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About the talk:

This talk traces the history and transformation of Luanda, Angola, the nation’s capital as well as one of the oldest settlements founded by the European colonial powers in the Southern Hemisphere. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research alongside his own experiences growing up in Luanda, Tomás shows how the city’s physical and social boundaries—its skin—constitute porous and shifting interfaces between center and margins, settler and Native, enslaver and enslaved, formal and informal, and the powerful and the powerless. In their relationship with the state and their struggle to gain rights to the city, squatters embody the process of negotiating Luanda’s divisions and the sociopolitical forces that shape them.

About the speaker:

António Tomás is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg and author of Amílcar Cabral: The Life of a Reluctant Nationalist and In the Skin of the City: Spatial Transformation in Luanda.