1Published in 2021 in the book series “Routledge Studies in the Modern History of Africa”, Vasco Martins’ Colonialism, Ethnicity and War in Angola follows the history of the largest Angolan ethnic group, the Ovimbundu, as well as the evolution of feelings of ethnic and political belonging among them.

2Focusing on the social, cultural, and economic processes at play since the late 19th century, Martins examines “whether ethnicity had a role in the political organization of Angola or whether it had been an absent force in recent Angolan history” (p. 3). Combining different methodologies such as the study of archival sources, participant-observation, and an accurate literature review of African studies on ethnicity, colonialism, and political participation, the book offers an analysis that accounts for the complexity and heterogeneity of the Ovimbundu’s experience, both at the level of elites and ordinary people.

3The book starts from the premise that tribes emerged as a by-product of colonialism, a concept epitomized in “the notion that Europeans believed that Africans belonged to tribes, so Africans created tribes to belong to” (p. 60). However, just like other forms of imagined communities, once created, tribes worked as powerful sociopolitical constructs and defined how people perceived themselves and how they were perceived by others. Though all nationalist movements – and later all parties – had anti-tribalist claims, ethnicity affected the political landscape during the liberation struggle and the civil war in ways that have not yet been entirely overcome. Martins affirms that, in Angola, discussing how ethnicity related to the political choices made by certain groups is still a sensitive matter and even a “public taboo” (p. 10). Yet, the author successfully conducted a series of interviews that bring fresh insights on how ordinary people processed historical events and how these contributed to define their perceptions of ethnic identity, marginalization, and citizenship.

4The book is divided into five chapters that follow both a thematic and chronological partition, examining the processes that shaped modern Ovimbundu’s identity under colonial rule, during the liberation struggle, the civil war, and in post-war Angola.

5Chapter 1 analyzes how the intervention of an external agent – in this case, Christian missions – helped to define and promote a modern Ovimbundu identity. Besides bringing a new religion and a new set of moral values, missions also provided education and health care, which made them particularly attractive to the local populations. Adapting their structures to avoid an abrupt rupture with what was perceived as traditional or customary, missions quickly expanded throughout the central highlands and, with them, emerged a new African elite that could navigate both western and local realities, often acting as intermediaries between them. The use of Umbundu – a language that missionaries not only learned, but also codified in writing for the first time – was a key element for the success of the Christian enterprise and contributed to building a new sense of unity among people scattered across a vast region who, until then, had not imagined themselves as part of the same community.

6The colonial state also used what was perceived as traditional or customary to advance its political agenda. Through the system of indirect rule – to which Martins dedicates a thorough analysis in Chapter 2 – the state coopted African chiefs and delegated some of the functions of colonial administration, including collecting taxes, redistributing lands, and providing quotas of workers to be sent to the ever-growing fazendas in the north. The massive recruitment of workforce through the system of contrato had both a disruptive and creative impact on Ovimbundu identity. While those who stayed had to rearticulate economic and social structures to compensate for the absence of men, large groups of workers displaced from their native region forged a strong perception of their ethnic identity precisely when they found themselves distant from their family and land (p. 55).

8In last two chapters, Martins challenges the essentialist ethnic association between Ovimbundu and UNITA to show how popular support for Savimbi’s movement was gathered through a combination of factors that went far beyond ethnicity, and included intense political mobilization, and the use of violence. At the same time, the author also reflects on how the widespread narrative of complete allegiance to UNITA turned Ovimbundu into Angolans’ “others”. This perception of otherness was strengthened by the diffusion of negative stereotypes rooted in prejudices that describe the Ovimbundu as docile subject (or worse, active collaborators) of the colonial state. Drawing from the interviews he conducted, Martins concludes by considering how, in post-war Angola, “a mantle of negligent historical amnesia and forgiveness” (p. 144) did not lead to an effective reconciliation of all sectors of society and, since access to full citizenship still passes through the adhesion to the political program of a specific party, the Ovimbundu oscillate between marginalization and integration.