‘Speaking’ through songs? African Black women, colonial violence and resistance among Cokwe people in rural Angola

This article analyses Cokwe songs sung by African women and their insurgent voices in rural Angolan territories during the late Portuguese colonial period. Considering the complex forms of colonial violence endured by African populations through forced labour in the 1950s, this article examines the counter-hegemonic potential of music and the limits of subalternity, rethinking the conditions and possibilities of the subaltern subject’s voice. I explore how these songs transcended their local contexts to challenge colonial power narratives, focusing on how women used songs as tools to resist systemic violence, address oppression, and convey messages of survival and empowerment. What experiences of multifaceted violence perpetrated against the African population are revealed in these songs? In what ways did African women engage with this violence? To what extent did these subaltern women ‘speak’ through these songs? This article draws on interdisciplinary research combining anthropology, history, and postcolonial/decolonial theory to answer these questions. It incorporates a range of historical archival sources (sound, photographs, texts) and narratives of Angolan interlocutors collected during multisite and collaborative ethnographic fieldwork conducted in both Portugal and Angola. I argue that these songs and the women who performed them played a crucial role, both locally and translocally, resisting against the multiple layers of violence embedded in their lives, revealing intricate dynamics of power, race, class, gender, sexuality, and resistance. These songs serve as powerful sites of subaltern expression, showing how women navigated, resisted, and gave meaning through music to the violence of colonial labour regimes through music. This article offers a critical perspective on how creative expressions can confront gender-based violence, resist colonial domination, and foster collective memory and awareness. It emphasises the voices, agency, and identity of women, often overlooked, thereby contributing to a more inclusive approach to gender and feminist studies and postcolonial theory.