9
When Angola came out of the Cold War in 1991 it was a different country from the one that had emerged from the colonial war. In 1974, a major export had been coffee, efficiently carried by lorry on asphalted highways built for strategic military purposes. In 1991 one of the exports which exceeded coffee was scrap metal, quarried from the half-a-million tonnes of non-ferrous junk attached to the thousands of military and civilian vehicles which had been blown up along Angola’s ruined roads during the years of bitter conflict. The graveyard of military vehicles was matched by the graveyard of human victims. Those who had died of hunger, wounds, disease or gunshots were buried and uncounted, but those who survived—maimed, crippled, displaced and unemployed—were all too visible to the agencies which supplied them with basic meals and artificial limbs.
When the burdens of war were temporarily lifted, the eighteen months from May 1991 to September 1992 were the most spectacular period of optimism and freedom that Angola had ever witnessed. Savimbi and his entourage of generals moved up from their remote fastness at Jamba to establish opulent residential quarters in the Miramar district of Luanda, overlooking the palm-fringed bay. Thousands of highland refugees, camped in the coastal cities, loaded their meagre possessions on to their heads and set off for the interior to rediscover their villages and seek out surviving relatives. International observers poured into the country to marvel at the peace process, at the new economic opportunities, and at the adoption in Africa of a democratic procedure to settle differences. The political parties hired public relations firms to run sophisticated election campaigns on television, and the political leaders drew large crowds of cheering supporters to their rallies in town squares across the country. The UN representative, Margaret Anstee, flew everywhere in decrepit aircraft, parsimoniously funded by the United States and courageously piloted by intrepid Russians. She endeavoured to harmonise the two partisan armies that were to be partly demobilised and partly integrated into a single national force. The euphoria of peace, however, made supervised demobilisation virtually impossible. The government conscripts vanished into civilian society while the opposition ones were sometimes hidden away in provincial redoubts in case the ‘leader’ should require their services later. The most obsolete of UNITA weapons were handed over to teams of international inspectors but sophisticated military equipment was apparently cached in arms dumps strategically chosen around the provinces by Savimbi himself. On the government side a new security force, dressed in a sinister black costume, was armed and trained for action against civilians, should circumstances lead to urban warfare after the election. While people danced in the streets and vowed that war should never return, the pragmatic power-brokers on both sides made contingency plans.
After a year of blissful peace, Angola finally went to the polls to elect a parliament and a new president. In the election voters were broadly divided cleanly between those in the towns and those in the countryside. Several towns had more or less survived the war of destabilisation with imported food bought with oil revenue. The countryside had done much less well. The Soviet-style economy had failed to create a rural network that could purchase produce from farmers or distribute essential commodities such as soap, salt and cooking oil. The difference was striking when, on 12 September 1992, the countryside voted for the opposition, for Savimbi and for change, while the towns voted for the government, for subsidised food, and for protection against hungry raiders from the rural areas. UNITA leaders were dismayed to find that many urban Ovimbundu, both in highland towns and in coastal cities, had failed to support them but had adopted the urban strategy of voting for the MPLA. Equally dismaying to Savimbi was the betrayal by the United States, which had allegedly promised him that if he were to stop the war, and go to the polls, he would win the election. When Savimbi failed to prevail, by a clear margin of two to one in the parliamentary election and by a decisive, though not absolute, majority vote for the presidency, he prepared to return to war. Western-style democracy had no consolation prize for coming second in first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all, voting. Savimbi refused to contemplate a compromise solution, recognising that the presidential system, so attractive to him when he thought he would win, gave all power to the president rather than to a prime minister, or a cabinet, or an elected parliament. He calculated that his only hope of gaining the power which he had craved pathologically since his student days in Switzerland, was to seize it through the barrel of a gun.
Civil war broke out in Angola on 1 November 1992 and was different from the colonial war of 1961, from the interventionist war of 1975, and from the destabilisation war of the 1980s. All three of the earlier conflicts had been fought primarily in the countryside and had only indirectly affected towns. The war of 1992 concerned whole cities. The defeated opposition could do its electoral sums as effectively as any United Nations observer and recognised that it was in the urban heartland that it had lost its bid for power. UNITA therefore set out to destroy disloyal cities. It also set out to destroy, if possible, a government that had proved itself unwilling to make any concessions to its opponents or even offer significant post-war redistribution of the national wealth. The civil war of 1992 broke out initially in Luanda itself, triggered by UNITA’s intransigent rejection of the election result, but launched with vigour by the government. Within days the city was violently cleansed of politicians unwilling to abandon Savimbi’s cause. Worse still urban militias were given licence to settle old scores and attack townspeople who might have been less than loyal to the government.
The conflict of 1992–94 brought heavier weapons to Angola than the ones used in previous wars. Big towns of the interior such as Huambo and Malange were shelled as the population starved. Savimbi no longer received weapons from South Africa but had access to relatively cheap second-hand equipment bought, ironically, from the former Soviet empire. The huge republic of Ukraine, with 50 million people struggling to make a living, sold him redundant military hardware and its air fleet flew weapons, ammunition and fuel-oil to makeshift airstrips hidden in the orchard savannah of eastern Angola. Payment for the new UNITA arsenal was made by digging diamonds from the rivers of the interior and flying them, via cloak-and-dagger channels, to Antwerp, the capital of the diamond world, or to new diamond-cutting centres in Tel Aviv and Mumbai. In the expensive business of modern warfare, fought with technologically sophisticated weapons requiring imported ammunition, UNITA came to recognise that its diamond wealth was small compared to the oil wealth of the government. In 1993 it therefore attacked an on-shore oil installation at the mouth of the Congo River, either to deprive the MPLA of revenue or to capture an oil supply of its own. The oil port of Soyo temporarily fell into opposition hands but ruptured storage tanks only caused massive pollution while the oil platforms on the ocean horizon were never at risk. Savimbi was forced to recognise that early military successes had exhausted his resources and could bring no immediate political victory. For survival he needed to seek a truce.
Ending the civil war proved a particularly intractable diplomatic challenge. Margaret Anstee, having orchestrated the election with aplomb, negotiated valiantly to win the peace. It was not until late in 1994, however, that a new United Nations peacemaker, Alioune Beye, eventually secured an agreement in Lusaka. The accord generated none of the euphoria that had accompanied the peace signed in 1991. Savimbi showed his contempt for the unpalatable necessity of suspending hostilities by staying away from the signing ceremony. He had no desire to come face-to-face with dos Santos, who had now outwitted him both in an election, which had been patently free and fair, and in siege warfare, which had given the government control of the highland cities that Savimbi deemed to be his birth-right. Savimbi retired to the small highland town of Bailundu to plot future political and military developments. Dos Santos set about consolidating his personal power by both political and financial means. Savimbi evaded all forms of United Nations peace monitoring under the terms of the Lusaka Protocol while dos Santos basked in almost unlimited Western support. War remained on the horizon, however, and each side tried to provoke the other into being the first to break the ceasefire and so incur international opprobrium. The cold hostility, neither war nor peace, lasted for four years.
One way in which the president sought to defuse the anger of the opposition, and minimise the danger of a return to war, was by creating a ‘government of national unity’. A number of posts were offered to members of the southern élite who were willing to leave the highland and join the ruling circle in Luanda. Some seventy UNITA members who had been elected to parliament in September 1992 moved to the comforts of the city and took their seats in the legislative chamber. Seven of their leaders became ministers and vice-ministers in a cabinet whose padded payroll included sixty MPLA members. Some highland generals were apparently offered inducements of 3 million US dollars each to change sides. The relatively low-key concession to power-sharing was silently undermined, however, by the continuing rise of presidential authority.
The failure of the 1992 election, and the catastrophic war which followed, convinced President dos Santos that he must concentrate more power in his own hands. From being a single-party state with a disaffected opposition thinly scattered in the provinces, Angola became a presidential state in which power emanated from the palace. Dos Santos, like Louis XIV, built his palace on the outskirts of the restless city, safely removed from the fickle mob, and it was there that political decisions began to bypass ministries, party cells, and bureaucracies. Angola was no longer a ‘people’s republic’ and the president’s huge, well-fortified, residential complex, known as the Futungo, resembled the ostentatious luxury displayed by Mobutu in Zaire in contrast to the austere highland hideouts in which Savimbi dodged from night to night to avoid assassination by his many personal and political foes. For all the gilding on his cage, dos Santos was almost as much a prisoner as Savimbi since he was reluctant to travel through the country, even accompanied by his heavily-armed guard. The caged president orchestrated a personality cult with adulation for the man of peace, a shining contrast with Savimbi, the warmonger. The presidential court even suggested that dos Santos, who had been at war with his own people for twenty years, be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize!
In 1998 the presidential personality cult reached a climax during a week-long birthday party for dos Santos. He ceremonially visited the restoration work on the seventeenth-century chapel of Our Lady of Muxima, launched a regatta and a parachuting competition, awarded new costumes to paramount chiefs, and unveiled a commemorative postage stamp. He also opened an exhibition on ‘protecting the sea and its riches’ to show his concern for the environment though many of his human subjects went on starving. The medical plight to which the country had been reduced gave the president an opportunity to visit favoured hospitals bearing gifts, to call on a leper colony, and on a camp for displaced children. He expressed solidarity with those who campaigned against polio or sustained the victims of AIDS. An American-style fundraising dinner was devoted to the rehabilitation of the victims of land-mines which his government had done as much as Savimbi’s opposition to scatter over the country. The week-long festivities ended with gymnastics, sporting competitions, the cutting of a birthday cake and the award of a Brazilian honorary degree. Bread-and-circuses were an attempt to overcome popular disaffection and increasing fear of police surveillance. As the president became all-powerful even the elders of the MPLA felt marginalised, as when a prime minister from the prestigious van Dunem Creole family was humiliatingly made to carry the blame for government unpopularity. While people on the street saw the junketing and partying as an extravagant display of scandal and corruption, members of the establishment saw hero-worship as the necessary gateway to power and status. Money poured into the presidency and the politics of clientelism became ever more pronounced.
To sweeten those on whom the regime depended the presidential office increased the range of organisations which became dependent on its bounty and were therefore trapped into silent complicity. Benefactions were used both to minimise grass-root protest from the hungry slums and to manipulate the factionalism which kept the traditional cadres of the MPLA in disarray. One institutionalised step on the road to totalitarian presidentialism was the creation, in 1996, of the Eduardo dos Santos Foundation. This foundation was designed to implement a widespread policy of privatising the assets of the state so that they could be used to consolidate the power of the president rather than meet any of the more objectively assessed political needs of the nation. The ideology was far from new to Africa but in Angola the process was masked by opaque layers of secrecy and cloaked in dubious forms of legality. The patrimonial foundation refined the politics of patronage and derived its wealth from a presidential ‘tax’ which mirrored state taxes levied on international trading firms, petroleum prospectors, construction companies, and banking corporations as well as on the smaller domestic businesses. Having creamed off a top slice of the nation’s assets, the foundation began to provide services that had ceased to be available through state channels but which now became privately accessible to the president’s clients. A well-funded presidential university was set up to compete with the national university which had been named after Agostinho Neto. The foundation also gained public credit by giving a small subsidy to a home for abandoned children, though the core funding was siphoned out of the city council budget. Some of the largesse reached the provinces but presidential bounty was predominantly spent in the capital, the political base with a capacity to make or unmake presidents.
Manipulating power by wielding carrots and sticks for the élite was rather easier than winning support among the urban masses for whom poverty was a perceived consequence of widespread corruption. It became necessary to generate ‘spontaneous’ outbursts of popular enthusiasm for the president. The sans-culottes of Sambizanga, the black quarter in which dos Santos had been born but in which Nito Alves had mounted his 1977 challenge to the government of Agostinho Neto, were persuaded to come down into the asphalt town and demonstrate their loyalty to the president. The ‘spontaneity’ had been so well prepared that the chanting crowds wore specially prepared T-shirts bearing pictures of ‘their’ president. The mobilisation of the dispossessed rapidly grew bitter, however, when the crowds were permitted to search out approved public enemies against whom to vent their rage over their shabby poverty. The first permitted target was an ethnic one and the demonstrators chanted anti-Ovimbundu slogans as they intimidated anyone who had come down from the highland. In order to separate the faithful from the faithless it was suggested in parliament that identity cards should be issued naming the ‘tribe’ of each bearer, but this calamitous recipe for urban warfare was not followed up. By 1996 the orchestrated politics of violence were extended to include xenophobia and crowds were permitted to attack anyone who might be branded as ‘foreign’. A government campaign against aliens was given the chilling codename ‘Cancer One’ and the search for enemies was directed not only at Africans, particularly ‘Zaireans’ from Congo, but also at communities such as the Lebanese whom the population saw as exploiting shopkeepers.
While politicians were manipulating power down in the city, the highland was getting ready for war. By the end of 1996 it was estimated that Savimbi’s war chest had grown to $2 billion and that he had recently been able to buy another 45 tonnes of weapons flown in from Bulgaria to the mile-long airstrip which UNITA conscripts had built near Bailundu. At this time no fewer than 20,000 of Angola’s government troops were being tied down in Cabinda where armed secessionist movements were threatening the security of the oil wells. Each movement in the enclave had the potential to secure active support from Angola’s northern neighbours, Congo-Brazzaville and Congo-Kinshasa, either of which would gladly have conquered Cabinda. On 17 May 1997 foreign relations suddenly changed, however, when Mobutu’s dictatorship collapsed. A new military dictator, Laurent Kabila with a shadowy past in the Lumumba era, took control of Kinshasa and formed an alliance with the dos Santos government in Luanda. As a result of the change some 10,000 of Savimbi’s troops, who had been sheltered by Mobutu, were temporarily stranded and had to seek refuge across the river in Congo-Brazzaville.
Within weeks of the Kinshasa revolution a similar revolution broke out in Brazzaville. To ensure an outcome that did not threaten Angola, dos Santos, with the tacit connivance of France and the United States, sent troops from Cabinda to support a former Brazzaville president, Sassou-Nguesso. In Brazzaville the regional logistics of civil war took on new dimensions with Croatian mercenaries on one side and weapons from Uzbekistan on the other. This turbulence disrupted UNITA’s war preparation, but during 1998 Savimbi retrieved his scattered units, recruited some members of Mobutu’s former presidential guard, and mobilised a force of 15,000 combat-ready men backed up by 10,000 auxiliary conscripts, a few genocidal Rwanda militants, the orphaned units which had lost power in Brazzaville, and a few Serbian mercenaries. Morocco had meanwhile trained a new officer corps to replace the UNITA generals who had been seduced into moving to Luanda.
Dos Santos also prepared for war after the accidental death on 18 June 1998 of the United Nations peacekeeper, Alioune Beye. Thirty battalions were deployed around the country and an air force equipped with Brazilian jet fighters was put on standby near Benguela. Spanish counter-insurgency specialists were brought in to train 25,000 police commandos who might be needed to repress civilian unrest once the war was launched. Luanda politicians hoped quickly to drive the UNITA forces out of the country and across the border into Zambia. City generals also aspired to capture the Kwango valley where UNITA’s most plentiful alluvial diamonds had been found. By the last weeks of 1998 dos Santos was persuaded that further delay in attacking UNITA would be strategically foolish, but it was already too late to strike the winning blow and government forces, some inappropriately armed and others inadequately trained, were fiercely repulsed when they tried to take the highland. During the first half of 1999 UNITA held the military advantage and even its reluctant recruits, kidnapped from nominally ‘friendly’ Ovimbundu territory, fought for their lives, terrified by threats that if they lost the war the mestizos of the city would pack them off as despised farm labour to the greatly feared, snake-infested, forests of the northern lowland. The civil war of 1998 was the most cruel yet and humanitarian food supplies could not be flown to starving cities under siege.
The depraved conflict between a corrupt government mesmerised by wealth, and an inhuman opposition obsessed by power, carried on throughout 1999 and into 2000. In some engagements UNITA captured government weapons, but a shortage of fuel caused it serious logistical difficulties. One solution was to buy diesel covertly from the enemy. Personal relations across the divide between the two warring élites were closer than ethnic or ideological enmity might suggest. Successive peace negotiations had accustomed rival delegations to making deals with each other while drinking together in expensive foreign night clubs. But to buy fuel on a black market run by enemy officers required a supply of fresh diamonds. In the late 1990s it was estimated that as many as 100,000 men and women were being forced to dig the alluvial mud of the Kwango River for meagre returns of ever-smaller gems. Angola’s diamonds earned barely one-tenth of the $7 billion a year now derived from oil, but they nevertheless enabled UNITA to continue operations after Cold War funding had been cut off. The leaders used diamond money to win support from France’s client regimes in Burkina Faso, Togo and Côte d’Ivoire, all of which provided travel documents and forged sales papers. While the United Nations attempted, unsuccessfully, to impose penalties on nations which engaged in the diamonds-for-weapons trade, mercenary planes continued to fly diamond-funded guns into highland Angola. The weapons arrived under cover of darkness, relayed at unsupervised airstrips in countries which were rewarded for closing their eyes. When oil prices were low the government, like its opponents, struggled to fund the costs of warfare although it had managed to write off 4 billion of its old 11-billion-dollar war-debt. When oil prices recovered, however, the military tide turned and Savimbi lost his highland headquarters in Bailundu. Thereafter fighting concentrated on the dry, empty, plains on the eastern border through which the leader drove his mobile command caravan, visiting his shifting guerrilla camps.
With increasing oil prices an international scramble to obtain a stake in the Angolan petroleum industry reached gold-rush proportions. The exploration companies, those of Britain and France to the fore, calculated that the North Sea and Alaskan fields would run out of accessible reserves in the new century and that the best future prospects might lie in the ultra-deep concessions off Angola’s Atlantic coast. Although the technology had not yet been perfected to drill oil from a seabed 2 miles deep—with underwater stations serviced by automated submarines and with flexible extraction pipes attached to surface platforms—the companies were nonetheless willing to make down-payments of $300 million for the right even to explore, let alone exploit, each block in Angola’s deep waters. In the early months of the new millennium Luanda’s ‘jungle capitalism’ was once more awash with money. The benefits of wealth did not, however, trickle down to the people. School teachers continued to be outnumbered by soldiers in a ratio of two-and-a-half to one. One-fifth of the national education budget was appropriated to educate élite children abroad. Voices of complaint, including those of independent Luanda newspapers, were silenced by government as brutally as the opposition had previously silenced Huambo journalists. In the countryside ‘totalitarian savagery’ continued unabated with the kidnapping of all available children for military duty. While slaughter ravaged the highland, members of Savimbi’s family were sheltered in a West African haven controversially afforded them by the president of Togo.
By the year 2000 Angola had come full circle in the thirty years since the death of Salazar. The civil wars of the 1990s, like the colonial wars of the 1960s, had reached a stalemate. The lives of many people were disrupted but no solution to the military confrontation between the central government and the guerrillas seemed in sight. The economy had changed from a dependence on the unpredictable price of coffee to a dependence on the equally-fluctuating price of petroleum. In neither case was the industrial sector of production able to cushion the country against the uncertainties of world markets. Politics in 2000 was as unresponsive to public opinion as it had been in 1970, though the dictator who balanced the powers of the several factions of the property-owning class was now a member of Luanda’s home-grown élite rather than of Portugal’s imperially-oriented haute bourgeoisie. Now, as then, the army kept an eye on political decision-making and had a finger in the economic pie. Senior officers in the colonial army of the 1960s used their black market wealth to invest in real estate in Lisbon. The officers of the national army of the 1990s invested their newly-acquired riches in the Luanda housing market. Wealth was as sharply polarised as it had been in late-colonial times but the city slums had grown far beyond half a million with the arrival of 2 million displaced transients camped on the Luanda coastal plain. The colonial class of 200,000 privileged and semi-privileged expatriates had been replaced by a similar number of black Portuguese-speaking Angolans who retained many of the old colonial attitudes of social superiority and who worshipped in the same Catholic churches that had sustained Salazar’s brand of authoritarianism. Dos Santos even invited the pope to visit Luanda and had one of his sons baptised a Catholic. On the streets the Angolan press of the 1990s was almost as circumscribed in its news and opinions as the censored press of the 1960s had been and Angolan citizens who held political views were as wary of the political police as colonial subjects had been when trying to evade Salazar’s secret agents. Freedom of opinion and of opportunity, which had been stifled in the days of empire, appeared almost incapable of resuscitation in the era of liberation, though a few courageous voices such as that of journalist and human rights activist Rafael Marques could occasionally be heard. Some change was, however, afoot.
On 22 February 2002 Jonas Savimbi, the life-long commander of UNITA, was cornered, killed and secretly buried near the eastern town of Luena. The way was thereby opened for another attempt to find a peaceful future for Angola. Previous peace settlements drawn up at Bicesse in 1991, and Lusaka in 1994, had been orchestrated by foreigners and had failed. A new solution to the twenty-seven years of civil war, which had followed the thirteen years of colonial war, was drafted by Angolans themselves. Representatives of both liberation movements agreed on a peace formula so that the challenge of reconstruction could be faced. The parties were not, however, presented with a clean slate and the colonial legacy which they inherited was a deeply scarred one.
The complex reality of post-war Angola can only be understood by referring to its past. Well-meaning visitors, in the dawn years of the twenty-first century, rushed in talking about a ‘return to normality’, but this represented a failure to grasp history. Three-quarters of Angola’s population had never known peace, last seen forty years before. The ‘normality’ of peace-time was entirely novel not only for young Angolans but also for most adults. As for democracy—that ‘normality’ embedded in the minds of Europeans—Angola had never enjoyed democracy. Indeed the one attempt to hold a one-person-one-vote election in Angola, the election of 1992, had resulted in one of the most destructive of all the wars that had torn the country apart. Angolans who had never known peace or democracy had never known the rule of law either. The institutions of political decision-making, and the administrative practices of the 2002 ‘government of reconciliation’, were the unhappy linear descendants of a colonial police-state founded 100 years earlier by soldiers such as Paiva Couceiro and Norton de Matos and then ruled for forty years by Salazar. ‘Administration by consent’, or ‘trial by jury’, or ‘participatory local government’, were norms of an open society which the colonial powers had conspicuously failed to introduce into Africa. The long era of endemic warfare made a change of political style even more difficult to achieve in Angola than in former British or French colonies.
One pervasive war-time legacy was the widespread survival of anti-personnel land-mines strewn, unmapped, across Angola’s farm lands. Clearing the mines was a highly skilled and very expensive operation, helped by such organisations as the Mines Advisory Group and the Halo Trust. One of Angola’s own sophisticated de-mining experts had been trained in Cambodia where, as in Angola, millions of mines had been planted to starve peasants and to deprive towns of food. The clearing of the mines, however, did not necessarily benefit returning peasants who found that traditional titles to land-use were being challenged by entrepreneurs coming out from the city. The farms of the Amboim plateau, a mere hundred miles south of Luanda, were a particular target for demobilised generals who wanted to dust off colonial projects and re-establish plantations worked by cheap migrant labour. Absentee city millionaires also cast covetous eyes on the highland around Huambo. Land with good fertility, and in some cases with colonial irrigation and drainage, did not always return to Ovimbundu peasants with ancient oral rights. It was seized, instead, by carpet-baggers waving paper titles obtained from a corrupt and cash-starved bureaucracy.
The crisis over post-colonial land tenure was equally severe in Luanda. The old colonial suburbs of the city, the workers’ town known as the Bairo Operário, had been built of brick to house those serving the public institutions. When the war ended, oil wealth enabled new city magnates to demolish even the best of the old boroughs to build high-rise apartment blocks. Housing was both for the victors of the civil wars and for the now increasing expatriate population. American oil companies, Brazilian engineering firms, Portuguese bankers, and great cohorts of foreign diplomats paid handsomely to live on the land being seized from its historic owners. The swathes of destruction by bulldozer were fiercely but unavailingly opposed. Dispossessed citizens were unable to wade through the jumbled piles of municipal archives to retrieve the title deeds to the houses and lands which they had lost. In the twenty-first century, outer suburbs were also being built by a neo-imperial generation of Chinese entrepreneurs. Public services, however, did not match urban growth. In the slums the musseque dwellers lacked water and sanitation and suffered health risks of plague proportions, but even middle-class Luandans regularly lacked piped water, reliable electricity, or collective transport. The city became so choked by private traffic that the president, with his cavalcade of out-riders, found the suburban bottle-necks so frustrating that he moved his office out of the suburbs and back to the city on high ground next to the cathedral.
One of the multi-facetted legacies of colonialism in Angola was Christianity. In the western regions the old Protestant traditions, Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist, survived. In the east the Plymouth Brothers maintained a presence among war-time refugees. Foreign religious organisations brought health facilities to the most neglected of the provinces in an attempt to reduce infant and maternal mortality. Some Catholic voices had been brave enough to speak out against the brutality of civil war and one bishop was even awarded an international prize for defending civil rights. After the end of the war, Radio Ecclesia, a Catholic broadcasting station, became the most courageous voice of the independent media in Angola. A nervous government, however, insisted on curbing outspoken debate and closed the relay broadcasting stations which Britain had gifted to the provincial capitals in an effort to stimulate grass-roots democracy. The regime still saw rural rebellion as a possible threat to peace. Although fearful of the radical voice of Catholicism, the postwar government liked the power of an episcopal hierarchy and organised a pilgrimage to the old shrine of Muxima on the Kwanza River. 70,000 pilgrims travelled there by bus while some members of the élite chartered helicopters. An equally dramatic religious development was an explosion of new churches in the Pentecostal tradition. After the war the Pentecostals bought up empty shops, hotels and warehouses and turned them into churches and chapels at the rate of one new congregation each week. Great preachers gave comfort to the masses and one prayer meeting filled a football stadium to its 80,000 capacity. The Pentecostals, with financial help from Brazil, were even able to build a cathedral-like church in Luanda. Alongside the growth of new Pentecostalism and of old Catholicism, Luanda city also preserved its Methodist core. The great Methodist church was regularly thronged under the auspices of an elderly black bishop who had survived all the phases of the wars. Some refugees returning from exile in Congo switched their allegiance from the Baptist Church to Methodism and sang the great Wesleyan hymns in Kikongo rather than in Kimbundu.
One of the controversial legacies of colonialism remained the off-shore oil economy which generated billions of dollars of revenue. In the tiny oil-producing enclave of Cabinda separatist political movements continued to wage war long after the rest of the country had secured peace. In 2010 their guerrillas even targeted a bus-load of footballers from Togo, captained by a Tottenham Hotspur star, as the team prepared to play in an Africa Cup match. The big question which the government of post-war Angola faced was whether the long-lauded presence of oil was really a blessing or actually a curse. As production rose from one million to two million barrels a day, first-world donor countries, such as Britain, deemed Angola rich enough to finance its own development priorities. The expected ‘peace dividend’, derived from the drop in military expenditure, now needed to be matched by a ‘transparency dividend’ which traced the flow of petroleum income. A bare 8 per cent of the government’s oil revenue went into the key sectors of health and education. A similar proportion, perhaps as much as a billion dollars a year, allegedly escaped the purview of auditors and was apparently embezzled by top politicians who invested their winnings in Brazil, or stored them in Swiss banks. The task of auditing oil revenue was made particularly difficult when the drilling companies furtively failed to reveal how much oil they were extracting while the presidency stubbornly refused to reveal how much it was secretly charging each company for a drilling licence. Strict transparency would have been required to obtain development loans from the International Monetary Fund. Instead the president turned to more expensive credit from China, a country which studiously avoided political interference in the affairs of partner states and attached no moral strings to its investments. Angola, tragically, joined the oil-rich dictatorships of Uzbekistan and Equatorial Guinea as one of the most corrupt countries in the world. The problem of oil dependency grew more acute when in 2015 oil prices dropped. The government adopted harsher attitudes to its critics, notably the human rights lawyer and journalist Raphael Marques.
One obvious colonial legacy was the continued use of the colonial language. Indeed, an attempt to bridge ethnic boundaries after the war ended, and to create a distinctive cultural unity for the nation, was undertaken when the president declared that Portuguese would be the ‘national’—not merely the ‘official’—language of all Angolans. As one of the ‘Lusophone’ nations, Angola could be proudly contrasted with Francophone Congo and Anglophone South Africa. The continued use of the imperial language also facilitated a new relationship between the old colony and its former imperial master, a legacy which might not have been anticipated. A new form of ‘neocolonialism’ enabled rich Angolans to buy up utility companies, telecommunications, and banks in the former mother country. As a result of such investments one of the president’s daughters became the first female billionaire in Africa. Another feature of the association was the ability of Angolan businessmen to hire Gastarbeiter from Portugal who came to Angola with skills which were not available locally. This unexpected and reverse dependency on investment, and on migration, may have been hurtful to Portuguese pride, but it did help Portugal survive the 2008 economic crisis in the Eurozone. In Angola, meanwhile, after two centuries of colonial exploitation, people were at last in a position to visualise a stable and prosperous future and even benefit from their long relationship with Portugal.
In the early years of the twenty-first century one sign of hope for the future of Angola rested in the energy and inventiveness of its women. Luandan women had developed giant markets which kept the city fed and clothed. They bought their supplies through a global air-freight network which stretched west to Brazil and east to the Arabian Gulf. In the provinces women, supported by foreign-sponsored micro-credit, established a multiplicity of small-scale business enterprises which traded everything from clothes and vegetables to spare engine-parts for municipal buses. Female solidarity enabled women to support one another in times of crisis, even when jealous male politicians tried to interfere with their business plans by deploying a much-feared ‘fiscal police’ to harvest some of the profits. The robust nature of female enterprise in Angola crossed ethnic boundaries and was as dynamic among the Kongo of the north as among the Ovimbundu of the south.
The economic revival stretched throughout the country and was not only to be found in the burgeoning city of Luanda. In the south-west the plateau communities of white settlements had escaped the worst disruptions of war and old grassland traditions of cattle-keeping were adapted with modern methods of ranching and dairying. In the bursting city of Lubango the son of a Swiss mission family even opened a cheese factory. In the far north the revival of forest food crops for the market brought wealth back to the city of Uige at the heart of the former coffee groves. On the highland a stretch of the Benguela railway was restored to working order and Ovimbundu farmers were able to use it to supply fresh produce to the city Huambo. Angola began to look like a typical African country of westernised towns’ men and women supported by market-oriented peasants. The country was administered by a highly-centralised, presidential, government, but it was a government that had been freely chosen in a popular election. Even the parliamentary opposition spoke optimistically about Angola’s future prospects.