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Precarity in Angolan diamond mining towns, 1920–2014: tracing agency of the state, mining companies and urban households

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 March 2018

Cristina Udelsmann Rodrigues  and
Deborah Fahy Bryceson
Cristina Udelsmann Rodrigues*
Affiliation:
Nordic Africa Institute, PO Box 1703, 75147 Uppsala, Sweden
Deborah Fahy Bryceson*
Affiliation:
Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, 15a George Square, Edinburgh, UK
*
Email: cristina.udelsmann.rodrigues@nai.uu.se
Email: dfbryceson@bryceson.net
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Abstract

After nearly 30 years of civil war, Angola gained peace in 2002. The country's diamond and oil wealth affords the national government the means to pursue economic reconstruction and urban development. However, in the diamond-producing region of Lunda Sul, where intense fighting between MPLA and UNITA forces was waged, the legacy of war lingers on in the form of livelihood uncertainty and uneven access to the benefits of the state's urban development programmes. There are three main interactive agents of urban change: the Angolan state, the mining corporations, and not least urban residents. The period has been one of shifting alignments of responsibility for urban housing, livelihoods and welfare provisioning. Beyond the pressures of post-war adjustment, the wider context of global capital investment and labour market restructuring has introduced a new surge of corporate mining investment and differentiated patterns of prosperity and precarity in Lunda Sul.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 113 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

This article relies on Angolan field data collected under the auspices of the Urbanisation and Poverty in Mining Africa (UPIMA) research programme at the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow. We are grateful for funding from the UK's Department for International Development (DfID) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) RES-167-25-0488.

References

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