Legal Gazettes as Historical Roadmaps for Researching the Cooperative Movement in Angola
This text recounts experiences of engaging with Angolan state authorities and institutions during fieldwork when researching the state’s role since independence in devising strategies to govern its vast rural areas and its peoples. A central pillar of this strategy consisted in the construction of a...
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| In: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/sources, |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Language: | Anglais |
| Published: |
Sources
2024
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Summary: | This text recounts experiences of engaging with Angolan state authorities and institutions during fieldwork when researching the state’s role since independence in devising strategies to govern its vast rural areas and its peoples. A central pillar of this strategy consisted in the construction of a nation-wide attempt at developing a corporatist cooperative sector. The goals were two-fold: it would channel much needed resources to the rural economy through a state-led agricultural sector as well as providing structures of political oversight and control over the rural workers. The outbreak of civil war impeded much of the initial plans, yet the strategy progressed nevertheless. The research project therefore focused on exploring the origins of the cooperative sector. In conducting this historical research, one of the main primary sources of documentation and analysis was the government’s legal gazettes. A main mission of the fieldwork became the identification and location of these documents pertaining to the cooperative movement. The task was made difficult as Angola’s legal gazettes are not accessible to the public in any centralised manner and existing online databases are incomplete. Given the circumstances, accessing the documents would require going through public officials. The research was conducted in a specific period of authoritarian decompression, led by a corporatist regime that had been consolidating its power and influence nationwide in the two decades following the end of the civil war in 2002. The research project progressed significantly by gaining access to primary documentation through both public and private institutions, as well as securing informal semi-direct interviews with key officials. The relative success of the fieldwork provides a blueprint for accessing different sources of documents in Angola and the measured openness of the regime to researchers probing its institutions for research purposes. In the end, the documents unearthed during the archival research demonstrated the extent to which the cooperative sector in Angola had been politicised since its conception. Contextualising this political experiment provides the value of the present research as it gives important historical insight into how the cooperatives’ trajectory ultimately undermined their current form, character, and efficiency. |
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