, a social and political imaginary which spoke to a highland population equally fragmented and socially mobile through colonialism and missionary activity. Derluguian's lucid analysis of ‘utopia in the periphery’ (p. 99) reveals the roots of ‘indigenous anti-state dynamic’ that informed the Mozambican civil war after independence, but remains silent on Frelimo's positioning today.
By contrast, Pearce, on Angola, and Sumich, on Mozambique, offer needed and welcome analyses of the contemporary manifestations and uses of nationalism, opening up avenues for further research. Sumich's ethnography of Maputo's upper-middle class, often affiliated to the ruling Frelimo party, shows how nationalism, based on an elite vision of modernism, has persisted through Frelimo's ideological changes, reproducing an elite that see themselves as ‘fundamentally different’ from a vast majority of the population (p. 128). Nationalist ideology has thus shifted from an emancipatory project to mobilise the population to an ‘indicator of status and power for the elite’ (p. 132). It would be interesting to investigate how the population excluded from this ‘modernity’ perceive it, and where contemporary nationalism as a dominant(-party) ideology reaches its limits. Pearce partially addresses this, when he explains why, due to how the war in Angola was ended by UNITA's military defeat, there is no space in parliamentary politics today to contest the MPLA's dominant nationalism, an encompassing, but essentially depoliticised discourse that remains silent on the salient but taboo issues of race, class and ethnicity. Angolans thus increasingly find alternative modes of expression to contest that dominant national ideology.
David Birmingham's chapter on ‘nationalism’ in Angola today stands out by its combative tone. The author pulls no punches in denouncing the Angolan elite's disregard for the ‘people’ they continuously invoke and claim to represent. He argues that Angola's rulers are looking to Brazil and Portugal as business partners and models for their ambitions, and have no real interest in developing the country, as they do not feel ‘truly African’ and scorn the ‘rather more backwards’ members of the African Union (p. 219). Such a polemic approach always carries the risk of analytical shortcuts, which weaken the argument for readers not intimately acquainted with the Angolan context. That Angola ‘fell prey to the proxy conflict’ of the Cold war after independence (p. 225), or that Angola's engagement with China after the war was ‘orchestrated by the political masters in Beijing’ (p. 226), for example, reduces far more complex dynamics to simple causalities. Nonetheless, the overall argument reflects the convictions and feelings of a majority of the Angolan population, which feel increasingly abandoned by an elite they see as foreign.
Williams' conclusion pulls the rich and diverse strands of analysis together again. However, at several points in the volume ‘corrupt politics’ crops up (for instance on pp. 100, 249) without being further problematised. Here, the analysis of the interplay of – admittedly predatory – economic practices and the modernist project of nationalism in these three countries could have been pushed further.
