Luís António Santos

Portugal and Angola: the politics of a troubled media relationship

In his last text of 2016, published on Christmas day, the editor of Angola’s official newspaper, Jornal de Angola, wrote a ‘message of harmony’ where he chose to focus on diplomatic relations with the former colonial power. José Ribeiro’s (2016) reading was clear: ‘Forty one years after independence the Portuguese elites still treat us impolitely as if we were their slaves’. This posture would be reinforced precisely a week later in the first editorial of 2017: ‘Angola will not cease to be an independent country [...] no longer willing to accept mouldy neo-colonial impositions from abroad’ (Ribeiro, 2017). Rather than fortuitous episodes these bellicose statements are a sign that a post-colonial reframing of the relationship between the two countries is – despite the relevance of economic ties1 – still far from attained but also a sign of how the media have become strategically relevant in this ongoing political process. Following the definitive end of the civil war in Angola in 2002 (with the death of Jonas Savimbi, and UNITA’s ensuing transformation into a political party) a small elite began to accumulate wealth in haste. Much in a manner close to that described by Bayart (1993) – through a ‘politics of the belly’ oriented by ‘strategies of offering’ (pp. 228–259) – a restrict group of people, formed by members of the State, ruling party and military apparatuses started to take control of oil and precious minerals extraction income and progressively extended its interests into other areas (Costa J, Lopes JT and Louçã F, 2014: 126). The elite itself acknowledged this process with a very carefully chosen and ideologically charged wording – a ‘legitimate primitive accumulation of capital’2 – and the whole procedure has even been applauded by the President, José Eduardo dos Santos (2013), in a ‘State of the Nation’ address to Parliament in October: