Colonial Resonances

Abstract

In this essay I chart the resonance of colonial urbanism in contemporary urban renewal projects in the Angolan port city of Lobito. I trace how the city’s aesthetics and design reflect and produce its social, material, and economic connections throughout the cyclical ups and downs of its fortunes. Riffing off Christina Schwenkel, we can study the “lingering affectations and sentimentalities” of past economic and political regimes through a city’s bricks and their affective resonances (2013: 254–55). While Angola has undergone profound political, ideological, social, and economic change since the beginning of the twentieth century, Lobito’s architecture still echoes with the logics and needs of extractive capitalism. I begin with a brief history of the port and railway in the city, then work through the affects of former railway and port workers to consider the transformation of the built environment following Angolan independence in 1975.