The Road of Progress: Individualisation and Interaction Agency in Southeast Angola

In this article, I discuss the ways in which infrastructures of statecraft reverse the social purpose that they ideologically embody. I focus on the road EN140 and the village of Cusseque in Southeast Angola. EN140 was a long-sought popular aspiration, finally concretised in 2010. Since then, it has been promoted, conspicuously by the Angolan government and national media, as an instrument of extending progress, social union, and equality into rural areas. However, rather than spreading it, EN140 helps convert progress into a field of personal quests, individually privatised in rural societies. In Southeast Angola, the social ideal of progress advocated by the national politics of (re)construction is unfeasible by the effects of certain material infrastructures built in the name of such an ideal. Although it is based on a regional perspective, this article demonstrates a universal phenomenon: the role of inorganic materiality in the production of subjectivities.