Book Review: Bernardo Pinto da Cruz (ed.), (Des)Controlo em Luanda: Urbanismo, Polícia e Lazer nos Musseques do Império [(Dis)control in Luanda: Urbanism, Police and Leisure in the Musseques of the Empire]

Known locally as musseques, the slums located in the outskirts of Luanda, the capital of Angola, were important foci of Portuguese colonial policy, especially during the war period that preceded the fall of Salazar and Caetano’s regime (1961–1974). Nonetheless, much remains unknown in relation to their genesis and how everyday life was organized in these urban areas marked by poverty, insalubrity, the threat of eradication, and police terror. How did the organization and execution of Portuguese colonial policy, namely in the dimensions referring to the surveillance, control, and repression of poor native populations, contribute to shaping the development of this large African city and its slums? On what logics were they founded? And what implications did urban policies and urban initiatives, and the strategies for disciplining and controlling local culture and leisure, have on the formation of the cultural, associative, and political dispositions and practices of their populations in the final stage of the Portuguese colonial empire? Through research carried out on these subjects by six social scientists from Portugal and Brazil, these are the main questions this book wishes to answer. The analyses contained in this book are based on the evidence of the “dualism” characteristic of Luanda, which opposed the “poor,” “Black,” and peripheral musseques to the city’s “Downtown,” the center of White colonial power in Angola. This was unquestionably a physical dualism, but also a dualism that became deeply rooted in the minds and public representations that were then made of social life in the Angolan capital. Fueled by the racism that divided Luanda’s society from top to bottom, this dualism translated into a “punitive geography” of which the musseques were the main expression: inevitably presented by the colonial power and by dominant, everyday portrayals as contexts of “vagrancy” and “criminality,” as well as loci of dissent and revolt, if not “nests of terrorists.” Since this was the time of the rise and consolidation of liberation movements in the country, the musseques were the frequent targets of racial violence, police terror, and indiscriminate punishment. All chapters in this book attest to the ubiquity of this dualism and seek to specify both the factors of its (re)production and its social and political implications. In doing so, they denounce the lusotropicalist representations of colonial cities as flourishing and diverse urban contexts, supposedly characterized by ethno-racial imbrication and by the cultural fluidity typical of a “soft colonialism.” At the same time, the book contributes to complicating the—sometimes miserabilist, sometimes populist—visions of life in the slums, and the relationships (actually quite complex) that their residents established with other social agents, with the colonial power or with liberation movements. Also, these chapters 1129621 CTYXXX10.1177/15356841221129621City & CommunityBook Reviews book-review2022