Empire in Africa: Angola and Its Neighbors

11. A Journey through Angola

11 A Journey through Angola In May 2003 I was invited to accompany four members of a British parliamentary delegation to Angola. This personal account of some of the things we saw and heard represents a background to the official all-party report.1 It also draws on the short piece published in the house journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, whose staff, attached to the British Angola Forum, organized the visit. Our purpose was to witness the reconstruction and resettlement being attempted in both urban and rural Angola one year after the end of the series of wars chronicled in this book. I am very grateful to Hilton Dawson, Andrew Robathan, Tony Colman, and Francis Listowel for their companionship ; their indefatigable professionalism quite restored my faith in politicians. The most unexpected aspect of postwar Angola in May 2003 is the vibrancy of the free press. Every Saturday the streets of the cidade asfaltada (asphalt city) are alive with runners selling no less than five titles. The competition is fierce as editors struggle to devise ever more eye-catching stories of financial malfeasance and political infighting. The most noted, and most persecuted, of the weeklies so suffered from the strain that some of its editorial You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. board members left and two rival papers are now on the street: the Angolense, number 226, boasting its sixth year of survival, and the Semanário Angolense, number 11, in its first year of publication. Government attempts at curbing the explosion of pent-up frustrations that seethe among the cultured Angolan middle classes have been a mixture of the crude and the subtle. The attempt at direct prepublication censorship seems to have backfired. When political newspapers appeared with blank spaces, reader curiosity knew no bounds and samizdat photocopies of offending articles, which had often previously appeared in the Portuguese press, were passed from hand to hand through business and government offices. Editors seem not to have adopted the ingenious scam of the old Central African Examiner, which, in the first days of Ian Smith’s Rhodesian rebellion, offered prizes to readers who correctly filled in the censor’s blank spaces. The government in Luanda backtracked on censorship, not having the skills of the old Salazar dictatorship, which filled blank spaces with government copy tailored to fit the gaps. More covert forms of pressure are therefore applied by latter-day minders of the public consciousness. The big story, which has run and run, is “Who are the richest men in Angola?” The names and photographs of the fifty-nine top candidates are now very much in the public domain. Each is allegedly worth more than fifty million United States dollars, some of them more than one hundred million. The list may not be very accurate either in names or in magnitudes, but its publication has had very interesting consequences. One Angolan entrepreneur took the offending newspaper to court and charged it with destroying his credit rating on the international financial markets. He was, he protested, worth very much more than the alleged one hundred million dollars he was accused of siphoning off the common weal. The paper’s editor also went to court and accused the government of libel. The official press, he said, had so intemperately denounced the millionaire story as a slur on the integrity of members of the ruling elite that it had undermined his reputation for journalistic probity. The government, whose 160 / Empire in Africa You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. supporters featured prominently on the list, referred the story to the attorney general, but he very publicly washed his hands of the matter and passed the case to the criminal police. The destination of Angola’s three billion dollars’ worth of missing oil earnings is one of the fascinating facets of a new stirring of public awareness. The defining moment of Angola’s loss of innocence came a generation ago, on May 27, 1977. When the younger folk in Luanda feel reasonably safe from the prying ears of the security services...