Ricardo Soares de Oliveira - Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola Since the Civil War

I have been fascinated by Angola for more than fifteen years and incurred extraordinary debts in the process of trying to understand its paradoxical history of tragedy and immense promise. On the basis of my own experience and expertise, the book seeks to make sense of this magnificent and beggar land, to borrow Joseph Brodskys words, as it left a long war behind. My greatest thanks goes to the many Angolans who spoke to me with candour, especially between 2009 and 2013. Most of these interviews and conversations were confidential. It goes without saying that neither they, nor anyone thanked below, share any responsibility in regard to the interpretation put forward in this book or any mistakes that may have crept in.

A project on this scale would not have been possible without the generous support of the Leverhulme Trust, which granted me a Research Fellowship during the academic year of 201112. As a result, I was able to conduct the necessary fieldwork and gather material for this book. The Leverhulme Trust did not hesitate to support the high costs of fieldwork in Angola and kept bureaucratic matters to a minimum. I thank the Master and fellows of St Peters College and the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford for the granting of research leave on this occasion. I am also pleased to acknowledge a 2009 Small Research Grant from the British Academy that financed three trips to Angola and the productive time spent at Sciences Po as OXPO Visiting Professor during March and April 2012. An associated senior researcher position at the Christian Michelsen Institute in Bergen since September 2013 has provided me with access to an outstanding group of researchers, many of whom with more than a decade of experience in Angola. Lastly, I want to express my continued appreciation of the work of the Global Public Policy Institute, to which I have been attached since 2005, and in particular to Wolfgang Reinecke and Thorsten Benner.

While in Luanda, I benefited from the wonderful hospitality of my friend Alexandre Manuel Santos and his late mother, Dona Maria Alice Santos. Dona Alice, the former director of the celebrated Santa Teresinha School in Sumbe, was a formidable character and an Angolan patriot. Manuels house was like home to me, and I do not have enough words to thank him and his friends for welcoming me in such a way. Also in Luanda, I was privileged to be able to discuss energy-related matters with Jos Oliveira. Manuel Alves da Rocha, the director of the Centro de Estudos e Investigao Cientfica (CEIC) at the Catholic University of Angola, an island of excellence and the countrys major research center, was generous with his time and knowledge, as were Nelson Pestana and Regina Santos. The following people have offered valuable observations over many conversations: Fernando Pacheco, Jernimo Belo, Rafael Marques, Srgio Calundungo, Miguel Gomes, Carlos Leite, Carlos Rosado de Carvalho, Cesaltina Abreu, Arlindo Barbeitos, Maria Alexandre Dskalos, Belisrio dos Santos and the late Joo Van Dunem.

I also owe a debt of gratitude to Angola scholars Didier Pclard, Michel Cahen, Justin Pearce, Assis Malaquias, Antnio Toms, Paulo Ingls, Chlo Buire, Ana Duarte, Cheryl Schmitz, Claudia Gastrow, Paula Roque and Sylvia Croese, who provided me with valuable insights, as well as Jon Schubert and Marissa Moorman for sending me two important, then-unpublished papers. Mathias de Alencastro was a source of knowledge about the Lundas as well as a great travel companion in the east of Angola. In particular, Id like to acknowledge the generosity of the late Christine Messiant, whose outstanding work on Angola continues to influence me. I met Christine in 2003 during a five-month stay in Paris, and she gave me precious advice in the following two years about research on Angola.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of researching and writing this book was the opportunity to see a new generation of researchers emerge whose work is changing our knowledge about Angola and placing this crucial African state at the forefront of academic and policy debates about the continent as a whole. Research in Angola remains a difficult and very expensive enterprise but the excitement more than compensates for the drawbacks. In collaboration with Manuel Ennes Ferreira, I organized a conference on Angolan research in Oxford in July 2011. In March 2014 we co-organized a follow-up event with Aslak Orre and Mathias de Alencastro. These events were collaborations with Lisbons ISEG, CMI, and three Luandan universities, the Catholic University of Angola, Lusada University and the Economics Faculty of Agostinho Neto University. I am grateful to the participants in the two conferences for their excellent contributions and hope that such gatherings of scholars become more frequent and increasingly take place in Angola itself.

Kathryn Allawalia of ForeignAffairs, Tom Burgis of the Financial Times, and Rosemary Bechler at Open Democracy kindly commissioned or accepted to publish short pieces on Angola that were helpful in clarifying my thinking on this subject. In addition, the first section of Chapter 1, parts of Chapter 2, and the last section of Chapter 3 are based on papers I published in the Journal of Modern African Studies (2007 and 2011) and in Politique Africaine (2013). Michael Dwyer at Hurst Publishers, as well as Jon de Peyer, Rob Pinney and Fatima Jamadar, were once again a wonderful team to work with, and I thank them for the dedication they have shown towards this book.