Negotiating with the Angolan Coast: Recreational Fishing in Colonial Luanda (1945–1975)

This article contributes to and expands the environmental history of recreational fishing through examining the development of recreational fishing in late colonial Luanda, Angola, 1945–1975. It draws on colonial archives, newspapers, tourism magazines, specialised fishing periodicals and oral testimonies to argue that recreational fishing developed through processes of dwelling in different coastal environments as practitioners and practices took shape in relation to their ecological conditions and possibilities. On the more accessible northern coast of Luanda, fishing was closely intertwined with everyday leisure, sociability and food provisioning, while the more environmentally heterogeneous southern coast demanded greater mobility and more specialised forms of angling. In the absence of systematic scientific research on marine ecosystems, recreational fishing relied on understandings of coastal dynamics and drew upon multiple layers of local knowledge. By foregrounding the changing relationships between recreational fishing, coastal environments and ecological processes, the article also contributes to broader discussions of human–environment interactions, tourism and coastal leisure.