Contemporary Tradition and Modernity in Africa

The second chapter of Part I recounts the context in which this story is told. Africa below the Sahara  faces the daunting challenge to create wealth for its peoples and to deal with its disruptive history: slave trade, followed by a relatively short period of true colonialization, independence, and the remaining strive for decolonialization. Africa may be characterized by an emerged reality of ‘having a double version of everything’: traditional and modern. While by no means static, nor mutually exclusive nor free from power inequalities, we can detect the search for ‘traditional’ indigenous forms of leadership, management, and organization and the efforts to reconcile a mosaic of cultural logic and institutions. Some talk about the search for hybrid forms, others call it confluence and in this story about the Portuguese subsidiary in Angola, the questions will be posed what are the rather static, essentialized aspects of culture and which flexible, performative aspects of culture can in the end be distinguished (both from Angolan and Portuguese sides)?