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

Claudia Gastrow’s illuminating book on post-oil-boom Luanda, The Aesthetics of Belonging, calls attention to the role of indigenous urban desires in examining “how Africa’s cities and citizens engage in worlding practices” from popular neighborhoods in the city (178). Such engagement from Luanda’s musseques contests visible urban growth with a form of ambivalent critique where the city stands “as an object of desire and scorn” (178). At the core of the book is an argument for understanding what Gastrow terms “aesthetic dissent” as a popular critique of the program of postwar national reconstruction. The Angolan government packages large-scale urban redevelopment facilitated through oil-boom liquidity through a contradictory process she terms “violence as care” (57). In examining the messages disseminated by the state and how they are received by residents of various popular neighborhoods in Luanda, Gastrow asks us to think of aesthetics as a readily available resource that residents of musseques have “to explore, explain, and contest Luanda’s rebuilding” (179–80). Throughout the book, Gastrow’s clear line of connection between the aesthetics of the city, the popular critique of reconstruction, and questions of political belonging make for a compelling contribution to the fields of urban anthropology and African studies.

The deep clarity and power of Gastrow’s exposition of urban change makes the city visible in different ways. She maps the aesthetic critiques coming from the musseque and shows how they respond to the political forms of new development in the city—the musseques hence defy their being rendered “ungeographic” by the political replanning of Angola’s capital (McKittrick Reference McKittrick2006). The directionality of critique in the book recenters the musseque as a locus of theory formation, with residents as its primary exponents. As Gastrow’s in-depth research on displacement from and rebuilding in popular neighborhoods reveals to us, there is a profound move here to historicize the musseque: not merely a spatial form, the musseque is a particular formation of an indigenous urbanism where residents think of themselves as the original Angolans. Inhabitants here see themselves as historical agents reconfiguring the city through “aesthetic dissent” and debates over the politics of comfort. For instance, Chapter Four delves into the tenor of such debates over the double-edged nature of comfort that is central to legitimate expectation in the musseque for a better life, for piped water, for housing “with conditions” (with services), despite the reality of relocation. Of particular note is a scene describing two residents, Moises and Hugo, arguing about the distinction between the shortage versus lack of water. Their disagreement affords deep insight into the politics of place that have emerged from the musseque in response to the new political economy of city redevelopment: Gastrow writes that “Moises’ outburst indicated how the politics of comfort emerges at the intersection of the built environment and the political and economic relationships that constitute the possibilities of infrastructural aesthesis” (129). Gastrow hence interprets the specificity of this contestation in the light of how national reconstruction ties questions of political belonging to an acute awareness of the changing “distribution of the sensible” in the capital (Ranciere Reference Rancière2013).

In showing the musseques as spaces of organization from which the city is visualized, critiqued, and planned in significant ways, Gastrow enables a dual view of the city. Using archival and ethnographic methods, she shows the city as both an object of aspiration and as disorganized itself, its corrupted form purposefully marginalizing inclusion. Residents use urban aesthetics as an entry point to criticize the role of the foreignness of the city’s builders and financiers, including jabs at then MPLA President Dos Santos, in opposition to their own autochthony and legitimate belonging: thus, a research interlocutor decries, “they are going to put foreigners here. But the actual Angolan does not have the right to live in the city” (160). Such forthright accounts are only excavated through deep and patient ethnographic investigation of the building practices and popular projects of legitimacy emerging from places like Cazenga and Zango. In Chapter Two, Gastrow notably theorizes the “moral economy of materiality” that emerges from the musseques, as residents labor to use standardized grid layouts and durable building materials, including concrete block houses, to claim aesthetic legitimacy as urban citizens even as they face demolition and displacement.

Although beyond the direct scope of her study, Gastrow’s detailed ethnographic investigation also leaves one to consider what other forms of identity-making, modes of sociality, and projects of solidarity residents engage with in daily life. Do city building projects from the musseques additionally intersect with residents’ personal and political positioning as postconflict subjects? Luanda, like Kigali, is increasingly emerging as a node of scholarly focus in the wider field of African urbanism. Gastrow’s brilliant and highly readable book offers an essential political history of place in this changing city, illuminating the critique of political belonging that emerges in its most trenchant form from the musseque.