Angola Prison Rodeo

On the one hand, the story about the annual Angola Prison Rodeo on Morning Edition today was sort of uplifting (the inmates were proud of their accomplishments, expressed their cultures through creating food for the rodeo, and clearly were having a rare moment of being treated with dignity). And the Angola officials interviewed seemed rather like benevolent captors. But somehow I came away from the story really, really depressed.

I think it was two things, both related to statements made by these officials, no-doubt well-intentioned. The first was one of the officials' (I'm assuming the head of the prison) statement that he considered himself to be the prisoners' "Daddy", since they never had one. Now, I'm sure that if that is really is attitude, the prisoners prefer it to many alternative attitudes he could assume, but, first, is it really true that all of the prisoners never had Daddys? And do even those many who no doubt lacked a strong paternal figure really want to identify themselves a a child of the prison? Do they owe gratitude and deference to prison officials and the guards who enforce their rules? If I were in prison, even for life, I think I would want to insist that I fundamentally belonged to some family other than the prison family. But maybe I'm wrong about that. The real problem, for me as a historian, is that he sounds very much like a plantation owner: they were always insisting that they were more fathers than owners to their slaves.

The second thing bothered me even more. The other official gave a brief history of Angola, and in the process lightly pointed out that it used to be a "slave breeding ground." Now, as a historian who has been working on race relations in the South for some time, I have no idea what she is talking about. There is, to my knowledge, no evidence that attempts to force slaves to reproduce ever got past the level of forcing individual slaves to marry and live together, and treating slave women who failed to reproduce to the satisfaction of the master poorly. This is certainly bad enough, of course, but it is a very different thing from the image that "breeding grounds" evokes in the mind. If there were breeding grounds, historians really need to come to terms with that. If, however, Angola was not a breeding ground, as I very much suspect, I very much wonder if the myth of the breeding ground isn't the product of some sort of sick eroticization of the sexual violence of slavery on the part of the prison official, which can't be good.