Introduction

In this chapter, I will focus on the historical production of the inter-related moral economies of manhood and veteranhood that the men I worked with were affected by over their life courses. While the experiences of war and military service certainly constituted ruptures in veterans’ lifeworlds, they were also inserted into a longer history and were interpreted, experienced and navigated in terms of that history. Alongside this complex intermingling of change and continuity in veterans’ moral worlds, the socio-economic context in which they were trying to live moral lives was changing, in many cases throwing up new dilemmas as they tried to live up to older values.

Moral concerns were paramount for veterans as they recounted their life histories, and these can be summarised briefly as follows: As the movements of a larger political history swept them up, they related to this history principally in the (varied) moral terms with which they had been raised. Military service was viewed as involuntary, and as a danger to be survived morally as well as physically, in which maintaining one's moral integrity was of the utmost importance. The moral economy of veteranhood articulated by veterans was strongly shaped by an implicit bargain with the party-state that their sacrifice for the nation through military service ought to be compensated, in the form of pensions, education/training, employment or all three. The fact that this support had not been forthcoming accentuated the perception of military service as a damaging interruption to their life projects, within the context of an immoral and pointlessly destructive civil war.

Veterans’ concerns upon demobilisation were to resume their interrupted life projects, which were shaped by the rights and responsibilities articulated by a particular moral economy of senior manhood. This moral economy was strongly shaped by intertwined and sometimes antagonistic ideas about Umbundu tradition and Christianity stemming from their childhoods in latecolonial Angola, for which ideals of breadwinner masculinity were central. This entailed marriage and the building of stable, upwardly mobile households of which they were the heads and providers, ambitions that were both limited and imperilled by the failure of the party-state to compensate them for their military service, and by the economic consequences of the war.