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This paper focuses on the study of burial practices, including biological anthropology and archaeothanatology, through archaeological excavations of two burial sites in the historical city of Mbanza Kongo, the former capital of the Kongo kingdom. Beyond some aspects related to funerary archaeology, the goal of this paper is to understand the chronology of excavated burials, the spatial distribution of graves and their architecture as well as burials methods. The main objective is also trying to understand how in the burials area, local worship practices alight themselves in a dogmatic and ideological environment influenced by Christianity. The paper aims to compare burials dynamism and practices between ancient’s christian and public cemeteries in Mbanza Kongo as well as those in the Northern provinces of the Kongo Kingdom. This medieval African society at the forefront of cultural blending, has experienced various forms of resilience including in the field of burials.

In Portugal, until recently, the official memory of the Empire has overlooked the violent pasts under the dictatorship and decolonization – colonial war, repatriation - less unifying for the national collective identity. The first part of this article focuses on the societal and academic shift resulting from the emergence of memorializing counter-narratives. The aim is to identify the players in these processes and illustrate how, in this new political relationship with the past, the memory of dictatorship can be imbricated with that of decolonization. Studying current research — historiography, postcolonial studies — also highlights divergences in Portuguese academia on the role of history and memory — postmemory in particular — in the interpretation of such past events. The second part looks back on two case studies with a heuristic potential to deconstruct the very homogeneous representations of the history of Portuguese colonization and decolonization of Angola, and decompartmentalize national accounts. This relates to two individuals whose family histories link them to the Portuguese colonial presence in Angola, involved in writing about the past through eye-witness accounts or scientific research: an exiled in France, grandson of a colonial administrator and son of an anticolonial and antifascist militant actions; and the daughter of an interracial couple of retornados undertaking research on Angola. These case studies also reveal the complexity of social, political and ethno-racial affiliations in this postcolonial post-imperial context and challenge the social hierarchization inherited from the past and the silence surrounding this heritage.

Research on East German racism before and after 1990 continues to focus on the experiences of the white majority. This paper focuses on the oral histories of Mozambican and Angolan worker-trainees who came to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) between 1978-1990 to work, live, and love, and those of the mixed-race children who emerged from their relationships to East German women. The racial knowledge pervading social interactions, state interests, and socialist notions of solidarity, limited the ability of the workers to freely live in mixed-race relationships, but never fully determined their experiences. Instead, Mozambican and Angolan worker-trainees exerted some degree of agency, pursued individual agendas, and resisted their racially constructed positions, in part through engaging in mixed-race relationships. While their children experienced racialised stereotypes much earlier in their biographies, they too were able to challenge and resist East German racist knowledge. Their strategies often took them on journeys searching for their Mozambican parent and of challenging close East German family members. Together, the oral histories of both generations before and after 1990 illuminate the complex ways in which racist knowledge operates and bring up new questions and challenges to existing research on racism in (East) Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A pesquisa procura analisar o Poder Local em Angola, país situado na África Sub-saariana, e as instituições que o integram, reconhecidas explicitamente na Constitução da República de Angola de 2010. Entretanto, o Poder Local e as instituições descentralizadas e participativas que o compõem necessitam muito mais do que o seu reconhecimento formal. É preciso desenvolver instituições políticas participativas. E esse é o grande desafio da governação local democrática angolana neste século XXI.

In underdeveloped countries in Asia and Africa, non-effective post-harvest technologies and sometimes ideal environmental conditions for development of pests like insects, fungi, rodents and birds, can lead to damage of both raw or processed foods. Losses can achieve considerable proportions in dried vegetables used as food products, particularly in underdeveloped countries where food security problems are a daily basis routine. The major goal of the present study was the identification of insects and fungi associated with maize under local storage conditions in the Angola provinces of de Benguela, Bié, Cuando Cubango, Cuanza sul, Huambo, Huíla, Luanda, Malange and Namibe. A wide range of storage methods for cereals were sampled, from small containers of peasants and small farmers up to the large metal containers used by large agricultural companies and Estates. The achieved results will contribute for food security improvement in Angola and for the maintenance and preservation of good and healthy seeds at the traditional farmers’ community level. The insect pests registered from the studied samples were Cryptolestes ferrugineus, Gnatocerus maxillosus, Liposcelis bostrychophila, Oryzaephilus surinamensis, Rhyzopertha dominica, Sitophilus zeamais, Sitotroga cerealella and Tribolium castaneum. The species Prostephanus truncatus was not found in the studied samples. Fungi in the genus Aspergillus, Fusarium and Penicillium were presented at a high incidence in all samples studied, although the relative abundance of different fungi species varied with the sample location.

This article engages with refugee studies on the one hand, and the history of decolonization on the other. Looking at the arrival of over 500,000 migrants from Angola and Mozambique in main-land Portugal in the years around 1975, it analyzes contemporary disagreements about the cate-gorization of these migrants as either “returnees" or “refugees." While these disagreements helped bring about the emergence of a post-imperial nation, I argue that refugee studies would benefit from scrutinizing the ways in which the concept “refugee" is used by governments, migrant communities, and international bodies like the UNHCR to make claims. This does not mean abandoning “refugee" as an analytical tool; rather, we ought to refine our understanding of it as a relational category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay will consider some of the main problems related to the application of the Literary Canon to African Literatures in Portuguese Language and will focus on the particular case of the debate on the novel Yaka, written by Pepetela. Cosmological and political differences from Europe, social identity and ethnical variety are the main fields which need to be explored, aiming to go through the cultural contrasts that stand on the core of Africa and to allow the European reader to have the tools to understand the message of the written text properly. A short presentation of the Angolan Literature, with its linguistic plurality, will show how it has been used as a mirror of society and as a vehicle of the freedom utopias which held to the composition of a new nation after Independence: from Cordeiro da Matta to Raul David, from Luandino Vieira to Pepetela. The considerations on the case of Yaka – and on the observation of the Angolan Literary Critic Luís Kandjimbo on the novel and its supposed “coloniality” -, will be useful tools to disclose the possible distortions of the message of literary works. Kandjimbo appeals to the ontological specificity of the Angolan literary production and to its extended oral component to propose an alternative Canon to the European one, that on his own opinion uses the platonic heritage to create a totalitarian education on the basis on social reproduction. He opposes the model of a “cultural reproduction”, legitimated by the endogenous character of Angolan literature. Following this model, the Canon shall include all the writers (black, white and mixed ones) representing intrinsic factors and features historically related to the Angolan population and community. This argument, satisfactory on its essence, is then forcedly applied to the novel object of our interest: charged with the supposed demystification of Mutu-ya-Kevela, historical personality well-known for the struggle against colonialism, Yaka is presented as alien to real Angola. An attentive analysis of the singular narrative focus of the text will soon demonstrate the strong satirical purpose of the writer in representing the deep dissatisfaction of the white component of the country, no more recognized as Portuguese by the central authority, but still dealing with the complications related to define themselves as Angolan. We are lead to think that the condemnation of Kandjimbo (a brilliant critic who demonstrates in different occasions to know how to deal with complex logical and philosophical matters) is related to ideological or political issues. Several relevant questions arise from this very example. As the diffusion of art isn’t, nowadays, neither limited to a single country nor to a specific continent, are the readers able to grasp the deepest meaning of every single novel? Can we detect the eventual deformations on the perception of each identity concept?

In this article, the oldest Bantu dictionary hitherto known is explored, that is the Vocabularium Latinum, Hispanicum, e Congense, handed down to us through a manuscript from 1652 by the Flemish Capuchin Joris van Gheel, missionary in the Kongo (present-day north-western Angola and the southern part of the Lower Congo Province of the DRC). The manuscript was heavily reworked by the Belgian Jesuits Joseph van Wing and Constant Penders, and published in 1928. Both works are currently being digitized, linked and added to an interlingual and multimedia database that revolves around Kikongo and the early history of the Kongo kingdom. In Sections 1 and 2 the origins of Bantu lexicography in general and of Kikongo metalexicography in particular are revisited. Sections 3 and 4 are devoted to a study of Van Gheel's manuscript and an analysis of Van Wing and Penders' rework. In Sections 5 and 6 translation equivalence and lexicographical structure in both dictionaries are scrutinized and compared. In Section 7, finally, all the material is brought together.

No presente artigo desenvolver-se-á uma análise sobre o lugar desempenhado por Portugal na formação escolar superior de estudantes angolanos, procurando dar conta dos aspectos simbólicos, afectivos, culturais e económicos subjacentes a essa escolha. A análise incidirá, ainda, sobre uma caracterização sociológica das trajectórias educacionais e socioeconómicas das suas famílias, e destas por relação com a estrutura social angolana em situação de mudança. Procurará ainda cruzar a trajectória dessas famílias e o valor atribuído ao capital escolar com a trajectória de Angola e o investimento no ensino, desde o período da independência. Esta caracterização, quer dos estudantes quer das famílias, far-se-á igualmente por relação com outras situações sociais, por esses grupos entendidas como "outras". Nesta última abordagem, procurar-se-á analisar a forma como esses estudantes representam as "elites no poder" e, ainda, como essa representação interfere nas suas expectativas em relação ao futuro, nomeadamente no que se refere ao retorno ao seu país.The author analyses Angolan students' higher education while studying in Portugal, by taking into account the symbolic, affective, cultural and economic aspects influencing the choice of studying that country. The analysis will also characterize educational and socio-economic routes defined by the students' families, as well as their relations to the current social changes taking place in Angola. One of these changes is the increased value given to higher education, specifically after independence. The national intervention in this area is related to the families' investment in a dialectic discussion between short-term individual actions and long-term structural changes. It is hypothesized that the value given to education depends on individual socio-economic and political positions. This idea is reinforced by the analysis of the way students interviewed conceive other groups of students who chose other countries for higher education, as well as the way they see themselves in relation to the current Angolan elite. Finally we discuss how they see their future and their expectations concerning their return to Angola, after obtaining their diploma.

Putting people of non-European descent commercially on public display was a standard practice throughout the 19th century. This study concentrates on a distinct period of Austrian history in the first half of this epoque – the Vormärz – and on the capital city, Vienna. In researching ten different human exhibitions, it turns out that typical elements of the later „Völkerschauen“ were nascent already in that early phase. Furthermore, an impact of censorship on presentations and representations of „exotic“ persons has to be considered. Thirdly it is argued that in commenting on these exhibitions, natural science played a big role in articulating cultural prejudices and shaping them systematically into pre-Darwin theories of race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the first Jesuit missionaries arrived in Luanda in 1559 there was great conflict in the region between the king of Congo, Diogo-Ier, and the Ngola who sought emancipation from Congolese control. Francisco de Gouveia was part of a Portoguese embassy composed of another Jesuit priest, two brothers and the future governor of the colony of Angola, Paulo Dias de Novais. The four missionaries accompanied the ambassador and left diverse evidence of this episode of relations with the Ngola. António Mendes, one of the two brothers, left two letters. These provided a detailed description of the banquet organized by the Ngola in 1559 for the reception of the Portuguese ambassador. From the placement of the guests to the sharing of palm wine, António Mendes provided precious information on the history of the royal feasts of Ndongo at the end of the 16th century. In this article, I will present a comparative table of two documents, revealing their distortions and inaccuracies. I first shed light on the causes of contradictions between written documents sent to the same individuals only a few months apart. This first methodological exercise enables me to draw broader conclusions concerning the fragmentary knowledge associated with colonial sources in early Angola. Then, based on a comparison of these documents with later accounts of the dietary habits of the Mbundu and the description of the Ngola banquets, I present certain features of the feasts of the mbundu elite court until the definitive military conquest of the Ndongo by the Portuguese in 1671.

The article discusses the impact of the Portuguese colonial empire, including Angola and Mozambique, its disintegration after 1974, and the reasons for the lack of public debate about colonialism. The author claims that the Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar denied basic rights to the indigenous populations, blocked reforms using a policy of settlement, and camouflaged suppression by appointing persons with a relatively liberal outlook to important posts in the administration of the colonies. Another factor for the disappearance of colonialism from public discourse in Portugal is the relatively conflict-free re-integration of Portuguese settlers into their native country.

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After the long civil war, when waiting for substantive reconstruction aid proved futile, the Angolan government resorted to a comprehensive credit and cooperation agreement with China in 2004. Under this deal, rebuilding is financed by an initial oil-backed loan of 2.4 billion U.S. dollars repayable in 17 years and with an unbeatable interest rate of 1.5 percent. A »topping up« of two billion U.S. dollars was agreed in 2006 when Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao visited Angola in June 2006. Through this new cooperation Angola has risen to become the largest Chinese trading partner in Africa, with a volume of 9.3 billion U.S. dollars in 2006 (2005: 6.95 billion US dollars), even overtaking South Africa. In May of 2006 the southwest African country had already become China's largest supplier of crude, surpassing Saudi Arabia. At the same time, China overtook the U.S. as the largest buyer of Angolan oil. With the help of the oil-backed loans, huge reconstruction projects are being implemented, such as a new international airport for Luanda, a new production and broadcasting center for the state Television TVA, as well as the coastal North-South Highway between Lobito and Luanda. China is also a partner in the projected second Angolan refinery to be constructed in Lobito. Furthermore, the money is being put into the ailing electricity network of the overcrowded capital Luanda, several regional hospitals and schools in all provinces. A huge low cost housing project involving the construction of several satellite cities is to be implemented in all provinces. The Angolan Government hails the cooperation with China as the only way to quickly re-launch the essential infrastructure which is so important for the revival of the war-torn Angolan economy. The short implementation time for most of the projects will surely also help to improve the Government's image before the upcoming general elections projected for 2008 and 2009. This help comes at a crucial time, and apparently without strings attached. China is also seen as a new alternative to the West in international relations, creating a new balance with more weight for developing countries On China's side, the immediate economic interest is to secure the energy supply for the booming Chinese economy Apart from that, the deal is very profitable as China can provide its state firms with formidable projects, export some of its redundant manpower as well as goods and machinery to Angola. Most of the construction work is being carried out by Chinese firms and their imported workers, due to a clause stating that 70 percent of tenders will go to Chinese firms, with 30 percent going to Angolan firms. At the same time, it secures oil for some years to come, and at beneficial terms. While the immediate advantages for both sides are more than apparent, the medium-to long-term consequences of such a massive Chinese involvement in Angola are less clear. International critics fear first and foremost that this engagement will slow down efforts aimed at bringing about more transparency and economic reform. Apart from that there has been little discussion on the insertion of post-war Angola into the global economy. How will it be possible to revive and diversify local industry - outside of oil and diamond production - in order to compete internationally? In reality, the structure of trade relations with China will be almost identical to relations with the West, with Angola exporting natural resources and importing all kinds of consumer goods. Furthermore, there is no strong impulse for the local economy as Angolan firms and the national workforce are only marginally involved in the projects. Thus job creation and know-how transfer are minimal. Some also fear that there is not enough capacity on the Angolan side to effectively manage and monitor the projects, control their quality, and continuously maintain the infrastructure.… [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is aimed at establishing the linguistic position of Dhimba in relation to Hereto and Ndonga. Dhimba speakers (about 24000 in number) reside in the north-western comer of Owamboland. especially in Otjovanatjie and Etoto and partly in the north-eastern comer of Kaokoland (Ehombo) but also in scaterred communities in urban quarters of Opuwo, Okangwati and Ondangwa. In the opinion of the Dhimba-speakers, Dhimba constitutes a Hereto dialect. According to the linguistics findings of the missionaries in the 19th century no dialect differentiation among Herero-speakers could be observed (Kolbe 1883:ix). However handwritten notes taken by O. Dempwolff in 1904/5 expose some outstanding distinctive features of the Mbanderu dialect at that time (Ohly 1988:18ff). At present most of these dialectal contrast features have vanished due to the high social mobility among Herero-speakers and standarisation processes.

The article discusses the acceptance by the Portuguese government representative, Armando de Paula Coelho, of a report on forced labor in Portuguese Africa (Angola), despite "some mistakes." De Paula Coehlo said the report's recommendations would be implemented without difficulty in improving working conditions. The representative of Ghana, whose complaint initiated the inquiry, praised the report.

The article discusses the submission of a final report by a committee investigating a complaint by Ghana of forced labor in Portuguese Africa. The report concluded that forced labor had largely ceased but recommended an investigation of road building and in particular practices at the Cassequel Sugar Plantations in Angola.

In 225 children (135 boys, 90 girls) suffering from clinical relevant urinary tract infection the bacterial spectrum and resistance behaviour to routinely used antibiotics were evaluated. In 65.4% of the patients a significant bacteriuria was found: E. coli (34.6%), proteus (22.3%), klebsiella (14.6%), citrobacter (9.2%), enterobacter (5.4%) and pseudomonas (5.4%). In testing a high resistance of bacterias to trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazol, ampicillin, and gentamycin was found, whereas good susceptibility was found to nitrofurantoin and nalidixin acid.