Oil, Diamonds, and the Ghost of Freedom: Who Owns Liberation?
Angola’s liberation movement defeated colonial power — only to replicate its architecture of control. What happens when freedom becomes governance, and governance becomes greed?
Forty-nine years after independence, Angolans celebrate freedom — but live inside its contradiction.
The same revolutionaries who liberated the country from Portuguese colonial rule in 1975 built a dynasty that still hoards power, wealth, and truth. The oil still flows. The diamonds still glitter. But the people — the ones who fought, bled, and believed — remain spectators to their own story.
Why does this keep happening?
Why do so many revolutions that begin with poetry and sacrifice end up governed by paranoia and greed?
From Luanda to Managua, the pattern repeats: the liberators turn into the gatekeepers.
The colonial operating system never shut down
When Portugal finally abandoned Angola, it didn’t leave behind functioning institutions — just a blueprint for control. The colonial economy had one purpose: extraction. The bureaucracy served those who obeyed. The army crushed those who questioned.
So when the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola) seized power, they inherited a poisoned machine. The revolutionaries swapped flags and uniforms, but the system’s core code — hierarchy, secrecy, obedience — stayed the same. What was once white colonial rule became Black postcolonial elitism.
Colonialism doesn’t end with independence. It mutates.
From comrades to clients
Liberation movements know how to fight wars, not how to run democracies. The same structures that make them effective guerrillas — loyalty, discipline, central command — make them allergic to pluralism.
In Angola, the MPLA’s wartime solidarity turned into a ruling apparatus. Power was redistributed not to the people but among comrades. The party’s top ranks became CEOs of the revolution: ministers, generals, and family members occupying the upper floors of Luanda’s glass towers.
The rhetoric stayed Marxist. The reality turned capitalist.
The resource curse as inheritance
Oil and diamonds could have rebuilt the nation; instead, they became its Achilles’ heel. When a government earns billions without taxing its people, it owes them nothing. It can buy loyalty instead of earning it.
That’s Angola today: a rentier state where politics is business, and business is power. Offshore accounts overflow while schools crumble. A single elite family, the dos Santos dynasty, symbolised this grotesque imbalance — until even they were replaced by another layer of technocratic loyalty under João Lourenço.
Different faces, same code.
Colonialism’s psychological residue
It’s easy to blame corruption on greed, but greed itself was part of the colonial pedagogy.
The coloniser’s most enduring lesson was contempt — for the poor, for the land, for the idea of equality. Postcolonial elites inherited that logic. They simply changed its language: now it’s spoken in business English, bureaucratic Portuguese, or corporate Mandarin.
What Fanon called the “pitfalls of national consciousness” play out like a curse. The native bourgeoisie, he warned, would “take over from the Europeans and carry on the same structures of exploitation.” Angola became a case study. The revolution internalised the violence it once fought.
The ghosts are global
No country decays in isolation. Western oil firms, Chinese contractors, and Angolan oligarchs form a single triangle of interest. The pipelines that cross the Atlantic and Indian Oceans don’t just transport crude; they transport complicity.
The world keeps buying Angola’s resources, and that demand keeps the system alive.
Revolutionary governments may fall in love with power, but it’s the global economy that rewards their loyalty.
The other Angola
And yet, beyond the glass towers and propaganda, there’s another Angola — one that sings, paints, and questions.
Writers like Ondjaki and Yara Monteiro. Musicians like Paulo Flores and Aline Frazão. The new filmmakers documenting Luanda’s musseques. The street poets who remember that independence wasn’t a gift — it was a promise.
They’re the ones keeping the original spirit of liberation alive — not in parliament, but in culture. They don’t speak of utopia; they speak of dignity.
Maybe that’s the real postcolonial challenge: not just to win freedom, but to learn how to stay free. Angola reminds us that independence can be the beginning of captivity — unless the revolution keeps rewriting itself.
