White privilege: grey zones. Portuguese migrants in Angola

Abstract

It is often assumed that South-North migrations are fundamentally different from North-South ones. That White privilege is unequivocal, universal and tendentially homogenous – while simultaneously invisible for those who have it. This article confronts these assumptions by putting the spotlight on subjective experiences of awkwardness and vulnerability, embodied by White Europeans living in sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among Portuguese work migrants to Angola, and critically engaging conceptualizations of “structural oblivion” and “white double consciousness”, the article unpacks the remodulation of White subjectivities in a contemporary postcolonial Black-majority context. It argues that the comforts of the deep-rooted White privilege were counterbalanced (but not nullified) by postcolonial political and economic changes, and implicit and explicit indictments to reckon with the past.

Introduction

Discourse surrounding global migrations is ripe with assumptions that South-North migrations exhibit a tendentially homogeneous nature distinct from North-South ones. This notion is intwined with the concept of White ¹ privilege, perceived often as unequivocal, unified, universal – and yet, simultaneously invisible to those who benefit from it (Dyer 2008). Such assertions, however, overlook the complex and diversified experiences of individuals located within these broad categories, and the specifics of each of their contexts. In response, research on North-South mobility or ‘privileged mobilities’ (Amit 2007; Fechter 2016; Fechter and Walsh 2010; Lundström 2014; Kunz, 2016; Kunz, 2020) has for the last couple of decades sought to thicken our knowledge, by bringing to light the contradictions and nuances of plentiful empirical cases, describing the manifold ways North-South migrants ‘rework or challenge relations and practices forged through imperialism’ (Leonard 2008, 45).

This article follows in such literature, aiming to contribute to a nuanced understanding of the intersection of migration and White privilege, by examining the subjective experiences of awkwardness and vulnerability articulated by White European migrants in a sub-Saharan African country. The empirical focus is on recent Portuguese migrants to Angola, a context ripe with postcolonial significance, as the legacy of Portuguese colonialism infuses the experiences of contemporary migration, at the same time that recent economic dynamics invert – if only circumstantially (or even fictitiously) – geo-political hierarchies.

While I do not intend to minimize the significance of White privilege and coloniality in this context (explored at length in Augusto et al., 2022; Valente Cardoso 2019; Åkesson, 2018), I wish here to move the focus of analysis to a less explored dimension: how do White migrant subjects perceive, navigate and relativize these privileges? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2016 in Benguela, one of Angola’s biggest cities, I describe White Portuguese identities as structurally contradictory: on the one hand, favored, on the other, awkward and vulnerable (Lan 2022). In developing this argument, I critically engage with the concepts of “structural oblivion” (McIntosh 2017) which refers to the tendency of privileged groups to remain unaware of the systemic advantages they possess, and “White double consciousness” (Alcoff 2015) which captures the dual awareness that White individuals may develop when they find themselves in a minority position, as well as the importance of racialized embodiment.

These concepts will assist me in delineating empirically what I term the grey zones of White privilege, and delve into the nuances and complexities of Portuguese/White subjectivities in Angola. These ethnographic reflections are organized according to themes that cut across the interlocutors’ experiences: the embodied experience and perceived consequences of being racialized as White; the precarity and felt insecurity of their living circumstances, and the tensions between the subjects’ morals and ethics and their sense of self-preservation or self-interest. Before I get into them, I lay out the concepts that will frame the analysis and provide some background on the Portuguese recent migration to Angola.

Concepts to approach North-South migrants’ subjectivities

Post-colonial White presence in Africa, whether in the continuity of settler colonialism or the result of post-colonial migration, has been described as characterized by partial continuities and imperfect ruptures within the ongoing temporality of the colonial condition (Peraldi and Terrazzoni 2016). Ethnographic studies conducted among White communities in sub-Saharan Africa reveal the specific contours of Whiteness and White subjectivities in this context, highlighting their conspicuous, contested, and often resented nature (e.g. Gressier 2015; McIntosh 2016; Suzuki 2018) ² .

While the end of colonial rule and the rise of Black majority governments formally dismantled racist regimes in which sovereign power was concentrated in the hands of a White ruling minority, racial inequalities remain entrenched across the continent. Indeed, while “the racial divide between White and Black no longer neatly maps onto the divide between dominator and dominated”, racial disparities not only persist but are often reinforced by new social arrangements and institutions, as well as the expansive reach of global capitalism (van Zyl-Hermann and Boersema, 2017:61). In the case of contemporary migrants from the Global North to Africa, studies suggest that these individuals often leverage linguistic, economic, and cultural capital perceived as advantageous, while simultaneously being shaped by shifting power dynamics and the broader impact of global macro-level forces, which in turn influence local identity formations (Peraldi and Terrazzoni 2016, 22). This has given rise to the understanding of Whiteness itself as a form of capital that can facilitate class mobility within migration contexts (Garner 2016; Lundström 2014).

The contours of the recent Portuguese migration to Angola resonate these general considerations. Being usually offered higher work positions and higher salaries than the ones they had previously held or could aspire to hold in Portugal, the Portuguese migrants assumed positions of relative comfort, in professional and economical terms. More often than not, they would be responsible for Angolan subordinates in the workplace – and, frequently, at home as well, as many would employ Black Angolans as house-staff. This was due to generalized assumptions about the competency, efficiency and reliability of Portuguese workers (see Augusto et al., 2022; Åkesson 2018). However, this also led some Angolans to voice their acrimony in recurrent—though most of the times inconsequential—complaints: “They [the Portuguese] take the best jobs”, “They still think we live in colonial times”. The subdued hostility expressed by some Angolans, combined with the fraught history shared by the two countries, made the Portuguese feel they had to find justification for their presence. As they saw their legitimacy questioned, the migrants resorted to the notion of superiority in, at least, the technical domains to which they were connected professionally. To a certain extent, it could be argued, this presumed superiority was ratified by Angolans, be it the individuals they interacted with them daily or the country’s leadership that incentivized their presence. In this sense, the concept of coloniality, defined as the European “mystified image of their own patterns of producing knowledge and meaning” (Quijano, 2007:169) has doubtlessly illuminating potential in this context (as highlighted in Augusto et al., 2022; Valente Cardoso 2019).

Observing a similar dynamic among White Kenyans, Janet McIntosh writes about the upkeep of hegemony as involving a hidden, even nonvoluntary, element:

If ‘hegemony’ is a system in which all social strata are implicated in the process of oppression, then not only do the subaltern sometimes unwittingly collude in their own oppression, but, too, the powerful oppress not only deliberately but sometimes unwittingly’ (2016:12).

This “light ignorance and denial” of the powerful (the “being ‘out of it”) implies “a certain self-interested kind of work”, even though a part of it might occur unconsciously for subjects (McIntosh 2016:12). This work is what Mcintosh calls “structural oblivion”: a subject position of “ignorance, denial, and ideology (…) [and the] refusal of certain implications of social structure” (2016: 10). It creates among the Whites the non-deliberate neglect of the “experience of and/or reasons for the resentment of less privileged groups” while it obfuscates “the ways in which [their own] ideologies, practices and very habits of mind continue to uphold one’s privilege” (McIntosh 2016: 10, see also Klinkert 2021).

The work of structural oblivion though ever present amongst my interlocutors, was countered by two other factors that limited its reach and affordances: on the one hand, the temporal closeness to colonial times and the recent memory of them; on the other hand, the interlocutors’ own embodied experience of racialization. I describe these and argue that, combined, they resulted in a particular form of “White double consciousness” which I elaborate further down.

Benoît de l’Estoîle describes the concept of colonial legacy as having a capacious character and a fatalist imprint, which distinguishes it from adjacent notions (e.g. collective memory). Colonial legacy implies acknowledging a shared history and recognizing its enduring structuring role, even—and this is an essential point for me here—when this legacy is not accredited by its ‘potential heirs’. More than memory (l’Estoîle, 2008: 270), colonial legacies, can be claimed and negotiated, or repudiated, only partially accepted, falsified or even challenged – yet, they are inexorable. Colonial legacies generally involve myriad and contrasting feelings, and may “elicit contestation and negotiation, struggle for recognition and suspicions of illegitimacy” (l’Estoîle, 2008: 270). Above all, a colonial legacy creates strong and complex relationships between the various potential heirs “as suggested by the double meaning of share, to divide and to have in common” (l’Estoîle, 2008: 270). Described in this way, the concept emphasizes the inescapability of the colonial past—whether the subjects claim or reject it —as well as the indelible bonds that are created between the heirs of that legacy. While colonial legacies loom wherever race and racism are produced—which is to say, everywhere—what might have a more subterranean presence in other contexts, becomes strikingly evident in the empirical case at hand. We are talking about White migrants of a specific nationality, and that was far from irrelevant. The relative recent demise of the Portuguese colonial empire and (Angola only attained independence in 1975, after 13 years of colonial war) results in that many Angolan and Portuguese living individuals had a personal memory of colonial times. The fraught past was all too recent to be easily discarded.

What I term here the embodied experience of racialization refers to the effects of the conspicuity of White bodies in Angola— something that struck most interlocutors as a first-time experience. The sensation of being noticeable, singled out in a crowd, lead to the cognizance of one’s own racialized existence, in ways that (ironically) resonate Franz Fanon (2008) and Sarah Ahmed’s (2007) reflections on inhabiting a White world as a non-white body, what the latter describes as the noticeability of “the arrival of some bodies more than others” (p.163). This embodied and (for most) novel experience of racialization, combined with the inescapability of colonial legacies, opened space to what some authors have called “White double consciousness” (Alcoff 2015; McIntosh 2016). Departing from W.E.B Du Bois’ famous notion of ‘Black double consciousness’, which described African American subjectivity as the sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, Alcoff (2015) and McIntosh (2016) suggest that extending “the concept to encompass situations where a privileged social group reckons internally with the judgements of its critics, destabilizing it”, can be productive (McIntosh 2016:6) ³ . I concur with this thought, adding that it becomes particularly salient in Black–majority, post-colonial contexts.

To relate concomitantly to the concepts of “White double consciousness” and “structural oblivion” might appear as a paradox. While double consciousness suggests a heightened awareness of the Whites’ own racial identity (and, eventually, the privileges associated with it), structural oblivion points to the exact opposite, the ignorance (unwitting or otherwise) of one’s own historically accrued privilege. Conscious of this apparent contradiction, I demonstrate empirically that their articulation indeed occurred amongst my interlocutors. This co-habitation of opposites, leads me to think about the reshaping of White subjectivities in Angola, as situated in a tension between double consciousness and structural oblivion, in a bipolarity of hyper and hypo racial awareness.

These ambiguities resonate the complexification of White subjectivities in other global contexts. For instance, researching on English language teachers in China, Lan (2021: 2) identifies tensions between the advantages of “white-skin privilege as a form of embodied racial capital” that favor racially white English speakers for teaching jobs and their simultaneous positioning as perpetual foreigners, excluded from more prestigious roles. To clarify this dynamic, she distinguishes between corporeal whiteness — the embodied racial identity of foreign teachers — and hegemonic whiteness — the global discourses of white supremacy that prioritize certain varieties and speakers of English. While hegemonic whiteness elevates the language practices of White teachers as the most desirable and “correct” within Chinese private schools, long-standing narratives of foreignness limit their racial capital, restricting them to short-term roles. Lan’s work thus reveals how, even as neoliberal discourses reinforce White linguistic dominance, localized processes of racialization can unsettle this hegemony in specific contexts.

Portuguese recent migrants to Angola – facts, figures and fictions

Portuguese recent migration to Angola took off soon after 2002—the year of the signature of the Angolan Peace Agreements that marks an end to decades of armed conflict—and grew slowly until 2008. Around that date, the flow of arrivals intensified significantly due to the economic crisis in the Euro-zone, and the dearth of employment in Portugal. Estimates for 2015 often exceed 150,000 Portuguese workers, but precise figures are difficult to establish since local statistics were unreliable, consular registration was voluntary, many held dual nationality, and some were irregular migrants (e.g., undocumented). Remittance data, however, provides a useful indicator, whereby Angola became the third largest source of remittances to Portugal, after France and Switzerland. Between 2006 and 2012, remittances from Angola grew by at least 30% annually (except in 2011) and were 18 times higher than the amount flowing in the opposite direction by 2012 (Candeias et al., 2016; Åkesson 2018; Sangreman, 2015).

Encompassing highly paid experts, middle-class professionals and working-class laborers the Portuguese migrants in Angola formed a diverse group. Amongst them there were construction workers, teachers, bank clerks, doctors and nurses, shopkeepers. Some had been born in colonial Angola, and left for Portugal after the independence ⁴ , a few had been able to obtain Angolan naturalization, which they would keep along with the Portuguese citizenship. The heterogeneity in terms of class, education, work experience, legal status, or personal connection to Angola, dictated radically different conditions for the trajectories of the migrants.

While Portuguese workers were settling in Angola, a handful of Angolan nationals were making investments in strategic sectors of the Portuguese economy - banking, telecommunications, media and energy (Mark 2012). To describe these unusual circumstances involving the inverted flows of people and capital, news outlets used expressions like “reverse colonialism” (Al Jazeera 2015) and “role reversal” (Onishi 2017). Though they fail to capture the whole picture, these titles are nonetheless indicative of a discursive shift in which Angola was emerging as a place of opportunity for Portuguese workers. A place which was led by a small group of transnationally powerful oligarchs who not only held enormous political-economic leverage in their African country of origin, as they had acquired key positions in sectors of the Portuguese market as well (Costa et al., 2014; Filipe, 2013). These business ventures were the object of intense media coverage, contributing to the emergence of the ideation, in the Portuguese public discourse, of the (transnationally) powerful Angolan oligarch.

This sui generis conjuncture reinforced an already atypical relative position of the two countries within the “core-periphery model”, as is pointed by Augusto et al. (2022). On the one hand, Portugal has historically occupied a peripheral position relative to the major global economic centers of Northwestern Europe and North America, to which it has exported significant numbers of labor migrants. On the other hand, it functioned as the colonial metropole at the core of its own imperial periphery, marked by reciprocal migration flows—sending colonial settlers abroad while receiving migrants of varying skill levels from its former colonies. Angola’s place within the core–periphery system is equally complex: while peripheral from a global standpoint, it holds a position of regional geopolitical and economic significance within Central and Southern Africa. (Augusto et al., 2022, 7).

Finally, the Angola where Portuguese professionals found jobs, is not only characterized by its rampant, oil-driven GDP growth, but it has also been pinpointed as a case of illiberal peacebuilding. Affected by the practices of political manipulation common in electoral authoritarian contexts, it has been described as driven by “logics of concentration (e.g., from nepotism to elitism, presidentialism, centralization, etc.)” as well as “exploitative economic processes such as kleptocracy and other forms of parasitism, and usurpation of resources” (Blanes and Samussuku 2022, 478) ⁵ . Thus, beyond navigating relationships with common Angolan individuals, the Portuguese migrants were required to work with(in) the Angolan political system, “the ultimate enabler (or, possibly, inhibitor) of their presence and initiatives and, in their eyes, a mystifying, unpredictable and therefore anxiogenic hovering presence” (Valente Cardoso 2022:424) ⁶ . This would pose several trials. For one, Angolan state representatives would regularly employ an anti-colonial language to comment on different aspects of contemporary Portuguese-Angolan relations. Though scholars and journalists would call this out as a toothless discourse for internal consumption only, one without actual palpable consequence for the migrants, since the country’s leadership cultivated close relationships to Portugal at many levels (Costa et al., 2014; Filipe, 2013; Soares De Oliveira 2015), frequently my Portuguese interlocutors did not understand it in such way. Depending on how familiarized they were with “the system” (Schubert, 2017), some felt affected by this language and continuously struggled to find their way in an opaque socio-political landscape full of contradiction and unpredictability, including with respect to how the Portuguese migrants were perceived and dealt with.

In Benguela I met a Portuguese community largely made up of men aged roughly 25–65, many tied to construction. Many of the women met had arrived to join their partners and for the most part, had been able to secure jobs as well, generally, in the services sector. Portuguese workers were also present in private health, pharmacies, banking, telecoms and small businesses—they were highly visible in restaurants and hotels, for instance—and some taught on the side at the university. The education of my interlocutors ranged from university degrees, to vocational know-how gained through professional experience on building sites. Most interlocutors had come with working permits obtained in Portugal; others had entered with ordinary visas later converted to naturalization. There was also a gray zone of irregular arrangements that flourished during the boom years, where paperwork was slow and “knowing how to maneuver” mattered as much as rules (I will mention a couple of such cases below).

Shaped by slavery and colonial occupation, Benguela remains a divided city, with the colonial-era cidade (city) core surrounded by precarious informal bairros (neighborhoods). According to the census that year, in 2014, Benguela province counted 2.2 million inhabitants (8.4% of Angola’s population), ranking fourth after Luanda, Huíla, and Huambo. While, as mentioned, precise figures are lacking, both officials and migrants themselves considered Benguela the main hub of Portuguese settlement outside Luanda. Given that the cidade part of the city — where most of the Portuguese lived – was quite small and that the spaces of conviviality frequented by them were scarce, fieldwork moved through the small circuits of cafés, worksites, and gatherings, expanding by snowballing and a little social media cartography. Data was produced mostly in participant observation, complemented by targeted conversations and pre-field interviews in Portugal. Although the broader community skewed male, the group of people that I engaged with in Benguela was close to gender-balanced. However, talk of politics and business often clustered among men in this context, which likely tilts the voices that appear in this article.

My positionality as a Portuguese, White woman not only facilitated access to the field. It also meant that I was able to navigate these conversations with subtle direction: keeping my interventions discrete, I engaged attentively, often guiding discussions by mirroring the gestures, tone, and expressions I had previously observed, and trying to blend into the social texture while gently steering the dialogue and encouraging openness. Crucially, the fact that we shared racial and national identities made my understanding of the interlocutors more intimate and embodied. Like them, I was immersed in the (novel) experience of Whiteness (and Portugueseness) in Angola, which meant navigating not only social but also deeply personal uncertainties.

Grey zones of privilege

The weightiness of whiteness

In trying to understand the ambiguous effects of Whiteness on their migratory experience, I noticed a distinction between two levels of the racialized experience of the Portuguese in Angola. A first level in which the interlocutors recognized that, being racialized as White, they were ascribed a certain number of characteristics positively valued locally (e.g., knowledge, work experience, economic means), and therefore conducive to privileged opportunities – above all, professional ones but also of other kinds (for instance, advantages in the market of intimate relationships, as described in Valente Cardoso 2022). In which they recognized, in a word, they own “racial capital”, though, obviously not using the term. The second level of the racialized experience of Portuguese migrants, relates to the circumstances in which the colour of their skin turned into a hassle. For instance, when they were accused of undeserved favouritism in the workplace, when they felt that they were preferred prey for local policemen in search of a bribe, or that several social and public interventions with high public visibility were foreclosed to them; or, even when they anticipated that Angolans would take advantage of their generosity or naiveté. While this second level manifested itself in palpable ways, being easily illustrated with personal anecdotes, the first one, often remained unspoken, absorbed by “structural oblivion”. Structural oblivion allowed the migrants to articulate their privileges in a veiled, or mitigated manner, while being, at the same time, abundantly verbal about daily hurdles associated to their whiteness (see also Lan 2022).

I was once invited to tag along in a work-related road-trip from Benguela to Lubango (a city some 350 kms away from Benguela, which meant 5-6 hours on the road), with three skilled workers of the construction sector, all of whom had been trained in Portugal. The oldest of them was born in Angola before independence, left to Portugal in 1976, where he had lived until 2009, when his boss offered him a job opportunity in Angola, and “he did not think twice” before accepting. Once in the country, he had undergone the process of Angolan naturalization – he was thus a dual citizen. The second man, also White, had been on successive working contracts for 7 years. The third one was a younger Black, Cabo Verde-born, Portuguese citizen. Before we departed, the group discussed for a brief moment who, from the three of them, should drive and decided that Nuno, the latter, should have the wheel, as the police would be less likely to stop and harass us in a car driven by a Black person.

Although the decision was consensual, it triggered an exchange that illustrates some of the commonplaces my interlocutors would articulate regarding their personal experiences racialization. Nuno, had gotten to the country much later than his White colleagues and he defined as his “adaptation to the Angolan culture” as “very challenging”. His familiarity with the context (in geographical, cultural, and even linguistic terms) paled in comparison with that of his White companions—as, it seemed clear to me, did his enjoyment of the country. Yet, his colleagues observed, in some ways he had it much easier in Angola than them. Having studied and worked in Portugal, Nuno had come equipped with the cultural capital that was valued locally. But, due to the color of his skin, he would be protected from the discriminatory annoyances which—the White men commiserated—were a constant in their own lives.

But why were my interlocutors’ so disturbed by these routine bothers? “Structural oblivion” can explain part of the story—the part in which the engrained ideologies inherited from colonialism, allowed them to selectively ignore the advantages that Whiteness brought them and fixate instead on its supposed downsides. But there is perhaps another side to consider: the conspicuity of their Whiteness. And the discomfort that this represented to people that were used to be part of the racial majority. The sensation of being noticeable, singled out in a crowd, leads to the cognizance of one’s own bodily existence, of one’s racialized existence, as Sarah Ahmed’s reflections on inhabiting a white world as a non-white body, illustrates (2007, 163). As her reflections on “being stopped” resonate the Portuguese migrants constant anxiety with being pulled aside by the police, while driving (Ahmed 2007, 161–62).

The above illustrates how White migrants experienced disorientation (Ahmed 2007), but also how they tried to maneuver it (in this case, by avoidance) in everyday small decisions. But beyond these quotidian micro hassles, Whiteness was also believed to be an obstacle for a complete integration or even the enjoyment of truly equal opportunities in the Angolan society. For example, it was believed to signify foreclosure from an involvement de jure in politics, given the supposed rejection of White Angolans in governmental positions, believed to endure since early post-independence times. This belief had its fundaments in a complicated history of White presence in the ranks of the MPLA (see e.g. Pawson, 2014; Schubert, 2017; Blanes 2023), and resulted in that it was commonplace knowledge shared by most interlocutors, that Whites should refrain from social notoriety or public visibility. In some instances, this was deployed as excuse to abstaining from a deeper social-political engagement, while in others it seemed to be genuinely lamented by informants who wished to take a bigger role in the “future of the country”, but felt they could not.

Other modalities of conduct were equally not accessible to Whites, according to the interlocutors. For instance, forms of corruption believed to be usual amongst Black Angolans of a certain socio-economic stand. As was put by José, an interlocutor in is early sixties, after telling me that a Black family member of his had syphoned off a considerable sum from the company for which he worked, with no penalty:

I have been here for twenty years, and it’s really a shame that I haven’t had the opportunity to get a hold of that type of money, in that way. The thing is [he adds with a sneer, pointing at his arm]… unfortunately, I have not yet been able to change my skin-color.

In this instance, José did not seem to be moralizing Angolans’ behaviour, or show a scandalized reaction at corruption – as was often the case amongst the Portuguese. Instead, only the faded admission of one’s own greed and the articulation of that which seems to be valid everywhere, every time – though in different degrees and to variable repercussions - that the same type of misconduct weighed differently according to how the perpetrator is racialized. What stroke me was the tone he used - of complacency, acceptance. José was a well-off, long-established White Portuguese-Angolan who owned a very successful local business. Far from suffering from a situation of precarity or instability – as the cases I will bring up in the next section - he was connected to a large, bi-national and bi-racial friendship and kinship network that would spread both up and down the social ranks. He had doubtlessly benefited from the advantages of Whiteness in many domains of his migratory experience (Augusto et al.). Above all, he was happy in Angola. The fact that he understood his skin-color as disqualifying him for the pursuit of certain putative ambitions (unlawful as they might be), seemed to be accepted as the way things are. Or, I would venture, as a form of “white double consciousness” and acknowledgment of colonial legacy, whereby seeing himself through the eyes of Black Angolans, José accepted the current asymmetries as expectable (eventually fair?) consequence of the past. A past which was not that far removed, in neither collective nor individual terms, as José himself carried the personal memory of Angola in colonial times.

Precarity and insecurity

Pedro, a young man who had worked for several periods of time without an official working permit, explained to me that during the peak of the economic boom, some companies would deliberately maintain expatriate employees working after the end of the lawful period, to keep the construction sites going. Trouble with the authorities, if they were to occur, would be dealt with by influence-peddling and bribes. Undertaking this risk would be the rational decision, economically speaking: ‘better to pay a bribe than to lose a good worker for some months’, as he put it.

In a similar manner to other mobility settings, accounts of irregular migrant situations were frequent amongst my interlocutors. Pedro, just quoted, presents the perspective of a firmly established company, the administrators of which could navigate the lines separating legality and illegality through various forms of corruption (in a broad sense), from a position of relative security and assurance. The delimitations between the categories of mighty White expat and undocumented alien worker got more blurred in other cases, such as the following one.

Seated next to me at a group dinner, Paulo let out nonchalantly that for the last three years he had not travelled back to Portugal because of issues he had with his old employer. Though I tried to get some details, he evaded my curiosity. Later, talking to a mutual acquaintance, I got a glimpse of the contours of his case: his old employer had kept his passport and owed him several months of salary. Confronted with this situation and evaluating his social capital in comparison to his boss’, he concluded that it would be pointless to bring the case to the local authorities (or the Portuguese ones, for that matter). Instead, he was just waiting around to see how the situation would unfold.

As it happens elsewhere, the migrant condition would render the Portuguese vulnerable to the harassment of employers, work colleagues or the authorities - to a variable degree, as patent in these two very different situations. Though it is easy to relativize this vulnerability from a distance, — and with the argument that they still were privileged, White Europeans — risks, fears, and anxieties were naturally experienced differently on site.

To better comprehend these subjective forms of White vulnerability encountered (as understood by the subjects themselves) it is relevant to add a few points on the specific conjuncture. Mid-2015, when I got to the country, Angola was experiencing an economic recession after years of uninterrupted growth. The crisis unfolded quickly with ripple effects on the livelihoods of the entire migrant community: devaluation of the local currency, difficulties in obtaining hard currency (US dollars), salary payments delayed. Business managers complained about strains on the efforts to import goods, others deplored the high inflation, or the increasing obstacles imposed on demands for working permits and naturalization requests. Circles of friends were disintegrating, as some were pushed to depart due to sudden unemployment.

The economic downturn was accompanied by an upsurge of political protest followed by state repression. Albeit such events are generally considered a tipping point in the international – including, significantly, the Portuguese - media discourse about the Angolan regime (Blanes 2023), among my interlocutors the situation was rarely discussed. For them, the revelation of the authoritarian character of the Angolan state was hardly newsworthy. Yet, the events did herald something critical: that those in charge, those with whom the Portuguese had spent years on building relationships, were losing their grip over the country - especially since this coincided with uncertainty in regards the successor to the President of the Republic and the economic downturn. This feeling of uncertainty was, many would complain, bad for business and, thus, bad for the Portuguese.

Such circumstantial vulnerabilities (or the imagination thereof) would pile up on top of structural ones relating to the delicate navigation of foreignness and Whiteness – I do always circle back to it. The already profuse concern about criminality grew even more and projected itself into the future, an expectable outcome of the economic recession. The expressed fear was that as Angolan lower classes felt their condition of life deteriorate due to inflation and unemployment, they would turn to petty criminality and/or social unrest. Either way it went, the Portuguese thought of themselves to be the likely first target of violence, since, as I was told in different occasions: “The Whites always serve as scapegoats for everything that goes wrong”, or else “They think we are all rich”, or even, as Carlos put it:

They will get angrier. It’s like… sometimes, I am in my big car with AC, stopped at a crossing, and next to me these elderly men [mais-velhos], in tiny old motorbikes, some of them still fought against the Portuguese, and they start thinking, you know?…

I want to linger for a moment in Carlos words, as a manifestation of White double consciousness. In the proximity of impoverished, Black elderly men, Carlos was visited by the collective memory of the colonial war. This reflection was not triggered by any direct interpellation, just the awareness of that colonial legacy. Sara Ahmed writes that “bodies remember (…) histories, even when we forget them”, and that “histories (…) surface on the body, or even shape how bodies surface” (2007, 154). Carlos' words above made me wonder if White bodies also remember their own past as the oppressor in colonial relations. Do these histories surface in White bodies, in the form of caution, angst, fear?

Useful fools of authoritarianism or bearers of development?

Arguably, the presence of Portuguese migrants was instrumental for the strengthening of an highly authoritarian political regime, and the enlargement of a socio-economic gap between a tiny elite that governed Angolan and the impoverished masses that inhabited it. My fieldwork research did not contradict this suggestion of complicity with the system, but it did give me insight on the diverse and perhaps unforeseen ways the subjects made sense of the political situation and themselves in it.

Though most times the Portuguese would embody the role of obedient executives of the party-state interests, silent functionaries who should not seek for notoriety, there were also situations in which a sense of pride in their presence was discernible. This stemmed from two assessments largely shared amongst the community: on the one hand, the conviction that the Portuguese migrants’ skills and work were necessary, since they were supposedly absent amongst Angolans, and were better than the existing alternatives ⁷ . On the other hand, the idea that their ethics were superior to that of Angolan political leaders. The result of these combined assumptions was that many held the belief that, even if in a trifling way - limited as they were by that very condition of multiple ‘non-belonging’ and resulting forced compliance - their presence had a positive impact on the development of Angola and produced tangible improvements in the lives of Angolans. In fact, the relationship between Portuguese migrants and the Angolan government was marked by a mixture of deference and disdain. Stories of Angolan elites indulging in luxury, whether witnessed or heard about, would simultaneously amuse and horrify the Portuguese, in a setting where understanding the attitudes of the Angolan elite was thought crucial for achieving personal financial and professional goals. These anecdotes, along with strategies for navigating them, fuelled hours of conversation filled with intrigue, speculation, humor, and contempt. Beyond racial exoticism (which doubtlessly was also part of it), this discourse served perhaps a hidden purpose: the more preposterous the attitudes and behaviours of the Angolan politicians looked in their eyes, the more they felt their presence legitimised. As if they convinced themselves that things would be even worse, were they not around, working as technical and ethical mediators between the interests of the greedy, amoral mandatories and the all-too-vulnerable populace.

A conversation I had with a young civil engineer named Miguel illustrates perfectly this sentiment. To exemplify what he saw as a complete absence of interest by the government officials in “changing something for the better of the population”, he narrated a situation in which a decision taken by him and his colleague (also Portuguese), against the will of the governmental contractors, led to a hold the construction of a road that did not fulfil basic safety requirements. According to his account, had it been constructed according to the government’s initial plan, the road would have constituted a serious hazard for the population.

The conversation carried on with Miguel mentioning several cases of petty corruption that he had witnessed in his line of business. He seemed to be amused by the triviality of some of the politicians’ demands: one bluntly asking him for an iPad for his children, another craving a new laptop for himself… Miguel finally declared with what felt to me genuine sorrow:

When you first arrive here, in the beginning, you come with the idea that we are going to change Angola – or at least something! – and then, with time, you adapt yourself…’. [And, after a long pause] ‘I don’t see a solution for this. I don’t see it.

Evidently, the will to be useful (to change Angola, or at least something, as Miguel had once imagined), co-existed with crude calculations of financial gains’ maximization/self-interest and self-protection. In truth, none would publicly criticize the Angolan regime, and most Portuguese workers would docilely perform the role that was expected of them, keeping for private settings their moral slanders of the representatives of the regional and national government. Similarly, thoughts about political alternatives for Angola were often cut short by a sense of impotence that I was never able to discern whether it was genuine, or mere excuse for disengagement.

The very idea of self-interest warrants perhaps some reflection. On an elementary version, self-interest in this context was connected to the pursuit of economic gains. These migrants were, after all – or before everything else - economic migrants. They were there to earn an income and were willing to bend themselves in myriad ways in order to insure that they would. But of course, there were other dimensions to how they made sense of their presence: for instance, the feeling that they were necessary. Is it also self-interest to appreciate the social recognition that emanates from being considered out of the ordinary and necessary for the community’s wellbeing? Joana, a young nurse who was making plans to move back to Europe, embodied this ambiguity. Looking back at her six years of working both as university lecturer – a position that she, holder only of an undergraduate university degree, could not aspire to in Portugal - and as a practitioner in a private medical center, she shared:

In any other place, you’re only one more. Here, with a university degree you have a status, a recognition, not only with the students, but amongst the colleagues… everywhere. I love to be a teacher. I will miss it. Yes, I will. It’s like I’ve been telling you: You feel useful here.

One more amongst many in Europe, she felt useful and unique in Africa. Another university teacher, Helena, who, having spent her youth in Angola, had wanted to come back for “emotional reasons”, communicates a similar feeling:

Here, there is a huge lack of education, but they recognize that, and they are thirsty for knowledge. (…) A teacher for them is a superior entity, they have great respect for teachers (…)

It will not escape the reader how their words resonate countless narratives of well-intentioned Whites that postcolonial critical lenses have been picking apart for decades. They are manifestations of the coloniality discussed in the beginning, this underlying, almost unwitting feeling of (benevolent?) superiority. And yet, perhaps it will also not escape the (benevolent?) reader, that, beyond or underneath race/nationality and the weight of colonial history (if such a place is conceivable), the sense of usefulness and purposefulness conveyed was genuine and considered personal enriching on its own right.

Conclusion

The arrival to Luanda was a shock. The extreme poverty, the children in the streets… And what impressed me the most was to see those luxurious compounds with I don’t know how many cars (…) and in front of that, people from their same race in extreme poverty. How is it possible to live like that and see their brothers—I’m going to call them like that—living in that way?

These were the words of a Portuguese woman in her 40s who taught at a local university, when I asked her to describe her first impressions of Angola. Her shock seemed genuine. Which made it even more meaningful that she did not include herself (or other Whites/Portuguese) in the picture of astounding social inequality that she describes. That she seemed to be able to see some social inequities but “unsee” (Schubert and Sumich 2025) others of which she was part and parcel, is to me the bluntest illustration of structural oblivion. In this article I focussed the grey zones where White privilege was circumstantially contested, suspended, inverted—that should not preclude us from recognizing how ingrained the obliviousness of the historical structures of racial oppression was among the Portuguese migrants I encountered in Benguela. Sometimes, two things can be true at once.

Alongside with other cases of White contemporary presence in Africa, the new Portuguese presence in Angola also instigates us to nuance the often-repeated formula that “the privilege of privilege renders the terms of privilege invisible” (Kimmel 1992: 675). The terms, or spoils, of White privilege seemed to be for most migrants, evident—foremost, they had a clear advantage in the job market, but also beyond that. Frequently, they were also openly contested by locals. Thus, the supposed ‘invisible knapsack’ to which Whiteness and White privilege were likened in Peggy McIntosh’s famous ‘confession’ (McIntosh, 2009) ⁸ was not only very visible, but also unnervingly loaded with “colonial legacies” – the haunting presence of a past that, though infrequently mentioned, was never really forgotten. The terms of White privilege were therefore both implicitly and explicitly contested and undercut by feelings of racial/national discrimination.

What followed was a remodeling of privileged selves. The comforts of long-standing advantage did not disappear, but they were tempered by political and economic shifts, social demands, and worldwide reckonings with historical wrongs (which fostered a white double consciousness). The terrain was still uneven (shaped by race and nationality, marked by colonialism and its legacies), and yet these new contestations substantially changed how it was walked.