Since the end of colonial rule in Africa and other parts of the so-called "third world countries," Africans have sought to renegotiate their colonialized spacesland, labor, and urban environments-by reexamining the aesthetic qualities that should define an African city.This remapping of African city aesthetics is not just a technical exercise, it is a postcolonial decolonization effort aimed at dismantling what colonial authorities once called "European" and "native" spaces.Angola, a former Portuguese colony that gained independence in 1975 and experienced a destructive civil war, saw the large-scale demolition of houses in its capital, Luanda.These demolitions targeted structures labeled "cabanas de chapa" (corrugated iron shacks) and musseques.The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) believes that urban and political belonging are fundamentally shaped by ingrained aesthetic orientations rooted in urban materialities that distinguish and categorize who and what can be included in the city (2).While there was an urgent need to address the "seemingly intractable problems of the African cities" (3), the state's reliance on the oil boom as the primary mechanism for urban transformation ultimately worked against the material and social realities of the mussequeslong-standing sites of Indigenous urbanism.What emerged instead was a form of "cut-and-paste" urbanism (177), detached from local histories and practices.Claudia Gastrow's The Aesthetics of Belonging explores how aesthetics mediate political belonging in Luanda during the country's postconflict oil boom.Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Gastrow examines state policies and programs related to aesthetics, dissent, and public life under the MPLA governments of José Eduardo dos Santos and João Lourenço.Her central argument is that aesthetics are not neutral; they actively structure inclusion and exclusion, reshaping what counts as "Indigenous urbanism," which, in Luanda, is located in the musseques, often dismissed as "informal areas" (2).Following the demolition of musseques and the influx of oil revenues in the early 2000s, the Angolan state launched an ambitious program of "national reconstruction" to rebuild a country devastated by decades of war (3).While these projects disproportionately displaced lower-class residents, Gastrow demonstrates that they were primarily designed to satisfy the consumer demands of elites, international corporations, and an emerging middle class.Land and housing became sites of intense negotiation, as concrete-block, self-built homes competed for space and legitimacy.These struggles were not merely about
Mathias Chukwudi Isiani (Mon,) studied this question.