Rafael Marques remembers three encounters during his journeying through Angola. The first sketch tells the story of Pedro, who uses his truck to take pregnant women on a four-hour, pot-holed journey to the nearest maternity hospital. In the second sketch, Almeida makes it big as a diamond digger but blows his fortune on the pleasures of life. Lastly, a train-track market in Viana, Luanda is described. “Angolans,” writes Marques, “continue to wait for something to happen. People are struggling for immediate survival, without the luxury of medium or long-term perspectives.”

Inspired perhaps, by having survived war and misery, Pedro cheerfully shared his story on how his truck had turned into a maternity hospital on wheels.

I met Pedro by the roadside, between the municipality of Cacula and Lubango, the capital of the southern Angolan province of Huíla. I was touring the south of the country by car. He was stuck in the middle of nowhere, in the evening, with his car broken down, and so I gave him a ride.

The road seemed like a long net of small and huge potholes – so awful that it took more than four hours to drive the 60 km between the two towns.

Along the way, Pedro told me a lively story about the state of the road. As the only fellow with a car in his community, for years now he has been taking pregnant women to the Lubango Hospital to give birth. He said no woman has yet made it to the hospital. All have ended up giving birth in his car due to the tortuous journey, and without a single fatality.

“It eases the burden on the maternity hospital”, he said.

On another car journey, to the east of the country, I came across Almeida Gonçalves, a young man who worked as an informal diamond digger. A single lucky stone had earned him US$250,000. I asked him how he spent his money. He shrugged his shoulders and said: “I had to spend everything on clothes, food and drinks. I did not know how to spend it on other things.”

All he had left was a motorbike – until that was confiscated by the police in an act of extortion. Yet his eyes still light up when he imagines he might strike it lucky once again.

In other circumstance, Almeida Gonçalves might well be an Angolan government minister – provided he could upgrade his tastes from motorbikes to top luxury cars. As a minister, he would be entrusted with the mission of depositing, in his personal bank accounts, incalculable amounts of state funds, as it is a common government practice.

As for Pedro, he might fare well as a provincial governor. He has the virtue of finding advantages in total chaos, in the absence of management. The former governor of Kwanza-Norte province Manuel Pedro Pacavira managed to do the same; after more than a decade of misrule, he has been rewarded with la dolce vita as ambassador to Italy.

The train of indifference

The third and last example in my sketch of Angola as it is today has to do with the informal market set on the railway tracks in Viana, Luanda. The train passes through, whistling. People, unconcerned and in no rush, remove themselves and their goods from the tracks, just enough to make space for the locomotive to get past. As the train moves on, people reclaim their places on the tracks just inches behind it, and set their businesses once again. At times one can see the rusty train in the middle of the market. Once it has passed through, it is as though the train had never used those tracks.

Angolans continue to wait for something to happen. People are struggling for immediate survival, without the luxury of medium or long-term perspectives. There is no leadership to show a different way out, to share his or her vision of the future.

Notwithstanding three years of peace, society has simply given up the quest for common ground. Each person has become an island in search of individual peace and stability. To do so, one has to pledge allegiance to the families who control the chaos that we call the state.

The social and civic dynamics of 2001-2003, which seemed to have the potential to build common interests and ensure the fair participation of all sectors in bringing about changes, have crumbled.

Nowadays, war is no longer an argument to excuse people’s inertia. By the same token, the regime’s repression is also not a justification for inaction.

During the most violent and difficult years of our history, several names and values emerged out of the struggle for independence, for peace, for freedom of the press and of expression.

Repression has been replaced by corruption, by evil laughter at someone else's suffering, as the source of the real personal power in our society. Such a notion of power mirrors our own lack of purpose.

The regime, stretched in two directions between the ruling MPLA and its leader, José Eduardo dos Santos, has exhausted its ability to reinvent itself and to do better for the country. It has become a family feud that sustains itself on the apathy of the society at large. It survives by swallowing up the opposition. The regime also enjoys comfort in the belief it has secured itself through means of patronage rather than by its own merit or civic and political achievements.

For some time now, President dos Santos has been a little more than a chess player who entertains himself. He plays against himself. When it comes to addressing social problems, he has notoriously little authority over the executive that he supposedly leads.

Meanwhile, his prime minister, Nandó, may as well not exist, except when he becomes the laughing stock of the independent media for his gaffes, and for the regular public beatings that his sons inflict upon defenseless citizens.

I see peace and the opportunity for a serious and transparent democratization process in just the same way as I see the train making its way through the market. I note:

- The absence of social solidarity in the struggle for the common good and people’s indifference to the anomalies of the State;
- The collapse of forces such as opposition and organized civil society that ought to stand between the people and the regime;
- The stagnation and even backward movement in the development of the independent media outlets, which ought to be instrumental in the setting of a new culture of democracy, tolerance and transparency;
- The vast gulf between the ruling class (the plundering elite) and the proletariat and peasant classes (reclassified as simply "poor" or "the rest of society" and put at the mercy of the poverty reduction strategy programmes of the international community – World Bank, et al.)
- A political culture of postponing political and social problems to the extreme limit (e.g. civil disarmament, reducing unemployment, dealing with resource use, violence and social exclusion in the Lunda diamond fields, and the oil-rich Cabinda province, et al.)
- The potential for social upheaval, aggravated by the worsening of people’s living conditions, in times of peace. Even the alternative forms of survival such as street vending are being brutally crushed by the police.

As an Angolan, I feel defeated by my own weaknesses and limitations. I live in torment for not being able to do more for the society, for the country I love. In anguish, I seek refuge in my loneliness to digest the bitterness for a lost battle in the pursuit of human dignity in Angola.

I assume defeat. I face the reality and I prepare myself for the triumph of my own consciousness and that of the society, against the evil that inhabits in and destroys us.

Agostinho Neto once said, to Angolans, “we shall come back...”

So be it.

* Rafael Marques is an Angolan journalist.

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Streams of stinking water run ceaselessly through the alleys that cut across the hillside of Margoso, Luanda. Generations of citizens have walked there and lived there, accustomed to the smell, and condemned to be forgotten.

It is on these alleys, in these slums on which politics has turned a blind eye, that a generation of young people, excluded and uprooted, have fomented a new political revolution through rap and through the repeated frustration that comes from having been robbed of their rights as citizens.

MCK, 22, has won notoriety. On 26 November 2003, José Eduardo dos Santos's presidential guard killed car-washer Arsénio Sebastião "Cherokee", 27, for singing MCK's rap "Technique, Causes and Consequences", a.k.a "I know what's up". Cherokee has in turn become a symbol of injustice in Angola.

Going down those alleys on the way to his house, MCK jokes about his social status, especially when, in the morning, he sets about fetching water in a drum which he carries on his back, on his shoulder or in his hands, whichever feels most convenient.

"I am the youngest in the family and I have to fetch water every day," he says.

His room is extremely cramped, even for one person. In the rainy season, prayer is the only thing that holds his house together – as well as his faith. Other rap activists cling to survival in the same way: Furacão and Keyta Mayanda, not to mention Brigadeiro 10 Pacotes, who was responsible for organising the thirtieth day memorial mass for Cherokee.

The outrage, evident on the faces and on the posters which line Marçal slum, where the deceased lived, is a sign of a mature understanding of the real relationship between the people and the regime.

The rappers managed, on their own initiative, to collect nearly one thousand dollars to give the victim's family: a sum that puts to shame the maize flour and beans the presidential guard left at the home of the deceased.

Moreover, MCK assumed responsibility for putting Cherokee's two children through school. He markets his CDs directly, and his meagre profits are put towards this cause. This is revolution.

"We have to promote a revolution of the mind in order to correct what happened in 1975. Colonialism ended, but the system remains the same. We count for nothing in our own country," argues Keyta Mayanda.

"You pressed 'play' and fell into a trench of ideas," goes the first track on MCK's CD: thirteen tracks with the suggestive name of "The trench of ideas".

This album, and others that are yet more radical in tone such as "Know the truth and the truth shall set you free" by Brigadeiro 10 Pacotes [Brigadier 10 packs], were recorded and produced in improvised studios.

The minibus taxi drivers who provide transport for the masses are willingly helping to arouse consciences, to politicise the masses. This controversial music, banned by the authorities, plays on the stereos in these overcrowded vehicles; music whose value lies in the content of its lyrics as well as in its beat.

"The government plays a different guitar" by Brigadeiro 10 Pacotes is the most controversial and also the most commonly heard song on this distribution circuit. It is a direct challenge to the Big Chief.

Frantz Fanon warned African politicians that the politicisation of the masses does not, and cannot, come through political speeches: "Politicisation means opening the spirit, awakening the spirit, enlightening the spirit."

In the slums, home to the masses - to an absolute majority - the silence of the people has become imprisoned by misery, paralysed by war and oppression. Track 11, "Echoes of rebellion," awakens a dormant spirit: balumuka. It looks at "a people suffering at the hands of the rulers". It examines the importing of western disguises by the political class, which has been looting the resources of the people and justifying it with "pretty speeches".

"Echoes of rebellion" calls on citizens to "be prepared / the people's silence speaks / the people's passivity is bursting the balloon". The verses take up the message about and for the people:

"We are politically tamed
Economically colonised
Culturally stagnated
Socially retarded … "

From where does this critical consciousness come? MCK says it comes from the life that he sees around himself. He has finished high school, but has neither access to the public university nor the funds to enter the private universities. Nevertheless, this consciousness is also the result of the gains made by press freedom. The singer keeps under his bed a large collection of press clippings, full of cases of corruption, misrule and whatever else. "We write our lyrics based on what we get from the press and from Rádio Ecclésia [the Angolan Catholic radio station]."

Despite its unimpressive circulation (on average 30 000 copies per week among Luanda's 3.5 million inhabitants), the independent press has been the driving force behind a growing democratic consciousness. And in a spontaneous reciprocal gesture, track six of "Trench of ideas", entitled "Topics for the article" is a tribute to the independent press which inspired it, as well as a parody of the dressed-up official version of events. With a forced, ironic optimism it explores what has changed and what remains the same: "The police beauty salon has new hairstyles … Parliament is just a sham / and whoever can do anything isn't part of it … the young are lost in a desert like camels."

And the chatter still continues at the scene of the crime, the Mussulo quayside, where the Dos Santo's guards tortured and killed Cherokee, by drowning him, in broad daylight in a public place. There where the elite go to relax and enjoy the kind of privileges which in Angola are reserved for a few. There, in truth's cemetery, where the people's silence is celebrated with mocking smiles. It is all part of the same process.

Music has no place in the grand scheme of politics in Angola. Especially not rap, invented in the 1970s by imaginative people living on the edge of society in the ghettos of New York's Bronx.

With neither change nor elections in sight, what consequences will this have for the abyss that separates the regime, the opposition, the city centres, the Luanda slums, the demobilized soldiers, the governors' palaces, and the rest of the country?

* Rafael Marques is a Angolan journalist

As another year came to an end, democracy in Angola was carefully folded like a handkerchief and prominently featured in the chest pocket of its ruler’s jacket. The folding took place at the ruling Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola (MPLA) 5th party congress in December, where it was expected that the conclave would send a strong signal on the course of democracy in the country, given that the democratic mandate of the current government expired in 1996, and that due to the war between 1998 and 2002 elections were postponed until peaceful days arrived. But as 2004 begins and almost two years into peace, there are no signs of even a date for elections that will set the normalization of State institutions in motion.

On December 09 at the party congress, the president of MPLA and only candidate, José Eduardo dos Santos, was re-elected for another five-year term, unanimously and by acclamation not by vote. When it came to suggestions for a fair democratic process by secret ballot only the president voted in favour of such a procedure. The other delegates, more than 1400 of them, voted for acclamation. There was only a single abstention.

* Read the rest of this article by clicking on the link below.