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Angola Social Structure in Urban Areas
Whatever the kind and degree of change in the workings
of
lineage and community in rural Angola, research in the
musseques of Luanda showed that the lineage system
had
little significance there. Musseques are
settlements in and
around Luanda (and some of the other big towns) in which
many of
the urban poor live. Residents of the settlements in
Luanda were
predominantly of Mbundu origin. In the 1980s, the
settlements
became the refuge of hundreds of thousands of displaced
persons.
Some of the inhabitants of the musseques worked
regularly in manual jobs, but others were employed only
intermittently, and still others would go jobless for long
periods.
The variation in the material circumstances of males in
particular
affected the composition of the households. Ideally, and
often in
fact, the household consisted of a man and a woman, living
in a
union legally or otherwise sanctioned, and their children.
Occasionally, another kinsman or kinswoman was part of the
unit. In
the 1980s, with the influx of the rural displaced,
additional kin
or acquaintances were probably also becoming part of many
of the
family units.
The man was expected to assume the primary
responsibility for
supporting the household and to provide, if possible, for
the
education of the children, although others sometimes
contributed.
Given the economic circumstances of most of these men, the
burden
sometimes became overwhelming, and some men reacted by
leaving the
household. This reaction accounted, with some exceptions,
for the
presence of female heads of households.
In the 1980s, an important effect of extended kinship
ties was
the expectation of migrants from rural areas that they
could turn
first to their kin already in place for at least temporary
housing
and other aid. The tendency was to look to heads of
households who
were of the same matrilineage, but that practice was not
universal.
Moreover, it did not signify that the matrilineage had
been
transplanted to the musseques. The relationship
between the
head of the household and the newly arrived migrant was
that
between two individuals. The urban situation did not
provide the
conditions for the functioning of the matrilineage as a
social,
political, and economic unit.
Given the combination of the nuclear family household,
the
absence of matrilineages, and the relative ethnic
homogeneity of
the musseques of Luanda, the organization of
permanent or
temporary groups engaged in social or political activity
and the
formation of interpersonal relationships were likely to be
based
directly on economic concerns or on other common interests
arising
out of the urban situation. Elsewhere, such concerns and
interests
were often mediated by or couched in terms of
considerations of
ethnicity or kinship.
Data as of February 1989
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