A Genocide Without a People: Violence and Epistemic Improvisations in the Kakombola War, Angola, 1940–1941

This article offers a new interpretation of the so-called “Kakombola war,” which took place in colonial Angola between 1940 and 1941. Absent from international historiography but central to the oral narratives collected by anthropologist Ruy Duarte de Carvalho from the VaKuvale, a pastoral community in the region, this episode is remembered through the term kakombola – in OluKuvale, “to take everything, leave nothing.”Footnote1 Survivors use it to describe Portuguese military operations that resulted in expropriations, arrests, deportations, and the mass death of populations classified by colonial authorities as “insubordinate mucubal tribes.”Footnote2 Drawing on colonieal sources and oral accounts, the article argues that these events constitute genocide in the sense proposed by Raphael Lemkin and reinterpreted by Dirk Moses: violence targeting the social, cultural, and cosmological foundations of human groups – even when such groups did not exist as discrete ethnic entities. The Kakombola war thus compels us to consider a form of genocide without a people, in which epistemic and classificatory practices were inseparable from the logic of elimination. In other words, a form of genocide in which the targeted group emerged through the very classificatory practices that justified its elimination. The article proceeds in three sections: first, it explores the ambiguous historicity of the VaKuvale and mucubais categories in southern Angola; second, it analyzes the growing conflation of mucubais with rebels between the 1920s and 1940s; finally, it reflects on the conceptual implications of the case for genocide studies.