3 “Everyday” Displacements in Colonial Angola: Changing Political Geographies of Infrastructure, Gender, and Quotidian Village Concentration

Aharon deGrassi

Introduction

In 2012, Mama OMA, an elderly woman from a cassava-farming village near where I conducted fieldwork in western Malanje, shared a story with me. She recounted how, during the colonial period, she and her fellow villagers had been forced to carry heavy stones to build the nearby road.¹ Raising her hands above her head to mimic the burdensome weight, she let out a small, exasperated laugh of relief that the dreadful practice was long over. Later research revealed that her forced labour in road construction in western Malanje Province was part of a larger, Angola-wide program of manual dirt road building combined with village concentration (see figure 3.1 below).

Another day, a soba (chief) explained to me that their small village had been relocated along a built road. Previously, it was situated a short distance away, down the sloping hill, closer to the Carianza stream (see figure 3.1 below). I had inquired about his village’s location after carefully examining detailed older maps of the area, which seemed to show the village in a different place. I had also discussed with other researchers the existence of villages with similar names on these maps, and which were now in different locations. As these pieces of a broader story about long-standing quotidian road construction and village relocation began to coalesce, I recalled earlier visits to different areas with agricultural extension officers who pointed out the remnants of various villages, with low lines of crumbling rounded earthen adobe blocks used for walls still sometimes visible in the grass, often accompanied by palm or mango trees in the vicinity.

The concept of quotidian village concentration refers to the everyday, routine practice of relocating rural communities to specific areas, often along newly constructed roads, to facilitate administrative control, resource extraction, and labour mobilization. Today, the persistent memories and narratives surrounding quotidian village concentration continue to influence contemporary governmental discourse. For example, shortly after taking office, the governor of Malanje Province, who is also a prominent national political figure and a long-standing member of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA), urged villagers to “join together in the same communities to avoid dispersion,” arguing that dispersion “makes it difficult for the government to deliver public services.” He further encouraged traditional authorities in scattered villages to “consolidate with other traditional authorities to achieve a greater concentration of population.”²

The central argument of this chapter is that quotidian processes of village concentration along roads expanded significantly in the early twentieth century throughout Angola, affecting a significant proportion or even a majority of the rural population. Colonial administrative policies and practices played a crucial role in shaping these processes, often forcing rural communities into concentrated villages along infrastructure routes to facilitate control and resource extraction. Quotidian processes of village concentration were pervasive and deeply affected the daily lives of the rural population under colonial rule, and their legacy continues to influence rural life in the post-independence era.

Traditional theories of state power often assume a static political geography, where state power is exerted over fixed locations. However, the dynamic processes of village concentration and road construction in Angola illustrate a more fluid and interactive relationship between state power and spatial organization. This chapter contends that colonial authorities, through policies like village concentration and road construction, actively reshaped the geography to enhance control and resource extraction.

There is also an important relationship between gender and geographies of state power in villagization processes. The forced relocation of villages along roads increased the burden of labour on women. Women had to travel longer distances to access water sources and agricultural fields, as villages were often moved away from streams to ridges. Forced labour for road construction also disproportionately affected women and children. Colonial policies often conscripted women and children for the arduous labour of breaking rocks into gravel for road construction. This form of forced labour was effectively a form of taxation that reinforced patriarchal control while exploiting women’s labour.

This chapter focuses on everyday practices of roadside village concentration as one component of what I have detailed elsewhere as a long-term, cumulative, recursive expansionary dynamic that was “constituted by the sextuplet of military conquest, indirect rule through ‘traditional’ authorities, regularized labour recruitment, extensive road building, concentration of villages, and transport and commercial regulation.”³ The extent and continuing significance of this practice have been severely underappreciated.⁴ Because processes of displacement were local and happened in the course of normal governance, they often occurred without being documented in detail, which makes it quite difficult to study and to appreciate their extent. I therefore make my argument by drawing on a mix of six sorts of evidence: ethnographic fieldwork, laws, colonial administrative reports, maps, miscellaneous literature, and land registry archives.⁵

Limited Large Modernist Schemes vs. Extensive Everyday Displacement

The large, grand modernist schemes involving camps, strategic hamlets, and planned villages have been sharply analyzed by James Scott and others.⁶ Yet critical scholars’ emphases on the follies of utopian modernist projects risk turning those failures themselves into distracting spectacles that can blind us to much more widespread dynamics affecting the day-to-day lives of the popular majority of people. Bender’s classic book on Angola states that by the early 1970s nearly a fifth of Angola’s population was in strategic hamlets (roughly 1 million people out of 5.6 million, including Portuguese).⁷ This striking exercise in social engineering rightly garnered international attention and criticism, particularly given the similarities with other related processes in Algeria, Vietnam, and so on. However, aside from the fact that in Angola the vast majority of these settlements appear to have been in the East and North, very little reliable precise information is available about them.⁸ Moreover, the important question of what happened with the rest of the 4 million people not in the border war zones has largely been ignored.

The broader importance of quotidian villagization far exceeded both modernist agricultural and settlement schemes as well as health-driven colonial “model villages.” Colonial villagization for health reasons—foremost among them being reduction of sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis) transmitted by tsetse flies (Glossina) that prefer moist vegetation—has been widely recognized over past decades.⁹ Coghe’s recent work on villagization in colonial Angola rightly points to colonialists’ emphasis on villagization for health reasons, the broader intercolonial networks shaping such approaches to health, and the patchy way such health-related model villagization occurred in practice.¹⁰ It is crucial to recognize, however, that early patterns of villagization actually preceded the later health-related projects. This early villagization was more widespread, driven by concerns with administration, taxation, labour, and road building.¹¹ The villages were often located next to new roads, which were built through forced labour. Placing villages along these roads facilitated the forced mobilization of villagers for labour on additional road projects, creating an expansionary dynamic.¹²

Overemphasizing large-scale modernist schemes also risks overshadowing women’s conditions and resources, and the consequent relevance of concentration along ridgetop roads that displaced them from stream-side villages with better access to water. Space, water, and gender are key elements in processing the starchy roots of cassava (the primary staple food of the region): “In some circumstances, a minor change in the sequence of the different processing steps can lead to up to a hundred-fold increase levels of cyanogenic compounds in the final food product.”¹³ Access to water is really important because soaking is a complex process involving a range of micro-organisms and biochemical processes. People vary the duration of soaking (number of days) according to different types of cassava, water sources and conditions, ambient temperature, availability of sunshine, climate conditions, end uses, and so on.

The responsibilities of women in ensuring safe food production extend beyond the often-cited example of cassava cyanide being an issue only during exceptional wartime food emergencies. The effects of cyanide poisoning can be far more extensive than the most visible indication of acute poisoning, known as konzo. Konzo is an acute irreversible condition that can present in varying stages, from weakness (including trembling, muscle cramping, numbness, aching, and blurred vision) to reliance on a cane, dependence on crutches, and total immobilization. Beyond this acute visible condition, repeated exposure to lower levels of cyanide can produce a range of significant but less immediate and less visible effects, which can emerge progressively. There may also be cognitive effects that have not yet been thoroughly studied. These conditions are reported not just in war-displaced areas of Congo, but by journalists in contemporary Angola as well as in day-to-day conversations in the field.¹⁴

Increased exposure to cassava cyanide due to the distance from water sources for soaking is compounded by a lack of access to fish, whose proteins help break down cyanide in the body. Village concentration also makes it more time-consuming to collect a varied diet of products (mushrooms, herbs, insects, etc.) that counteract cyanide.¹⁵ Additionally, concentrating villages increases reliance on bitter, cyanide-rich cassava varieties to deter theft. Planting cassava in drier areas further increases the roots’ cyanide content, as the plants produce more cyanide to protect against predators made hungrier by drought-induced scarcities.¹⁶

There are important spatial constraints related to accessing water, where gendered divisions of labour mean that women often engage in extra work to access water for domestic uses and, most significantly, for cassava processing. For many villages, access to water has been made more difficult and time-consuming by the concentration of villages along roads and away from streams, as well as the fragmentation of the landscape into plantations spanning streams. Some villages do have boreholes for water for cooking, washing, drinking, and bathing. However, spending more time carrying water to fermentation barrels, or cassava to soaking pits, means less time for other productive activities. Even in those villages with transport access, the fragmented and concentrated agrarian and transport structures combine with gendered divisions of labour to constrain the amount of cassava that can be produced for market.

Evolution of Road Construction and Village Concentration in Angola

The concentration of villages along often newly built roads occurred in Angola particularly from the 1910s onward. In this section I trace chronologically the development of roads and village concentration, drawing on laws, archives, and various reports, supported by a few examples mostly from Malanje. My conceptual argument is that contemporary patterns of settlement and forms of state administration are the products of spatial dialectical relations between state and society. Roads and concentrated villages did not emerge all at once everywhere and remain unchanged, but rather emerged and changed dynamically over time through interactions. Hence it is useful to outline some basic chronological periods in which these dialectical relations occurred: pre-1900s, conquest, early administration, pre–World War II, post–World War II, and post-1961.

Centuries before the 1900s, the Jesuits introduced some of the earliest concepts and practices of concentrated villages, particularly in Brazil and Latin America. These settlements, known as reductions (or reduções), were established for Indigenous people and sometimes referred to as missions.¹⁷ The specific lines of influence of these earlier experiences of twentieth-century resettlement remain to be studied, as well as their relation to roadworks from the sixteenth century onward.¹⁸

For a long time, before the renewed conquest efforts of the late nineteenth century, paths were essential trade routes and received active attention and maintenance. Roads were emphasized amid renewed efforts at military conquest, particularly by General João de Almeida, who reportedly compiled some of the first detailed road maps in 1906, perhaps drawing on the work of the cartographer Diniz.¹⁹ Such routes were key to the logistics of military supply chains that relied not simply on porters, but also on wheeled transport and cavalry, but were not yet motorized. By the early 1900s, as occupation was solidified in various forms in various parts of Angola, there was a gradual and uneven shift away from emphasizing roads for military personnel and equipment to conquer and occupy, and toward roads for automobiles for trade and administration.²⁰

During this period of conquest, many people were forced out of their villages near roads when these villages were destroyed, often burned by soldiers, functionaries (Portuguese or Angolan), or staff of traditional authorities. While some people whose homes were burned fled further away from roads and military or administrative posts, some people also relocated to the new administrative villages alongside roads. Early colonial reports of conquest in Malanje and elsewhere explicitly mention burning numerous villages and encountering others abandoned.²¹ In eastern Malanje, for example, Portuguese Army Lieutenant Ultra Machado’s column burned dozens of villages during its sixteen-day campaign in 1911 to conquer Kassanje, a significant centre for trade in commodities and enslaved people in West Central Africa for centuries.²² After violent military conquest campaigns, certain sobas (chiefs) were obliged to move their villages nearer to the administrative posts.²³ It was also explicitly prohibited for anyone under the authority of chiefs newly subordinated to the Portuguese to move away from roads.²⁴

By the 1910s there was a broader shift in colonial directives away from prizing only glorified monarchism and military conquest, and toward liberal rational administration. This was driven partly by the downfall of the Portuguese monarchy in 1910 and the rise a new republican Portuguese government. In Angola, the monarchist Governor Roçadas was replaced by the republican Coelho, who instituted administrative measures on roads and settlements. The transition from occupation to administration in Angola occurred at the same time as a global rise of automobiles. By 1902 Angola already had one of its first cars, imported from Hamburg by a private company.²⁵ And by 1911 the government had issued an official itinerary of Angola’s road network.²⁶

In 1911 and 1912, incentives in the form of reduced hut taxes were established for people living closer to municipal capitals, regional roads, and military posts.²⁷ In Coelho’s lengthy 1911 local government regulations, he drew significantly from experiences in Mozambique, particularly a 1908 law, emphasizing the importance of extending administrative control and taxation without prompting a wholesale exodus. In the case of Mozambique, the threat was particularly salient given the option of migrating to the mines in South Africa.²⁸ In early 1912, additional measures were instituted to encourage settlement along regional roads by exempting residents from hut taxes, particularly for areas that were seen to have been depopulated by commercial trade that used people for porterage to the detriment of settled agricultural production.²⁹

The large-scale shift to motorized roads for administration really came under Angola’s modernizing Governor Norton de Matos, who also emphasized village concentration along roads.³⁰ De Matos arrived in Angola in May 1912, and quickly prohibited new settlements in areas with tsetse flies that transmitted sleeping sickness, mandated the removal of existing settlements from these areas, and required a five-hundred-metre radius of cleared vegetation around any settlements that could not be relocated. Additionally, he banned the construction of new roads through tsetse fly zones.³¹ Within only a couple months of arriving in Angola, de Matos was guided by Lieutenant Ultra Machado, mentioned above, on a car tour of the colony in the dry season of July 1912. They passed through Kassanje on their way to the Lundas roughly a year after Machado’s dry-season conquest of Kassanje. This formative trip led de Matos to swiftly emphasize a massive road-building campaign, with specific legislation, that included providing cars for governors of districts after they had built three hundred kilometres of road, with an additional car for each thousand-kilometre stretch built.³²

After returning from this car tour of Angola, De Matos asserted that

the existence of roads that permit rapid transit is one of the principal means of rapid and effective administrative occupation of the territories of Angola. . . . These roads and automobiles will permit the rapid circulation of functionaries, indispensable for a good execution and financing of all the public services, and making possible the integrated administrative occupation of the Province. . . . [As] always the use of force becomes indispensable, in a region so vast and still with nuclei of insubmission. . . . The construction of “automobile roads” would become one of the best ways of avoiding any attempt at revolt, and, in the case of alterations in order, it would be easy to repress these with the rapid deployment of armed forces permitted by the roads and trucks.³³

During de Matos’s tenure, road building in Angola increased significantly (see figure 3.2), as did collection of direct hut and head taxes.³⁴

De Matos’s major reform came on 17 April 1913, updating the detailed administrative regulations outlined in the August 1911 law, again with explicit measures on roadworks and village concentration.³⁵ The 1913 law required circunscrição (circuit or county) administrators to hold “sobas responsible for clearing roads and conserving their alignment” and to “direct the opening of roads, making their plans [traçado] and teaching the indigenous.” Chefes de posto, in charge of circunscrições, were required to “oversee the conservation of roads,” and sobas were obliged to “gather the indigenous of their lands necessary to clean and open roads and to rebuild their settlements. . . . Clearing service of the roads will be done two times, at least, each year, once at the end of dry season and once immediately after the rainy season.”³⁶

A further update in September 1914 again required that Indigenous people live in villages composed of no fewer than sixty houses, situated in sites without Glossina flies, or at least away from water courses, lakes, and dense vegetation.³⁷ De Matos had also unsuccessfully tried to push through legislation giving regedors (also called soba grandes, or sector chiefs) a financial incentive for village concentration, raising their stipend by five escudos for every 25 houses, up to 150 houses (though this was only later instituted in 1923).³⁸

It appears that de Matos may have been influenced by the secretary of Indigenous affairs, João Ferreira Diniz, whom he had appointed upon arriving in Angola. Charged with censusing Angolans in order to calculate and enforce taxes and labour recruitment, Diniz faced the problem of people fleeing both the census and attempts at enforcement. And so, he proposed some overly ambitious regulations that put forward a maximum period of five years for the concentration of all villages, after which all other houses would be demolished. Diniz later published this proposal in which local administrative commissions would choose the locations for villages, based on five criteria: (1) access to water, (2) existing nuclei, (3) resources, (4) road access to administrative capitals, and (5) other administrative conveniences.³⁹

Apparently only parts of this proposal were included in later legislation and practice; the balance or trade-off between the criteria is also unclear. Villages would be segregated by “tribes,” have at least fifty houses, in clusters no smaller than ten, with no more than 150 metres between clusters of houses. Each house would be required to have five square meters per inhabitant and could only be built after getting a licence from the administration and following rules about hygiene. Licences would help fund a yearly prize for the best house in terms of “aesthetics and hygiene.” The respective traditional authority would be responsible for enforcing rules, and liable to a fine of between one and twenty escudos (also payable in labour) if villagers did not meet the rules. Local administrators would then be able to more easily enforce collection of hut taxes, which, if unpaid, would skyrocket (doubling the first year unpaid, tripling the second, etc.).

While the fate of Diniz’s proposal remains unclear, it does illustrate some of the contemporary thinking: namely, that access to water was subordinated to administrative control via roads. This is because when Machado himself was briefly governor general in 1915 he ordered the further restructuring of Angola’s geography by decreeing that all new roads (and hence concentrations of villages) be relocated on ridgetops to minimize river crossings (and hence away from former path routes and water access).⁴⁰ The location of new roads along ridgetops was part of a broader interrelated standardization, mechanization, and industrialization of transport. That standardization included drainage and other details for the roads, which were to be 6 metres wide with drainage ditches on each side measuring 0.6 metres wide and 0.2 metres deep, with a maximum curve of a radius of 10 metres, maximum incline of 12 per cent, and other specifications. Road building included clearing vegetation and levelling the surface, as well as building bridges. But it also involved breaking rocks into gravel, or macadam, an arduous labour-intensive activity occurring at hundreds of gravel pits and quarries across the colony.

In 1920, officials shifted policy to head taxes and emphasized administrative control, prompting people to flee. In response, officials implemented a mix of spatial measures that combined reduced pressure with tighter control. So, again in 1921 there was a re-emphasis on living in concentrated settlements or facing stiff fines.⁴¹ Head taxes were restricted to men only in 1923, prompting them to seek out cash wage work, or being compelled to work, in off-farm mines, plantations, and towns, leaving administrators to force women and children to build local roads.

This is the sort of dialectical sequence that is crucial but not sufficiently appreciated in most analyses: As the military and police ability to enforce taxation increased, so there were more exactions made on villages for labour and tax; people responded in the 1920s by fleeing; and the government in turn responded by emphasizing villagization.⁴³

Resettlement provisions were included in the updated 1931 individual tax regulations, and the major 1933 Overseas Administrative Reform Law also further institutionalized requirements for administrators to concentrate villages.⁴⁴ The 1931 law states that in order to “facilitate tax census operations” the administrators should “oblige, in the shortest term possible, all the indigenous to group their houses in locations chosen” based on terms set by a health delegate as well as with the “concentration of indigenous populations” where there were already people, grouped by tribe, sobados, and families subordinate to the same chief, and “should not, by rule, establish settlements with less than 10 houses.”⁴⁵

After Salazar’s New State dictatorship had begun to entrench itself, the 1933 Overseas Administrative Reform Law reiterated the responsibility of administrators to “Direct the opening of roads and correction of plans/sketches [traçados]; [and] oblige the indigenous to link their villages with paths,” with lower chefes de postos similarly tasked.⁴⁶ This 1933 law likewise emphasized roadside villagization, charging administrators with “ensuring the cleanliness and linearity of indigenous villages, seeking to relocate them closer to the roads, situating them in locales that are salubrious and where they can find the best plots for the usual crops, wherever possible in accord with health/sanitary authorities.”⁴⁷

This process was reported for numerous villages in northern coffee areas since the early 1930s, as later described by one first-hand witness in 1957:

During 1932 and 1933, for reasons which the Portuguese colonial administration has kept secret, all our villages were moved. We were forced to construct other villages along automobile roads. Certain villages whose inhabitants were not able to move themselves in the time allowed by the administration were burned.⁴⁸

Another example comes from a 1934 report by the local administrator of Kalandula (Duque de Bragança) in Malanje, which states that villages there were already being concentrated. It noted that the Overseas Administrative Reform had set forth native villagization. And stated that bringing “the indigenous together with the roads, making it easier to regulate [fiscalisção] their livelihoods, the censusing for native tax, and the easy and careful conservation of roads, given that we have in that way the indigenous readily at hand, for repairs, making it unnecessary for sepoys to over mountains and valleys, looking for people for the works and committing all sorts of vexations and violences.” It stated (fairly unrealistically) that all village relocations should be completed within three or four years. It depicted village concentration in similar terms as Diniz and de Matos, whose laws the report cites.⁴⁹

This example from Kalandula was occurring throughout Malanje Province (and quite likely Angola), exemplified by a circa 1933 instruction on “Villagization of the Indigenous,” which was issued by the governor of Malanje Province himself, Vasco Lopes Alves, and sent to the local administrators.⁵⁰ The governor’s six-page, eleven-article instruction outlined several key directives: Villages should comprise people of the same race; fields should be demarcated and cleared; houses should be constructed from local materials; irrigation projects should be studied and implemented by the Indigenous population; large land concessions near Indigenous villages should be avoided, as well as the presence of trading stores and European residences within these villages. Additionally, each village was to have a school and be regularly visited by health and agricultural extension agents. Each village would also have a regedor (sector chief) who would act as the intermediary between the inhabitants and the authorities. In November 1935, Malanje Provincial Governor Alves also ordered the administrator of Malanje Municipality to compose a report on villagization within sixty days.⁵¹ He mentioned that the governor general of Angola had recommended the building of Indigenous villagizations to facilitate services. The report was to count the numbers of Indigenous who are not in villages above fifty houses, count the number of villages with fifty to one hundred houses to group these people, determine where the new villagizations would be located, and calculate the cost of construction and links with roads. Likewise, the governor of Luanda Province noted in 1935 that “all circunscrições are working on the construction of villages aimed at concentrating the natives” in new villages “close to the roads.”⁵²

Indicative of a broader renewed Portuguese attention to colonization, and thus villagization, a Colonization Congress was held in 1934, with recommendations promoting villagization.⁵³ The next year a questionnaire addressing villagization was circulated by the colonial minister at the 1935 Imperial Economy Conference.⁵⁴ Two years later, at the second conference of colonial governors in 1937, Melo Vieira presented a session on “Conditions of Fixation of Fixing Indigenous to the Land.”⁵⁵

Concerns had been raised, however, since the 1930s about implications of villagization for access to water and land, being voiced again in the 1950s.⁵⁶ A new, more extensive fourteen-article draft decree was written up and submitted in June 1939 by Colonial Minister José Vieira Machado, proposing that governors be responsible for gradually grouping villages into twenty or more families, with villages grouped by “race” and organized for various social and economic development purposes. This was followed by a report around 1940 on villagization by the former high commissioner of Angola, Vicente Ferreira. However, in 1941 ministers voted against the draft decree.⁵⁷ Given the contradiction between villagization and labour recruitment, and the thorny question of rights for villagized people “in an intermediary state between Portuguese citizenship and the indigenato,” the issue was discussed and debated for several years at the highest levels, including in the Colonial Council around 1948.⁵⁸ In practice, such high-level uncertainty meant on-the-ground discretion for local administrators to continue.⁵⁹

The Erasure of Former Settlements

The processes of road building and village concentration and relocation along roads continued in the periods after World War II and after the 1961 outbreak of the liberation war and increase in counter-insurgency measures.⁶⁰ Some evidence of this was found in the Malanje land registry archives, which survived the war (the city of Malanje was not captured by UNITA, the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola), and which I spent some time studying. The map in figure 3.3 below reveals traces of villages (denoted by clusters of dots representing houses) that were displaced and then were “removed” from the map by marking over them with a dark pen, some of which has worn away over time, once again revealing the villages (see left corner).

Another example in the Malanje land archives is from near Cacuso in the early 1970s, where José de Matos Figueira filed a land claim of one thousand hectares. The map of his plantation claim shows various villages crossed off and blacked out (figure 3.4 below). And yet, Figueira stated in his description of the area that there were no other rights holders.⁶¹ This was despite the fact that there were still farms (including some coffee plants) in the area. Figueira noted in a 1970 letter that a former claim on the land had been abandoned about ten years prior, leaving only ruins of the adobe houses and some burnt mango and orange trees. In sum, the landscape was being constructed through new plantation claims in which past ruins of villages were being erased, while it still bore marks of habitation and use (coffee and farms), as well as abandonment during the political tumult since 1961.

Looking at figure 3.5, settlement changes are also visible by overlaying the locations of houses from the older 1959 map (indicated by dots) on the more recent map from around 1980. The contrast clearly shows that in the past dispersed houses were often along streams, but subsequently became more concentrated and located along roads.

For example, above the village of Mandele, the 1959 map shows numerous houses along the Quifuma stream (area of oval). This area had been claimed by a Portuguese settler in Kota named Alípio Machado as part of a hundred-hectare plantation that he applied to formalize in 1969. The local use of the stream and the existence of the houses along it were administratively written off, with remarks that only a small field was in use, but the rest had never been cultivated nor used for cattle by Indigenous inhabitants. The subsequent 1979–80 map shows only the ruins of some of the neighbouring villages, with no indication of other villages nor the settlements near the Quifuma stream that Machado enclosed. After 1980, it is likely that further concentration in larger villages and along roads may have occurred as war increased (in this specific area starting around 1983, periodically until 2002).

A broader picture about the relative extent of such changes emerges if one examines the “annotated” old maps that show villages being covered up (literally black-boxed) or crossed out, as well as the overlay of the older and newer map series. For Malanje Province alone the number of smaller settlements and villages that have disappeared is on the order of a thousand.

The likelihood is that, Angola-wide, the number is multiple times this, though of course the processes varied, particularly for more dispersed, arid, and pastoral areas (and Malanje did have a relatively high proportion of white colonial settlers). An extremely rough approximation is illustrated in the map I have composed from available GIS data (shown in map 3.1 below), which overlays digital databases of the geographic coordinates of contemporary (ca. 1980s) villages with main roads. The patterns of villages along roads is unmistakable and striking, particularly for the northern half of the country, where the liberation war was intense due to Angolan forces mobilizing across the border in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In central Angola, the correlation is less clear visually, partly because the settlement density is greater and many non-primary roads are not shown, while in arid and sparsely populated southern Angola, locations near rivers and streams is common.

Comparing old and subsequent maps is often a fraught exercise. However, there are unmistakable instances where villages marked on early 1900s maps either do not appear at all on detailed 1950s maps or appear in distinctly different locations, typically along new straight roads. This was a quotidian process involving a few dozen people or households in each instance. It was often liminal, not requiring careful reporting, with a lack of means or incentive to record it accurately. A challenge is that only those villages that explorers saw or heard about during their travels are shown on early maps. Their routes relied on existing paths between villages, meaning they travelled where there were people and paths, making their routes self-selecting rather than arbitrary. The resolution of these maps is often low. Sometimes locations mentioned in texts do not appear on maps, and vice versa. Nonetheless, many villages depicted on these maps still exist today. Further detailed research is needed to understand the extent to which people in post-colonial and postwar Angola have been able or inclined to move to or return to locations formerly occupied decades ago (anywhere from ten to ninety years prior). Elsewhere, I have emphasized understanding key questions of land legacies in terms of dynamic “cumulative combinations.”⁶²

Conclusions and Implications

There is broader suggestive evidence from numerous studies mentioning village grouping and roadside concentration in dozens of African countries. Detailed maps of village settlement patterns across various regions further support the prevalence of this roadside concentration policy. ⁶³ Similar experiences in Mozambique, both pre– and post–World War II, and in Guinea Bissau’s post-1960 wartime experiences, also point to this trend. While various authors mention colonial village concentration along roads, the broader patterns and extent have not yet been thoroughly studied. Understanding the specificities of Lusophone networks and experiences in relation to broader inter-imperial connections remains an ongoing challenge.⁶⁴

These findings have practical implications, firstly for contemporary postwar road reconstruction programs that are reinforcing these historic patterns. Approximately $20 billion has reportedly been spent on rebuilding over twelve thousand kilometres of roads from early 2008 to 2017, though the data require further scrutiny.⁶⁵ Despite promises that such roads would facilitate the sale of goods from the countryside and spur agricultural production and rural livelihoods, there remain significant urban-rural inequalities in poverty levels.⁶⁶ More recently, such patterns are further entrenched by using satellite imagery processed with machine learning and artificial intelligence, now influencing development research, policy, and projects.⁶⁷

Secondly, these findings help recast theories of state power by challenging the assumption of fixed geography. For example, Soares de Oliveira’s assumption of Angola’s “enduring limitations of geography” and Portugal’s relative “weakness” in early colonial Angola is problematic.⁶⁸ In contrast, Boone rightly moves past the binary of total “state presence” or complete absence, recognizing that “levels and quality of stateness vary . . . across functional domains of state action . . . and across social groups.”⁶⁹

Thirdly, gender is crucial to all these dynamics, yet insufficiently addressed in the literature.⁷⁰ Much of the increasingly rich literature on women, land, and the Portuguese Empire has focused primarily on tenure rather than situating land in its integrated geographic contexts.⁷¹ Gender-blind assumptions about colonial Portuguese spatial weakness suggest that when faced with taxes individuals (whose gender goes unspecified) could simply flee, but this ignores the importance of access to water, and particularly gendered differences in domestic responsibilities.⁷² “Exiting” was not available equally to men and women, and could place a disproportionate burden on women. Exiting to mountainous or forested areas difficult for state agents likewise could entail heightened challenges for women’s access to water. Analysts who invoke “exit” have hitherto largely assumed a unitary household or village as an actor, and hence left as an unexamined “black box” exactly who decided who should exit, on which bases, and through which decision-making procedures.⁷³

Furthermore, forced labour for road construction was very often disproportionately done by women and children, and effectively constituted a form of taxation. Village concentration along roads could thus both rely upon and reinforce patriarchy. While men may have faced pressure from state taxes to exit, conversely, they also may have had incentives to collaborate with the colonial state in order to reinforce their advantages and control over women. These countervailing incentives affected different men differently. Indirect rule as a form involving violence and governmentality also relied on reinforcing and reconfiguring patriarchy, even as it also involved some less significant restrictions on patriarchal rule and was also subject to new forms of women’s resistances and claims.

This chapter has focused on extensive quotidian roadside village concentration as one component of a long-term, cumulative, recursive expansionary dynamic. This dynamic was constituted by military conquest, indirect rule through “traditional” authorities, regularized labour recruitment, extensive road building, concentration of villages, and transport and commercial regulation. Recognizing this more broadly as a common colonial practice also prompts re-theorizing of geographies of the state, and, consequently, the political possibilities and strategies for substantively changing these impoverishing historic infrastructures and displacements.

Notes to Chapter 3

Research for this chapter was supported by a post-doctoral fellowship at the Yale Program in Agrarian Studies, and I am grateful for comments on an earlier version, “Cassava Capitalism? Gendered Land, Space, and States in Rural Angola’s Pasts and Futures,” presented as part of the panel “Land Access and Property Rights in Angola, Mozambique, and Brazil,” at the 61st Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Atlanta, 30 November 2018.

1. 1 “OMA” designated her involvement (presumably as the village representative) with the Organização das Mulheres de Angola (Organization of Angolan Women), which is affiliated with the MPLA, but held broader significance during the one-party period.

2. 2 ANGOP, “Governador exorta populações a viver em comunidades,” 23 February 2013; ANGOP, “Governador exorta população a produzir mais para reduzir importações,” 18 September 2014; ANGOP, “População exortada a unir-se para facilitar acções da administração municipal,” 22 August 2014.

3. 3 Aaron deGrassi “Provisional Reconstructions: Geo-Histories of Infrastructure and Agrarian Configuration in Malanje, Angola” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2015).

4. 4 Much scholarship has been preoccupied with modernist spectacles and often unrealized land grabbing, thereby compounding the analytical marginalization faced by a much larger majority of smallholder peasants in Africa. Older literature on settlement geography, despite its limitations, has gone out of fashion, while newer GIS-based literature often lacks sufficient critical analysis. Cf. Marilyn Silberfein, ed., Rural Settlement Structure and African Development (Westview, 1988); Martha Wilfhart, Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics (University of California Press, 2022).

5. 5 Partly inspired by James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, Misreading the African Landscape (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

6. 6 James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 1998); Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed (Yale University Press, 2009).

7. 7 Gerald Bender, Angola Under the Portuguese (University of California Press, 1978). Bender’s figures are cited by W. S. van der Waals, Portugal’s War in Angola, 1961–1974 (Ashanti, 1993), and John Cann, Counterinsurgency in Africa (Greenwood Press, 1997). Cann cites van der Waals (Portugal’s War, 120), in turn citing Bender (Angola Under the Portuguese, 164–5, 200–1, 227, 232).

8. 8 Bender does not provide a source for the one million number; it appears to be pieced together from scattered references, and, in particular, a smuggled trove of confidential documents from a classified high-level 1968 symposium on experiences with and approaches to counter-subversion in Angola. See Caroline Reuver-Cohen and William Jerman, eds., Angola: Secret Government Documents on Counter-Subversion (IDOC, 1974), 29, which gives a figure of 887,923 in camps by 1968–9, paraphrasing page 3 of report IV-e. Similarly, there are problems with the figures given in the more recent history by the Portuguese Army, which notes that by 1971, in the Eastern Military Zone of Angola, 960,054 people had been resettled into 1,936 villages. EME, Resenha histórico-militar das campanhas de África, vol. VI, tomo I—Angola, livro 2 (Estado-Maior do Exército, 2006), 482. But again, this is without citing any precise source. EME (Resenha histórico-militar) also gives a table of some eastern camp figures, but only about 194,000. But census figures from 1970 for the eastern provinces add up to only 628,000 people. So presumably this figure also includes the roughly 300,000 people in the North estimated to also be in camps. Major strategic settlement had started in the North in the coffee lands after the 1961 rebellion. Cann, Counterinsurgency, 155, notes that by 1964, 150 aldeamentos had been built in the North, with total capacity of around 300,000 people, citing van der Waals, Portugal’s War, 120. Bender also mentions resettlement around Bie.

9. 9 Particularly after Kjekus’s path-breaking study of Tanzania. See Helge Kjekshus, Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History (Heinemann Educational Books, 1977). See also Maryinez Lyons, The Colonial Disease (Cambridge University Press, 1992); and on Angola P. Janssens, “La Trypanosomiase en Angola a l’aube du 20e Siècle,” Bulletin des Séances 42, no. 3 (1996): 537–69.

10. 10 Samuël Coghe, “Reordering Colonial Society: Model Villages and Social Planning in Rural Angola, 1920–45,” Journal of Contemporary History 52, no. 1 (2017): 16–44; Samuël Coghe, Population Politics in the Tropics: Demography, Health, and Transimperialism in Colonial Angola (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

11. 11 See also Maria da Conceição Neto, “In Town and Out of Town: A Social History of Huambo (Angola), 1902–1961” (PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, 2012).

12. 12 Although Coghe briefly notes taxation and administration, he does not examine these aspects in detail and completely overlooks road construction. My emphasis also differs from the dynamics of colonial discourses that promoted villagization as a means to stabilize “itinerant” agriculture. See Coghe, “Reordering,” 27, 36, 38.

13. 13 Daniel Okitundu, Dieudonné Mumba, and Desiré Tshala-Katumbay, “Konzo: Neurology of a Permanent and Non-Progressive Motor Neuron Disorder Associated with Food (Cassava) Toxicity,” in Neglected Tropical Diseases and Conditions of the Nervous System, ed. Marina Bentivoglio et al. (Springer, 2014), 328.

14. 14 E.g. ANGOP, “Defendida necessidade de se continuar estudos sobre as razões da paraparezia,” 8 December 2011; ANGOP, “Paraparezia espática possível doença que afecta Caungula,” 12 October 2010; ANGOP, “Cuanza Norte: Criança morre por alegado consumo de mandioca amarga,” 16 August 2016; ANGOP, “Síndrome febril preocupa comunidade na Lunda Norte,” Lusa, 27 May 2016. Cf. Amy Maxmen, “Poverty Plus a Poisonous Plant Blamed for Paralysis in Rural Africa,” NPR, 23 February 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/02/23/515819034/poverty-plus-a-poisonous-plant-blamed-for-paralysis-in-rural-africa.

15. 15 Paulin Mutwale Kapepula et al., “Traditional Foods as Putative Sources of Antioxidants with Health Benefits in Konzoi,” in Antioxidants in Foods and Its Applications, edited by Emad Shalaby and Ghada Azzam (InTechOpen, 2018), 117–36.

16. 16 Jane Guyer, An African Niche Economy (International African Institute, 1997).

17. 17 Teófilo Duarte, “A concentração populacional indígena e os Jesuítas,” O Mundo Português 9, no. 102 (1942): 249–59; no. 103: 305–14; nos. 104–5: 343–57; no. 106: 407–15. See also Beatrix Heintze, “Angola Under Portuguese Rule,” in Africae Monumenta, ed. Ana Paula Tavares and Catarina Madeira Santos (IICT, 2002).

18. 18 Aharon de Grassi, “Changing Paths and Histories: Mapping Pre-Colonial Connections in Africa,” Radical History Review, no. 131 (May 2018): 169–75; Beatrix Heintze and Achim von Oppen, eds., Angola on the Move (Lembeck, 2008).

19. 19 Whereas Couceiro had complained about lack of road maintenance in the Dembos, the building of the Ambriz–Quinzonve road was important. Tavares, Africae monumenta, 39; Henrique de Paiva Couceiro, Dois Anos de Governo (Edições Gama, 1907), 65.

20. 20 For an example of the military purposes, see December 1907 Instrucções para o encarregado da abertura d’uma arreteira entre Senze Itombe e os comandos dos Dembos e Lombige, in d’Almeida, João. Operações Militares Nos Dembos Em 1907 (Typographia Universal, 1909).

21. 21 E.g., José Martins dos Santos, Diligência ao Hollo e Ginga: Relatório, No. 2/2/15/4. Arquivo Histórico Militar (Lisbon, 1909).

22. 22 Fernando de UItra Machado, No Distrito da Lunda: A Ocupação de Cassanje (Imprensa Nacional, 1913).

23. 23 Machado, No Distrito, 139.

24. 24 Standard allegiance form Model A in Machado, No Distrito, 140.

25. 25 Sentença 1 January 1902, Boletim Oficial [hereafter BO] 5.

26. 26 Portaria 520-A, BO 18.

27. 27 1911 Regulamento das circumscripções civis da provincia de Angola, Art. 110, 1 August signed by Gov. Coelho. See also Portarias 377, BO 13, 28 March (Governor Macedo), and Portaria 378 of 1912 (BO 13).

28. 28 Angola’s 1911 Regulamento drew on Portaria 671-A, 12 Setembro 1908, Regulamento das Circunscrições Civis dos Distritos de Lourenço Marques e Inhambane, signed by Gov. Freire de Andrade. See also Freire de Andrade’s Relatórios sobre Moçambique. I’m indebted to insights from Barbara Direito, “Políticas colonais de terras em Moçambique” (PhD diss., University of Lisbon, 2013). See also Barbara Direito, Terra e colonialismo em Moçambique (Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2020).

29. 29 Portarias 377 and 378, BO 13, 1912.

30. 30 De Matos’s background is relevant here. His attention to spatial engineering was shaped by his background as a military engineer influenced by British practice in India while he was called there to Portuguese Goa to put down a tax revolt and to manage an agricultural land survey to revamp tax collection. De Matos diverged from the militarism of Gomes da Costa. See José Norton, Norton de Matos: Biografia (Bertrand, 2002). See also Norton de Matos, A Província de Angola (Edição de Maranus, 1926), Norton, Norton de Matos; Norton de Matos, Memórias e Trabalhos da Minha Vida (Editora Marítimo Colonial, 1944).

31. 31 Portaria 627, BO 20, 17 May 1912. See also Portaria 998, BO 31, 1 August 1912, and Jill Dias’s work on the subject.

32. 32 Portaria 520-A, BO 18.

33. 33 Quoted in de Matos, A Província de Angola, author’s translation.

34. 34 Aaron de Grassi, “Provisional Reconstructions: Geo-Histories of Infrastructure and Agrarian Configuration in Malanje, Angola” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2015).

35. 35 The 1911 reforms focused on decentralizing administrative powers to make local governance more efficient. The territory of Angola was reorganized into a system of districts, municipalities (concelhos), and counties (circunscrições). This reorganization aimed to improve the administrative oversight and control over different regions. 1913, Portaria 375, Regulamento das Circunscrições Administrativas da Província de Angola, Art. 15 §15, Art. 37 §7.

36. 36 Respectively, Art. 26 §5 and §22, Art. 58 §3, Art. 78.

37. 37 Decreto 1224, BO 45 of 1914.

38. 38 De Matos, A Província de Angola.

39. 39 Populações Indígenas de Angola (Coimbra University, 1918), 747–9.

40. 40 “Instruções provisórias a seguir no estudo e construção de estradas carreteiras,” §A.4, approved by Portaria Provincial 1064-A, 17 November 1915.

41. 41 Portaria 137, 16 December 1921, BO 51, reproduced in de Matos, A Província de Angola, 267–8).

42. 42 Decreto 237, Art. 48, BO, 16 February 1923. By Norton de Matos.

43. 43 The 1926 census cited by Diniz needs further research.

44. 44 This was also shaped by thinking by the 1930s on land restructuring in Portugal, particularly around emparcelamento and internal colonization. See Alfonso Álvarez and Fernando Baptista, Terra e Tecnologia (Celta Editora, 2005).

45. 45 Diploma Legislativo 237 Art. 16.

46. 46 Art. 53 §4 on administrators, and Art. 70 §3 on chefes de posto.

47. 47 See Decreto Lei 23229, of 15 November 1933, especially Art. 50 §11.

48. 48 The quotation is from a 1957 document to the UN, reproduced in Ronald Chilcote Emerging Nationalism in Portuguese Africa (Hoover Institution Press, 1972), 47. See Jeffrey Paige, Agrarian Revolution (Free Press, 1975), 242–3, for the coffee areas.

49. 49 Othello Fonseca, Provincia de Malanje, Circunscrição Administrativa do Duque de Bragança (1935), 161.

50. 50 In Fonseca, 162–7. Cf. Vasco Alves, Relatório Anual do Governador da Província de Malange (1935), 55. See “Instruction #10.”

51. 51 See Despacho 23-G, Ordem de Malange, n10, 1935, pp. 4–5.

52. 52 Quoted in Coghe, “Reordering,” 34; after pp. 19, 40–2 of J. G. de Lencastre, “Relatório do Governador da Província de Luanda, 1934–1935,” Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon, MU, ISAU 2246. Also, 1936 legislation mandated that administrative state farm depots supply trees for the new roads and concentrated villages, and failures to pay taxes could be made up with labour in constructing new villages, and new roads. See Regulamento das Granjas Administrativas, Diploma Legislativa 823, BO 22 Suplemento, 2 June 1936, art. 12, sec.1.c, and Portaria 1874, art. 13, BO 47, of 30 November 1936.

53. 53 See, e.g., J. Bossa, “O Regime de Concessão de Terras aos Indígenas nas Colónias de África,” Boletim Geral do Ultramar [hereafter BGU] 11, no. 117 (1935): 3–27. See also Conclusões das Teses Apresentadas ao Primeiro Congresso de Colonização (Imprensa Moderna, 1934).

54. 54 BGU 11, no. 127 (1935): 117–19.

55. 55 BGU 13, no. 139 (1937): 46.

56. 56 J. Bebiano, Angola: Alguns Problemas (Imprensa Nacional, 1938), 52; Mesquitela Lima, “A Concentração Populacional Indígena,” Mensário Administrativa, nos. 135–6 (1958): 21–5; “A Concentração Populacional Indígena: Subsídios Para um Estudo de Geografia Humana,” Actividades de Angola 1 (1959): 51–6.

57. 57 The proposed decree was entitled “Social and Economic Organization of Indigenous Populations.” For extensive details, views, votes, and discussion on the proposed regulation, see BGU 17, no. 191 (1941): 7–119.

58. 58 H. Cabrita, “Será Vantajoso Realizar o Aldeamento Indígena,’ BGU 23, no. 268 (1947): 72. See the text of the proposed decree “Social and Economic Organization of Indigenous Populations” in J. Machado, “Colonização Portuguesa em África,” Boletim Geral das Colónias 16, no. 178 (1940): 7–370. See Sampaio e Melo, “Organização Social e Económico das Populações Indígenas,” BGU 17, no. 191 (1941): 7–9.

59. 59 While Coghe rightly notes that the lofty “model village” projects were “only incompletely and unevenly realized,” my argument also differs qualitatively in going beyond such relatively few “model villages” that have garnered disproportionate academic attention. Instead, I emphasize that quotidian village concentration was widespread and dialectical. Here, detailed geographic analysis is crucial to assessing overall state power and its limits, in contrast to the anecdotal and metaphorical approach of Fredrick Cooper’s influential notion of a “gatekeeper state”—the difference has important implications for both theory and contemporary political stakes. See Aharon de Grassi, “Beyond Gatekeeper Spatial Metaphors of the State in Africa,” Third World Thematics 3, no. 3 (2018): 398–418.

60. 60 See also Bernardo Pinto da Cruz and Diogo Curto, “The Good and the Bad Concentration: Regedorias in Angola,” Portuguese Studies Review 25, no. 1 (2017): 205–31. By 1944, there were 4,216 vehicles (562 belonging to the state), quickly increasing by 1948 to 7,482 (958 state). Anuário Estatístico 1944–1947 (Imprensa Nacional, 1948), 373; Anuário Estatístico 1948 (Imprensa Nacional, 1950), 287.

61. 61 Each land claim was required to file a description of the area, bordering parcels, planned crops, and other claims.

62. 62 Aharon de Grassi and Jesse Salah Ovadia, “Trajectories of Large-Scale Land Acquisition Dynamics in Angola: Diversity, Histories, and Implications for the Political Economy of Development in Africa,” Land Use Policy 67 (2017): 115–25.

63. 63 For example, studies mention such processes for Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Lesotho, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. See Pourtier’s striking maps of village concentration in Gabon (contrasting prior to 1944 and after 1970), partly inspired my early digging into these issues in Angola. Roland Pourtier, Le Gabon, vol. 2 (Harmattan, 1989). See also, for example, Franklyn Kaloko, “African Rural Settlement Patterns,” Ekistics 50, no. 303 (1983): 459–62; Catherine Boone, Political Topographies of the African State (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 182; Jan Vansina, Being Colonized: The Kuba Experience in Rural Congo, 1880–1960 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 227, 236.

64. 64 For example, Coghe, Population Politics; Alexander Keese, Living with Ambiguity (Franz Steiner, 2007); Keese, Ethnicity and the Colonial State (Brill, 2015).

65. 65 Mustapha Benmaamar, Fatima Arroyo, and Nelson Eduardo, Angola Road Sector Public Expenditure Review (World Bank, 2020); Rede Angola, “Cada quilómetro de estrada custou USD 2,1 milhões,” Rede Angola, 16 March 2016, http://m.redeangola.info/cada-quilometro-de-estrada-custou-usd-21-milhoes/.

66. 66 Cf. Inge Tvedten, Gilson Lázaro, and Eyolf Jul-Larsen, Comparing Urban and Rural Poverty in Angola (Chr. Michelsen Institute, 2018).

67. 67 “Mapping the World to Help Aid Workers, with Weakly, Semi-Supervised Learning,” Meta AI, 9 April 2019, https://ai.facebook.com/blog/mapping-the-world-to-help-aid-workers-with-weakly-semi-supervised-learning/; Devin Coldewey, “Facebook’s AI Team Maps the Whole Population of Africa,” TechCrunch, 9 April 9 2019, https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/09/facebooks-ai-team-maps-out-where-everyone-in-africa-lives/; Benmaamar, Arroyo, and Eduardo, Angola Road; Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology (Polity, 2019).

68. 68 Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, “Post-War State-Making in the Angolan Periphery,” Politique africaine 130 (2013): 165–87.

69. 69 Boone’s analysis also tends to take geography as given, rather than seeing it as actively produced. Herbst is more glaring in this error, contending that African rulers encountered a “political geography they were forced to take as a given,” assuming Portugal had only “preposterous pretenses” and “the most limited abilities to project power.” Even Boone’s nuanced work, which seeks to explain the unevenness of state power, still takes “geographically uneven distributions of population” as fixed variables, rather than phenomena that need explaining. See Catherine Boone, “Territorial Politics and the Reach of the State: Unevenness by Design,” Revista de Ciencia Política 32, no. 3 (2012): 637, and Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa (Princeton University Press, 2000), 12, 76.

70. 70 See deGrassi “Provisional Reconstructions.”

71. 71 Mariana Candido and Eugénia Rodrigues, “African Women’s Access and Rights to Property in the Portuguese Empire,” African Economic History 43 (2015): 1–18; Mariana Candido, Wealth, Land, and Property (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

72. 72 Jane Guyer, “Book Review: The African Frontier,” Human Ecology 18, no. 1 (1990): 143–6.

73. 73 Kathleen A. Staudt, “Uncaptured or Unmotivated? Women and the Food Crisis in Africa,” Rural Sociology 52, no. 1 (1987): 37–55; Goran Hyden and Pauline Peters, “Debate on the ‘Economy of Affection’: Is It a Useful Tool for Gender Analysis?,” in Structural Adjustment and African Women Farmers, ed. Christina H. Gladwin (University of Florida Press, 1991), 303–35.