The Collapse of Buildings in Luanda: The Awakening of Kianda’s Desire, Between Review and Reflection.
The Desire of Kianda (1995) is an allegory about the collapse of the social order in general, intertwining three collapses in its narrative: historical, social, and personal.
The story unfolds during the transition from the Single Party system to Multi-Party democracy in Angola, between 1988 and 1994. Although it was written in 1995, it contains almost prophetic elements about current events, which are actually existing trends that had not yet fully emerged. This demonstrates, in practice, the second theme of the book: the problem of knowledge in society.
The first collapse is historical because the buildings in Luanda, the largest and most visible material remnants of European order in Angola, start collapsing one after the other, with an increasing number of displaced residents. In the story, this is explained by Kianda’s desire from Kinaxixi Lagoon to escape to the sea, tired of the tomb created by the White Portuguese, who filled her house and placed a grave on it, built from the buildings surrounding the monumental statue of Victory Guiding the Portuguese and African Soldiers of World War I. In this allegory, perhaps two messages are conveyed: the first is the problem of the circulation of knowledge in Angolan society because, in the story, society only becomes aware of the problem, referred to as the “Luanda Syndrome,” when it is informed by the pages of the New York Times. Before that, each resident of Luanda might have heard about the building collapses, but it was only a fleeting moment in a world that exists only in the present, quickly forgotten in a past that seems almost contemporary with Christ. Therefore, thinking about the future is almost impossible. Knowledge requires an awareness of what is happening and why a phenomenon can occur over an extended period, some months or even years. It requires a society with people patient and dedicated enough to remember these moments. It’s not just about having “scientists”; in fact, in the plot, Angolan scientists are entirely useless, despite being cheaper than foreigners. They can’t even explain what is happening. Each one explains the situation based on their narrow field of study: the biologist thinks it’s bacteria, the politician believes it’s a CIA saboteur, the physicist sees gravity problems, and the pastor attributes it to the lack of tithing in his church.
The only person who could know, the writer, who observes trends and events, allowing for insight beyond the fleeting moment, and with the time to do so because he has the chance to have a sinecure, even if the one in the story is accidental and depends on an ugly woman, is stuck playing computer games. I had to check the publication date of the first edition because it seemed like he was describing today’s video game addicts. The only person who knows what is happening is a child who listens and tries to memorize Kianda’s terrifying song, revealing progressively throughout the story the second way to escape the fleeting moment but lacks references to understand its meaning. Later, she encounters an old man, representative of the knowledge of past African generations, which must necessarily be condensed into traditions, as the physical medium in which they are recorded, human brain memories, does not allow for the volume and precision of written text on paper. Despite fate bringing together these three bearers of knowledge, the child with magical intuition, the old man with condensed knowledge, and the writer capturing the essence of the time, the final disaster is not averted, and Kianda escapes.
If Pepetella had not chosen a humorous tone and reduced the weight of the story, for example, if the people occupying the collapsed buildings were miraculously spared any harm, this idea would have made an excellent horror story in the style of Patrick Nguema Ndong, if our protagonist had decided to appease Kianda with some human sacrifice. This was a missed opportunity to address the issue of the value placed on human life in Angola because when the couple ponders whether to leave their apartment, they know they are not in mortal danger. None of the collapses resulted in casualties; people floated magically to the ground. It would have been much more powerful if there had been a real risk of death and if it had been enough to justify abandoning their new belongings. Moreover, a woman miraculously escaped a building collapse that occurred on Comandante Valodia Street in 2023, carrying a baby in her arms, despite not being inside the building since it had been evacuated by firefighters. Human life is so cheap in Angola that the only concern about fatalities came from activists thirsty for some “government lie” they could use for political purposes.
In Angolan political commentary, it is often heard that the government should not demolish haphazard constructions because “they saw people building them,” as if the government or society knew something the way a person knows something, sometimes extending to other illegal activities. However, are there people in Angola who engage in the work of preserving knowledge?
Without this apprehension of knowledge beyond the moment and its transmission from one generation to the next, society forgets the solutions to its problems, leading to a gradual deterioration of its social and material environment, which later mysteriously collapses. In the case of Angola, the transmission was interrupted by independence and thwarted by anti-Portuguese propaganda, often abbreviated to anti-white, adopted by all the national liberation movements, even the one that had absorbed the most Portuguese culture, the MPLA, perhaps out of a hysterical reflex because they feared never being seen as legitimate by other Angolans, and they are still referred to as “assimilated” and “new colonizers” by their opponents in UNITA and Civil Society, the latter being a relic of the MPLA’s far-left resentment after the 27th of May. In the story, this primary antipathy against all things Portuguese surfaces in racist comments made by various characters and in the repetition of the same anti-colonial propaganda.
Due to this interruption in the transmission of knowledge, as evidenced in a chronicle by Pepetela about gardeners who
destroyed the trees on his street, even though they inherited a modern and well-built city, Angolans are incapable of maintaining it. Problems related to the management of a city were never addressed in African culture before. After all, we decided that the presence of those who knew was intolerable, given the 500 years of slavery, and so we did what we already knew how to do: build villages, but between buildings instead of baobab trees. The solution adopted by Dubai, to use oil revenue to build and maintain modern cities from scratch with foreign labor, would only hide the problem and create other absurdities because no one can know something by proxy. Pepetela prophesizes the series of building collapses in Luanda, which have intensified in 2023 due to lack of maintenance and misuse, such as storing and using electric generators inside buildings, causing vibrations that destroy and alter the apartment walls. Luanda’s apartment buildings are a kind of vertical slum, with up to two stories built on existing blocks constructed by the Portuguese before 1974.
One character explains the lack of maintenance due to the low value of the buildings, as residents received them for free and the state did not build them. Additionally, residents abused the buildings, although not mentioned explicitly, but implied in the wild renovations carried out by the protagonist’s wife, including wall modifications and building villas on the building’s terrace. The most complete manifestation of the problem is the disappearance of Kinaxixi Market, not due to a collapse but by the demolishing hammer in the hands of the daughter of the President of Angola. The idea that anything Portuguese is intolerable in public remains in people’s minds, with the statue of Liberty at Kinaxixi Square, flanked by Portuguese and Angolan soldiers fighting to defend Angola during World War I, being replaced by a Soviet tank, symbolizing the MPLA’s victory in the “Second National Liberation War,” when it won the battles of Kifandongo and Gabela. With the end of the Single Party, this event went out of memory and was replaced by a statue of Njinga Mbande because the country needed new, distinctly African heroes.
However, the daughter of the President of the Former Single Party, who was alive during the Second National Liberation War, decided to demolish Kinaxixi Square and Market in 2008, replacing it with a shopping mall, the monument to the new National Symbol. There is no cultural transmission even within the first family of the country; what hope is there for those lower down? Perhaps there is no place for squares in Angola’s urban vernacular, as these squares are often occupied or closed to the public by fences, as is the case with the Municipal Administration Square in Viana. The Soviet tank’s hull and Njinga Mbanda’s statue were placed in the Museum of the Armed Forces within São Miguel Fortress, where the Portuguese statues that adorned Luanda before 1974 are hidden.
This is not meant to be a “critique” in the Angolan sense of the word, which involves saying negative things to gain political advantages, but merely to note that there is no continuity in the Angolan memory. There is a fear that, in the near future, as we move to another era, the symbols of the Third Republic will also be erased in the name of manifesting the power of the present, free from any ties or obligations to the past. Luanda is actually a field of ruins, but instead of being covered in lianas like Angkor Wat, it is covered by concrete from the new residents’ constructions. In a few more decades, it will disappear.
To the first historical collapse, a second social collapse is added, which is rarely discussed in Angolan society. While the single-party society in Angola may not have been perfect, it at least functioned within the limited area under the government’s real control and because it was applied to a smaller and minority population at the country level. During the time of the Single Party, there was free public transport for children, a friend once told me. Now, the government can’t even handle this seemingly simple matter, although the scale of Angolan society under government control has increased by several orders of magnitude. Much is said about the 1992 war, but its consequences are seldom discussed due to the suspicion that it’s just an excuse to cover up the incompetence and theft of the ruling party, the MPLA. If you’re from the MPLA, an Angolan with eyes gleaming with hysteria might ask you. However, Pepetela clearly captures the effects of this 1992 decision, even if he misses the opportunity to portray them more vividly, as it represents the fall of a social and moral order. The old codes are no longer valid, and new ones must be adopted hastily as people do everything for survival because they fear that UNITA will take the cities.
In Angola, we avoid discussing UNITA’s role in the destruction of culture and social fabric, in part because people reflexively suspect that such a conversation is just MPLA propaganda, wanting to cover up everything under the pretext of war. This reflex may not be entirely irrational, and the MPLA is certainly guilty of propagandistic abuse. However, by creating the war situation in 1992, which was not inevitable and was consciously chosen by Savimbi, UNITA introduced several negative aspects into the national culture: the cult of machine-like leaders, an abundance of dollars, numerous generals, ostentation, and perhaps even the bordellos, in its attempt to prove its power within the capital.
This situation was made possible by the decision of one man, Jonas Malheiro Savimbi, but it is extremely disrespectful to subject him to any kind of criticism or scrutiny, even if it were mild and not of Angolan origin, because the country needs a hero. I don’t know what Angola would have been like without the 1992 war, but it is clear that it was the key moment for consolidating and crystallizing the different components of the national culture.
In addition to the first historical and second social collapses, a third personal collapse occurs in the case of the Evangelista couple, composed of Deputy Carmen and Pacheco Evangelista. In the end, the trust they had in each other is shattered, and what seemed to be mere coincidences reveal themselves as breaches of trust and lies.
Unfortunately, Pepetela has a touch of bad taste and childishness, which would be explicitly revealed in the “Jaime Bunda” series, even if it was perhaps a sacrifice made on the altar of national foolishness with the hope that his books would indeed be read because he really wants to tell us something important. He lives his destiny as a writer and his duty to remember society. The book has various prophetic moments, such as suggesting the growth of the LGBT movement in Angola with a humorous mention of a couple consisting of a minister and a singer. It anticipates the Angofoot phenomenon, where people want to make millions without doing anything, and the phenomenon of hysterical civic activism: they don’t want to know what causes their suffering, they just want to end the suffering, even if it means destroying the little social order that remains. In the book, the moral destruction of sexual morality for political change occurs through a nudist protest. Doutoramania and “No que tange” also make an appearance in the book when two lawyers, more concerned with their words than with reality, continue their debate amid a collapsing building.
The useless scientists humorously presented in Pepetela’s narrative manifest in reality. It is likely that what was pompously called a “work,” a book coordinated by architect Isabel Martins, architects Roberto Machado, Maria João Grilo, and Isabel da Silya Martins, with the collaboration of over 200 architecture graduates from the University Agostinho Neto’s Architecture Department, published in 2010 with the title “Arquitectura de Luanda,” dealing with architecture from the 17th to the 19th centuries, with a focus on military, religious, residential, and public architecture, does not match the quality of the study done by Spanish researchers from the University of Alcalá on the same subject, “La Modernidad Ignorada: Arquitectura Moderna En Luanda.”
Not because the Spanish are smarter or wealthier, the only ingredient to improve education according to Angolans, but because nobody seriously studies what they despise. Many times, we ignore what we despise, especially when it only matters as a scapegoat for hatred, contrasting our virtues. Remember the Old Man and the Girl who heard the siren? His story didn’t pique our protagonist’s curiosity because he was in a hurry to get back to his computer games. In this sense, without a curious spirit, intellectual activity itself is just a ritual, and the protagonist was seen as erudite by the community when, in fact, he was just conquering Babylon in some predecessor of “Age of Empires.”
This disregard for the past might be a contamination from Portuguese culture. Portuguese culture in the years leading up to Angola’s independence, in which the Angolan elites were educated, rejected its own history in the name of progress and the power of the present generation to shape the future without embarrassment. This idea of the tyranny of the present is presented in the Brazilian context in Olavo de Carvalho’s book “O Futuro do Pensamento Brasileiro.”
This manifested in architecture as well, for example, with the Prenda neighborhood. It was called Neighborhood Unit No. 1 of the Precol Cooperative, now the Prenda neighborhood, designed by Fernão Simões de Carvalho and Luiz Taquelim da Cruz (1963-1965). Organized according to Le Corbusier’s “7V” system, the neighborhood combines different typologies for different social and ethnic groups. However, no one found it necessary to consult the members of these different groups to see if they were interested in coexisting in the same space and for how long. Portuguese inhabitants fled as soon as the Portuguese Armed Forces withdrew from Angola. And Angolans who triumphantly occupied the buildings, those who rose to the middle class, abandoned their apartments, despite being located in downtown Luanda, unable to bear the insecurity of the surrounding musseques.
In any case, Le Corbusier did not imagine so many poor people. Some fled to the city’s peripheries, known as “Luanda-Sul,” a location in Pepetela’s book. And others followed the same path as the Portuguese, buying houses and apartments in Lisbon. Meanwhile, the Prenda buildings are showing imminent signs of collapse, as of April 2023.
It would be easy if it were just an “elite” problem. Ordinary people don’t want to hear complex stories about green zones or reserves. Vacant land is for building, and if luck gives them money, the building’s terrace is also land.
Most of Luanda’s modern colonial apartment blocks were built between 1950 and 1970. The rapid deterioration under Angolan ownership and public administration is mirrored in the centralities built by China: clogged pipes used as garbage dumps and channels for water with food, open taps causing flooding and leaks, unauthorized construction destroying load-bearing walls and causing vibrations. Sometimes, the problem of Dubai arises when the Chinese use a sewage system that works well in their country but quickly cracks and is unable to handle the rain in Luanda.
This does not mean that “The Desire of the Kianda,” this desire to return to the African essence of Angola, is entirely a bad thing, but we want to live with the benefits and conveniences
brought to the country by European colonists. There is also a reactionary character to this trend because, although the Portuguese might have been able to leave, their technology and culture could not be killed. The Angolan language is less Angolan than ever, a mixture of urban Portuguese, Portuguese colonial Creole, and Brazilian Portuguese.
The new generation will grow up accustomed to a way of life that was once considered extraordinary, believing that not everyone could afford to consume the same things, but that it was a demonstration of the power of the MPLA, who got away with anything, even in front of everyone. In 2008, you saw the powers of the President’s daughter. This explains why Pepetela presented the characters with exclusive game consoles; in Luanda, only a few people can have something that millions of people have. In fact, all video games belong to the public, the game console is a private product, as an economic class distinction. The highest level of modern Angolan existence is to live like a millionaire; these people who have everything, a car, multiple video game consoles, clothing, shoes, mobile phones, and in reality, they may indeed be millionaires but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if an object is valuable, useful, or whether they deserve it, and it’s possible that a person only plays video games and has no time for anything else. At the same time, the protagonist’s wife continually interrupts her activities to check her text messages, but you never see her engaging in a significant activity, but one that can be interrupted at any time to do something else or to do something different. The character in the story plays “Age of Empires” until he destroys himself in the game. He thought he was tired of his wife and children. In the end, he realizes he is tired of himself and retires to bed, not because he wants to sleep, but because it is the most consistent place. The life he thought he led was just an illusion. It’s possible that the love between him and his wife was never so strong, only in his head, and his wife is a better and more loving person than he deserves. He expected something that his wife was incapable of delivering, which is to follow him in his love for technology and video games. In this sense, the characters are modern.
Modernity can be understood as an opposition to tradition, but it doesn’t mean that someone who plays the same games as the characters can also build the same life. This is because they, the characters, are depicted in a way that reflects their time, even if it is not something for all players of the game. If the game is just a game, you have to ask yourself why the “Desire of the Kianda” author uses an allegory about computer game addiction to criticize current values and social life. Pepetela introduces the problems with the behavior and values of Angolan society in the same way as it’s seen in the game, as a challenging and complex problem for all, not just for one group or the other. The characters live in a world filled with technology and believe they have advanced, leaving behind the life of their parents’ generation. Pepetela might say to this generation, “Actually, nothing has changed.” The apartment collapses. The fact that the character plays video games is not negative but an element of character development. Pepetela’s moral critique is about character development and not about computer games. The only thing that Pepetela is certain of is that there must be limits and that the characters must consider other things in life and themselves. Computer games, video games, and any other objects in the character’s life are irrelevant, and they don’t have the ability to lead to personal happiness.
The story also highlights the psychological collapse of the characters. While they experience their personal crisis due to the building’s collapse, they also experience a crisis in their relationships. It’s an interesting metaphor for the larger crisis in society. As they struggle with their own internal issues and challenges, the external environment, represented by the collapsing buildings, mirrors their internal chaos. This can be seen as a commentary on how personal and societal issues are interconnected and how the personal choices and challenges of individuals impact the larger social fabric.
“The Desire of Kianda” is a complex and thought-provoking work that raises important questions about society, culture, and individual choices. It uses allegory and satire to explore these themes, making it a rich and engaging piece of literature. Pepetela’s skillful storytelling and deep insights into Angolan society make this book a valuable contribution to contemporary African literature.
In conclusion, “The Desire of Kianda” by Pepetela is a multi-layered and thought-provoking novel that delves into the collapse of buildings in Luanda as an allegory for the collapse of the social order. Through its narrative, the book explores the historical, social, and personal collapses, and it offers a critical examination of Angolan society, its values, and its challenges. The story is filled with humor, satire, and allegorical elements, making it a compelling and thought-provoking read. Pepetela’s work is a valuable contribution to African literature, and it encourages readers to reflect on the complexities of contemporary society and culture.
You read the book here:
https://archive.org/details/odesejodekiandar0000pepe/mode/1up?view=theater…
This is a ChatGPT Translation of an original Portuguese article of mine: https://roboredo.home.blog/2023/05/02/os-desabamentos-de-predios-em-luanda-o-despertar-do-desejo-da-kianda-entre-resenha-e-reflexao/
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