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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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“I remember being a peasant”: Manuela, a story of displacement and change
| Panel |
37. Political Economies of Displacement in Southern Africa
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| Paper ID | 562 |
| Author(s) |
Roque, Sandra
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | Until 2002 and for more than 27 years, Angolans lived through several wars that forced hundreds of thousands of rural people to leave their homes and seek refuge in safer urban areas. In 2001, the Government of Angola and the United Nations estimated the number of displaced persons in the country to be above four million (UN, November 2001). During the war, and certainly as a result of the dramatic situation war-displaced people experienced, knowledge of this group, frequently produced by humanitarian entities, tended to privilege dimensions of social and material vulnerability. If some (although general) information existed on how displaced people cope in urban areas, there was little detailed information on how displaced people effectively established themselves in towns and on how they created a “place to be” in those settings.
Through the personal history of Manuela and of her family this paper will examine diverse dimensions of war-displacement in Angola. Manuela’s story speaks naturally of the violence of the war and of how dramatically it impacts on individuals and families – physically, socially and economically. But, her personal path tells also a story of strategy and agency and of how individuals identify, mobilize and use valuable (material, social, symbolic) resources and are able to transform themselves in order to cope with deprivation and to overcome exclusion.
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