Critique of Western Technological Hegemony and Neo-Animism in Ruy Duarte de Carvalho

Angolan philosopher Ruy Duarte de Carvalho was a man of many talents: a poet, an anthropologist, a filmmaker, a committed fictional writer and essayist, an agronomist, and even a watercolour painter. All these abilities proved valuable in making sense of the relations between colonialism, nationalism, modernization, identity, progress, and ecology in Angola, particularly in countering the stamp of backwardness attached to the nomadic shepherds of Southern Angola, in whom he discovered sustainable indigenous forms of living. Rather than being determined by some type of nostalgic attachment to the past, Ruy Duarte de Carvalho was driven by the recognition of the adequacy of the shepherds’ traditional practices, totally adapted to the semi-desert ecosystem. He was also painfully aware of the inability of such lifestyles to resist modernization. The present work puts Ruy Duarte de Carvalho’s essays and novels in context. It shows how the shepherds’ cause became the central point around which revolved a coherent reflection on the economic, political, and ideological subjugation of traditional minorities (in a way, also of entire African countries) under the pressure of a worldwide Western expansion impelled by the ideology of progress at all costs, led both by westerners and by the westernized groups who hold the political power in Angola. Ruy Duarte de Carvalho found a way out of the conundrum in neo-animism, a philosophical shift towards integration with Nature.