Introduction

1A few months before the 2017 general elections in Angola, a number of profiles, pages, and groups of self-proclaimed “activists” from Cabinda began to show up in my personal Facebook timeline as suggestions and requests for connection. Ever since my first fieldwork stay in Cabinda in 2011, I have been added on Facebook by many “mutual friends” with field interlocutors, most of whom I had no prior contact with. In 2017, however, the friend requests and suggestions of people, groups, and pages from Cabinda to follow were noticeably marked by the words “activism” and “independence”.

3The first part of the article is an overview of the methodology I adopted to explore this field of research, combining a general ethnographic approach of the Internet with procedures for collecting and extracting digital data. It also presents an overview of the strategies and means of action of Cabindan independentist activists on Facebook, which are also methods used to observe this social universe. I will then go on to present the dataset through which the content produced by Cabindan independentists on Facebook can be understood, focusing on messages that call out to an imagined “international community” as their interlocutor. Finally, I will analyse different versions of a message that was posted repeatedly by two different pages between 2016 and 2023, showing how independentist contents articulate historical claims with contemporary political context, combining the use of digital technologies with contemporary African perspectives.

Remote Ethnography, Data Scraping and Cabindan Independentist Sites on Facebook

6More often than not, ethnographic accounts of digital social media are entangled in broader scholarly methodological reflections on how to make sense of computational data (Hjorth et al. 2016). Given the elusive experience of reading, screen printing, and copy/pasting information from timelines that constantly refresh and update, another goal of this project was learning to use data scraping tools to enable more systematic reviews of contents. Considering the transformations that have affected data extraction over the last decade, primarily due to ethical concerns (Schneble et al. 2018, Buchanan 2020), collecting information from Cabindan independentist Facebook sites through automated means for research purposes became dependent on what Facebook itself allowed to be extracted through its Application Programming Interface (API).

Navigating Cabindan Independentist Sites on Facebook

9The genesis and transformation of Cabindan independentist movements have been addressed from different perspectives, focusing on the interplay between regional geopolitics and sociocultural particularities, assessing the progress and setbacks of political actors involved in the conflict in relation to their goals and positions (Almeida 2013, Bembe 2010, Carvalho 2018, Mabeko-Talli 2001). Overall, these approaches portray the history of Cabindan independentism between the 1960s and 1980s as a cycle of mobilization of Cabindan political forces, followed by colonial and postcolonial governments co-opting Cabindan leaders by interpreting independence claims as grievances associated with social demands and problems addressed by the state through parliamentary politics and bureaucratic procedures. From the 1990s through the 2010s, civil society organizations and activists focused on denouncing the militarization of state presence in Cabinda, justified as peacekeeping and stability maintenance measures to prevent the disruption of oil industry dynamics and hence ensure national security (Hodges 2001, HRW 2009).

10From 2017 onwards, new Cabindan political denominations arose, such as the Movimento Independentista de Cabinda (MIC, Independentist Movement of Cabinda), União dos Cabindeses pela Independência (UCI, Union of Cabindans for Independence), Frente Unida pela Libertação de Cabinda (FULC, United Front for the Liberation of Cabinda), Movimento de Reunificação do Povo de Cabinda para a Sua Soberania (MPRCS, Movement of Reunification of the People of Cabinda for their Sovereignty), and Movimento de Libertação de Cabinda (MLC, Cabinda Liberation Movement). This dynamic emerged and/or gained visibility in the lead-up to the 2017 Angolan general elections, the first in which José Eduardo dos Santos did not run for president as head of the ruling party, the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA, People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola). This was widely interpreted as a sign of potential change in the governing regime, even if the MPLA were to emerge victorious again (as it turned out to, making João Lourenço Angola’s third president since independence). From an independentist point of view, it was an appropriate time to pressure state politics to encourage changes in the Cabindan situation as well.

12Along with the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and its boost of online video-meeting platforms, another dynamic emerged in an effort to create instances dedicated to gathering different civil society organizations in Cabinda around human rights claims. Examples of these initiatives include the Associação para o Desenvolvimento da Cultura dos Direitos Humanos (ADCDH, Association for the Development of Human Rights Culture), the Núcleo dos Ativistas de Cabinda (NAC, Cabinda Activist Hub), and the Alto Conselho de Cabinda (ACC, Cabinda High Council). The first two in particular centred their activities on the promotion and broadcasting of online lives and webinars with activists from different Cabindan organizations, activists from abroad, and scholars, as a political training programme.

14The groups, pages, and profiles mentioned here usually have thousands of followers. One UCI page has over 7 thousand followers, an MIC page has 2.3 thousand, a DLC group has 4.4 thousand members, and a group called “Cabinda não é Angola” created in 2017 has over 14 thousand members. Of course, the same Facebook user can follow different pages and be a member of different groups, but the numbers show the potential of this virtual ensemble in spreading information through digital social media and allowing independentist perspectives to reach audiences that would otherwise only have become aware of the Cabinda issue through traditional media or not at all.

Cabindan Connections on Facebook

16Looking into activist appeals to the “international community” in digital social media revisits the issues raised by Malkki (1993) and Ferguson (2002) regarding this practice in conflicts between particular social groups and the state in different African settings. The former showed how refugees in United Nations camps wrote letters to other international organizations and embassies of European countries to draw the attention of an imagined “international opinion” to the conditions they experienced in their places of origin, where they suffered ethnic persecution, and to the precariousness of life in the refugee camps themselves. The sense of international community or international opinion evoked by the refugees did not precede, but was performatively constituted by the letters. Writing was then a way for refugees of fashioning themselves, to other refugees and UN staff, as interlocutors with a voice in this community and hence in camp matters.

17Ferguson (2002) examined a letter addressed to “members and officials of Europe” found with the dead bodies of two teenage Guineans in the cargo hold of a plane upon its landing in Brussels in 1998. The letter was an appeal to the “graciousness and solidarity” of Europeans “to come to our rescue” from problems such as “war, disease, malnutrition, etc.”. Ferguson suggests that letters addressed to open audiences of nations or regions connote calls for a “supranational moral order” that can arbitrate or intervene in humanitarian issues that should be above the particular interests of nations. In the context of new information and communication technologies, appeals to the international community have also been analyzed as expressions of “distant suffering”, which is disseminated and mediatized to entice empathy and solidarity from people worldwide, thus building transnational and/or global “communities of feeling” (Boltanski 1999, Markham 2019).

18Ipinyomi (2016) argues that the idea of an “international community” is reiterated by political actors in sub-Saharan Africa as a myth that legitimizes governments and validate regimes and ideologies as local “counterparts” to major democracies, often allowing domestic repression to be carried out under the guise of securing national stability and development in accordance with international standards and expectations. As Ferguson (2006) and Reed (2009) point out, Cabinda, like other African territories ascribed to resource extraction, is ruled by the joint interests of the state and of transnational oil companies, turning it into an “adjusted space-time” (Harvey 2003) where contesting politics and ideologies are construed as disturbances in the national “development” and “reconstruction” process.

19In order to analyse these elements, from a set of about 47,000 posts from Cabindan independentist pages on Facebook, I filtered out approximately 450 that included the expression “international community” in their text message. These posts do not constitute the entirety of the posts addressed to or thought of as appeals to the international community, nor are they representative of the totality or subsets of posts composed by Cabindan independentist pages on Facebook. In a way or another, every social media post can be read as a way of drawing attention to and raising awareness of the independentist agenda worldwide. However, the mention of the “international community” is relevant, not only because it informs an intended message addressee, but also because it works as an invocation of or an appeal to this entity and its expected or imagined effects on the conflict in Cabinda.

Table 1. Posts containing the expression “international community”

21In these posts, the international community is sometimes appealed to as a negligent entity that turns a blind eye, whistles past the graveyard, and is complicit with the Angolan regime for its interest in the oil extracted from Cabinda. At other times, it is invoked as a qualified and impartial overseer of elections and negotiation tables, a mediator of conflicts, and a potential promoter of human rights and self-determination for Cabinda. Some posts present the international community as an abstract, while others portray it as the set of Western nations or “powers”, the former colonizers of African countries – especially France, Britain, Portugal, and Germany as the host of the Berlin Conference – alongside multilateral organizations such as the United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU), and the Organization of African Union (OAU).

The International Community in the Context of Cabindan Activism

23By themselves, such word associations do not reveal particular meanings or social significance attributed to the categories in question, but they do outline a context in which the invocations of the international community make sense as a Cabindan independentist practice. The recurrence of certain words becomes relevant insofar as it reflects certain topoi of Cabindan historiography and independentist discourse. The similar frequency of direito, território, política, and independência point to various arguments that circulate among independentist sites regarding, for instance, the way international law may frame the Cabindan situation, as well as the role of the non-contiguity of Cabinda’s territory in relation to the rest of Angola and the ethnolinguistic kinship between the region’s pre-colonial kingdoms as reasons for independence. The recurrence of “Portugal” refers to the role that Cabindan independentists assign to Portugal as the endorser of Cabinda’s incorporation into Angola upon the signing of the Alvor Agreement (1975) with the three Angolan main liberation movements (MPLA, UNITA, FNLA), while “United Nations” evokes the argument that Cabinda was listed by the OAU and the United Nations as the 39th African nation to be decolonized, while Angola was the 34th.

24By producing and reproducing messages that link the international community to issues related to the history of Angola and Cabinda, activists and political movements are able to reintroduce events and characters that the Angolan regime’s narrative has set in the past into the current public debate. As Trouillot (1995) points out, to ascribe facts and events to the past may also mean to silence them, considering them finished and therefore irrelevant to understanding and solving problems and conflicts in the present. Posting on Facebook and other digital social media platforms thus operates as a strategy to inscribe the perspectives of activists and independence movements into the regional historiography, pointing to possible presents and futures in which Cabinda is an independent country or an autonomous territory, in conformity with a principle of self-determination supposedly consecrated by international law, which develops according to its own values and identity.

25Among the messages considered here, one merits particular attention for its reiteration and variation over the period between 2016 and 2023 and for compiling the issues raised by the word analysis mentioned above. It is a summary of temporal milestones in Angolan historiography, punctuated by arguments and reasons why Cabinda should not have become an integral part of Angola. This message was first posted by the page Jornal de Cabinda on 11 October 2016 and reposted with some variations three times in 2017 by the same site. In October 2018, the message was posted again by a page that could not be identified nor have its data collected. The same message was posted again in April 2020 and twice in April 2023 respectively by the pages MIC – Movimento Independentista de Cabinda – Official, MIC – Portugal: Movimento Independentista de Cabinda, and MIC – USA: Movimento Independentista de Cabinda.

26These posts did not receive particularly high engagement, but Jornal de Cabinda’s posts experienced an increase in the first semester of 2017, the period right before the general elections in Angola, and showed some regularity in the posting of pages associated with the MIC, considering that its official page has twice as many followers as those of their Portugal and United States branches.

Table 2. Posts Reproducing the Text with Cabindan Historical Milestones

Post	Page	Publication date	Comments	Reactions	Shares
1	Jornal de Cabinda	11/10/2016	0	34	0
2	Jornal de Cabinda	25/01/2017	17	85	2
3	Jornal de Cabinda	27/02/2017	35	155	8
4	Jornal de Cabinda	27/05/2017	38	105	55
5	Unidentified	13/10/2018	0	0	0
6	MIC – Movimento Independentista de Cabinda – Official	27/04/2020	4	35	56
7	MIC – Portugal: Movimento Independentista de Cabinda	27/04/2023	0	16	16
8	MIC – USA: Movimento Independentista de Cabinda	27/04/2023	5	24	9

27The message puts together the points raised by the word analysis carried out above, as we can see in the text first posted by Jornal de Cabinda:

29At the end, the credits of both the quote and the text (François-Xavier Verschave / Franco Marcolinos RS) were deleted and the remark “Obs: This is the main reason why FLEC fights for the independence of Cabinda” added. The third post only changed the title to “CABINDA IS NOT ANGOLA” and deleted the sentence “Discover the true history of Cabinda”. The fourth post changed the title of the text again to “Cabinda Promised Land”, added a yellow map of Cabinda on a white background without its surroundings, and deleted the final remark mentioning FLEC.

30The sixth post, now from the MIC – Official page, changed the title once again to “Cabinda Promised Land for the Cabindans”, replaced the image of the map of Cabinda with one that depicts the neighbouring countries and regions, and added the following paragraph after the quote:

O MIC já mais se desviará das motivações levadas a criação de Movimentos nos 60, que sempre foi em primeiro lugar defender a independência de cabinda. Iremos ao fim, nem que degolem as nossas Cabeças, sempre estaremos firmes, determinados, coesos e persistentes em memória dos que já tombados pela defesa desta linda pátria mãe chamada CABINDA. MIC Trabalhar Mais e Falar Menos.

The MIC will never deviate from the motivations that led to the creation of Movements in the 1960s, which has always been, first and foremost, to defend the independence of Cabinda. We will go to the end, even if they behead us, we will always stand firm, determined, united, and persistent in memory of those who have already fallen defending this beautiful mother country called CABINDA. MIC Work More and Talk Less.

31In the seventh post, the MIC – Portugal page changed the order of the paragraphs, placing the information about the occupation of Cabinda (2 and 3 November 1974) before the paragraph about the Alvor Agreement and added “through DECREE-LAW NO. 458-A/75 FROM 22 AUGUST” at the end, as the legal annulment of “this annexation” of Cabinda by Angola. The same image was used, but this time it was hyperlinked to a WhatsApp number from Portugal. In the final post, MIC – USA reproduced the same text and image without the associated number.

History as a Meme: The Past as a Context for Virtual Futures

32The reiteration of this message in different versions and in different posts resembles the operating logic of an Internet meme. Studies of the digital as a social universe suggest that memes are “digital objects”, the possible senses and meanings of which are transformed and rescaled through their transmission and retransmission by various actors (Shifman 2014). The changes in the text and presentation of the post through the addition of images, for example, resignify the message as the basis of independentist issues across various pages and users interconnected through Cabindan independentist activism. If, at first, the message reads as historical, meaning a mere chronology of facts and historical events relevant to Cabinda, from the second version onwards, the message turns into a contested object and the text becomes the “true history of Cabinda”, as opposed to a ‘false’ one. Combined with new titles such as “CABINDA NÃO É ANGOLA” (Cabinda is not Angola) and “CABINDA TERRA PROMETIDA” (Cabinda Promised Land), the message shifts its focus from presenting historical milestones to denouncing the “unprecedented drama” inflicted on Cabindans.

33The names of the leaders of Angolan movements and of the president of Congo-Brazzaville, added to the text in the second version of the message, are also symbols of the anticolonial struggles in the region, as they are often invoked as liberation heroes and founders of nations. Explicitly labelling them as participants in a process that violates the “international law that recognizes the sovereignty and right to self-determination of the people of Cabinda”, or even accusing them of “invading” or “illegally occupying” another territory, works as an attempt to undermine the political legacy they maintain to this day as relatively hegemonic forces in the region, especially the MPLA as it has been the ruling party in Angola ever since. Similarly, the inclusion and subsequent removal of the mention of FLEC and the introduction of a new movement, MIC, also signals a symbolic distancing from the current expressions of the generation of activists and political groups formed around the anticolonial struggles of the 1960s, claiming their original motivation, “which has always been first and foremost to defend the independence of Cabinda”, but removing them from the position of protagonist.

34Along with the text message, the images chosen by the pages refer to the territorial dimension, which is also presented as a basis for independence. They emphasize a history of supposedly autonomous relations between Cabinda, Portugal, and Angola that began with the agreements that elevated Cabinda to a “protectorate”, which is perceived as a fundamentally distinct legal framework from that of a “colony”. This was followed by shifts in the Cabindan administration that ended up placing it under the same administration as the “Angolan colony, without consulting the people of Cabinda, although it has no common border with Angola”. Thus, the images of the map operate as symbols of autonomy and self-reliance.

37Since Cabinda had been officially at peace since 2006, after the 2010 attack, the Angolan state began systematically repressing civil society activities in Cabinda, under the pretext of maintaining the peace and safeguarding national security, without acknowledging that the old conflict had resurfaced. Thus, the “hegemonic propaganda” wiping the people of Cabinda “from universal memory” in the context of independentist Facebook posts refers to the denial of the very existence of a conflict and, therefore, of the existence of other points of view on the situation and status of Cabinda in Angola and in the world today.

38Cabindan activism on Facebook is then part of a broader social phenomenon involving the use of the Internet and digital social media platforms as a means of expressing demands and spreading their causes while avoiding the usual forms of repression and silencing of public agendas which had been in effect until the first decade of the 21st century. Through this, innovation trumps the traditional models of political mobilization inherited from the anticolonial movements of the mid-twentieth century (Larmer 2015, Vidal 2015). Nevertheless, as Mutsvairo (2016) suggests, such changes in the forms of mobilization have also affected the scale of action and the worldview of the individuals involved in activism, changing the way they constitute and engage with their audience and leading to conflicts between old and new generations of activists.

39The public, in the sense of an audience or community formed around an information source or a common interest, is a key element for understanding what media and communications studies address as the sociocultural uses of digital social media as it relates to the notion of ‘context’. Studies on the rise of digital social media platforms from the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s emphasized their propensity to merge users’ distinct spheres of sociality, publicly disclosing how individuals act and communicate according to their peers in different social environments. This feature of digital social media has been referred to as “context collapse” (boyd 2010), i.e. the fast amalgamation of what individuals once perceived as separate publics or audiences in front of whom they had to adjust their behaviour and forms of expression to fit in with different social environments, both online and offline.

40However, as social media users have become more and more aware of this fact, technology developers have complexified the algorithm behind the content shown to users with codes that allow digital platforms to learn which types of posts are more appropriate for which publics or audiences. This has been understood as configuring “networked publics” composed of “networked selves” (Papacharissi 2010), since users are connected as parts of a same public through the similarity of their individual choices and preferences, rather than their sociocultural backgrounds.

41Anthropological perspectives have shown that, although digital platforms focus on individuality, people also devise their own user experiences according to their relationships with different social groups to avoid or work around context collapse. Creating multiple profiles on the same platform, connecting to different social groups across different platforms and apps, or temporarily disconnecting from some platforms while focusing on others are some of the examined strategies to project different selves meant for different social contexts, as well as for online or offline interactions (Miller et al. 2016, Costa 2018).

42As pondered by Srinivasan et al. (2019), studies on digital media publics in different African settings show a tendency towards the pluralization of scholarly and epistemological backgrounds to approach Africa, overtaking conventional and often Eurocentric perspectives that support the global analysis of matters such as the public sphere, public opinion, civil society, and social movements. Furthermore, by focusing on transformations associated with a worldwide “digital turn” in particular through interconnected social setups, these studies also contribute to understanding not only how processes devised elsewhere impact on Africa, but also how modes of using digital technology in African contexts influence its development and spread.

43By addressing an open-ended audience, Cabindan pages are looking to reach and engage as many publics as possible in the context of their activism. This entails expanding the context of Cabindan activism by connecting it to other political actors and situations, making it a global issue and not simply an Angolan one. In this sense, Cabindan activists are aiming not only for a networked public but, to take a concept from Ingold (2010) and Haraway (2016), also for a meshworked public “in which a vibration in one segment will have reverberation throughout” (Hamilton 2022: 53). Different contexts connected through the agency of activists are likewise enmeshed, rather than collapsed. The idea of an enmeshed context implies continuous interconnections between any given nodes through other nodes in an open-ended network. To make sense across a mesh, content must be relatable for different audiences while remaining consistent with the message their producers intend to convey.

44Contemporary accounts of how Africans handle new information and communication technologies, especially smartphones, focus on the affinity with the logics of how they engage invisible or immaterial actors, things, and realities (de Bruin & Nyamnjoh 2009, de Bruin & van Dijk 2012, Vokes & Pype 2016, de Bruin 2019, Newell & Pype 2021). This proposition is part of a broader inquiry into “African futures” (Goldstone & Obarrio 2017, Greiner et al. 2022) and “African potentials” (Moyo & Mine 2016, Ofosu-Kusi & Matsuda 2020), which puts into perspective some of the dichotomies established by modern thought for classifying knowledge (folklore vs Science, popular vs scholar, intuitive vs technical) and information (fake vs fact, lie vs truth, fiction vs reality, digital vs physical, virtual vs actual). From this debate, the notion of “incompleteness” is particularly appropriate to this case.

45According to Nyamnjoh (2017), liberation struggles and decolonization processes have challenged African postcolonial societies to reintegrate the same world system in which they were colonies, but this time as sovereign nations. This produced a sense of “incompleteness” of African worldviews that translates into the extension of economic and technological dependence due not only to centuries of exploitation and ravaging extractivism of people and natural resources, but also to the curbing of potential alternative paths to progress by relegating African knowledge matrices to the status of “traditions”. Nevertheless, by acknowledging incompleteness, Africans in different social positions have also thrived at creating and fostering means of “self-expansion” (Nyamnjoh 2019: 282) by intersecting, translating, and merging “traditional” and “modern” social worlds. African traditional worldviews that had been pigeonholed as superstitions and primitive religious practices in the colonial archive thus gained new meaning with the proliferation of digital technologies and infrastructure that reinstated as modern the logical principle that guides traditional practices and beliefs, i.e. trusting material and immaterial animated things to mediate social relations.

46Whereas incompleteness foments self-expansion and the projection of other realities, it plays a crucial role in crisis, conflict, and problem-resolution processes. Much of what colonial representations labelled “witchcraft”, “primitive religion”, and “customary law”, for example, are forms of enacting environments in which people negotiate and take positions before the collective according to the amount of power they can draw from socially recognized virtual entities such as ancestral spirits, mythic narratives, and kinship ties (Mavhungu 2012, Bonhomme 2015, Péclard & Warnier 2018). Regarding Cabinda, Milando (2007a, 2007b) has outwardly approached the dynamics of incompleteness and self-expansion through “invisible actors” by discerning how rural communities and “development operators” rationalize the hardships faced by infrastructure development projects. While the latter consider problems like failing machinery and undetected physical obstacles a feature of material conditions, the former believe they are due to forest and water spirits that may be against these types of projects or demand higher compensation for their impact.

47Inasmuch as digital technology has expanded this logic on a global scale, this rationale of how virtual worlds can coexist with reality has enabled Africans to appropriate and make use of digital social media’s affordances and algorithms as entities that may prompt social change on individual and collective instances (van Binsbergen & van Dijk 2004). Therefore, mediation is what makes relations “virtual”, meaning that virtuality is not a feature of digital technology – since mediation exists in multiple forms. On the contrary, digital technology has enabled people to visualize and even inhabit virtual worlds, interacting with others through and in virtual environments (Boellstorff et al. 2012). As possible imagined worlds beyond the “actual”, virtual worlds can also be seen as “potential” worlds that project not only how the world might have been if history had happened otherwise, but also how the world, or at least a world, can be (van Binsbergen 1997). Considering the open-ended public and enmeshed context of Cabindan independentist activism, as well as its changing and elusive shape in independentist contents, the “international community” appealed to in their posts can also be understood as an entity which may be enrolled and informed to foster their cause.

Looking for Incompleteness in Cabindan Activism

48Noticing similarities in the ways Africans mediate relations through algorithms and spirits – and other material and immaterial beings and things – does not mean that both belong in the same social domains of African societies, nor that all African societies operate in the same manner. In order to delve deeper into the logics of algorithm enrolling and assess its interconnections and/or divergences in relation to other practices, research must observe how social actors themselves assess the successes and setbacks of this strategy, as well as if and how they draw insights from how other virtual settings work. Milando’s (2007a, 2007b) study on the interactions between spirits and development projects mentioned above provides a starting point to fathom how incompleteness fits in the Cabindan context in a broader sense and what its influence might be on the digital social media strategies of independentist activists. On the other hand, it was by examining the contents produced by activists in the present that the possibility of conceiving the milieu of spirits and witchcraft as a virtual world analogous to the digital came about.

49The changes to the text posted by Jornal de Cabinda in 2016 are indicative of the role that incompleteness plays in Cabindan activism. If each post is a mode of enrolling the algorithm to carry the message to the “international community”, then the changes to the message are also experiments with the effectiveness of both the algorithm and the message itself. For example, the higher engagement of the third and fourth posts can be read as an effect of the changes to the content of the post – the inclusion of the slogan “Cabinda não é Angola” and the attachment of an image – as well as of the different moments of mobilization around political agendas such as the general elections and the annual celebrations of the Treaty of Simulambuco (on 1 February), which tend to intensify the posting of political statements. Thence, the contents of these posts are meant to be supplemented and modified to expand the context of the Cabindan activism to new audiences and continue to be accessed by the public that is already connected.

50The role of incompleteness in Cabindan independentist activism on Facebook thus stems from the way in which the algorithm is enrolled to build a network where the algorithm plays the role of a virtual entity that brings posts towards the audience and the context is a projected virtual environment within which posts assume particular meanings. By addressing an open-ended audience, activists invoke forces from other contexts to intervene in the situation of Cabinda, not as external actors, however, but as self-expansions of the activists themselves. The power that the “international community” might have in pressuring for the recognition of Cabinda as an autonomous or independent territory thus acts as an extension of the power that Cabindan activists have to summon it. As a result, although the ultimate goal of independence, autonomy, or any other negotiated solution has not yet been achieved, connections between Cabindan activists and other movements and organizations, politicians, and researchers, are gathered as potential new nodes from which the independentist meshworked context can be expanded to increase the chances of achieving potential futures.