[2] The history of kuduro has come about in a time of Angolan civil unrest, and it provided a means of coping with hardship and positivity for the younger generation.
[3] Scholar Inês Cordeiro Dias describes how kuduro “became a popular form of artistic expression for Angolans, especially those living in the slums, to claim their space in the city, and to criticize society.”[4] Angola experienced periods of war, repression, and some instances of political tranquility.
There was significant anti-colonial resistance to Portuguese rule and influence which created a transitional government composed of two political parties.
Furthermore, early producers created batidas in direct conversation with their techno and house influences and thus kuduro is predominantly loop-based and instrumental.
As the Civil War abated, instating a coalition government between UNITA and MPLA, the Angolan economy liberalized and there was a wider availability of personal computers.
This resulted in DIY kuduro production using the Fruity Loops interface, which democratized the enterprise of creating batidas.
[8] DJ Riot of Sistema said, "Kuduro was never world music… It wasn’t born on congas and bongos, as some traditional folk-music.
The incorporation of debility complicates normative notions of “abled-ness” while recalling motifs of black survival throughout the diaspora, specifically in relation to the land mines planted after Angola's war of independence that has left many Angolans amputated.
[11] Kuduristas contort their bodies in direct response to their spatial environments: "Kuduristas, acutely aware of the six to twenty million landmines still waiting to be detonated, as well as the fact that one out of every 334 Angolans has lost a limb as a result of landmine detonation, emulate to various degrees the movements of the land mine victims around them, and are themselves victims.
"[11] Young also argues that kuduristas use their dancing “to signify on the normative landscape of the black body,” and by extension, their spatial order.
Acts of oppression (colonialism) and violence have composed their environments as sites of subjugation, but these dancers influence the essence of their settings by taking up space and recasting it through their bodies and movement.
[12] Kuduro's instrumentation, often sampling sounds from everyday life like keyboards and cellphones, reflects this second meaning by sonically reproducing the theme of enduring hard times and places.
The earliest kuduro musicians typically composed their tracks on all-in-one sequencer/sampler workstations brought back to Angola by middle-class youth who had spent time in Europe.
The limited memory of these sequencing machines provides one explanation for the short loop-based format of early kuduro.
The gradual liberalization of Angola's economy in the early 2000s made personal computers more widely available to the general population, enabling producers to compose tracks using production programs such as Fruity Loops (later renamed FL Studio).
This pattern-based software vastly expanded the sonic potential of kuduro, as producers could incorporate synthesized sounds built into the Fruity Loops program.
This technological revolution further expanded the possibilities for kuduro production, allowing musicians to record vocals from home, without having to visit a formal studio.
A considerable number of young individuals, endowed with the necessary resources, pursued education abroad, thereby mitigating exposure to the most severe aspects of the Civil War.
Due to limited memory capacity in the sequencers utilized, early kuduro productions relied on arrangements based on concise loops.
Nevertheless, the loop-centric and instrumental nature of early kuduro compositions resonates with the influences of house and techno genres that inspired the initial producers.
Technologically, this generation marked a shift away from FL Studio as the primary means of production to sequence-based software such as Cubase or Logic Pro.
Kuduro is very popular across former Portuguese overseas countries in Africa, as well as in the suburbs of Lisbon, Portugal (namely Amadora and Queluz), due to the large number of Angolan immigrants.