Search Results for: Carlos Cardoso

Strongmen Thrive on their Ability to Keep People in Fear

Full text of the 2014 Carlos Cardoso Memorial Lecture, delivered on November 4, 2014 at Wits University. First, I would like to share with you a personal experience I had with Carlos Cardoso, the great friend I never had the chance to meet personally. Back in 1999, when I was jailed in Angola for calling president Dos Santos a dictator and corrupt, Carlos Cardoso was instrumental in mobilizing lawyers, journalists and concerned Mozambicans to lend their support to me. Upon my release, we began a regular e-mail correspondence that went beyond my legal battles, conviction, political persecution and travel ban. We broadened the conversation on teaming up to chiefly expose the scourge of corruption in both our countries. We believed in conquering the public space for the freedoms of speech and of the press to take root. We made the struggle for that public space ours. While Carlos was breaking […]

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Angola’s ‘Money Pit’ Currency Museum

The Banco Nacional de Angola (BNA), the country’s central bank, is housed in one of the prettiest colonial buildings that the capital city has to offer: a confection of Portuguese colonial construction in pink and white, consisting of two colonnaded wings which meet at a circular tower topped by a distinctive red-tiled cupola. The ‘wedding cake’, completed in 1956, occupies an entire block of Luanda’s Marginal, the gently-curving and tree-lined avenue which runs the length of the picturesque bay. Buried in the paved pedestrian square alongside the bank, some meters beneath an elaborate winged structure, is one of the city’s lesser known museums: the subterranean ‘Museu da Moeda’ (the Currency Museum). Opened in 2016, it may only have a single below-ground exhibition room with exhibits of dubious worth but this museum is worthy of a little more attention than it has received so far. The Currency Museum project, which began […]

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Measures In Favor and Against Mosques in Angola

As an illustration of Maka Angola’s investigation into the treatment of Islam in Angola, here is a chronological list of measures taken by the government regarding Islamic practice in the provinces of Luanda, Lunda Norte, Zaire, Bié and Malanje. The last of these mechanisms were decreed on January 29, 2014 by the Luanda Provincial Court. With reference to Case no. 005713-C, the court ordered the temporary closure of the Nurr Al Islamia Mosque in the Mártires de Kifangondo area of Luanda, because of a dispute between two Imams: Diakité A’dama, a Malian, and Alhaji Fode, a Gambian. Created in 1995, the mosque is the second largest in Angola, large enough to accommodate over 1,500 worshippers. In his ruling, the judge emphasised that the Islamic Community of Angola (CISA) had a request for recognition under consideration by the Religious Affairs Department of the Ministry of Justice. This statement is incorrect. CISA […]

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Hotel Talatona and the Scavangeing of Sonangol

The Talatona Convention Centre (CCTA) is one example of the large-scale investments that Sonangol, the state oil company, has been making in Angola in order to diversify its activity beyond the petroleum sector. At a cost of $149.1 million, the centre includes a five-star hotel called the Tatalona Convention Hotel (HCTA), which was opened on 18 December 2009 by president José Eduardo dos Santos. Sonangol’s investments outside of the oil sector have served as the most effective mean to divert hundreds of millions in public funds to an inner circle of senior government officials and company directors. CCTA is only one of these schemes. On 8 November 2006, Sonangol set up CCTA in partnership with the Angolan private companies Simaroco and Oil International Supply Services S.A. (OISS). This happened six months after the opening of the $60 million convention centre by the then vice-president Fernando Dias dos Santos. On the […]

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