PaperCONFERENCE‘Control and navigation: people searching to reach their goals in an ever more (in)flexible world’

‘Communication in times of war and peace: the case of Southeast Angola’Inge Brinkman

AbstractTechnologies are often presented as neutral, universal and abstract things: after the ‘introduction’ of a specific technology it is described as having an ‘impact’ on society. But technologies only acquire their meaning in the light of the history and culture of a society.

An example of this can be found in the association between peace and transport/communication for many south-east Angolans living in Rundu, Namibia. Shortly after peace accords were signed in Angola in 2002, road traffic became possible again and the mobile phone was introduced, leading to new forms of contact between south-east Angolans and Angolan migrants in Rundu.

Obviously the idea of peace was not included when designers created the mobile phone, and in this sense the meaning attached to mobile telephony by south-East Angolans is unexpected. In the paper it is argued that it is more fruitful to view the relations between technology and society in terms of such embedded interactive mutual shaping, rather than any assumed neutral, universal or abstract ‘impact’.

IntroductionTechnologies are often presented as neutral, universal and abstract ‘things’. After the ‘introduction’ of a specific technology it is described as having an ‘impact’ on society.

Obviously, a newly introduced technology may lead to changes in a given society. The problem with the ‘effects’-approach is that it suggests that ‘the technology’ in question is the determining factor. People using the technology are treated as recipients or passive consumers. Sometimes it is even assumed that a given technology will have the same ‘effect’ everywhere in the world. Such an approach can be labeled technological determinism.

From the very start of this programme, we questioned this approach. Our aim was to study new ICT, social hierarchies and mobility in so-called marginal regions in Africa. Yet instead of reasoning from a one-way direction and speaking of ‘the impact’ of new ICT in Africa, we attempted to study the relationship between society and technology as ‘interactive’, technologies and societies mutually shaping each other. Technologies may transform society, but at the same time, a technology is also changed by society. Technologies only acquire their meaning in the light of the history and culture of a society.

In this process, technologies become embedded in a history of earlier technologies of existing socio-political hierarchies, of developments in communication patterns, of changes in mobility, transport, infrastructure,, in the history of mass media at the national level, or at the regional level: in short: a technology becomes embedded.

People are not at all ‘passive recipients’ of technologies, far from it, people do things with technologies. So a technology is something we do, in that sense not a ‘thing’, but an action. End-users are not recipients, they are also producers: they make the technology. This process, whereby a technology is shaped by its users, we call the process of ‘appropriation’: people make technology ‘their own’.

In the programme proposal we referred to: ‘social transformations being occasioned by the introduction of new ICTs, the processes of local appropriation of new ICTs and the ways in which new ICTs relate to older forms of communication technology’.

The interactive way of looking at the relationship between society and technology is, as such, not a new approach. There exists, for example, the approach called: Social Construction of Technology (SCOT). However, where it concerns Africa, the ‘impact’ approach is far more influential, so we still consider it important to stress the interactive approach and emphasise that the ‘effects’ or the ‘impact’ of a technology on society is only one side of the story; it is also important to see what effects and impact society has on a technology: what becomes of a technology when it is introduced in Africa.

Another issue is, while SCOT is an accepted approach and technological determinism is by and large rejected, in much of the literature this is still not taken to its conclusions. If technology not only has an effect on society, but society also on technology and if technology does not only does things with people, but rather people do things with technology,1 it follows that we cannot take the technology as our point of departure. We must take ‘people’ and their culture and history as our point of departure.

This is precisely what the programme envisaged. The aim was to study at a micro-level, through life-histories what the relationship was between people and communication technologies, thereby not focusing on what technologies do to people, but how people make technologies fit into their lives. Our claims are based in small-scale empirical research, trying to understand ‘structural change’ from a ‘bottom-up’ perspective, thereby stressing ‘agency’ of ‘small’ people attempting to cope with ‘big’ structures.2

This always means, in my view, that generalizations are not possible. Comparison is possible, but not generalizations: it is always the specificities and the particularities of a case that will provide the argument. So it is not because I want to be anecdotal that we will discuss the example new ICT as used by people from southeast Angola living in Rundu, Namibia [1]. It is because in my view it is the only way.

It follows that we need to situate these developments in the realm of new ICT in history, so we need to have at least a basic understanding of the history of this region. That is not an introduction, but belongs to the argument, to the body of the text that I am presenting.

Mobility and news[2] South-east Angola is a land of sand and rivers, by the Portuguese colonials called: ‘the lands at the end of the earth’, regarded as one of the most remotest areas of the country. While the Portuguese had started some colonies at the coast of Angola in the 15 th century already, the south-east never really became colonised: some parts remained exempted from taxation throughout the colonial era, because the costs to collect them were higher than the revenues (very rare for a colonial order). A few administrative posts were built, locally called mbongi (town), but nothing much was done in the realm of colonial rule and administration, road construction, education, health services, etc.

The south-east also remained a land ‘without missionaries’: also exceptional for 20 th

century non-Islamic Africa. In contrast to other parts of Angola then, there was neither development of a local educated elite nor of Christianity during the colonial era.

1 de Laet, Marianne and Annemarie Mol, ‚The Zimbabwe bush pump: mechanics of a fluid technology’, Social Studies of Science 30, 2 (2000) pp. 225-263.2 Cf: John Lonsdale, ‘Agency in tight corners: narrative and initiative in African history’, Journal of African Cultural Studies 13, 1 (2000) pp. 5-16.

The south-east of Angola was a marginalised area: politically, economically, socially the region was considered unimportant and backward. Often it was also considered isolated: yet as a matter of fact marginalisation and isolation formed a paradox. The infrastructure and transport facilities were extremely limited, but at the same time many people from the region travelled widely in search of work and food, not only within the region, or within Angola, but also to Zambia (n-Rhod), Namibia (South-West Afr), and South-Africa. Portuguese was not widely spoken, if a European tongue was known at all it was rather English or Afrikaans. Travelling was in any case crucial for social existence: the idea to have one fixed abode was quite foreign to the inhabitants. People might move the entire village, if there was a quarrel for example, people would stay with other groups of relatives (sons would leave their mother’ place at a certain age to live with their MB, brides would go to live at the village of their husband, but frequently visit their parents, etc, etc), people would visit each other regularly in any case and there was a rotary slash-and-burn form of agriculture, whereby couples tend to stay for days on their field in make-shift huts. These intricate visiting patterns also formed the source of information, it was through these networks that news spread, rumours were told, new ideas and new goods entered, etc. [3 nzango]

Mobility and knowledge were (and are) strongly interlinked: knowledge was at once a prerequisite for travel and stemmed from it. Returning from a journey, people were obliged to sit down and explain their experiences in recitation. The dissemination of knowledge, the process of teaching and learning was strongly linked to travel. Visitors, telling about foreign lands and cultures, could be a source of knowledge; as the proverb says: ‘You came to teach knowledge in this country’. The recitations told by people returning from a journey, likewise could increase knowledge in the community: ‘You did not know that there were trees on the other side of the river, it is because I the elder told you’.

War[4] In 1966 guerrillas from MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola) and some UNITA (União Nacional para a Indepêndencia Total de Angola) entered the region through newly independent Zambia. Unita soon retreated to a small area North of Cuando Cubango (Cuando CUbango roughly being the District, later province we are discussing), and a long guerrilla war started between the MPLA guerrillas and the Portuguese army. There was basically nothing to fight for, so both parties took to gathering as many people as they could in their sphere of influence. For the MPLA, this were camps in ‘the bush’; for the Portuguese this was formed by the local administrative centres + newly set up concentrated villages, surrounded by watchtowers and barbed wire. [5: port camp] Quite some local people tried to flee, to Zambia and to Namibia, then still called south-west Africa. Travelling became increasing difficult and contact between groups of people – those in the bush, those in town and those who had fled – constituted ever more of a problem.

Now initially, families tended to be together, as they were abducted (by the MPLA or the Portuguese) or fled abroad together. Already at this stage, it was a problem, as the people in the region are characterized by a high degree of mobility, so those who were absent from their village of residence became separated from their people, visitors were taken along with the other captives, etc. But problems grew as the Portuguese army stepped up their actions in the bush: people sometimes fled in panic – some were killed, some managed to escape either with the MPLA or crossing the border independently and yet others were taken to town by the Portuguese forces. Families were split.

The nationalist war stopped in 1974, after a coup in Portugal and in 1975 Angola became independent. Many people returned to the region, families were re-united and people tried to return to village life. But even before independence fighting started again, between the various nationalist movements of Angola and a long war ensued and the south-east of angola

was in the frontline. The government party MPLA held the regional towns, while the rebel group UNITA stuck to the bush. There were some intervals, notably in 1992 when elections were held, but we can say that this region has known war from 1966 to 2002. In 2002, the longtime leader of UNITA, Jonas SAvimbi was killed in combat and peace accords were signed by both parties.

In 1996 and 1997 and on subsequent visits, I conducted interviews with people from south-east Angola resident in Rundu, Namibia. And I consulted the archives of the Portuguese secret police, housed in Lisbon. On the basis of this I wrote a book on the history of the nationalist war (between 1966 and 1974) as a history of idea: what had people thought about war, mobility and legitimacy before Angolan independence?3

The question now of course is: what do people think now, now that there is peace, about these issues of mobility and legitimacy?

Shortly after the peace accords were signed in Angola in 2002, road traffic became possible again and the mobile phone was introduced. These two factors were important in new patterns of contact between south-east Angolans and Angolan migrants in Rundu.

Repatriation?After the establishment pf peace in Angola, the Namibian government tried to set up a repatriation programme: the Angolan refugees in the country were required to register and to answer questions about ‘their origin, their home.’

For formal refugees residing in UN refugee camps (such as Osire) the situation was already complex. Voluntary repatriation was rather limited: soon after repatriation started the organizations involved realized that Angolans living in Namibia were not strongly inclined towards returning to Angola on a permanent basis. The UNHCR representative Lawrence Mbangson explained: ‘Some said they have no relatives or property in Angola. Namibia is home to them and Angola is ‘strange’.4 Other reasons cited were children schooling in Namibia, marriage with a Namibian spouse, insecurity in Angola and even having bought a right-hand drive car (Angola is LHD).5 Even now, Angolans registered in Namibia still have the refugee status, only planned to be lifted in June 2012. All the same, the Namibian government is adamant the Angolans should ‘return’: ‘Home is always home. They have to go back home,’ the same Lawrence Mbangson insisted.6 The Namibian government is not eager to see the Angolan immigrants integrate into Namibian society.

[6] For illegal immigrants – as many people of Angolan background in Rundu are – matters are even less secure. During the war there were regular round-ups carried out by the Namibian police by which people without documents were dropped over the border. People had no papers, and so access to work, land, education, etc was difficult: although people felt strong ties with Angola, a Namibian ID was certainly valued because of this.7 [7: Vihemba]

3 Brinkman, Inge, ,„A war for people.’ Civilians, mobility, and legitimacy in south-east Angola during the MPLA’s war for independence (Rüdiger Köppe Verlag: Cologne 2005).4 Selma Ikela, ‘Cassation clause for Angolan refugees extended’, Namibian Sun (31 January 2012) http://www.namibiansun.com/content/national-news/cessation-clause-for-angolan-refugees-extended 5 Ibid; Magreth Nunuhe, ‘Namibia: Angolan refugees to lose status’, New Era (25 March 2011) http://www.newera.com.na/article.php?articleid=37988 6 Catherine Sasman, ‘Namibia: Angolan refugees urged to go home’, AllAfrica.com (29 October 2010) http://allafrica.com/stories/201010290963.html ; also: Magreth Nunuhe, ‘Namibia: Angolan refugees want to stay’, New Era (12 April 2011) http://www.newera.com.na/article.php?articleid=38253 7 Bakewell, Oliver, 'The Meaning and Use of Identity Papers: handheld and heartfelt nationality in the borderlands of North-West Zambia', (IMI Working Paper 5. International Migration Institute, Oxford 2007).

Although the Namibian government wishes to see all illegal immigrants return to Angola, as a matter of fact ever more Angolans illegally cross the border and the Namibian government does not have the means to stop this. Some of these people only stay for some hours to go shopping in Rundu’s supermarkets, others come to stay for several weeks to get medical treatment, while yet others stay for years on end to look for work or for education.

The whole idea of ‘repatriation’ seems strange in the eyes of many Angolan immigrants.

For those people of Angolan descent who had been born in Namibia and also for many of those who had moved from Angola as a child, it was difficult to see themselves as returning ‘home’. As the war had started in the 1960s, some of these people were already in their thirties. They had gone to school in Rundu, some had married locally, their social network was Namibian (or consisted entirely of Angolans in a similar position), their children were schooling in Namibia. They felt they were Namibian. They had never been in Angola, had never known anybody there and only associated it with war, hunger, violence and crime. They fear Angola and cannot imagine anyone even wants to visit the country.8 These people usually tried to stick to their refugee network or their relations in the host community and hardly looked for people in Angola, when contact became possible again. Yet also for those who had moved to Namibia as an adult and so have memories of Angola, repatriation in classical sense was not regarded as logical; their country had changed beyond recognition. There is a saying in the region: ‘the country is the people’, so if the people have left, the country is no longer there. These people feel that there is no country to return to. The people were no longer there, other people had been brought in, relatives lived spread over a wide territory. When I asked a woman: ‘Have matters become different now with the peace?’, she replied: ‘Yes, because so many relatives have died. It will never be the same again.’9

Many of the elderly immigrants referred to Angola in nostalgic terms, but as the people had moved, the country had vanished and repatriation made no sense. Furthermore returning without any further insurances about safety, job opportunities, educational and health facilities was not regarded as a viable option. These people hardly see moving back to Angola as an option: ‘their people’ – their children, grandchildren – reside in Namibia. Yet, they are in general very keen on reinvesting in the traditional kin relations and actively seek to re-establish contact with their relatives in Angola, through letters, calls and visits.

Clearly then, with peace in Angola, the issue of ‘Angolanness’ becomes even more pertinent, complex and differentiated. Confronted with this, the issue of ‘Namibianness’ and other possible national belongings are also reconsidered.

Despite the attempts, the Namibian government has not insisted strongly on the return of illegal Angolan immigrants. As one Angolan man explained: ‘So the government said: we cannot expect those people to go back. If they want to yes, but we cannot force them. Because how can they get used to Angola again after all this time? Especially since nothing is there and also all their people are here.’10

Travel and connection[8 Vaniakangombe] As indicated, Angolan immigrants do reconsider their ties with Angola and many invest in the relationships with long-lost relatives. The possibility to travel and to communicate forms the basic ingredient of peace, according to many. After the peace accords,

8 Int9.9 Int 14.10 Abel from Edumed, Rundu, Nov 2012

travelling in Angola became ever less dangerous and – as gradually the roads were demined and rebuilt – the speed with which one could travel in Angola increased. In 10 years it was reduced by half. This was regarded as a crucial development: that there was an option in terms of mobility. When asked about the meaning of peace most informants mentioned the possibility to travel again. In general many interviewees mentioned ‘freedom’ as a characteristic of peace: people could now ‘do as they pleased’, a woman said. Another woman said: ‘to have peace is to communicate, to move freely, to visit each other.’

The mobile phone plays an important role in this. During the war the search for relatives was mainly done through the Red Cross message services, this service has stopped. But the circulation of mobile phone numbers greatly helps in re-establishing family connections. In many families, the first renewed contact between family members, who sometimes had not heard from each others for a decades, was firstly established through the delivery of a mobile phone number. In rundu the network is operating rather efficiently, whereas in southeast Angola many places still have no network, it being limited to the regional centres and there frequent problems, with the network, with electricity, and of course, on top there is the issue of credit (international calls are expensive), but still: people insist that peace, mobility and the mobile phone belong to the same set of events in their lives. [9: although this family does not even have a mobile phone. Sa, NiaYona]

Mass media and private media?When the telephone was designed, the idea was to have the telephone operate as a mass medium: one was expected to phone in for information (about the weather or whatever). But soon the telephone became a personal and private means of communication and people used it predominantly for calling their personal family and friends, not for public services.11

There is by now rather some literature on the relations between bourgeois society in 19th century Europe and the development of a separate public and private sphere. This has resulted in the literature in a distinction between private media for personal use and mass media.

More research is needed on this idea, but from the interviews I gather that by people from southeast Angola no such distinction is made. For example, the account that a visitor offers upon arrival might include anything on the place where he/she comes from, ranging from death, funeral, wedding, birth, disease, resettlement, political changes, work opportunities and conditions, social relations, agricultural changes, new plots, marital problems, judiciary cases, crimes, witchcraft cases, etc. After this the visitor would tell the story of the journey; perhaps including details of the route followed, the state of the road, the means of transport used, financial aspects, the length of the journey, problems met underway, other travelers, the places where the traveler stopped, how s/he was received there, how long s/he stayed there, etc. Only after this narrative a visitor would finally indicate the purpose of his/her visit.

Communication technologies are also not divided along these lines. People indicate that the radio can be used for delivering private messages, the Red cross also was regarded as both public and private. The mobile phone is at once individualized, but people may also listen to it in a family group setting (switching on the loudspeaker), personal news may be exchanged, but also political rumour.

These remarks show that what would be classified as private family news and information about political affairs would intermingle in these exchanges. In the literature on news and rumour there is, especially where it concerns African studies, a focus on the

11 Fischer, Claude S., America calling: a social history of the telephone to 1940 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford Uni of California press 1994)

political sphere (radio trottoir),12 but in this case we notice that family news at least as important and that family life and the political sphere are not necessarily seen as opposites.

So perhaps if we study information exchange in south-east Angola, we may have to include family news as well as political rumour. Instead of viewing these as separate spheres, it is precisely the interaction of various forms of news, information and knowledge within the communication circuits that deserves attention. Communication ecology (Altheide): integrated whole.

ConclusionThe core of the argument was that mobility, ICT and peace are associated with each other by people from south-east Angola living in Rundu, Namibia. Obviously the idea of peace was not included when designers created the mobile phone, and in this sense the meaning attached to mobile telephony by south-East Angolans is unexpected. Furthermore in this, the usual distinction made in academic literature between private media and mass media is not experienced in this context. So, we may ask ourselves: is this distinction valid everywhere? And: is it still valid in the light of the recent developments in new ICT?The paper hopefully does not only abstractly argue that that it is more fruitful to view the relations between technology and society in terms of embedded interactive mutual shaping, rather than any assumed neutral, universal or abstract ‘impact’. It hopefully also ‘shows’ this, through the case of immigrants from southeast Angola living in Rundu.

12 See for example: Stephen Ellis, ‘Tuning in to pavement radio’, African Affairs 88, 352 (1989) pp. 321-330.