Windeck

I have been watching a soap opera from Angola on the internet.  
So what is so special about a ‘telenovela’ from Angola?
It is this: nearly all the characters are black.
All these rich and beautiful people are black. All these people who have servants (alas black servants - just imagine if the servants were white!!!!!), who live in lovely houses, who wear gorgeous clothes, who are surrounded by ultra modern gadgets are black.
I sometimes wonder how I would feel if I’d been labelled black by the racialists, with their ubiquitous images of poor and hungry dark skinned folk, of African people dying of aids, of Africa being a basket case and so called black people as servants and so called white people as the bosses?
The so called black people who have come to this country from the West Indies in the past sixty years are invariably working class. They share a similar cultural outlook to the indigenous working class. You get out of your head on drugs, drink or Christianity, you keep your head down, and you do what needs to be done. Working class survival tactics.
‘Black’ people are mostly working class, and therefore powerless people, for class is a matter of power.
But these Angolans are powerful. Like wealthy footballers, they are supposed to be the poor, in need of care, patronised, but now they are the masters and mistresses of their own destinies.
These Angolans are not aristocrats either, like Nelson Mandela. They are nouveau riche, mere rabble, the lower orders made good.
For centuries Africans have been dragged into the hierarchical power structure, much like working class people in Europe, through war, slavery, genocide, land theft, and above all, through taxation.
Well, Angola has its modern state now. The infrastructure is being rebuilt after the war. Property rights are being created. An undisputed central government can raise its own taxes, create its own armies, fight its own wars.
Like all modern military bureaucratic hierarchies there is massive corruption and patronage. But so there is in Europe, so there is in America too.
Yes, the Angolan telenovela, Windeck is its name, is a marvellous thing, Africans enjoying the same wealth and power as Europeans.