ABSTRACT
With its anti-colonial commitment and promise of progress and equality, socialism was an attractive ideology for the first Angolan government within the era of Cold War binaries. Manifestations of socialist realism and alternative modernist practices derived from South–South and South–East cultural exchange and remain visible in Luanda’s cityscape until today. The impact of socialist visual culture on aesthetic projects in Africa has not yet been researched in depth. Bringing this together with questions around heritage and the preservation of official memory in forms of visual culture is the key motivation of this chapter. Which images from socialist cultural memory are (re)activated in present-day heritage culture, and how does this reactivation impact the accessibility and securitization of the heritage? I focus on these questions by presenting two recent examples of state-sponsored renovation of art and architecture in public spaces of Angola’s capital, Luanda: (a) The mural at the Military Hospital, and (b) the mausoleum of Angola’s first president, Agostinho Neto. The chapter invites readers to look closer into the cultural politics of post-socialism on the African continent. It also aims to show how these two sites function very differently concerning the question of securitization, arguing that it is the level of attention and acknowledgement as public heritage that correlates with its accessibility by providing both an insecure and unsecured space through official neglect, on the one hand, and an over-secured place through official attention on the other.
