Lueji Dharma

The author Lueji Dharma, whose real name is Cristina Câmara, has been living in Luanda since 2009 where she works as an architect and urban planner with a strong commitment to civil society.

By Lueji Dharma, Barbara Mesquita and Arno Holl

She was born in 1977, two years after Angola gained independence and in the middle of the bloody period of repression of the movement of “27 de Maio”, in the village of Calonda in the province of Lunda-Norte. The entire region of the precolonial Lunda Empire, which encompassed the north east of Angola and parts of today's Democratic Republic of Congo, is rich in diamond deposits.

Lueji’s mother is from the Baluba Chokwe ethnic group, her father was Portuguese. Originally from the island of Madeira, Lueji Dharma's father worked for the Diamang mining company after serving as a soldier in the war against independence movements in Mozambique and Angola. But the former soldier also had a soft side: “If there’s a way to describe him it’s in love with my mother.” Lueji describes her mother as “someone who suffered herself the tragic destiny of being an intelligent woman without many options.” Lueji’s mother lost her own mother at the early age of five. She then had to experience first-hand the violence of a stepmother who forced her to leave the house in a time of armed conflict. As so often in such cases, the child was accused of witchcraft. This belief penetrates families all over the country, including well educated people and even some high ranking members of the government. Therefore, Lueji Dharma's mother fled from her stepmother's violence to a sister at the age of 10 and got married early. This way, she could at least escape the fate that still befalls many young girls in Lunda-Norte today who, due to a lack of prospects, end up as prostitutes and have children at a far too young age. Maybe for knowing the importance of education, Lueji’s parents always encouraged their daughters to study and be independent. Her father used to give her dictionaries, encyclopedias, and books for her birthday, full of love for her.

Being born into a family with such diverse roots at a time of political upheaval and post-independence civil war had a lasting impact on Lueji Dharma and her journey in life. At 11 years old, her parents sent her to live with her grandmother in the countryside of Madeira, because of the still raging civil war.
“From one moment to the other I went from a place where I was called "chimbawe", the white girl, to a place where they yelled “negro”. I got persecuted. It came to a point where I was beaten up in school. I experienced physical violence, on both sides.”

In Madeira, Lueji developed a very close relationship with her nature-loving grandmother, received support from her teachers at school and the leader of the bullies ending up being her best friend. Yet, the separation from her nuclear family weighed heavy on her, especially as she was the only one sent away by her parents, while her younger brothers were allowed to stay home.

This separation only came to an end when her parents, too, moved to Madeira. By then, Lueji Dharma was a teenager living with her grandmother in Funchal, the island’s capital. Here, she had contact with other people from Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde. It was also here that she met the Angolan handball player Teresa and her husband Vivaldo Eduardo, who gave her a copy of the novel "Lueji" by Angolan writer Pepetela. This first encounter with Angolan literature was a formative experience for the young girl and laid the foundation for her ambitions of becoming an author. Cristina Câmara was highly impressed by the historical model of Pepetela's novel: Lueji, the queen of the Lunda Empire, whose enthronement presents a paradigm shift in the story because her father had chosen her as his successor instead of her brothers. This strong female protagonist, who was able to defy a male-dominated society, became her role model and she later on chose the queen's name as part of her pseudonym.

When she returned to Angola in 2006, she found a society full of strong women. Her parents were not impressed at all by the decision she took right after graduating from high school and university, and only four years after the end of civil war. Her mother worried that her daughter would not remain silent about the political, social and economic conditions in the country. There were also problems with the relatives with whom she initially stayed in Luanda. Lueji was far too self-determined in their eyes. Here it was custom to not take any decisions without consulting the family, and women were expected to subject to men.

“I’ve always been the kind of person who doesn’t know what it means to obey the man. So when they came and wanted to decide about my life, that’s seemed very strange to me. This is also a very Lunda thing, the women there are very empowered, at least in my family, they are actually powerful, even in a physical sense.”

Lueji Dharma, who was raised according to the Catholic faith and later was inspired by Hinduism spirituality (as the second part of her pseudonym tells), regards the great forbearance of women as one of the reasons why, in Angolan society, the extent of violence is not even bigger than it already is. She perceives the willingness of women to welcome their drinking, beating and cheating husbands home without any complaint as an unconditional love which ensures the coherent functioning of the society despite its population's harsh living conditions. In Lueji’s eyes, they offer what is the job of social security in other countries.

“A woman always maintains her hope that her son will change, no matter how badly he’s mistreated her. That is a kind of love. And many of these women that I admire possess this almost unconditional love. I think it is them who maintain the Angolan society. If this society lives on it is because of its women.”
Thus it is all the more regrettable that high-ranking officials whose mothers, like so many other women, provided for their families as zungueiras, street vendors, seem to suffer from poor memory and allow for them to be cruelly mistreated by police and fiscalization officers.

In her work as an architect and urban planner, Lueji Dharma's declared goal is, wherever possible, to re-qualify the slum areas, the musseques of Luanda. Whenever possible, they should receive a better infrastructure and property titles. In this context, the poor mapping and surveying of these urban districts, the machismo of the men, corruption, illiteracy and many people’s lack of sensibility towards the poorer parts of society are among the many obstacles the urban planner has to overcome. Nevertheless, she says about her work: “It’s a field that believes there is room for everybody.”

Apart from that, she did voluntary work for the Movimento Lev’Arte for three years. There, she founded “Mesa Bicuda”, a talk programme with a young audience from all parts of society with participations of influential figures from art, television and literature. As a member of the Brigada Jovem de Literatura de Angola, she helped making the young ones susceptible to the importance of literature and helped young poets and writers in publishing their works. At the moment, Lueji is active in the project “Standards de Gestão”, by Caritas Internationalis.