This article discusses how male Angolan war veterans navigated the sudden shift from the rigours of military discipline to life in a civilian society they no longer recognised, where money had become a dominant social value. Based on a year of participant observation and interviews with war veterans in the city of Huambo, it traces their life histories and their post-war struggles to develop the necessary creativity and initiative to make a profit in a disordered, war-torn economy, where masculine status and authority had come to depend crucially on monetary income. I analyse their reaction to the crumbling of the relative certainties of the patriarchal orders of both pre-war society and military life, and the associated anxieties around living up to a senior masculine archetype of the wise, authoritative provider whilst attempting to ensure that their wives' behaviour conformed to the family model that accompanies this archetype.
In this article we use men’s changing investments in desired material objects as a window into the changing moralities underpinning masculinities in the wake of Angola’s civil war. Drawing on participant observation and life history interviews with middle-aged men working in informal commerce in the city of Huambo, we examine the roles of land, houses, and cars in the construction of different styles of masculinity. We argue that analyzing differences among men’s investments in these objects provides useful insights into how men construct multireferential masculinities in a contested postcolonial, postwar context in which questions of gendered cultural hegemony are contentious and complex. These masculinities map onto competing, yet overlapping, sets of moral values that rework preexisting gendered cultural forms and practices to cope with the social and economic consequences of the war and to express aspirations for disparate modernities.
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