Elephant eye: Sousa Jamba says Angolans are not impressed by crude displays of wealth
There is a video making the rounds in Angolan circles of a young man from a wealthy family rolling up a $100 bill and smoking it while boasting about his wealth.
The habit of showing off seems to be very common in Angolans in the Diaspora — sons (it is mainly a man thing) of the wealthy elite showing off women, pricey cars, expensive jewellery.
At the height of the late president Jose Eduardo dos Santos’s regime, there was even a group of young men who hopped around the world in a private jet and then shared the photos on Facebook.
Many Angolans are no longer impressed: in fact, this boorish behaviour has come to be associated with showy members of the elite in the West who are not necessarily sophisticated or have good taste.
I have a young friend in Huambo called Ana Maria Chilombo who probably has never seen the inside of an airplane and does not have a passport.
Ana teaches at a rural school; she has to wake up at 4 am to get there. In the evening, she goes to university, where she is studying for a degree in African history.
Ana records her lectures; during the journey to work she listens to them and other audio books.
She is also an avid follower of international affairs; she has downloaded lectures on international matters from YouTube. Ana is certainly far more sophisticated than some Angolans in the West who spend most of their time in restaurants and posh nightclubs.
I was once chatting with a friend in Lubango, in the southern Angolan province of Huila, when I noticed that her living room was tastefully decorated.
She gave me a virtual tour; she lived in a dwelling that could have been featured in Architectural Digest. This friend had a passion for the writing of Germaine Greer, the Australian feminist author — and yet it is very possible that she also does not have a passport!
There is a long tradition of people doing everything to keep themselves well informed and cultured. Angolans are not impressed by the display of what can be gained materially in the West because they are very aware that there is more to life than cars, cigars or posh hotels.
I recall a time, when I was a child in colonial Angola, when my father had to take the battery powering his gigantic shortwave radio to a nearby town to be charged. At some point my father would disappear to take a nap (the door to his room would be closed) or to listen to broadcasts to Angola from liberation movements from the Republic of Congo.
I recall a time, too, when our house was raided by the police, who found a library with all sorts of books. They took much interest in the fictional works; they wanted to know who in our house was reading Dostoyevsky. It was my older brother, who at the time had fled from the Portuguese army to join one of the liberation movements.
When in 2019 my mother passed on aged 89, my niece, who teaches communication at a university in Luanda, said in the farewell speech that Grandma was an avid follower of the news.
My mother also read magazines and took a keen interest in small businesses around the world till the end of her life. In her seventies, she decided she needed to get a high school diploma so she could go to university to study international relations. My mother would certainly have laughed at the young men trying to impress the rest of the nation by smoking $100 notes and would have pitied them.
Pictured above; money to burn
