Ovimbundu

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Ethnic map of Angola, settlement area of ​​the Ovimbundu is marked in dark blue

The Ovimbundu (singular Ocimbundu , adjective and language name Umbundu ) are the largest ethnic group of Angola and make up about a third of the Angolan population.

Subgroups

The most important subgroups of the Ovimbundu are the Mbalundu (Portuguese Bailundo), the Wambo (Portuguese Huambo) and the Bieno; But the Sumbe, Sele, Ndulu, Sambo, Kissanje (Quissanje), Ganda, Sambo, Chikuma and Kakonda are also worth mentioning.

origin

The Ovimbundu emerged as a people on the central highlands of Angola and colonized this and the adjacent coastal strip, assimilating smaller ethnic groups of other origins. Originally they were exclusively farmers and (to a limited extent) cattle breeders, with some also traders and craftsmen. They founded various political units (mostly referred to as "kingdoms" in European literature), for example in the area of ​​today's provincial capitals Huambo and Kuito and the small town of Bailundo .

From the 17th century onwards, the Ovimbundu came into contact with the Portuguese when they built today's Benguela - in addition to Luanda - as a kind of bridgehead; at that time they developed a lively caravan trade between Benguela and the east of what is now Angola. Only in the course of the 19th century did the Portuguese take military possession of their area.

Colonial rule

The colonial occupation went hand in hand with the establishment of Catholic and Protestant missions. The Ovimbundu became predominantly Christians at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It is thanks to the American congregationalists , who were able to win about a third of the Ovimbundu for the Igreja Evangélica Congregacional de Angola (IECA), that the Umbundu was further developed: They determined its spelling in Latin script, put together a grammar and a lexicon and translated the Bible and other religious scriptures into Umbundu.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the caravan trade collapsed and the Ovimbundu switched to growing maize and other agricultural products, which they could market with Portuguese "bush traders". The presence of the colonial state increased and the traditional political structures lost more and more of their importance, without, however, disappearing completely.

At the same time the importance of the Christian churches, especially the IECA, but also the Catholic Church grew. This became the main reason for a comparatively widespread schooling and knowledge of Portuguese. Another consequence was that around the middle of the 20th century separate villages for Catholics, Protestants and non-Christians emerged in the entire Central Highlands.

Their above-average population growth made the Ovimbundu a preferred victim of the colonial policy of the 1950s and 1960s in two respects. Firstly, because Europeans (mostly Portuguese, but also some Germans) acquired extensive land for plantations ( coffee , sisal, etc.) in Central Angola during that phase and thus withdrew them from use by the Ovimbundu. As a result, many of them no longer had enough land to survive and were forced to either migrate to the city or work as plantation workers. Only a minority managed to learn a trade (blacksmith, tailor, shoemaker, etc.) and thereby secure an independent livelihood in the villages. On the other hand, the colonial state began to recruit workers from among the Ovimbundu for the then booming coffee plantations in the north, which were operated by Europeans and Bakongo . These were unable to withstand the pressure of the local colonial organs, all the less since a "hut tax" was introduced at the same time and they could only acquire the funds to pay it through wage labor.

War of Independence and Late Colonial Developments

During the anti-colonial war in Angola, 1961–1974 , the Ovimbundu were mostly secretly supporters of UNITA , one of three movements that led an armed struggle for Angola's independence and whose founder and leader, Jonas Savimbi , was Ocimbundu. UNITA built up a network of contacts underground among the Ovimbundu, with some of the IECA catechists helping it, but never succeeded in reaching the Central Highlands with its guerrilla actions. This was not least due to the security measures of the colonial state, the most drastic of which consisted of forcibly grouping villages, often of different religions, to form aldeias concentradas . These "concentrated villages" were newly created in places selected by the colonial authorities for "security reasons". However, since the residents continued to rely on the same fields, pastures and wooded areas as before, the geographical distance made agriculture considerably more difficult. The resulting hardships helped UNITA immensely in the political mobilization of the Ovimbundu against colonial rule. A minority of urban Ovimbundu with higher education decided at that time for a competing movement, the MPLA .

On the other hand, the easing of the colonial system that Portugal introduced in 1962 brought a certain opening up for the Ovimbundu. Through military service (where they were able to become an ensign), excursions for high school graduation classes (sometimes to the Portuguese metropolis), football teams and choirs, there was a knowledge of the outside world that was previously reserved for very few people. (The previously existing possibility of hiring oneself out as a miner in Namibia and acquiring cattle on the way back from the Ovambo , however, was stopped with the outbreak of the struggle for independence.)

Civil war

Due to the civil war 1975-2002 , many Ovimbundu moved to cities inside and outside their traditional settlement area, especially in the capital Luanda and neighboring communities, the coastal cities of Benguela and Lobito and Lubango in the south. The two most important cities in the heartland of Ovimbundu, Huambo and Kuito , were largely destroyed in the civil war. The rural population was largely thrown back to subsistence agriculture, as both the sale of agricultural products and wage labor - especially migrant work - were hardly possible. This was not least due to the fact that large areas - e.g. For many years - were completely under the control of UNITA and cut off from the rest of Angola.

present

Reconstruction has been slow since the end of the civil war. Most of the infrastructure has been repaired or rebuilt by the state. The sale of agricultural products has started again thanks to the initiative of urban traders from the “shadow economy”. Some of the population who fled to the cities has returned, while younger people in particular do not want to move back to the countryside. A number of plantations that were created by Portuguese settlers or foreign companies during the colonial period have now been given new masters - many of them generals or high-ranking politicians - so that the corresponding jobs have been created again. The destroyed cities have largely been rebuilt. The state administration is working again everywhere, albeit often under precarious circumstances. The network of traditional village chiefs and " chiefs " was rebuilt in many places. The churches, which were often handicapped during the civil war, are now working normally again. While the Ovimbundu initially largely abstained from active participation in politics, they are now speaking again in one way or another.

literature

  • Gladwyn Murray Childs, Umbundu Kinship and Character , London: Oxford University Press, 1949
  • Adrian Edwards, The Ovimbundu Under Two Sovereignties: A Study of Social Control and Social Change Among a People of Angola , London: Oxford University Press, 1962
  • Linda Heywood, Contested Power in Angola, 1840s to the Present , Rochester / NY: University of Rochester Press, 2000 (Political History of Ovimbundu), ISBN 978-1-58046-063-7
  • Cláudio Tomás, Discursos e práticas alternativas de reconciliação nacional e de construção da nação em Angola: O caso da Igreja Evangélica Congregacional de Angola , Master's thesis, Lisbon: ISCTE-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, 2008
  • Didier Péclard, Les incertitudes de la nation en Angola: Aux racines sociales de l'UNITA , Paris: Karthala, 2015, ISBN 2811114467

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ethnologists refer to the Ovimbundu, especially in English, sometimes as the "southern Mbundu", in contrast to the "northern Mbundu", ie the Kimbundu- speaking Ambundu . See for example Wikipedia in English. NB: The -s at the end of "Ovimbundu", which can be found in various texts, is not used by experts because it expresses the same thing as the prefix "ovi-", namely the plural.
  2. ^ Map of the ethnic groups in Angola
  3. ↑ See José Redinha, Etnias e culuras de Angola , Luanda: Instituto de Investigação Científica de Angola, 1975
  4. ^ René Pélissier : Les Guerres Grises: Résistance et revoltes en Angola (1854-1951) . Orgeval: Self-published by the author, 1977. On Ovimbundu's long resistance, see Douglas Wheeler & Diane Christensen, To rise with one mind: The Bailundo War of 1902 , in: Franz-Wilhelm Heimer , Social Change in Angola , Munich: Weltforum Verlag, 1973 , Pp. 53-92.
  5. ^ Hermann Pössinger, Interrelations between economic and social change in rural Africa: the case of the Ovimbundu of Angola , in: Franz-Wilhelm Heimer (ed.), Social Change in Angola , Munich: Weltforum Verlag, 1973, pp. 31-51 .
  6. ↑ Lawrence Henderson, As igrejas evangélicas na diocese de Nova Lisboa , in Portugal em África , 141, 1967, pp. 40-47 and ders., Development and the Church in Angola: Jesse Chipenda the Trailblazer , Nairobi: Acton Publisher, 2000.
  7. ↑ Iracema Dulley, Deus é feiticeiro: Pratica e disputa nas Missões católicas em Angola colonial , São Paulo: Edições Anna Blume, of 2010.
  8. ↑ See John Erni Remick, American Influence on the Education of the Ovimbundu (the Benguela and Bié Highlands) of Angola, Africa, from 1880-1914 , unpublished PhD dissertation, Oxford / Ohio: Miami University, 1976.
  9. ↑ See the book of the last American bishop of the IECA, Lawrence Henderson, Angola: Five Centuries of Conflict , Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979, ISBN 0801412471 .
  10. ^ See Hermann Pössinger, Landwirtschaftliche Entwicklung in Angola und Moçambique , Munich: Weltforum Verlag, 1968 and Jorge Vieira da Silva & Júlio Artur de Morais, Ecological conditions of social change in the Central Highlands of Angola , in: Franz-Wilhelm Heimer , Social Change in Angola , Munich: Weltforum Verlag, 1973, pp. 93–120.
  11. ↑ See José Capela, O imposto da palhota ea introdução do modo de produção capitalista nas colónias , Porto: Afrontamento, 1977
  12. ↑ Linda Heywood, Towards an understanding of modern political ideology in Africa: The cae of the Ovimbundu of Angola , Journal of Modern African Studies , 36/1, pp. 139–167
  13. ↑ See John Marcum, The Angolan Revolution , Volume II, Exile Politics and Guerrilla Warfare (1963–1976) , Cambridge / Mass. & London: MIT Press, 1978.
  14. ↑ See Gerald Bender, Planned rural settlements in Angola, 1900–1998 , in: Franz-Wilhelm Heimer , Social Change in Angola , Munich: Weltforum Verlag, 1973, pp. 235–279
  15. ↑ See History of Angola
  16. ↑ It was significant that in the 2012 elections to the Angolan National Assembly, UNITA received 30% to 36% of the vote in the provinces of Huambo and Bié.