This paper intersects ethnographic and archival research on the current drought situation in Southwestern Angola (Namibe, Huila, Cunene), which has suffered from severe lack of precipitation over the past decade, with a peak of environmental and humanitarian crisis in 2019. We propose a Janus-faced exercise: to confront the colonial projection of the infrastructural (hydrological) futures as unfolded by the Portuguese colonial apparatus in the 1960s with the present-day experience of drought, infrastructural breakdown and failed developmentalism. In doing so we will map the material infrastructural legacies of Portuguese colonialism, and explore their present-day significance in a context of environmental and humanitarian disaster. At the same time, we will debate the paradigms and strategies of governance in Angola in both colonial and post-independence times, and their effects in the current “drought relief” strategies.

--

Angola,Drought,Infrastructures