Part of review forum on “The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda.”

When I read Claudia Gastrow’s The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda, music played in my head. This is not surprising for anyone who knows Luanda where music is constitutive of the experience of urban space. Security guards outside homes and businesses listen to radios that play everything from kizomba to gospel. Music is played inside homes, in the quintais (backyards), and it fills the halls of apartment buildings. Kuduro dance battles sometimes break out on street corners. Blue-and-white kandongueiros offer transport across the city and vibrate with loud music. Best known as the circulatory system that distributed the sounds of electronic dance music kuduro, Angolan writer and musician Kalaf Epalanga also remembers that his aunt Beatriz’s kandongueiro only played old school semba (the music most associated with the late colonial period and struggle for independence).

Luanda’s semba, itself the assertion of a distinct Angolan aesthetic, emerged in the 1960s and 1970s out of the city’s musseques. These neighborhoods, Gastrow argues, are not best understood by the metaphors of lack and negation often used to describe them. In the urban origin stories and aesthetic discernment of musseque residents with whom she speaks and works, Gastrow hears active dispute of the oil boom building spectacle that characterizes life after the end of the civil war. This constitutes an assertion of urban autochthony. Gastrow outlines and argues for a set of urban construction practices and aspirations—historically contingent and sometimes internally contradictory—that express alternative ideas about urban aesthetics and political belonging. Dissent is also the manifestation of difference. Homes are the new semba, the new aesthetic battle that makes a political claim.

The song “Casamento” (Marriage) by the band Os Versateis echoed through my head as I read Gastrow’s book. From their debut album in 1996, this song originates outside the period of Gastrow’s focus. Nonetheless, many later songs express the same idea: the lack of housing makes marriage hard to realize. It speaks to a long-running desire to secure space in the city on one’s own terms. (Other such songs from the precise period Gastrow covers include Matias Damásio’s Kwanza Burro, Livongh’s Lad Jum, and Puto Português’ Casa da Sogra.) But it also raises questions of race and indigeneity that I might not have heard without having read Gastrow’s arguments. The song opens in the female voice of the singer Madame Jepele addressing her beloved: “Negro que eu quero/ negro que eu amo/ eu vou beijar você/negro que eu quero/ negro que eu sigo/ quero casar contigo” (Black man who I want/ black man who I love/ I am going to kiss you/ Black man who I love/Black man who I follow/I want to marry you). The vocalist, João Alexandre, then responds from his perspective: “mas casar contigo/ seria uma loucura/ não tenho casa/nem sei onde morar” (but marrying you/would be crazy/ I don’t have a house/ I don’t even know where to live). This is a frothy, danceable tune. In it, the singers role-play a pressing, urban drama. In the late 1990s, in the depths of a second round of Angola’s civil war, there was no new construction in the city and what did exist had been pushed to the limit. People transformed what had been rooftops and janitorial closets at the time of construction in the late colonial period into homes. Buildings burst at the seams, as water delivery and electricity failed, as occupancy grew with people in flight from war and normal population growth. This was the situation that the MPLA government under José Eduardo dos Santos set out to repair after the civil war ended in 2002.

The language of race, of Blackness, in the song is a form of endearment and marker of horizontality between man and woman, even as other lyrics offer tropes of masculinity that mark the male as provider: “um homem que pode ter e pode dar” (a husband who can have and can give). The idea that a black man should provide a home for a woman when they marry, and that this man cannot, is the song’s anchor. After reading Gastrow’s book, I hear the female singer’s address to “the black man I love” evoke a centuries-old political relation to, and struggle over, urban space.

Following Hugo ka Canham in refusing to separate Blackness and Indigeneity when thinking about the African continent, Gastrow proposes the idea of Black Indigenous urbanism to capture the alternatives that musseque residents assert in their construction practices and material choices.

Black Indigenous urbanism is Gastrow’s best big idea and signal achievement vis-à-vis the literature on urbanism in Angola and Angolan history more generally. Gastrow brings new thinking on indigeneity on the African continent and in the context of racial theorizing, perhaps most developed in the South African context, to an analysis of Angola. At the same time, she brings in the literature on Black studies, typically focused on North America, to her argument. She does so with a light and enlivening touch. As scholars, we should learn from this. While reading, I wondered what her interlocutors would think of the articulation “Black Indigenous urbanism.” Would it resonate for them? But I think what Gastrow points us to is precisely the ways in which the term, for not being emic, strings together a narrative about urban space, that unlike song, formerly did not have a clear throughline or voice.