Periodic Reporting for period 1 - LUARC (Implacable Archives: Reviving Mário Pinto de Andrade’s Personal Archive)
Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2024-12-31
The main objective of project LUARC is to contribute to the revival and development of the personal archive of the Angolan intellectual and politician Mário Pinto de Andrade (MPA). Using the archive as a key to uncover new narratives about Angola’s recent past and to map the evolution of practices and discourses on culture and nationalism, LUARC explores the life and intellectual journey of one of the most influential African thinkers of the twentieth century through the material traces left in his archive.
A cosmopolitan intellectual, MPA was also one of the founders and ideologues of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA), the nationalist movement that emerged victorious from the 1975 war of liberation against the Portuguese colonial state and has ruled Angola ever since. His clashes with the movement's leadership, however, made him a political pariah, and he was forced to leave Angola in 1975 and spend the rest of his life in exile. Moreover, as a form of retribution, his contribution to the Angolan national project has been largely overlooked by the dominant historical narrative for decades. Project LUARC brings back to the public’s attention the figure and work of a protagonist and a deep connoisseur of Angolan culture, recovering narratives that have long been ignored.
At the same time, LUARC reflects on the nature of personal archives and their potential for history writing and processes of memory building. It also invites different people to critically and creatively engage with the archive, including MPA’s family members and friends, former freedom fighters, researchers, archivists, and artists. Finally, by disseminating results and outputs across different target groups, including Angolan civil society, the project stimulates reflections that have a strong impact on the debate on Angola’s recent past.
A cosmopolitan intellectual, MPA was also one of the founders and ideologues of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA), the nationalist movement that emerged victorious from the 1975 war of liberation against the Portuguese colonial state and has ruled Angola ever since. His clashes with the movement's leadership, however, made him a political pariah, and he was forced to leave Angola in 1975 and spend the rest of his life in exile. Moreover, as a form of retribution, his contribution to the Angolan national project has been largely overlooked by the dominant historical narrative for decades. Project LUARC brings back to the public’s attention the figure and work of a protagonist and a deep connoisseur of Angolan culture, recovering narratives that have long been ignored.
At the same time, LUARC reflects on the nature of personal archives and their potential for history writing and processes of memory building. It also invites different people to critically and creatively engage with the archive, including MPA’s family members and friends, former freedom fighters, researchers, archivists, and artists. Finally, by disseminating results and outputs across different target groups, including Angolan civil society, the project stimulates reflections that have a strong impact on the debate on Angola’s recent past.
The project contributes to the revitalization of the archive in two ways: first, by using it as a primary source for her research and by disseminating this research to different audiences and contexts, the Principal Investigator (PI) responsible for the project demonstrates the richness of the archive and its potential for developing historical research on various topics. Second, she works with the archivists to develop strategies for improving the quality of the metadata currently provided by the digital archive.
The PI worked extensively with the records collected in MPA’s archive, which enabled her to map the evolution of practices and discourses on culture and nationalism in Angola. In particular, she focused on the role that MPA and other intellectuals played in shaping these discourses and on the impact they had on the development of the liberation struggle. Although the focus of her research is on nationalism, project LUARC also highlights the international and transnational connections that fostered the emergence of the Angolan nation, and places MPA at the centre of a dense network of contacts that were instrumental in promoting international solidarity and support for the Angolan liberation struggle.
Moreover, by exposing the not always straightforward relationship between MPA and the liberation movement of which he was a founder and first president, LUARC articulates an approach to the past that challenges the established narrative of the party that has ruled Angola since independence.
The PI worked extensively with the records collected in MPA’s archive, which enabled her to map the evolution of practices and discourses on culture and nationalism in Angola. In particular, she focused on the role that MPA and other intellectuals played in shaping these discourses and on the impact they had on the development of the liberation struggle. Although the focus of her research is on nationalism, project LUARC also highlights the international and transnational connections that fostered the emergence of the Angolan nation, and places MPA at the centre of a dense network of contacts that were instrumental in promoting international solidarity and support for the Angolan liberation struggle.
Moreover, by exposing the not always straightforward relationship between MPA and the liberation movement of which he was a founder and first president, LUARC articulates an approach to the past that challenges the established narrative of the party that has ruled Angola since independence.
The project goes beyond the current state of the art and contributes to expanding research on MPA and, more generally, on the history of the liberation struggle in Angola. It explores the relation between culture and nationalism in depth, focusing on themes such as the creation of international solidarity networks that supported the action of the liberation movements, and the role played by intellectuals both during the struggle and in the immediate aftermath of independence. By shedding new light on understudied aspects – such as MPA's permanence in a guerrilla base between 1971 and 1972 – the project offers new insights into a history that has often been told according to a codified and partisan version. As such, the project animates conversations about the recent past and, fifty years after the proclamation of independence and the collapse of the Portuguese empire, it offers the opportunity to discuss the legacies of colonialism that are still present in both Angola and Portugal.