Fugitive Modernities

The past two decades have seen numerous studies showing the many ways in which—even in the shadow of slavery—Africans were decisive actors in building modernity in the Americas. These studies have built on theoretical insights from diaspora studies and Paul Gilroy's idea of the black Atlantic to reconceptualize how Africans influenced and constructed Western modernities. This literature has generally examined Africa's historical significance in terms of its perceived utility for developing insights into the histories of the Americas. Africa remains—however subtly—more historical object than subject.Jessica Krug's new book is distinct because she takes the opposite position. Fugitive Modernities is both a history of the Kisama region of Angola and the history of a political idea. Krug wants her readers to reflect on how a revolutionary change can both challenge and be silenced by the coercion and power of the status quo. Fundamentally, Krug studies Kisama because of its fundamental significance in its own right, as offering a path toward understanding routes to personal and collective liberation.Liberation from oppression, in both the past and the present, is at the heart of Krug's book. From the late sixteenth century, Kisama—a mountainous region south of Luanda and the Kwanza River estuary—began to challenge the slaving wars of the Portuguese and their Imbangala allies in Angola. An army marshaled by the heroic military leader Kafuxi Ambari decisively defeated the Portuguese in a series of battles from 1595 to 1598, and thereafter Kisama became a refuge for those fleeing the growing threat of capture for the slave trade. Krug sees Kisama as embodying a “nonstatist” politics that over time came to directly challenge the dynamics of slavery and capitalism embodied by state power in Africa and the Americas alike (p. 80).Krug's book is the first detailed history of Kisama to be written. Yet it also speaks to the dilemmas that animate the community of historians writing about marginalized pasts amid today's increasing violence and inequality. Kisama is a model for “the constant negotiation between the importance of the practice of violence and the equal necessity of not weaving violence into the fabric of the society” (p. 147).The first two chapters establish Kisama's defeat of the Portuguese in the 1590s and its subsequent reputation in the Portuguese colonial archive as a site of resistance and a haven for those escaping the personal subjugation of Atlantic slavery. Chapter 3 then looks at the assault on Kisama led by the famous Queen Njinga of Matamba in the 1650s and the role of economies of food production in constructing inequalities. Chapters 4 and 5 then look at how these political and intellectual frameworks affected two key seventeenth-century maroon communities—Palenque de Limón, near Cartagena, and Palmares, in Brazil. Chapter 6 then shows how the liberation and antistatist politics embodied by Kisama ensured the region's silencing by both colonial regimes and their postcolonial successors in Angola under the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola.There are many historical insights here. For this journal's readers, Krug's most original argument is that the frameworks of American maroon communities were constructed first in Africa, where flight from the forces of enslavement was commonplace prior to the Atlantic crossing. For historians of West Central Africa, Krug's trenchant critique of statist bias in the existing historiography provides much food for thought. And Krug's broader historiographical approach, to move beyond Eurocentric concepts to ideas derived from African languages, powerfully critiques how colonial ideas continue to shape dominant historical discourses even in this era of decolonizing the curriculum.Like most powerful and original books, Fugitive Modernities provides more in the way of further questions than it does answers. Krug rightly takes a sledgehammer to much of the historiography, but this also brings some risks. Her opposition to statist historiographies of Angola sees her praising the male Kisama leader Kafuxi Ambari and critiquing the Njinga-centered seventeenth-century narratives, regardless of this move's gendered dimensions. Her antistatism also leads her to misconstrue some key elements of Angolan history. For instance, the capture of Luanda in 1575 is construed by her in chapter 2 as an alliance between Portugal and Kongo; however, some readers would not know about the 1568 Jaga rebellion against Kongo, the weakness of Kongo at the time (having become dependent on the Portuguese as a result of the alliance), or that Manikongos subsequently protested virulently the colony's impact at Luanda.Krug explicitly connects her antistatism to the current paradigm of state violence directed at black communities across the Americas and the marginalized in Angola. It seems as if a different conception of time and personhood (one not shaped by the accelerating experience of speed and teleology demanded by capitalism) could salve personal futures. For Krug, Kisama allows us to imagine a more humane and less brutalized form of interpersonal relationship in which the structures erected by states to constrain us are overcome in favor of shared liberation. There is a long way to go, but with works like this to sustain us, we can at least believe that the journey has begun

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  Fábio Baqueiro Figueiredo•Journal of Religion in Africa•2024

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