This thesis explores the role of the "public" in Angolan politics. The first part of the thesis outlines how the notion of the "public" is perceived. This starts with a review of Jiirgen Habennas's seminal contribution - The Structural Transformation a/the Public Sphere and the debate it provoked. Subsequently, this thesis argues that for many reasons Habermas's framework is not suitable for studying the "public" in Angola, and as a result will proceed to outline an alternative approach in which the "public" is instantiated through acts and practices of truth-telling or parrhesia as understood by Michel Foucault. Having outlined the approach to this subject, the second part of this thesis moves on to reviewing the history of the "public" in Angola. Furthermore, the final part of the thesis looks at contemporary Angolan politics. Following a review of the constitutional, legal and socio-economic framework within which public life in Angola exists, the present study examines the workings of the "public" during _ ~d after Pope Benedict's visit to Angola in March 2009. Moreover, this thesis also looks at one of the few media outlets that managed to preserve its independence vis-a.-vis the political regimt} - the Catholic Radio Ecclesia. Thus, this thesis argues that the entrenched. political regime of the Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola (MPLA) has succeeded in creating what is referred to in this thesis as a "pseudo-public sphere". In many ways this reality mimics the activities of a "genuine" public sphere as defined by Habermas. Nevertheless, this same reality is owned and controlled by the regime. Albeit this restricted atmosphere is a "counter-public sphere" emerging through acts of parrhesia, this thesis endeavours to analyse - -me complex interaction between the "pseudo-public" and the "counter-public".

How political authority and legitimacy are sustained in societies marked by socio-economic inequality and political exclusion is a long-standing preoccupation in the social sciences. Since the end of its civil war in 2002, Angola has often been cited as a paradigmatic case of such ‘illiberal peacebuilding’; of successful post-war transition to economic recovery and formal, political liberalisation, closely managed and tightly controlled by a ‘neoauthoritarian’, dominant-party regime. Based on 12 months of fieldwork in Luanda, this thesis offers an empirically and analytically innovative perspective that balances the ‘Africa rising’ narrative pervading mainstream media reports of post-war Angola, and complicates the clientelist account of Angolan politics that predominates academic literature. It does so by privileging an ethnographic approach rooted in urban life, encompassing social strata commonly studied separately. This seeks to delocalize the anthropological gaze and capture the radical social and spatial mobility of everyday life in Luanda. By working through the emic notion of the ‘system’, this thesis pays attention to both material practices and symbolic repertoires mobilised in the co-production of the political. For Angolans the ‘system’ is simultaneously a moral ordering device, a critique, and a mode d’emploi for their current political and socio-economic environment. It is characterised by multiple internal tensions: between the stasis and speed of urban life; blockages and mobility; the past and the future; ‘memory work’ and selective amnesia; and between fear and hope; and the affects and aspirations produced by ‘power’. Through detailed analysis of the practices through which people ‘work the system’, and of the political imaginaries and discursive repertoires that ‘make the system work’, the thesis looks at the myriad processes through which relationships between ‘power’ and ‘the people’ are constantly remade, renegotiated, and dialogically constructed. The analytical value of this notion of the ‘system’ is that it avoids reproducing a simplistic distinction between ‘state’ and ‘society’. By revealing the multiple linkages between these two spheres, we can think beyond ‘resistance’ and ‘complicity’, drawing out a more subtle account of hegemony, beyond the ‘cultivation of consent’ by the dominant. Examining the ‘functioning’ of ‘the system’ through the eyes of its ‘users’, the thesis therefore builds upon, and extends anthropology’s critique of dominance as something ‘produced’ by a group of select individuals, and investigates instead what it means and how it feels to live in and be part of such a polity. Its chapters explore the interweaving strands that make up this complex, mutually dependent relationship: history and the disjunctures between official and affective memories, ideas of racial and class identities, the idioms of kinship, and the practices and symbolisms of money-making. However, instead of reifying notions of ‘memory’, ‘tradition’, ‘identity’ or ‘corruption’ as analytical concepts, the thesis shows how social actors mobilise and modify these idioms in everyday interactions with ‘power’. Both in practice and in imagination, this ‘New Angola’ is constituted as essentially urban, upwardly mobile and aspirational, with rural areas left ‘behind’. Thus Luanda epitomises both a lived reality and a political project that stands for the entire country, as well as ‘laboratory of the global’, offering new insights into the politics of the everyday in dominant-party regimes in the 21st century.

Angola is currently the fifth-largest diamond producer in the world. Yet neither the politics nor the history of Angola's diamond trade receives much attention either in the Angolan scholarship or the thematic literature on the mining sector more generally. The gap in the literature is significant, for diamond companies produce far more than revenue and profits: for some one hundred years, the diamond sector has governed, policed, defended, and controlled the strategic, diamond-rich provinces of Lunda Sul and Lunda Norte. This thesis explores the historical trajectory of the diamond sector in the Lundas. It concentrates on the powerfully symbiotic relationship between the diamond sector and the state from the colonial period to the present time. Drawing on a wide range of untapped official documents as well as interviews, it argues that the diamond sector has functioned historically as the conduit through which the state projects its power and secures its interests in a strategic but hostile territory. The thesis further shows how the politics of resource control both define the state’s strategies towards the diamond sector and perpetuate the entrenched system of privatised governance that has existed in the Lundas for more than a century. The thesis builds upon both the historical and contemporary literature on the mining sector and the literature on state formation. It challenges the conventional notion that the persistent power of private companies in Africa is the result of state weakness or state absence, underlining instead how state leaders instrumentalise and empower companies according to their changing priorities. It also considers the implications of this case study more broadly through a cross-case analysis of mining politics elsewhere in Africa. In the process, this study provides an original approach to state–mining sector relations that is of relevance to scholars working on the politics and political economy of state-making and of resources extraction in Africa.