"Felix gives the most matter-of-fact and truthful answers. Asked about the situation, he answers tersely: Confusão. Confusão is a good word, a synthesis word, an everything word. In Angola it has its own specific sense and is literally untranslatable. To simplify things: Confusão means confusion, a mess, a state of anarchy and disorder. Confusão is a situation created by people, but in the course of creating it they lose control and direction, becoming victims of confusão themselves. A person wants to do something, but it all falls to pieces in his hands... Everything crosses him; even with the best will in the world, he falls over and over again into confusão. Confusão can overwhelm our thinking, and then others will say that the person has confusão in his head. It can steal into our hearts, and then our girls dump us. It can explode in a crowd and sweep through a mass of people - then there is fighting, death, arson. Sometimes confusão takes a more benign form in which it assumes the character of desultory, chaotic, but bloodless haggling... After a while confusão loses energy, weakens, vanishes. We emerge from a state of confusão exhausted, but somehow satisfied that we have managed to survive. We start gathering strength again for the next confusão."

I concentrated in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown, my course of study replicating the pattern of Portugal and its colonies (i.e. the best resources focused on Brazil), but I really can't believe I wasn't handed this book until yesterday, and then it was by my roommate and not a professor. (Thanks Aaron.)*

Another Day of Life, by Ryszard Kapuscinski. Like the collapsed civilization in Saramago's Blindess, Kapuscinski describes the European quarter in the city of Luanda after the Portuguese mass exodus -- luxury cars left gathering dust and growing rusty, houses boarded up with no one inside, the city's infrastructure almost instantly crumbling with only one person left who knows how to fly a plane and one engineer capable of maintaining Luanda's water supply intact.

Five hundred years of the Portuguese in Angola, during which time 3-4 million slaves were shipped to the Americas, the Cold War, the Brazilian economy, the Portuguese economy, the new world order and a country that is left 90% illiterate and in the middle of a civil war when it finally achieves independence. Somehow a Polish journalist wandering around Angola in 1974 manages to encapsulate all this history in a 150-page personal narrative. Finally all the acronyms (MPLA, UPA, UNITA, FNLA, PLUA, GRAE, FRA) are somewhat organized in my head. This book is so good.

*Update: To be fair, I have learned this was taught in Anani D.'s class the Afro-Luso-Brazilian Triangle, but not when I took it. [Adazinho, I would expand on what you said but there's a reason I put a thing on for comments.]