VULNERABLE MISSION

VULNERABLE MISSION IN ANGOLA: AN INTRA-AFRICAN CONVERSATION WITH JIM HARRIES
The italicized words above are purely Angolan. Native speakers in Portugal may not
have a clue what they mean, except the few words that have come to Portugal as slang.
Moreover, these words are not Bantu. They are Portuguese. Though some have etymological
roots in Kimbundu, Umbundu, or other Bantu languages, they made their way
into Angolan Portuguese generations ago and are now used widely across the nation
of Angola, from Cunene in the south to Cabinda in the north. They are used daily by
Angolans who speak only Portuguese. And many Angolans would be quite surprised
to hear that citizens of Portugal don’t even know how to communicate with these basic
Portuguese words. “Do people in Portugal not eat breakfast?” they might ask. 36
Adaptation of the language has enabled Angolans to use Portuguese effectively in even
the most traditional African settings. Last year I had the opportunity to be a bystander
in a sensitive situation where a church leader was accused of using witchcraft to possess
a teenage boy with his spirit, resulting in debilitating madness. The case was handled by
the soba (traditional communal leader) and included input from the traditional herbal
healer who was watching over the boy in the far-flung rural area of his home. The
process lasted parts of three days—and all of it was conducted in Portuguese. The only
times someone broke into Umbundu were when they wanted the opinion of the boy’s
grandmother, who was not comfortable in Portuguese. Immediately after hearing her
opinion, the participants would switch back to Portuguese. 37 Portuguese is Angola’s medium
of choice to handle the intricacies of African life.
Portuguese today belongs to Angola as much as it belongs to Brazil or Portugal. Each
country has its version of Portuguese; the differences reflect the variations in culture, and
the similarities foster fraternal connections between the three continents.
Ethnolinguistic ancestry is the key identity for Africans.
Harries relates the unwillingness of the Luo people to accept him, a white man, as part
of their tribe. The reason is simple: “in much of Africa, unlike in the West, someone’s
key identity is rooted in their ancestry.” 38 I suggest that this observation forms a defining
assumption that undergirds the whole of Harries’s thinking. For example, he makes
much of the cultural roots of language, and his (usually unspoken) assumption is that in
36 Many, many more Angolan Portuguese words could be listed. See, e.g., the list of 249 terms at http://
casadeluanda.blogspot.com/2008/03/dicionrio-angolano-de-a-d.html, http://casadeluanda.
blogspot.com/2008/03/dicionrio-angolano-de-e-l.html, and http://casadeluanda.blogspot.
com/2008/03/dicionrio-angolano-de-m-z.html. Moreover, these terms and many more are legitimized
by their inclusion in Portuguese dictionaries by major publishers such as the Porto Editora publishing group,
whose Dicionário Plural da Língua Portuguesa includes more than 1,500 “Africanisms”; see http://pluraleditores.
co.ao/PLE03.asp?area=3&tema=1&id=9803.
It is also worth noting that Angolan Portuguese should be categorized neither as a pidgin nor as a creole. It
is true Portuguese, conforming to the international Portuguese Acordo Ortográfico of 1945, but with expanded
vocabulary and the particularities of contextual usage so familiar to Harries and other students of linguistic
pragmatics.
37 It was not my white presence that influenced their choice of language. For the most part, they could not
have cared less that I was there—it was not my business. Several times I wandered off to do other things, but
the conversation continued in Portuguese.
38 Harries, Vulnerable Mission, 169–70.
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