02.
Settle:
Revillaging
(1)
I examine Cela’s project in its present iteration, Projecto Aldeia Nova, as a palimpsest of successive waves of violent population displacement. These range from the colonial period of settler agriculture, until the present-day strategies to fixate and pacificate rural populations after the end of the civil war. Through the combined means of interviews with soil scientists that worked in the area and archival research, I developed a spatiotemporal analysis of the transformations in land use that occurred since the reactivation of the project in 2005. Furthermore, by framing Cela within the wider temporal scale of the soil surveys conducted in 1960-61, I argue that the success and failure of the agricultural and social experiments that were implemented with the colonial model continue to hinder the present.
Basemap: Google (obtained through Google Earth Engine QGIS plugin), Map data (c)2021 [Airbus]
(2)
Basemap: Google (obtained through Google Earth Engine QGIS plugin), Map data (c)2021 [Airbus]
Aldeia 1
Aldeia 3
Aldeia 5
Aldeia 7
Aldeia 8
Aldeia 9
Aldeia 10
Aldeia 11
Aldeia 12
Aldeia 13
Aldeia 14
Aldeia 15
(3)
(4)
(4) Legislation published concerning the Colonato da Cela, 1956. Table II is set up for inserting plot coordinates, and below an empty rectangular frame labelled “Plan,” for drawing the shape of the plot. Table III was meant for defining the “juridical situation.” Source: Imprensa Nacional de Angola, ed., Legislação [da] província de Angola: colonato da Cela (Luanda: s.n., 1956).