Luanda's New Clothes
ETHNOGRAPHIC VIGNETTE | ANGOLA
In Luanda, air travel shifts. One international airport’s dusk is another’s dawn. A passage from old to new, from run-down center to crisp periphery. A rewriting of narratives, using urban landscapes as pencils. In October and November 2025, I strolled through Luanda’s two international transport hubs—the old, 4 de Fevereiro airport, and the new, Dr. Agostinho Neto—in what Hannerz (1980:1–2) might call “experiencing” an urban environment. I experienced two differing images of the past and the future. Inside Dr. Agostinho Neto, modernity, freshness, and desolate vastness dominated in outdrawn but deserted corridors; 4 de Fevereiro’s interior was run-down, tired, and lively. In December 2025, nearly all international arrivals and departures will have been relocated to Dr. Agostinho Neto International Airport.
In times of ongoing large-scale infrastructure mega-projects,[1] Luanda’s airport relocation underlines a global phenomenon and the role of urban infrastructure as a powerful tool and a way to write and rewrite history. Relocating one airport to benefit another reflects the reality most Luanda residents have faced since the urbanization and turmoil following the civil war in the 1980s and 1990s (Development Workshop 2000:4; Human Rights Watch 2007).
In Luanda’s informal settlements (musseques), migrants and refugees (deslocados) from rural areas often lack legal documents and written claims to their homes and lands, making them vulnerable to land grabbing during urban redevelopment projects (Tomas 2022:194; Hodges 2004:30–31; Croese 2016). “Luanda is more than ever polarized between the ‘asphalt’ city,” writes Davis (2006:97), “ceded by the Portuguese to the novos ricos,[2] and the vast dusty periphery of poor barrios and musseques.”
Caldeira (1996:323) notes that urban facelifts driven by class separation—shaped by land speculation, ideology, and short-term profits—are found in both reactionary and democratic megacities. Gazing at São Paulo, in Brazil’s post-dictatorship decades, the “fortress architecture” shaped by Western economists and political architects not merely transformed the look and senses of urban areas, it also removed the access to public spheres to large population parts (Caldeira 1996:323). When (physical and mental) walls are raised to separate people—through skin color, class, sex, or religion—urban infrastructure becomes a tool for suppression, not networking. The necessity of acknowledging “those from different social groups as cocitizens” with equal rights is undermined by the walls that “not strengthen citizenship but rather contribute to its corrosion” (ibid., 325). “The construction of status symbols,” concludes Caldeira (ibid., 308), “is a process which elaborates social distance and creates means for the assertion of social difference and inequality.”
Luanda’s airport relocation affair captures what von Schnitzler (2013:672–673) describes as a “techno-political device.” Infrastructure itself “becomes a political terrain for the negotiation of central ethical and political questions concerning civic virtue and the shape of citizenship” (ibid., 689). A modernized and up-to-date airport project thus signals a break with a stagnated past and symbolizes a leap towards a vibrant future.
Old and new—one narrative
The old airport was built in 1951, when Angola was an “overseas province” confiscated by the Portuguese Empire. First named after Portugal’s then-president Francisco Craveiro Lopes, the downtown-airport became a historical set piece during the last hours of Portuguese colonialism, when Angola in 1975 stood on the brink of independence after 500 years as a European commodity. Prior to Angola’s national liberation, half a million white Portuguese settlers squatted at the airport—in the terminals, on the tarmac, parking lot, and surrounding areas—demanding a “return” to a European “homeland” most of them had never visited (Peralta 2022:8–14; Kalter 2020; Kapuscinski 2001:12–13).
A Lisbon–Luanda “air-bridge” was set up, and the settlers were evacuated to Europe. The airport was left in a state of abandonment and silence, “monstrously littered and dirty because no one had cleaned up after the half million refugees” (Kapuscinski, ibid., 111). After the clean-up, the airport was renamed. Any honorary mention of the Portuguese colonial enterprise was dropped, and the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA)—which had won the domestic power-struggle and led the new independent national government—named Luanda’s main airport after a date: 4 February 1961.
On this Saturday, Angola’s armed liberation resistance erupted through a series of urban revolts, strikes, and prison breaks in central Luanda. This date and the events (as described by MPLA that continues to govern Angola) has been integrated in the urban landscape, historical infrastructure, and geographical narrative. By naming Luanda’s most integral avenue and international traffic hub after “the day on which the Angolan people, under the leadership of the MPLA, took the initiative in rising against Portuguese rule” (Pearce 2012:204), 4 February is immortalized as a historical event and physically embodied in the capital’s infrastructure.
The new airport, on the other hand, was part of a massive and vocal “long-term strategy for Angola,” where Luanda was to be “reclassified” (Udelsmann Rodrigues 2022:219). The project was launched in 2004, after the civil war and during an oil bonanza, primarily funded by the Chinese International Fund. Inaugurated in 2024, the airport was named after Angola’s first president, Agostinho Neto, a poet, doctor, and MPLA-co-founder. Neto led MPLA before and after independence, and was at the epicenter of 1975, a “year zero for Angola” concerning “the question of urbanism and processes of urbanization” (Tomas 2022:94). Independence, states Tomas (ibid.), “brought with it the possibility of a new reconfiguration of space, and more importantly, one that could allow for justice in the ways in which bodies were ascribed to space.” When Neto died of cancer in 1979, Angola’s first president—his body, name, spirit, and legacy—was incorporated into Luanda’s urban infrastructure.
Whose infrastructure—and how, when, and why?
The dismantling of the centrally located 4 de Fevereiro airport will clear “new” land in lucrative and posh areas, since the 1980s inhabited by deslocados. From Dr. Agostinho Neto transport, arriving visitors travel along well-planned lanes, paved roads, flashy billboards, and spotless industrial parks. Arriving at 4 de Fevereiro offers a ride along a chaotic, frantic, and over-trafficked route along run-down housing complexes and abandoned shops, and businesses. No billboard that welcomes you.
Luanda’s urban facelift could be seen as a direct attempt to claim authority over historical narratives and determine inclusion or exclusion. Infrastructure demonstrates power that, according to Barua (2023:28), “bleeds in multivalent and unexpected ways.” For Barua, infrastructure is more than a concept; it “continuously unsettles bodies and their arrangements” (ibid., italics in original). In Luanda, war refugees have been labeled as invaders and squatters. Barua’s (ibid., 46–49) analysis of New Delhi’s “Monkeymen” adds another layer, showing how class politics and myth circulate through perceptions of the urban poor.
Infrastructure combines various power phenomena: politics, economics, culture, and technology (Larkin 2013:328). “The poetics of infrastructure,” writes Larkin (ibid., 329), “allows us to understand how the political can be constituted through different means.” These words ring true in the arrival hall of Dr. Agostinho Neto, merely weeks before all international flights to Luanda will land here, abandoning 4 de Fevereiro. An airport can be regarded as a window to the outside; a sensation that Bestor (2001:84–90) grapples with, by analyzing seafood exports through the lens of symbolism and domestic prestige. When urban infrastructure becomes a market (if it is ever anything else but an extension of an economic system?), meanings and relationships adapt to its structures and various power layers.
Within infrastructure, and embedded in urban landscapes, we find the knowledge, ideology, theocratization, blood, sweat, and tears that link us to the early stages of industrialization (Anand 2015; Hornborg 2006). Infrastructure, Larkin (2013:329) resonates, exists apart from its purely technical functioning. Most of all, adds Anand (2015), “infrastructures are grafted onto an already-existing world,” forcing us to think about our own responsibility regarding the injustices embedded in geographical separation, social inequality, development schemes, and the concept of modernity.
Björkman (2014:501–502) traces the politics, power, and infrastructure of pipes and water access in Mumbai and underlines the importance of locality, contacts, and a “constant transferring of connections” that tells us just as much about the Indian megapolis’s pipe politics as about people’s perpetual need to interact with authorities and governmental middlemen. Björkman invokes the question of why urban areas look the way they do. When, how, and who turns these seemingly chaotic, spontaneous, and crowded mega villages into what they are? Björkman (ibid., 513–514) points to “historical patterns of differential rights and spatialized articulations of unequal citizenship (often rooted in a colonial past)” as a driving force of Mumbai’s “contemporary patterns of rule”—a state and look that manifests itself in unequal access to public goods and infrastructural services.
A (necessary?) narrative pivot
During my visit to Luanda, visitors were barred from Agostinho Neto’s memorial site as authorities prepared the mausoleum, museum, and other key sites for the upcoming 50th Independence anniversary. The closed doors embody what Martins and Cardina (2020:60) conclude as a “political standing” in contemporary Angola: neither Agostinho Neto’s memorial site nor any of Luanda’s newly built five-star hotels, chic nightclubs, or fancy beach resorts is meant to serve o povo (“the people”), whose place is in “the margins of the Angolan state” (ibid.).
The post-Neto MPLA-led government’s vision of creating a “Dubai-like” capital meant to welcome an influx of tourism, business, and “masses of foreigners into the city, turning it into a locus where the invisible hand of capitalism would consequently lift Angolans from poverty” (ibid., 46). In this vision, the modern, fresh, and newly inaugurated Dr. Agostinho Neto airport functions as Luanda’s open arms and welcoming smile. Consequently, the airport allows Angolan politicians and citizens to deem a modern and important piece of infrastructural project as their own, neither tied to Portuguese colonialism, architecture, or the physical scars of Portuguese settlers-squatters, nor the unofficial graveyard of a dying empire. In the end, its historical context gives it a certain agency and national purpose, regardless of one’s opinions of the airport’s interior design, Chinese funding, and explicit homage to capitalism.
Larkin (2013:333) points to infrastructure as a constant political being, constantly reminding us through shape, form, and names of our subjective positionality in urban schemes and place in history. Infrastructure as a political, cultural, and economic project, Larkin (ibid., 332) adds, “has its conceptual roots in the Enlightenment idea of a world in movement and open to change where the free circulation of goods, ideas, and people created the possibility of progress.” In Luanda, this is especially true as 4 de Fevereiro was constructed at a time when the Portuguese empire reshaped the urban infrastructure of Luanda, building a port, broad avenues, and an airport to create an air-bridge to the “Metropole,” to Europe.
Turning away from ethnocentricism
As ethnographers, infrastructure as objects, as emotions, as something we can feel, touch, smell, and experience, we are provided with a complex and ever-changing set of tools to better understand our own place in a world where urban jungles are ever-expanding (von Schnitzler 2015:389–405). Urban infrastructure—whether physical or digital—is the space where we seek connection, purpose, and fulfillment.
My ethnographic example from Luanda shows how urban infrastructure remains a tool for power and political historization—or simply put by an Angolan businessman at the baggage claim at the new but still-empty Dr. Agostinho Neto International Airport: “It feels nice to land here, at the new airport. It’s not as dirty as the old one—and situated much better. You have good a tar road straight to southern Luanda, and you don’t have to drive near the savages in the city’s worst musseques.”
In all states, times, and historical milieus, the political, military, or cultural victor determines the way history is being written and taught. Trouillot (1995:6) writes: “Each historical narrative renews a claim to truth.” Angola is no exception. Therefore, as an anthropologist, my aim is to embody reflexivity and tackle the ethnocentric and Westernized impulse to conclude this complex urban infrastructure project as either black or white—or worse, as good or bad.
By observing the Angolan rewriting process and urban infrastructure facelift as a post-colonial process, I realize the importance of removing 500 years of colonialism by replacing it with a narrative that aims to unite Angola, a society that, during its 50 years of independence, has experienced more days caught in a bloody civil war than moments of peace and stability. The historicity that is intertwined in the Dr. Agostinho Neto airport turns local citizens, at least theoretically, into actors and narrators of an urban transformation that claims control over the past and the future (Trouillot 1995:150).
Founded in 1575 by Portuguese conquistadors and remembered as a major slave-trade port that sent 1.2 million people across the Atlantic to the New World (Miller 1988:226–229), this conscious narrative pivot asserts historical self-determination and political agency in Luanda, both internally and externally.
[1]E.g., Indonesia’s relocation of its national capital (Perwira, Harijanti, Susanto & Adhihernawan 2024) or Inga III (a hydroelectric mega-dam project along the Congo River, assisted by the World Bank, but conducted in a region torn by war and political instability) (Scherer 2021).
[2]“Newly-rich” Angolans tied to the oil sector, construction business, or mining industry.
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