2On the other hand, the election revealed profound changes in electoral practices, as illustrated by UNITA’s victory in the capital, Luanda, a historical MPLA bastion and the centre of its power since 1974. How can we explain the regime’s resilience? How can we account for political changes, continuities, and discontinuities in Angola, beyond the party-state system, and, geographically, beyond Luanda? This issue attempts to suggest new directions for understanding Angola’s politics.

3Literature on politics is understood here broadly as that which concerns itself with the operations of power and leadership within and between institutions, systems, and activities and intends to bridge the gap between political theory/science and the everyday realities and experiences of Angolan citizens. In Angola, it has dedicated itself to two major – and intertwined – lines of inquiry. The first one examines the trajectory of Angolan nationalism and the process that brought Angola to independence; it primarily engages with the legacies of Portuguese colonialism, the anticolonial struggle, and the divisions of the nationalist movement (Bender 1978, Chabal & Vidal 2007, Marcum 1969, Messiant 2006). The second kind of literature is concerned with the consolidation of the state, the single-party rule, and, to use Fanon’s dictum (Fanon 2007), the “pitfalls of national consciousness” (Hodges 2004, Mabeko-Tali 2018, Messiant 2008, 2009, Oliveira 2013, Schubert 2017). This latter body of work focuses on the instruments and mechanisms used to consolidate power in Angola, either by controlling natural resources such as oil and diamonds, by centralizing state media and public discourse, or through the materiality of kinship (Cardoso 2015, Schubert 2019). How does recent research on Angola engage with and depart from this scholarship? What geopolitical, economic, social, and technological changes have impacted the political landscape and political activities in Angola?

5In parallel, President Dos Santos took decisive steps to redefine the political system in Angola by incorporating other powers into the office of the republic’s president (Wanda 2022: 109). The 1991 constitution, which introduced a head of government alongside a head of state, was promptly amended in 1998 to terminate the office of the Prime Minister, one of many signs that the regime had no intention of relinquishing any control. Since power had been obtained militarily, the government institutionalized the rationale of the victor. In the aftermath of the killing of Savimbi in 2002, the international community again pressured Angola to organize elections, insisting that financial support to the country’s shattered economy and the rebuilding of the infrastructure depended upon the regime’s willingness to democratize the political system. However, this moment coincided with Angola’s growing oil production, the rising prices of oil, and China’s increasing involvement in the economy of a few African countries. For the Angolan regime, this international conjecture was an opportunity to exchange oil for reconstruction aid (Campbell & Chaulia 2009). As such, in lieu of a proper peace process involving the participation of the various sectors of society through a reflection on political violence and engagement in truth and reconciliation initiatives, the MPLA embarked on what Ricardo Soares de Oliveira called “illiberal peacebuilding” focused on an entirely material and infrastructure-based reconstruction, based on its connection to China (Oliveira 2011). This allowed the regime to maintain and even reinforce its hegemony and for President Dos Santos and his inner circle to concentrate power and wealth at previously unseen levels in the country.

6When elections were finally called, after many delays, in 2008, the MPLA took ownership of the process to avoid losing (Tomás 2023). Complete control over state media (and the absence of almost any independent source covering the entire country) ensured the MPLA appeared as a devoted peacemaker (with President Dos Santos being referred to as “the Architect of Peace”). At the same time, UNITA was systematically demonized and presented as the party of warfare to a population bearing heavy memories of the 1992 post-electoral violence and the shattering of their hopes for peace (ROAPE 2008). Thanks to the oil boom, state resources were poured into the MPLA campaign, strengthening clientelist links and patronage over sectors of civil society. Political parties in the opposition struggled to fund their campaign, having received their campaign funds, as per the Constitution, only a few weeks before the elections. The National Electoral Commission, voting registration offices, and polling stations were staffed mainly with MPLA members or sympathizers, and the opposition parties denounced multiple forms of intimidation to coerce citizens into voting for the regime. The MPLA won by a landslide (over 80%), opening the door further constitutional reform.

7Since then, however, the MPLA’s electoral trajectory has consistently gone downhill. While it has won every election since the institution of multiparty politics, its lead has consistently diminished by about 10% each election, from 81% in 2008 to 71% in 2012 (after a constitutional reform abolished the presidential election in favour of a parliamentary one whereby the winning party’s leader becomes president), 61% in 2017 (when José Eduardo Dos Santos stepped down as the MPLA candidate and João Lourenço became Angola’s third president), and, finally, a much disputed 51% in 2022 (with abstention soaring over 55%), a result considered by Alex Vines as “a political earthquake” in Angola (Vines 2022).

9The campaign and elections took place in a climate of extreme tension, as the opposition regularly denounced the regime’s constellation of intimidation tactics, abuse of power, and lack of transparency in the organization and monitoring of the electoral process (Boio 2023). The death of former President Dos Santos in Barcelona on 8 July 2022, six weeks before the election, seemed like a telling sign that a chapter of the country’s political history was coming to a close, all the more so as it provoked a heated dispute within the MPLA and within the Dos Santos family itself (Gastrow & Lázaro 2022). While some (including his widow) asked for his return to national soil so he could be given a state funeral, Dos Santos’s eldest children – all facing prosecution in Angola – accused the regime of trying to cash in on his death as a way of enabling the ruling party to appear united and cohesive ahead of its most challenging election. João Lourenço seemed caught between party loyalty and his reluctance to showcase his association with a former president that his administration had conveniently portrayed as the mastermind behind Angola’s unhinged corruption. In that context, hopes for change soared ahead of election day, spearheaded by the mobilization of activists and social society organizations.

10For these new players in Angolan politics, supporting UNITA in a joint effort to oust the MPLA represented the culmination of ten years of peaceful protests that had started in the wake of the Arab Spring protests of 2011 (Lima 2013), opening a political space beyond the traditional MPLA/UNITA antagonism. Their activism was also the result of a much longer struggle by Angolan citizens to widen political participation beyond armed movements turned political parties in Angola (Mabeko-Tali 2023). Ever since the battle against the Estado Novo’s dictatorial and colonial rule in the 1960s and 1970s, political mobilization in Angola was never a safe venture. Under late colonialism, the repression of nationalist and anticolonial sentiments and the absence of political and civil rights in Portugal and its colonies led to over a decade of bloody anticolonial warfare. This fostered a culture of authoritarian and centralized rule in Lusophone African countries that prevailed after independence (Cahen 2015). In Angola, the Alvor Agreement (January 1975) signed between the Portuguese authorities and the anticolonial movements to organize the transition to independence resulted in the exclusive recognition of the armed movements (the MPLA, UNITA, and the FNLA) as legitimate political forces. Each movement, in turn, choked internal dissent and contestation, creating an atrophied political landscape where violence remained an important governance tool within and between political forces, party loyalty became a necessary condition to access key services and resources, and dissidence equated treason. The repression of revolutionary movements by the MPLA from 1975 to 1979, including the bloodbath that followed the attempted coup on 27 May 1977 (Pawson 2014), mirrored the killing of dissidents by UNITA leadership in the 1980s and 1990s (Bridgland 1995). The constant fear of repression and retaliation created a “dictatorship of silence” (Lima 2013) characterized by the population’s self-censorship and reluctance to challenge the regime’s past and present crimes and shortcomings. This was aggravated by the MPLA’s characterization of UNITA as the party of war after the failure of the 1992 peace process, leading to a general equation between political opposition and armed violence. In parallel, the presidency used state funds to create “civil society organizations”, such as FESA (the Eduardo Dos Santos Foundation, created in 1998), to provide the illusion of popular initiatives while being entirely under the control of the ruling party or the president’s entourage (Messiant 2009: 299).

12Beyond their general criticism of the MPLA and their reporting of human rights violations, the revús were eager to shift political discourse in Angola by reclaiming the country’s revolutionary history, largely confiscated by MPLA propaganda since independence. By questioning the official line on 27 May 1977 and its ensuing repression, activists called out the MPLA’s continuous silencing of dissenting voices as well as its confiscation of history to serve its own narrative of self-glorification. More importantly, they showed that new generations of Angolans refused to be scared into silence. Similarly, by calling themselves revús (short for revolutionaries), activists presented themselves as the true heirs of those who had resisted colonial violence and arbitrary rule and implicitly constructed the MPLA as the post-independence equivalent of the colonial administration. Mobilizing anticolonial and revolutionary symbols was a decisive move in a country whose national identity had been forged in the struggle against European imperialism. Provocatively claiming these revolutionary genealogies and values underlined their betrayal by the MPLA, whose political legitimacy was largely based on appropriating revolutionary themes and deeds during and in the aftermath of the anticolonial armed struggle. The revús were young and lacked formal party structures or support and their rap music and social media interventions were irreverent and playful (Buire 2016). This highlighted the asymmetrical nature of their fight against a party-state. When the MPLA tried to paint the revús as dangerous agitators seeking to destabilize the country and reignite the civil war, it quickly appeared as a desperate attempt to reignite old fears to confiscate political debate. Although presenting UNITA as a threat against peace and security had worked well for the MPLA in the 1990s and early 2000s, in the fight against the revús, the MPLA was definitely Goliath, and the activists were David.

13This was a significant change in the Angolan political landscape as criticism of the MPLA and political opposition could no longer be summarily discarded as a foreign threat to national security. This opened a political space where opposition to the ruling party could exist and connect with segments of the public beyond traditional clientelist networks. The MPLA party-state (and to a lesser extent, UNITA, due to its more limited resources) had cultivated strong links to civil society through complex relations of co-optation and redistribution, implying a certain degree of participation in and support for this mode of governance, thanks to the immense financial power granted by its oil resources (Tomás 2012). However, the alliance between the activist constellation, UNITA, and other smaller political parties in the 2022 elections proved that political forces were able to forge coalitions that went beyond clientelism, encompassing diverse segments of Angolan society which were often presented as antagonistic. This was made possible by the MPLA’s poor governance, the young age of the Angolan population (the majority of whom had no recollection of the civil war, let alone the anticolonial war), and Adalberto de Costa Júnior’s political finesse.

14However, a certain naïveté was also embodied by the most radical sectors of society, including MUDEI, which believed that the ruling party could be dethroned through an election. Since the MPLA’s electoral victories were proclaimed by the National Election Commission – which holds the power to register voters and oversees the electoral process – MUDEI hoped that an alternative vote count would unmask the MPLA’s tampering with the results. Indeed, in both UNITA/FPU and MUDEI’s parallel counts, the MPLA did not have enough votes to clinch elections. In the end, though, because the Angolan Constitution stipulates a very short period for producing the final election results, MUDEI did not have the means to count the ballots produced in the entire country in a timely manner. The Angolan institutions and constitution, forged by decades of MPLA power, protected the ruling party and ensured it stayed in power. UNITA/FPU faced a dilemma: they could either refuse and dispute the results or they could accept them and send a record number of opposition parliamentarians to the national assembly (90 for UNITA, out of 220 seats, against 124 for the MPLA). As per the Constitution, refusing to join the parliament would render the opposition illegal. The political cost of rejecting electoral results (reminiscent of 1992) and being accused of disregarding the democratic process was too high for UNITA; after denouncing the MPLA’s lack of transparency and instrumentalization of the institutions, the opposition party conceded.

15Where does this leave the country ahead of the 2027 elections? Given the descending trajectory of the MPLA and in the absence of any meaningful social and economic improvement of the population’s situation, an electoral victory seems unlikely. To make things even more nebulous, the Angolan Constitution limits the number of presidential mandates to two. As a result, the ruling party must either choose another presidential candidate or change the constitution to allow João Lourenço to run for a third term. What does a closer look at Angola during this period tell us that electoral results do not? Beyond UNITA’s significant victory in Luanda, have political sensibilities radically changed in the last decade? What other transformations have significantly impacted Angola’s society and culture in the previous years? The articles composing this special issue offer a snapshot of the diversity and complexity of Angola’s social, cultural, and political fabric. They highlight its structural impasses and contradictions and the new ways in which the Angolan people invest the political arena and seek to be agents of change. They also stress the enduring challenges and new avenues of research in and on Angola, including the difficulties Angolan researchers face in conducting and publishing research. Despite some promising proposals and exciting first drafts, this special issue laments the absence of papers by Angolan researchers. It is neither talent nor hard work, but the time and conditions in which to write and publish their findings that many Angolans lack in order for their voices to be heard in academic outlets.

16The opening article of this special issue, Ruy Lleras Blanes’s “The Ministry of Injustice and No Human Rights in Angola”, revisits Angola’s postcolonial history through the lens of human rights. Placing the regime’s perfunctory adoption of human rights in political discourse and institutions within a larger system of authoritarian and brutal rule, Llera Blanes demonstrates the chiasm in the regime’s actions as it adopts human rights frameworks while simultaneously inflicting continuous violence on its population. Llera Blanes offers a careful examination of MPLA legislation and key texts on human rights and social justice since the anticolonial struggle, focusing particularly on the late 1970s and the repression of MPLA dissidents, the writing of the 2010 Constitution, and the Lourenço administration’s initiatives to critically engage with state narratives, memory, and the victims of the events of 27 May 1977. Doing so, he highlights continuity in the regime’s practical lack of consideration for the human rights of Angolan citizens, while noting the growing attention paid to the topic in legislative/constitutional texts as well as in political discourse. Human rights illustrate the persistent discrepancy between institutional structures and the reality of how power is conceived and exercised in Angola. Paradoxically, by adopting laws and creating governmental bodies that seemingly take into account criticism formulated by its own citizens as much as that of international organizations, the MPLA actually manages to maintain, rather than challenge or transform, its mode of governance and its evading of democratic control. This results in the continuous precarity of the Angolan population, which remains the subject of state violence, even though the civil war ended over 20 years ago.

17The Angolan regime’s ability to bypass its own institutions and laws to remain in power is also, at least partly, what fired up the rise of activist movements demanding more democracy from the 2010s onwards. Based on extensive fieldwork in Luanda from 2019 to 2022 – that is, during João Lourenço’s first term as president of Angola – Chloé Buire’s article, “More Citizenship, Less Militancy: The Ambivalence of Political Activism in Luanda”, examines the ideological framework, actions, and strategies of several of these groups and how a decade of mobilization has created a new political community among the youth of Luanda. Critically engaging with the pitfalls and ethical dilemmas of creating long-term professional and personal connections with pro-democracy activists in a resolutely non-democratic environment, Buire offers a reflexive piece illuminating the ethnographic challenges posed by the Angolan political context. Analysing the activists’ ideological and intellectual landscapes, she also provides precious insights into the ways in which activists navigate internal rivalries and collaborations, balance professional risks and opportunities connected to their activism, and try to weigh in on current political debates while also retaining a disruptive influence. What emerges from this deep dive into the Luanda activist scene is a nuanced portrayal of a generation that is eager to break with the culture of fear imposed upon Angolan civil society since the 1970s, but struggles not to reproduce social, gender, and intellectual hierarchies within their own movement and groups.

18In her article “Pentecostalism in the ‘New Luanda’: Urbanity, Imaginaries, Aspirations and Resistance”, Natalia Zawiejska examines the ways in which political ideologies and modes of governance permeate and influence religious discourse and practices in urban settings, including church aesthetics and architecture. By analysing the manner in which Pentecostal churches engage with, and at times appropriate, official narratives of citizenship and modernity in Luanda, Zawiejska contends that Pentecostalism is an urban formation despite its ambivalent discourse about cities as places of sin and moral degradation. As such, it also appears, for some of its followers, to be a way into the urban modernity championed by the Angolan regime. Zawiejska locates her ethnographic research within the wider (postcolonial) urban trajectory of Luanda, shaped by the MPLA’s initially revolutionary and socialist, today rather neoliberal, narratives of modernity. Mobilizing the rich research conducted in Luanda in the past decade, Zawiejska also sheds light on the creative ways in which Luanda’s citizens have denounced and parodied the MPLA’s contradictory aspirations to modernity and its failure to provide basic services to its population. Triggered by the ‘New Angola’ development discourse, the ‘New Luanda’ ideal appears as an aspirational project and a set of desired ways of urban life that shape collective imaginaries, including Pentecostal ones, in 21st century Luanda. Zawiejska’s careful contextualization of Pentecostal churches within the wider sociocultural and political history of Luanda illuminates her examination of two specific churches, the Bom Deus Church and the Assembly of God of Maculusso, as their leaders and followers navigate MPLA politics, ethnic and ideological stigma, and middle-class aspirations in Angola, as well as within wider global Pentecostal networks.

19Leaving Luanda to focus instead on the Benguela province, Torun Reite and Florita Telo’s piece, “Demands, Political Inefficacy and Alienation. Youth in the 2022 Angolan Election Campaign in the Province of Benguela” is based on over a thousand interviews conducted during the 2022 general elections campaign. Analysing the priorities and preoccupations of the Angolan youth (18-35 years old) in the province, as well as their sources of political information, it compares their major demands to the electoral programmes put forward by the MPLA and UNITA, while also inquiring about the political participation of that social group. It shows that alongside economic concerns related mostly to poverty, employment and other opportunities, the youth is also eager to see political alternance, hoping it will reduce corruption and finally instil accountability among politicians. This mixed-method investigation, which gives us a fascinating cartography of the political, economic and social aspirations of young Angolans in over thirty municipalities of the Benguela province, demonstrates that despite an acute sense of the limitations offered by multiparty politics in the context of the MPLA’s hegemony, the youth is still hopeful that democratic change can take place through elections in Angola and improve their day-to-day lives.

20Moving further away from the centre of power in Angola, Paulo Müller’s article “International Community as Power Extension: Contents and Context of Cabindan Independentist Activism on Facebook,” examines how Cabindan activists use online platforms (here, Facebook) to articulate their demands and try to foster solidarity beyond the province. In a context of heightened centralisation around Luanda, and after decades of tight state control over the media, it is no surprise that social media and digital platforms have become important points of emission of counter-discourse for Cabindan nationalists. The Cabinda province, an Angolan enclave in Congo-Brazzaville (a legacy of the 1885 Berlin Conference) bordering the Democratic Republic of Congo has had a long history of resisting, culturally, politically and militarily, the Angolan state, but its strategic (offshore) oil resources and on-shore oil installations have paradoxically made it a strategic region for the MPLA party-state. Conducting a “remote ethnography” based on the extraction, compilation and analysis of online data, Muller demonstrates how Cabindan activists tried to mobilise the “international community” around their cause, while also enrolling the Facebook algorithm to build and strengthen connections between themselves. Through a close-reading of a message posted in different versions between 2016 and 2023, Muller exemplifies how various aspects of the struggle for the independence of Cabinda are highlighted in turn to create the biggest engagement and echo possible.

21Concluding this special issue, Phillip Rothwell’s “Uncanny Women and Angolan Unhomeliness” tackles contemporary Angolan politics through a literary angle. Offering a rare examination of prose and poetry written by four Angolan women (Ana Paula Tavare, Rosária da Silva, Margarida Paredes, and Chó de Guri), Rothwell demonstrates how women writers have long been contesting the MPLA’s gendered narrative of the nation, especially its use of the mother figure. The anticolonial struggle was a key moment in the creation of an Angolan national consciousness. Shaped by male writers, male fighters, and male political leaders (all of whom deliberately kept women at bay within these various, interlocking spheres), narratives of emancipation were highly gendered, with men largely portrayed as historical agents while women were more passive and vulnerable. As Rothwell illustrates through the poetry of Agostinho Neto, the MPLA leader and Angola’s first president, the mother figure especially came to symbolize the homeland waiting for her sons to free her from oppression. Reading Neto’s poetry against African feminist thinkers such as Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí or Obioma Nnaemeka, Rothwell highlights how motherhood portrayed by Angola’s male writers was highly steeped in the colonial norms of domesticity and passivity. Angolan women’s fiction and poetry, on the other hand, have consistently challenged these male-chauvinist fantasy narratives of nationhood. They have revealed the enduring social and political consequences of the MPLA’s gender blind spot, as their narratives and verses convey unhomeliness, that is, women’s uneasy inhabiting of a nation thought exclusively through a male perspective. As such, Rothwell contends that the revolutionary failure of the MPLA lies not so much in its inability to bring forth a utopian future, as in its reluctance to confront its own colonial gender bias.