Rodrigues, Deolinda Page 1 of 21 Rodrigues, Deolinda Margarida Paredes, Department of Anthropology, Federal University of Bahia https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.485 Published online: 26 March 2019 Summary Deolinda Rodrigues is a prominent figure in the Angolan history of the Liberation Struggle. Her thought and life history are relatively unknown in and outside Angola. Reflection on her life and thought is also hampered by the fact that there are few analytical works of literature produced about her life and literary work. Rodrigues is also marginalized in the nationalist historiography on Angola. Rodrigues’s story is an important one. She was a political activist and nationalist thinker and a woman who struggled in Angola while in exile against the gendered stereotypes of the day and of her compatriots. Studying her life and work opens up late colonial life in Angola for those from the educated classes who fought for their country’s independence from the political, social, economic, and intellectual oppression of Portuguese imperialism. While Rodrigues is considered a heroine in Angola, few Angolans know much about her writing or thinking. Outside Angola she is virtually unknown, yet her life points to the intersection of radical black politics, liberation movements, gendered forms of nationalism, and international beneficence networks that can enrich our understanding of each of these elements. Rodrigues’s autobiographical work, posthumously published by her brother, Roberto de Almeida, “Diário de um Exílio sem Regresso” (Diary of an exile with no return), 2003 edition, and “Cartas de Langidila e outros Documentos” (Langidila’s letters and other documents), 2004 edition, have made this study possible. Keywords: Angola, anticolonialism, liberation struggle, MPLA, freedom fighter, guerrilla women, women’s history , African women’s history Subjects: Women’s History The Portuguese Empire After World War II, Africa awakened to various forms of national and political consciousness, which marked the beginning of anticolonial struggles that lead to the independence of different countries. The Negritude and Pan-African movements also contributed to the end of European empires in Africa. The Bandung Conference in 1955 united the desire for liberation and the right for self-determination of the colonized countries and placed the Third World as an alternative to the polarization between the United States and the USSR. African countries won their independence beginning in 1957 with Ghana. The African decolonization process took place through negotiation in some countries and exhausting military conflicts in others. Margarida Paredes, Department of Anthropology, Federal University of Bahia Rodrigues, Deolinda Page 2 of 21 The Portuguese colonial regime was the last European empire to give up its colonies in Africa, having finally withdrawn from the territories it occupied on November 11, 1975. This was also the day Angola declared its independence. The Estado Novo regime ( 1933–1974 ), under the authoritarian rule of Oliveira Salazar, did not recognize the right of self-determination of the colonized and kept Angola in a colonial war, also known as Guerra do Ultramar (Overseas war) for thirteen years. The Guerra do Ultramar was meant to contain the anticolonial uprisings and liberation movements initiated in 1961 by African nationalists. Deolinda Rodrigues was part of this generation who resisted Portugal’s continuing colonization and launched the foundations for the liberation struggle in Angola. In order to avoid conviction in international forums as a colonial power, namely the UN, Portugal substituted the terms “Overseas territories” for “Empire” in its 1951 constitution. What were once called colonies were now identified as overseas provinces. In an attempt to legitimate the idea that Portugal was a “pluricontinental and multiracial nation,” Salazar resorted to Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre’s lusotropicalist ideology. This ideology supported the myth of the “good colonizer,” one who would promote miscegenation with his “other,” increasing native assimilation to the official politics of the overseas state. Discrimination, Colonial Oppression, and Resistance When Deolinda was born (1939), black people did not have civil or legal rights in Angola: this was discrimination that was considered essential to imperial order according to historian Conceição Neto. 1 Throughout her childhood, especially during her teenage years, young Deolinda witnessed racism and white supremacy that had been officially instituted through the “Estatuto do Indigenato” (Statute of the native people) that divided population into two categories: the indigenous (black people with no rights to citizenship) and the civilized (whites with a right to citizenship). The law established that natives were obliged to work under a contract of forced labor—a form of slavery. 1 Rodrigues, Deolinda Page 3 of 21 Figure 1. Deolinda Rodrigues. Deolinda Rodrigues Francisco de Almeida was born on February 10, 1939, in Catete, in the council of Icolo and Bengo. The daughter of primary school teachers, she was the third of five siblings: two girls and three boys. Her father, Adão Francisco de Almeida, a Methodist minister, was sent to rural areas. His family followed him to Catete, Caxicane, Barra do Dande, Kitongola, and Ndalatando, where he provided religious services. There Deolinda encountered racism and the exploitation of black people by the colonial regime. The family belonged to what Christine Messiant (2008 ) identified as “new assimilated,” that is, black people from interior regions of the country with academic and religious education in the Protestant missions who demanded the status of the assimilated in the first half of the 20th century. Deolinda Rodrigues, who came from an assimilated family, lived in Luanda in a Fanonian world divided in two: the white world of paved roads and colonial education, and the black world of musseques (peripheral neighborhoods or slums). The law also aimed at assimilating the indigenous people into colonial European culture, for they were seen as primitive and uncivilized. In order to continue her high school education, Rodrigues was forced to present an assimilation certificate. Citizenship was obtained by means of an administrative process that granted assimilated status. The candidate also had to fulfill a set of requirements: reading and writing in Portuguese, having a way of life and customs similar to that of Europeans, being Christian, and having means of subsistence. She was, however, a free spirit and resisted policies of assimilation in defiance of colonial authority. She wore traditional African clothing, walked through Mutamba (downtown Luanda) with no shoes, spoke in kimbundu , whistled, and refused to straighten her hair, despite her status. 2 Among black elite women, such practices were not tolerated by the colonial regime, since it was an expression of African culture and Angolan nationalism. Such practices, considered socially backward by colonial authorities, could justify removing Deolinda from the statute of the Estatuto do Assimilado, a “privilege” only granted to 1 percent of the population. The Estatuto do 2 Rodrigues, Deolinda Page 4 of 21 Assimilado, in practice, was a barrier to social mobility among black people, confronted with the arrival of white settlers in greater numbers to Angola, who, in turn, pushed African elites to the musseques and unemployment. In February 1957 , at the age of eighteen, Deolinda wrote in her diary, “There is a pan-African health meeting. Kreps introduced me to a physician from Ghana. Just seeing her makes me feel someone else, more African.” 3 In September of the same year, she noted the following in her diary pertaining to a UN economic commission meeting: “For the first time I saw Africans instructed to walk everywhere with the dignity and naturality wearing their native attires.” 4 In a text written in French entitled, “How can I help my compatriots recover their dignity?” in nationalist figure, Mário Pinto de Andrade’ archive, Deolinda reacts to humiliations and describes a climate of colonial oppression in which colonial officials routinely used violence, threatening and harming black lives and bodies. 5 In Luanda, our private and public lives have become more and more unbearable: we were surveilled in church and we were in danger at home. In school we were mocked; our existence depended on the Portuguese. Abuses against native people were ‘our daily bread.’ Often did I see white officers whipping natives under a burning sun. Each time a native was mistreated, always a black woman defied the perpetrator. Not only did the courage of my illiterate sisters fill me with strength, it embarrassed me due to my cowardly silence and inertia before so many cruelties and injustices. . . . I have lived all my life near slaves but, in the beginning of 1956, I went through a decisive experience: I travelled more than 1000 km in the company of approximately 50 of the Contratados. During the journey, my brothers sang in Kimbundu and expressed their sadness about the hardship of forced labour, asking themselves if they would go home and why they had not died yet. Some cried while singing. 6 Only in 1961 would the Estatuto do Indiginato (Indigenous statute) be revoked, after being pressured by revolts in northern Angola, leading to the start of liberation struggles across the Portuguese colonies in Africa. At this point, Rodrigues had already left the country and was exiled in America. 3 4 5 6 Rodrigues, Deolinda Page 5 of 21 Figure 2. “ Langidila, Diário de um Exílio sem Regresso <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZt2OwQJE1U> , YouTube documentary, 2015. In 1954, Rodrigues moved to Luanda with her mother, Mariana Pedro Neto de Almeida, and her siblings to study. She stayed in the Operário neighborhood, at Tia Maria da Silva’s place: that is, the home of first Angolan president, Agostinho Neto’s mother. 7 She finished elementary school at Escola da Missão Evangélica (Evangelical Mission school) and high school at the Liceu Salvador Correia. At the time, among thousands of students, there were only three or four black female students. She was an excellent student and studied Germanic languages during grades six and seven at the lyceum. She had to interrupt her studies for one year to work at the Mission School to aid her family financially. At the time, her father was in hospital and her older brother, Pedro, was studying agronomy in Portugal. By 1958 she was part of the United Methodist Youth, having joined the board of the newspaper O Estandarte (The Banner), where she published poetry. The Methodist Church Protestant missions, almost always foreign, had been in Angola since 1885, but they had always avoided getting involved with the Portugalization and with the assimilationist ideology of the Portuguese Empire. 8 American bishop Ralph Dodge, who lived for several decades in Dembos, referenced in Deolinda’s letters ( 2004) and in the diary (2003), wrote in the book The Unpopular Missionary : “Probably in no other place of Africa has the church taken a firmer stand . . . against abuses permitted by the current Portuguese government.” 9 Protestant and Catholic churches represented the only possibility of social mobility for the black community. At the Methodist church, studying and writing were encouraged as potentially life changing, and women were 7 8 9 Rodrigues, Deolinda Page 6 of 21 encouraged to study. The Methodist church had a major role in forming Deolinda’s political consciousness, as it was a place where youths could debate and criticize the profound inequality of the colonial system. In her journal, Deolinda commented in April 1958: The mission serves us as a place for clandestine movement . . . Even in our prayers, our eyes speak politics, but D. Doroteia thinks we are meditating about the ‘Lord's word’ . . . but if coming to church on Sundays helps us connect and do the nationalist work, then we can come to church. 10 Such a strategic appropriation of missionary work is due to the conditions under which the anticolonial struggle took place. Repression from the political police, PIDE (International and State Défense Police), forced all political movements underground, where they operated on the basis of family and religious ties and using the religious channels of Protestant missions. Clandestine Struggle As the injustices of the colonial regime worsened in the 1950s, the Methodist youth, especially those living in the urban areas, found themselves even more inclined to get involved in politics by joining the cultural and political organizations that challenged the colonial system. Historian Marissa Moorman explains that the history of nation and nationalism in Angola is primarily associated with two distinct spaces and two periods: first with 1950s Luanda (and Lisbon) and secondly, in the years 1961–74 , with the various fronts and bases of exiled leadership and guerrilla forces. Begun in urban elites’ clandestine organizing, nationalism expanded and militarized in the maquis and in exile as an armed struggle for liberation. 11 Deolinda joined the nationalist clandestine movement at the age of seventeen, in September 1956, although there was some internal resistance to her admission in the MLA (Movement for the Liberation of Angola) due to her being a woman. 12 Young Angolan students divided themselves into various movements at different times to trick the political police. 13 Deolinda was multilingual: she could speak kimbundu , Portuguese, English, French, and German. Jacinto Fortunato, a close friend who maintained correspondence with Deolinda in his exile, reports that in the 1950s she “translated simultaneously from English into Portuguese and from Portuguese into Kimbundu, revealing enormous cultural elasticity and a solid intellectual posture.” She could also type, a skill that older nationalists did not possess and that was useful to writing clandestine pamphlets or in sending correspondence to international agencies such as the UN to report the colonial situation. At this point she was organizing clandestine meetings in Luanda’s musseques , listening to Brazzaville Radio, and mobilizing young people in the anticolonial struggle. She established a friendship with Amílcar Cabral, an agronomist engineer from Guinea Bissau working in Angola, with whom she cooperated to send reports to international agencies. 14 10 11 12 13 14 Rodrigues, Deolinda Page 7 of 21 PIDE’s Surveillance and Persecution PIDE, International and State Défense Police, was the political police of the colonial state and repressive agency in the colonies (and in Portugal). In the colonies, PIDE would eliminate political adversaries, as happened to Eduardo Mondlane and Amílcar Cabral. 15 PIDE infiltrated its agents in nationalist and student organizations. PIDE officers used bribery, violence, torture, and whistleblowing to extort information from detainees. It also censored correspondence, newspapers, books, and movies. In the text mentioned earlier (“How Can I Help My Compatriots Regain Their Dignity?”), Deolinda describes the atmosphere of permanent fear she lived in due to PIDE’s surveillance and persecution: PIDE, Portugal’s secret police, was becoming more and more omnipresent and omniscient, and nationalists also had to be prudent in their relations. . . . The members of the nationalist group knew that PIDE was constantly spying on them. I was disturbed with the presence of a PIDE agent, a white, that was always at the corner of our house and that, one day, insulted me. Nor will I forget the night when, upon coming home with nationalist documents under my arm, a police car stopped by. I could barely breath. . . . When I arrived, police cars were parked outside. I rushed to hide as best as possible the documents I brought, convinced my time [to be arrested] had come. On the same night I burned the photos of our nationalist group. 16 The Trial “Processo dos 50” and Exile In the introduction to Diary of an Exile With no Return (2003), Roberto de Almeida reports that his sister, Deolinda Rodrigues, departed from “Angola in February 1959 . . . travelled to Lisbon and, shortly after, to Brazil. Thus, she escaped arrest by PIDE, who were looking for her in Luanda and Lisbon, eager to arrest more nationalists during the trial “Processo dos 50.” 17 Although she avoided imprisonment, she could not escape judicial process. De Almeida continues: see n. 18, not Almeida, it is Chasse. “She was accused of practices ‘against the State’s external security in the form of association to a secret organization’ as seen in an order by Angola’s Military Tribunal, process number 41/60, box 96.” 18 As PIDE’s surveillance increased, Deolinda realized that she was risking being arrested and decided to leave Angola, take refuge in a foreign country, and then finish her studies. In 1959 she was granted a scholarship by the Evangelical Mission to study sociology in Brazil. The dean of the Methodist Institute for Higher Education at the Flora Farmhouse, Santo Amaro, São Paulo, sent Deolinda a letter informing her that she would travel to Brazil on a work visa to be a chambermaid. From Luanda, Deolinda wrote back that the documents did not serve their 15 16 17 18 Rodrigues, Deolinda Page 8 of 21 purpose since her passport stated she was a student, not a worker as claimed in her “invitation letter.” 19 Discrimination against black people in Brazil is part of the social culture inherited from slavery. Deolinda complains about the missionaries’ paternalism and the fact that black people are treated like “babies.” 20 On February 3, 1959, she boarded the cargo ship Rita Maria to Portugal, celebrated her birthday on her own, and arrived in Lisbon on February 19 dressed in yellow clothes feeling dislocated in the capital of the empire. Her friends were afraid that she would be arrested for her African attire. She stayed at Maria Ruth Neto’s house in Amadora for twenty-four days waiting for her Brazilian visa. 21 On March 12, she received her tourist visa and was able to escape being arrested by PIDE. Arrests for the “Processo dos 50” started on March 29. Deolinda arrived in Brazil on March 26, and on April 11 of the same year PIDE issued an arrest warrant accusing Deolinda of being part of the MLA: Movement for the Liberation of Angola. After one and a half years in Brazil, faced with an impending extradition deal between Portugal and Brazil and aware of her arrest warrant, she fled South America to find refuge in the United States. By the end of August 1960, Deolinda was living in the United States, where she was confronted by racial discrimination. She considered racism to be the country’s most serious problem. 22 Deolinda expressed her indignation with Americans in her diary: “Americans seem to me very fake . . . they make us say we like that. Damn nguetas .” 23 Some months later, in a discussion with the “dorm Yankees,” one of her colleagues replies: “If you’re so anti-American, what are you doing here?” She said, “It’s true, I am here. But I don’t belong here.” 24 On November 11, she spent Thanksgiving at a colleague’s house in a slum in Chicago. She remarked: “Such misery, poverty, and disease in this house. The father is a night guard, the mother is paralytic . . . African- Americans need to rebel against this life” 25 . She adds, “We cannot expect anything from the Brazilian, American bastards, or anyone else . . . in a certain sense, the struggle . . . is between whites and blacks. 26 Deolinda saw a correlation between social inequality and racial inequality and considered the racial question to be at the core of pan-Africanism and Negritude. This intellectual move led her to affirm that Angolan nationalists must resort to the “African-Asian block instead of white peoples from either block.” 27 In the United States, Deolinda began studying at Illinois Wesleyan University, in Bloomington, Illinois. Later, she transferred to Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. In Brazil and in the United States (she and José Chipenda were the only Angolan students in 1960 ), she played an important role in publicizing her country’s situation in lectures and conferences, mostly in universities, with the aim of denouncing the crimes of Portuguese colonialism and mobilizing strength and resources in support of the Angolan people. She contacted several associations of black women and African Students’ Union in Chicago and exchanged letters with several black intellectuals in the United States. However, she complained in her writings about Americans’ indifference. 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 Rodrigues, Deolinda Page 9 of 21 She also complained about the missionaries’ meddling when they pressured her not to get involved with politics. Young Deolinda, with her rebel spirit, remained committed and took part in political meetings in spite of the mission: “It’s as if their imposition falls on deaf ears.” 28 It is in exile that she developed a more critical position toward the work developed by protestant missions: Mission folks want us to be thankful for the damn scholarship they are giving us and spread the word that they are the best imperialism agents. . . Not only does their Christianism colonize us, but it also destroys our culture and our own religion. 29 Deolinda had already been in the United States for several months when she was confronted with the peasant revolt on March 15, 1961, a political-messianic revolt aimed at liberating northern Angolan lands occupied by Portuguese settlers. Tormented by the brutal colonial repression against the revolt and the people and by the Protestant ministers, she asked the question: “Who can study while there is news about their people being arrested and massacred?” 30 After the internationally impactful revolt, Deolinda considers that “UPA is the most advanced struggle movement . . . we should all work together.” 31 She appeals for unity: “We are becoming more and more interested in leading nationalist groups to cooperate closely . . . This is why I am going to help UPA’s office in N.Y., even though I’m with the MPLA.” 32 One of Deolinda’s intentions was to curtail UPA’s bad press against MPLA when in international meetings the former presented MPLA as a Communist movement. Despite this rhetoric of unity, the Angolan nationalist movement came to be constructed in dispersion, to use Christine Messiant’s words. 33 Besides fighting Portuguese colonialism, UPA/ FNLA and MPLA also fought each other. MPLA complained that it was being attacked on two fronts: by UPA and the colonial army. Correspondence With Martin Luther King Deolinda had a vision of the transcontinental black world. By the end of May, she took the initiative to send a letter from Brazil to Martin Luther King Jr., minister of the “protestant family” and leader of the civil rights movement in the United States. 34 In The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr we read: In a 30 May [1959] , a twenty-year-old Angolan Student living in Brazil, requested King’s advice and support for the independence movement in her native country but admonished: ‘Please just do what You really can with no harm for You ... If some people have to pay with their lives ... let it be ourselves.’ [...] Rodrigues also wrote that she would ‘pay a high price for it if Portuguese know I have written you about this’ and added: ‘It would be good because it is easier for me to suffer with my People than to do something to help Angola before I am jailed too. 35 On July 21, 1959, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. replied: 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 Rodrigues, Deolinda Page 10 of 21 It seems that the Portuguese are some of the slowest people to give up their possessions in foreign territories. It is very unfortunate that they lack the vision to see the handwriting on the wall. It is always tragic to see an individual or nation seeking to stand up and stop an irresistible tidal wave. 36 ... I would say, however that the first step toward rectifying the situation is to develop real leadership in your country. Some one person or some few persons must stand as a symbol for your independence movement. As soon your symbol is set up it is not difficult to get people to follow, and the more the oppressor seeks to stop and defeat the symbol, the more it solidifies the movement. 37 In her September 26 reply, Deolinda wrote: I agree that a symbol for our independence movement is really necessary . . . Some of [our] leaders are already arrested and surely their imprisonment is awakening more people. Indeed, it hurts more than I thought it could for me to be away from Home and be well here while my People are having harder trials there. 38 Deolinda Rodrigues was bold enough to solicit Martin Luther King Jr.’s advice and experience, intertwining her history with a living legend of the 1960s. Return to Africa Deolinda’s letters to Martin Luther King Jr. and her diary confirm the pain of exile, which distanced her from the nationalist struggle. In 1962 Deolinda’s Portuguese passport expired, and she risked extradition. She unexpectedly decided to abandon her education in the United States to join the MPLA in Africa, motivated just by “the call I always heard from the suffering and exploitation of our people.” 39 She departed on January 29 for Guinea Conakry, accompanied by Mário de Andrade, and after a short stay in this country she took off on March 28 for Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) where she would finally join the MPLA’s board members, becoming part of the liberation movement she identified herself with. Nine months later, Deolinda was elected to the MPLA’s directorial board during the first national conference. The only woman on the board, she was in charge of the department of social issues. She was also a founding member of OMA (Angolan Women’s Organization) in 1962. In Léopoldville, she was also elected to Voluntary Corps for the Assistance of Angolan Refugees (CVAAR)’s executive board. Founded in 1961, this organization offered medical-social assistance to the Angolan community 40 that sought asylum in Congo following the brutal repression by the colonial army against the Revolt of the 15 in March 1961. 36 37 38 39 40 Rodrigues, Deolinda Page 11 of 21 The creation of such an organization aimed at avoiding Congo’s government blockade against MPLA, since they supported UPA instead. The twenty-seven dispensaries where ten doctors and thirty nurses worked (all from Angola) was as a sort of MPLA “Trojan Horse” aimed at establishing the movements foundations in a hostile territory and mobilizing refugees for guerrilla warfare in Angola’s countryside. Dispensaries also served as clandestine weapon storage places for the MPLA. To have an idea of CVAAR’s social impact, the group had more doctors available than in the entire newly independent Congolese state in 1961. 41 During her first year in Léopoldville, Deolinda did not write in her diary. When she resumed writing, she reports that she learned more in one year in Congo than in all of her life, due to the difficulties faced by MPLA. She added: “There are many nuisances in politics. We have too many bosses at MPLA.” 42 MPLA’s conference in 1963 saw the schism leading to Viriato da Cruz’s expulsion, a board member who contested Agostinho Neto’s leadership. 43 MPLA’s internal conflicts led to Matias Miguéis’s murder while Viriato found refuge in China. Deolinda, saddened, by this internal party strife, wrote in her journal: “Beef between Viriatos and Matias . . . Shameful! Such treason to those who are suffering inside the country! Wouldn’t it be better to kill myself?” 44 The Congolese government, in complicity with UPA/FNLA, ordered CVAAR’s closure in October 1963. UPA/FNLA started demanding identification papers and movement reports for all Angolans. The Congolese government expelled the MPLA from Léopoldville. It crossed the Congo River, moving to Brazzaville, Republic of Congo. Despite the many gaps in Deolinda’s biography, it is known that in Brazzaville she worked on the MPLA’s radio program “A Voz de Angola Combatente.” Later, she was transferred to frontier bases with Cabinda, where guerrilla reality was much different compared to the city. There, warriors starved constantly. Deolinda taught adults and children (“Each day I feel less able to teach after fasting,” she said), and hunger increasingly becomes a mark in her writing. “Guerrillas are already real heroes: going to war hungry is not . . . for everyone.” 45 Contradictions in the MPLA’s elite in Brazzaville started aggravating her. Deolinda, in the intimacy of her journal, accuses mestizos and whites of living in the capital surrounded by cars and milk. 46 “There are those who can easily make a ‘revolution’ since they never lack steak, ‘Le Monde’, and packs of AC cigarettes. . . I’ll stay and continue fighting for the people suffering inside. Not for this elite making a revolution with a full belly in a ballroom.” 47 Journalist Reginaldo Silva, in a newspaper chronicle published at Rede Angola in 2015, considered that all documents he accessed about the past do not come as close as “Deolinda Rodrigues’ writing; it is so upfront in the internal critique towards MPLA’s functioning and particularly to the positions of some of its main directors at the time, particularly towards the racial question, which always divided ‘comrades’.” 48 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 Rodrigues, Deolinda Page 12 of 21 Deolinda bluntly criticized the leadership of the two most important nationalist movements: “Angola does not have the necessary leader yet. Holden is a crook, to say the least. Neto is too influenced by advanced, comprehensive theories and whatever. It’s not politics and it’s morally virgin. This is what I think. I may be wrong.” 49 However, she considers that it is not quite time to “conduct the necessary modification of MPLA’s rotten core.” 50 Armed Struggle and the “Esquadrão Kamy” (Kamy Squadron) Figure 3. Cuban Limbânia Jimènez Rodriguez (Nancy) with Kamy squadron guerrillas Teresa Afonso, Lucrécia Paim, Irene Cohen, Limbânia Jimenez, Engrácia dos Santos, Josefa Gualdino, and Deolinda Rodrigues. Concerning MPLA’s armed struggle, women’s participation as guerrillas started in October 1966 at Deolinda Rodrigues’s initiative and was aimed at integrating a small group of women in the military column Esquadrão Kamy. This squadron would attempt to connect with MPLA’s base in the first military region, isolated in the bush of Nambuangongo. To do so, the squadron had to leave the base in Brazzaville (on the border with Cabinda), cross the Congo River to Kinshasa, clandestinely take the train to Angola’s border, avoid FNLA’s forces and Congo’s hostile government, and after entering Angola’s interior avoid confrontation with the Portuguese military. Deolinda Rodrigues and her colleagues, Irene Cohen, Lucrécia Paim, Engrácia dos Santos, Josefa Gualdino, and Teresa Afonso trained for two months in a CIR (Centre for Revolutionary Instruction) located in Dolisie. Cuban instructors trained them. One of the Cuban trainers was Rafael Mórecen Limonta, a black internationalist soldier who was given an Angolan ID card by the MPLA with the name Humberto Macedo Vasques to avoid suspicions of Cuban collaboration. 51 49 50 51 Rodrigues, Deolinda Page 13 of 21 Cuban military journalist Limbânia Jimènez Rodriguez witnessed the preparation of the guerrillas who would form Esquadrão Kamy. 52 In the book Heroínas de Angola (2010) she describes their military training: It was intense and consisted in learning how to handle several weapons such as the soviet PPSHA, AK, and DP, Chinese bazooka, and the Belgian FAL; guerrilla tactics, topography; political education and physical preparation. 53 Deolinda reported in her diary: “In the afternoon I went to the shooting range with the guys. What a wonderful thing: I did 2 ten with the carbine and with the PA in short range. It’s difficult to hold the heavy PM-44.” 54 The squadron, consisting of 127 freedom fighters, left Brazzaville on January 9, 1967, crossed the Congo River in passenger boats, and arrived in Kinshasa by the end of the afternoon. Deolinda was hidden in a safe house, and on the following day the guerrillas seized a convoy to Songololo at the border where the weapons hidden by MPLA’s militants in Congo were collected. 55 After crossing the border, this is what followed: When we were going to cross Luvi river, there came two Portuguese bombings . . . we lied down on the bush. We continued with our journey and I set foot in Angola after nearly 8 years away: I kissed the ground. 56 In the Angolan interior, Deolinda sprained her foot and had to be transported in a stretcher by her comrades. During the walk toward the first military region, the squadron got lost for several days as they tried to find the Ambriz River. With no supplies and unable to find food in the bush, four freedom fighters starved to death and the rest were weakened, including the guerrilla women: “Hunger is destroying everyone,” she lamented as she continued to write in her diary. 57 “Today it’s been one month since we left Congo. . . . There’s hunger and maka of food.” 58 Upon arriving at the Ambriz River during the rainy season, the soldiers found the riverbanks flooded, making crossing the river impossible. In an attempt to cross to the other side, twenty- five freedom fighters drowned. Burdened by the rains and hunger, the fighters considered abandoning their plan to get to the first military region: “The general opinion is that we should go back to Congo.” 59 The group split up; some continued to move further, but a group of fifteen comrades, including the guerrilla women, started their journey back to Congo on February 17. They buried their weapons, and Deolinda asked herself: “What if there is an attack, how are we going to defend ourselves?” 60 On March 1 they found themselves close to the Congolese border. Upon arriving in a farm, the owner told them the way to Songololo. Not suspecting that they had been betrayed, they ended up in Kamuna, a bordering region in Kinshasa, an FNLA stronghold: “We came to UPA’s hands. Ludi said ‘This time Holden is going to get me. . . . Everything seemed fine and then, all of a sudden, damn: Kamuna!” 61 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 Rodrigues, Deolinda Page 14 of 21 And so the diary suddenly ends on March 2, when the guerrillas were captured by UPA/FNLA and taken as prisoners to the Kinkuzu camp (UPA/FNLA’s military base in Congo). Considering the long list of MPLA militants and guerrillas killed by UPA/FNLA throughout the nationalist struggle, these MPLA soldiers soon feared for their lives. An international campaign for Deolinda and her comrades’ release was launched by OMA and MPLA with international agencies, especially the Organization of African Unity (OAU), requesting that Congolese authorities intervene to release them. They were not so fortunate. In the Tchiweka Documentation Association’s archives a long handwritten letter by Deolinda can be found, dated “Kinkuzu, 21/12/67,” proving that nine months after her capture she was still alive. In the letter addressed to MPLA’s board members in Brazza the unfortunate freedom fighter accounts for her precarious situation and the uncertainty she experiences in prison, but she writes bravely: “Away with sadness. If we ever leave, great. If we don’t, may the Angolan people win despite the pain of losing us.” In a dramatically autobiographical poem written in prison in Kinkuzu, the date confirms that she was still alive in March 1968. In this poem, Deolinda employs the use of gerunds to question a never-ending struggle and refers to imprisonment as an “island in hell” where there is always an inquisitor. 62 Inquiring Executioner of Upists under the sight of Portuguese prostitute woman caught up in politics thus, I am labelled inquiring the end of this nightmare inquiring each time the brute step sounds, the military jeep roars the trumpet sounds the general A guard is sent to my door Is it the shooting squad? my turn, his a comrade in the right margin the Congolese captain comes take us now or never? Here I am inquiring always inquiring there are no tunnels on hell’s island. 63 62 63 Rodrigues, Deolinda Page 15 of 21 Memories and Memorialization Figure 4. Statue of the heroines in the Heroines’ Square in Luanda. In 1986 a monument to the five guerrillas killed in Kinzuku was erected in Luanda in the Heroines’ Square. In a paper entitled, “Conflating the Party and the Nation in Angolan Monuments,” Jeremy Ball wrote: The women are dressed in the panos typical of rural women, rather the military uniforms they wore as guerrilla fighters. Margarida Paredes argues that the decision to depict the Heroínas in panos served to redomesticate them and thus dampen expectations arising from ideas about gender equality and women’s emancipation as part of revolution. [This] decision to rap the figures atop the plinth of the Heroínas monument in a pano reflects the societal expectation that after the war women assume traditional roles as wives and mothers. The MPLA’s decision to redomesticate the guerrillas is especially striking given the radical possibilities that fighting for liberations opened up for thousands of Angolan women. 64 The “day of the Angolan woman,” March 2, the day Deolinda Rodrigues was captured by UPA, is a national holiday. Despite the visibility of the celebrations, not all Angolan women see themselves represented by MPLA’s heroines and have asked for a date unrelated to the ruling party since Angola’s independence. 64 Rodrigues, Deolinda Page 16 of 21 Deolinda’s image is addressed to the “nationalist imagination” in a mythical way; what is highlighted is the fact that she died in the struggle for national independence. Such symbolic representation contributed to silencing the singular story of her life and her ideas, thus assimilating her into the nationalist narrative and forgetting her feminism and critiques of the MPLA. Feminist Avant la Lettre The 1960s were the years of African decolonization, the civil rights movement in the United States, the consolidation of scientific method, and the space race: but they were also years of struggle for the women’s rights movement. Deolinda Rodrigues was a woman of her time and fought for such social transformations. The nationalist struggle was a space of self-reinvention. This was a space that forced Deolinda to break from certain values linked to femininity and adopt attributes usually connected to masculinity such as authority, decision-making power, strength, courage, bravery, and violence. In order to become a “fighting comrade” in a movement where women’s emancipation was secondary to the more important national liberation, Deolinda was led to subvert the ruling order and articulate multiple dimensions of the social construction of gender. Esquadrão Kamy commander Ingo Benigno Vieira Lopes stated that Deolinda “was a hard, moody woman, with a commanding voice and who demanded from her comrade’s equal treatment.” 65 If one considers that viewing women as “moody,” according to feminist criticism, corresponds to an affirmation of masculine authority, the aforementioned qualities all refer to masculine attributes. Demanding equality also meant contesting male privilege. Deolinda’s identity construction happened with a certain uneasiness: “One of my female colleagues avoids me because I’m bossy, I’m used to ordering around and don’t know how to cook.” 66 In her more intimate autobiographical writing, Deolinda complains about not being accepted on her own terms and about the pressure she felt about motherhood and marriage. “Benedito says I should get married and have kids to pass my knowledge to them.” 67 She goes on to ask, “Is it possible that this revolution