‘If Angola were Libya’: protest and politics in Angola

Abstract:The first two decades of the 2000s were characterised by what has been termed Africa’s ‘third wave’ of protest, which highlighted the shortcomings of multi-party democracy and neoliberal economic policies. Angola was no exception to this trend, with small protests, beginning in 2011 and continuing into the present. Angola’s protests generated public contestations between protestors and the incumbent regime over what constituted legitimate political engagement. This contestation raised the question of what exactly defined democratic representation. The ruling MPLA appealed to established political institutions and practice to claim it embodied a democratic mandate. In contrast, protestors argued that the ruling party had emptied out the very rituals and laws it claimed to represent, thereby rendering their actions more representative of popular sentiment. What became clear was that discourses of democracy could be used for both liberatory, as well as repressive, actions. These contestations in Angola, reveal how third wave protests called for a rethinking of democracy.