Abstract
Article 22 of the working contract for the white employees of the Diamonds Company of Angola expressly prohibited the possession of photographic cameras within the diamond mining concession area. The company lived under a visual blackout. As much as for any other activity within the company’s territorial limits, to photograph, to film, to record, was a surveilled and disciplined task assigned to specific subjects, and designed to maximise performance and profit for the company’s stockholders. In this chapter, I return to the materials of the Diamonds Company of Angola to explore a couple of moments on which photography was part of forms of resistance to the contractual blackout. Moments where photographs were neither documents nor truthful records, and became, in time, grim comments on colonial imagination.
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Notes
- 1.
Due to civil war in Angola, the museum closed later that same year, only to be reopened in 2012, by then renamed Dundo Regional Museum.
- 2.
Ernesto Jardim de Vilhena acted as Administrator of the Diamonds Company of Angola, from 1918 to his death in 1966. For a comprehensive biographical approach, including his role as a collector, see Vilhena de Carvalho, 2014.
- 3.
Henrique Augusto Dias de Carvalho was appointed by the Portuguese Government to establish alliances with Angolan authorities in the aftermath of the Berlin Conference. He published key texts on the Cokwe and Aruund peoples as well a volume on their language. See Dias de Carvalho 1890a, 1890b. Photography on his mission to the Lunda (1884–1887) was undertaken by the pharmacist of the group, Sezinando Marques, who became one of the first Europeans to use photography in the Lundas.
- 4.
The first of these across the Lunda was in the mid-1930s (see Geisenhainer, 2018). Two others will follow, one of which, in 1954, will result in the Baumann Collection (see Heintz 2002).
- 5.
The designation of Overseas Provinces, applied to the territories formerly classified as Portuguese colonies (Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and East Timor, Goa, Daman and Diu) was a strategy to subtract these territories from the United Nations purview. The Constitutional Reform of 1952 leveled these territories and these were given the same legal status of mainland territory: these were not colonies but provinces, integral to the ‘Organic essence of the Portuguese Nation’.
- 6.
Relatórios e Contas da Administração[Administration Reports and Accounts], 1948, p. 11.
- 7.
Relatórios e Contas da Administração[Administration Reports and Accounts], 1949.
- 8.
Relatórios e Contas da Administração[Administration Reports and Accounts, 1965.
- 9.
As part of his military career, Henrique Galvão was a supporter of the Portuguese Imperial project but would eventually oppose the dictator from the 1950s onward. He was exiled in Brazil where he died in 1970.
- 10.
Serviço de Informações e Diligências, commonly referred to by former employees as the Diamang’s secret police.
- 11.
Many of these are common to mining operations anywhere in the world.
- 12.
Relatórios e Contas da Administração[Administration Reports and Accounts], 1950, p. 56.
- 13.
Relatórios e Contas da Administração = Administration Reports and Accounts, 1950, p. 115.
- 14.
Philip Newman, originally from Manchester, UK, had taken refuge in Portugal in 1942 as the country remained officially neutral during World War II. He became professor in the Lisbon Conservatory of Music and resumed his career from there, until his passing in 1966.
- 15.
Relatórios e Contas da Administração[Administration Reports and Accounts], 1950, p. 116.
- 16.
Relatórios e Contas da Administração[Administration Reports and Accounts], 1951, p. 36.
- 17.
In Portuguese: Serviço de Apoio e Propaganda à Mão-de-obra Indígena.
- 18.
Relatórios e Contas da Administração[Administration Reports and Accounts], 1943, p. 16.
- 19.
Relatórios e Contas da Administração[Administration Reports and Accounts], 1950, p. 51.
- 20.
Relatórios e Contas da Administração[Administration Reports and Accounts], 1950, p. 88–89.
- 21.
Relatórios e Contas da Administração[Administration Reports and Accounts], 1960.
- 22.
Relatórios e Contas da Administração[Administration Reports and Accounts], 1952, pp. 56–58.
- 23.
Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government, Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 66.
- 24.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, [1983] 1991).
- 25.
Cfr. Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer, 1989, ‘Institutional Ecology, “Translations” and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals’, Social Studies of Science, vol. 19 (1989), pp. 487–420.
- 26.
Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects—Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge Massachusets, London: Harvard University Press, 1991).
- 27.
Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope- Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 191.
- 28.
Terence Wright, ‘Photography: Theories of Realism and Convention’ in Elizabeth Edwards, ed., Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920, (New York and London: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 26.
- 29.
Naomi Schor, “Collecting Paris”, in John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, eds. The Cultures of Collecting (London: Reaktion Books, 1994) pp. 266–268.
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Porto, N. (2023). Photographic Colonial Agency: The Work of Agostiniano de Oliveira at the Diamang (1948–1966). In: Vicente, F.L., Ramos, A.D. (eds) Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_15
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