Cars Are Killing Luanda: Cronyism, Consumerism, and Other Assaults on Angola’s Postwar, Capital City

Abstract

If the bicycle embodied the contradictory effects of twentieth-century colonialism in Africa, then surely the car serves a similar purpose with regard to the postcolonial moment on the continent today. The automobile’s association with cosmopolitanism and modernity, urban living and elite values is evident in the expression of individual desires and in the tropes of mass advertising. Yet, its dependence on oil links it undeniably with the resource curse that has cruelly plagued so many African countries. The many potholed roads on which it travels in Angola, in Congo, or in Uganda underscore the failures of developmentalism and modernism, and expose the sabotage and neglect occasioned by intractable conflicts from western to southern Africa. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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