Doenças e desvios na independência angolana: higienismo, liamba, kaporroto e kazukuta

Abstract

This paper seeks to sketch a set of discourses that emerged in post-independent Angola which associated disease, crime and deviance in a diffuse hygienist framework within the modernizing national project undertaken by the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the organizations associated with it, especially the Organization of Angolan Women (OMA). In order to do this, this work reflects on a spectrum of negative moral values ​​about a set of non-productive uses of the body, such as the habitual use of marijuana (liamba) and alcohol (especially the artisanal brandy known as kaporroto), but also the attendance of bars and concerts, the taste for certain associated musical styles and adherence to certain ways of dressing and hairdressing, linked Black Atlantic culture boom, in addition to more fluid patterns of affective and sexual relationships. These moral reprimands were incorporated in the trope of kazukuta, the archetypal representation of the petty-bourgeois degradation characteristic of advanced industrial capitalism in the West. These negative moral valuations, which in some cases reached criminalization, emerged in parallel with symbolic and practical repression of certain aspects of “tradition” as a representation of “obscurantism” and “superstition”, in those spheres in which they disputed protagonism and legitimacy with the new, struggling state, namely redistributive private justice and local healing practices.