Paper short abstract:

Using archives and ethnography, I examine anthropologist Luis Polanah’s alternative ideas about rural development during his work with the Junta de Povoamento Provincial in Malanje, Angola. Two case studies illuminate the colonial context and current influence on land, law and rural development.

Paper long abstract:

I analyse, firstly, the work of mestiço Mozambican anthropologist Luís Polanah with the Provincial Settlement Board (JPP) while living in the village of Kinglês, Malanje, 1969-1971. He was responsible for the Support Group of the JPP's Malanje Regional Commission for Rural Reorganization during a land rush occasioned by new transport infrastructure in one of the heaviest areas of white settlement in Malanje. Secondly, I situate Polanah's experiences and his later contributions to the Rural Extension Mission in the broader canvas of JPP activities, and rural development strategy in Malanje and Angola. Polanah emphasized social contexts of indigenous agricultural production (largely cassava) - in contrast to technocratic and bureaucratic approaches, and amidst military and cultural counter-insurgency following the 1961 cotton revolt - and thus the need to "take into account the targeted people, the characteristics of the regional economy, the lived historical and political circumstances …" In addition to projects by Community Development Teams, he sought to title native land to prevent further settler expropriation, which I examine through a case of land conflict between locals and a prominent settler-bureaucrat. Lastly, as post-war infrastructure reconstruction and land privatization occasioned post-colonial land rushes in Malanje, I examine a current land dispute near Kinglês in order to trace the memories, landscapes, ideas, projects, and social networks through which Polanah's work resonates in current rural development efforts in Malanje and Angola, particularly the importance of anthropological methods and insights and the real but limited protections of public interest in efforts at smallholder and community land registration.