Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to provide evidence that behind the altercations surrounding the introduction of public cemeteries in colonial Angola was a clash between a novel, Romantic inspired mode of urban spatial production and an irreconcilable creole heritage – one of the legacies from the late Enlightenment.

Paper long abstract:

The beginning of the nineteenth century heralded a huge Romantic shift in the conceptual and architectonic design of graveyards throughout Europe - redesigned then as a bourgeois lieux de mémoire. This rupture, smoothed in Europe by a stable Judeo-Christian background, was differently enacted in colonial Angola. To the local and metropolitan elites, the creole compromise achieved during the late Enlightenment became impossible to sustain - during the Liberal and Romantic period that ensued - because it became unfeasible to imagine a "proper" city without its silent, hygienic and tightly regulated double: a modern public cemetery. This paradigm shift meant that an ongoing religious truce (during which the few Roman Catholic priests present at the colony didn't interfere with the local "gentile" funerary rites - such as "itamas" or "mutambe") was ultimately broken by Liberal public works reformers, in the name of progress and sanitation (Malaria was still attributed to miasmas). Public cemeteries thus became disputed memory sites, where two different groups worshiped the remembrance of their dead in wildly different ways, while projecting their values into the future via the design of their urban environment.