Geoffrey York
The world will probably never know the death toll in the Mount Sumi massacre. But it was certainly horrific. Most researchers estimate that hundreds of people were killed by Angola's police and military on April 16 – perhaps more than 1,000 people, including women and children.
The details will never be known because Angola's authoritarian government keeps a tight grip on its rural hinterland, including Mount Sumi, where a Christian sect had its camp. All we know is that the sect's leader was defying government orders, police tried to arrest him, violence erupted and then the killings began.
One video, apparently from a clandestine cellphone recording at the camp, shows a road littered with dead bodies, while a policeman savagely clubs an injured survivor. Tin-roofed huts are burning and police are looting the sect's abandoned belongings.
Even more shockingly, the world hasn't put much pressure on the Angolan regime to provide an accounting for the atrocity, even though it may have been the worst massacre in Southern Africa for decades. Aside from a few United Nations human rights officials, most Western leaders have been silent.
The Angolan government claims that only 13 sect members were killed by police, and it justified their deaths by calling them "snipers." But two independent observers – a journalist and an opposition politician – were able to reach the site about two weeks after the massacre. They found a half-destroyed camp and signs of "tampering" at the site. They concluded there was evidence of mass killings.
Angola gets an easy ride from the international community. Over the past decade, it's been a major oil exporter to the United States and China, so it has a lot of friends in high places. It's also a relatively obscure Portuguese-speaking country that often gets ignored by the international media, especially since the end of its long civil war in 2002.
Yet it shouldn't be ignored. Angola is now the third-biggest economy in Africa. Its economy has grown by an astonishing tenfold since the end of the war. It also has one of the continent's biggest armies, and it is increasingly influential as a diplomatic and financial power. To understand the shifting nature of power in Africa, you have to understand Angola.
"In a short space of time, this so-called failed state became one of the world's fastest-growing economies," Oxford professor Ricardo Soares de Oliveira writes in a new book, Magnificent and Beggar Land, about post-war Angola. "Angola's international power and influence have soared since 2002."
He documents how Angola has won powerful friends in the oil industry lobby and persuaded once-critical countries such as Canada and Germany to extend credit lines to it. In 2013, Britain rewarded Angola with the title of "High Level Prosperity Partner." With an extraordinary flow of oil revenue of up to $40-billion (US) annually, the Angolan elite were even able to reverse their colonial history by becoming a key investor in Portugal, their former colonizer.
"Angola has become a major foreign investor with interests spanning the globe, buying off choice morsels of its former imperial power's economy to boot," Mr. Soares de Oliveira writes.
His book also warns, however, that the Angolan regime could be severely damaged if the price of oil collapses. "As one of the world's most oil-dependent states, Angola's swagger literally hangs from the price of oil," he says.
And this, indeed, is what has happened over the past year, following the drastic drop in the global price of oil. Support for the government is declining as the economy tumbles. Angola's currency has dropped by 19 per cent against the U.S. dollar this year, and its central bank has told Angolan companies and citizens to cut their foreign exchange use by 50 per cent because of dwindling reserves. Inflation is rising and the purchasing power of ordinary Angolans has dropped by 30 per cent.
With the collapse of its oil revenue, Angola hasn't been able to spend as much on the Brazilian public relations agencies who had received multimillion-dollar contracts to burnish its image. There is also less money available for wages for its millions of civil servants and soldiers – a traditional way of buying support for the regime. Discontent over corruption and autocracy is rising.
As its popularity falls, the government is increasingly worried about threats to its political monopoly – including the fast-growing Christian sects, such as the one at Mount Sumi. Small-scale political protests are persisting in the capital, Luanda, and the government is cracking down as hard as it can.
In June, a group of Angolans gathered in a house in Luanda for a weekly book club. They were reading Gene Sharp's book, From Dictatorship to Democracy – a popular guide to the tactics of non-violent revolution. Police raided the house, arrested 13 people at gunpoint, put hoods over their heads, threw them into solitary confinement in prison and accused them of plotting a coup. Two months later, they still have not been released.
"We're seeing more and more the levels of political intolerance increasing," said Elias Isaac, director of the Angola office of the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa. "To discuss a book is seen as treason, and they are arrested."
Earlier this month, about 50 protestors tried again. Many of them were mothers or family members of the arrested book club members, and they were demanding the release of their loved ones. After they marched on a street in Luanda for about a kilometre, the police charged at them, using dogs and batons to attack them. Some of the protestors were hospitalized or detained.
In the new post-boom Angola, as the repression grows more ruthless, even middle-aged mothers, book club members and Christian sect followers are seen as a threat to the ruling elite.