He might be young, but he is brave enough to challenge the authoritarian regime in Angola. A government headed by a corrupt leader Jose Eduardo dos Santos, that forgets to help his own people that live in misery (accordingly to this text 70% of the population lives with less than 2$ a day) while making fortune for himself, his friends and family.
From here: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/03/nito-alves-teenage-resistance-angola
Nito Alves: the teenage reincarnation of resistance in Angola
The imprisoned 17-year-old activist shares a name with a rebellious political figure from the 1970s, and the authorities are unnerved
'Nito Alves symbolises the way that a growing number of young Angolans have lost the fear that has cowed their parents for decades.' Children in the Boa Vista slum on the outskirts of Luanda. Photograph: Stephane De Sakutin/AFP/Getty Images
"They are afraid of the people, they are really nervous." So replied an Angolan friend, a journalist since the 1970s, when I asked him why his country's police had been holding a 17-year-old boy in solitary confinement without visitors or access to lawyers since mid-September. Manuel Chivonde Nito Alves, the teenager in question, was charged with defamation and arrested on 12 September in the capital, Luanda. Not long before, he had visited a printing shop where he ordered 20 T-shirts to be printed with the words "Ze Dú/ Out/ Disgusting/ Dictator". Ze Dú is the nickname for president José Eduardo dos Santos, who begins his 35th year in power this month. On the back of each T-shirt, the young activist wanted the phrase: "Angolan people/ when the war/ is necessary and urgent in Angola/ to change the dictatorial government."
In itself, this was a brave, some might say foolhardy, act. Angola has been governed by the intolerant and authoritarian Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) since independence in 1975. The ruling elite has never responded well to criticism, and has a history of either buying in or bumping off opposition. Unfortunately for Nito Alves, word of his printing order reached Luanda's department of criminal investigation. His arrest was inevitable.
This is not the first time Nito Alves has challenged the 71-year-old president's authority. In 2011, inspired by the Arab spring, he began sharing information about the regime with his neighbours by pinning articles from local newspapers to a noticeboard outside his home. That year, aged just 15, he also started participating in the highly unusual anti-government protests that kicked off in March and which have continued, albeit sporadically, ever since. In May this year, Nito Alves was arrested during yet another protest, or vigil, for the thousands of victims of a 1977 MPLA purge. They were remembering two men who disappeared on the same day last year during a similar demonstration.
According to the award-winning Angolan investigative journalist Rafael Marques de Morais, the young Nito Alves has become "an icon of protest against the corrupt Dos Santos regime". Apparently, when he was first detained he was sharing a cell with a number of others and encouraged them to discuss the country's ruling elite. Before the night was out, the prisoners had begun to chant together against injustice and inequality. This may explain why the brave 17-year-old was put into solitary confinement.
But if Nito Alves really is an icon, it is not only because of his initiative and courage. He symbolises the way that a growing number of young Angolans have lost the fear that has cowed their parents for decades. Indeed, to anyone with knowledge about the country's contemporary history, this particular young man is an uncanny echo of the past.
By coincidence, the young Nito Alves currently sitting alone in a cell in Luanda shares his name with one of Angola's most taboo, and now dead, political figures. On 27 May 1977, the recently dismissed minister of interior administration, Alves Bernardo Baptista – commonly known asNito Alves – led an uprising against the government of presidentAgostinho Neto, the immediate predecessor of Dos Santos. As a young black military leader who had never left the country during its war for independence, Alves stood in clear contrast to the older, European-educated and often mixed-race urban elite who dominated the MPLA government in the 1970s. He famously said that there would be true equality in Angola only when whites were sweeping the streets alongside blacks. While this made him popular among the urban poor in particular, it alarmed the elite.
Unlike the Angolan civil war – which pitted the MPLA, supported by the Soviet Union and Cuba, against the Unita rebel group, supported by the CIA and apartheid-era South Africa – the 27 May uprising involved one faction of the MPLA trying to overthrow another. Thanks in part to thousands of Cuban soldiers, Nito Alves's challenge to power failed. But as a consequence, thousands – some say tens of thousands – of people were killed in the score-settling and purges that took place during the following weeks and months. Just 17 months after independence had been won, the MPLA was fractured, its supporters traumatised and in shock that their party and president could mete out such brutality.
Thirty-seven years later, the MPLA remains in power, presiding over an economy that appears – on paper at least – to be booming. One of Africa's top oil producers, it produces over 1.8 million barrels a day; it is the world's fourth largest diamond producer, selling an estimated $1bn worth each year; it is also cited as one of the world's fastest-growing economies, with GDP growth averaging at 11.6% during the past decade. Yet, claims of a trickle-down effect offer no comfort to the 70% of the country's population who live on less than $2 a day.
Although the MPLA won last year's general elections, there is widespread belief among Angolans that the results were manipulated. In Luanda, where only 56% of the electorate voted, a staggering 40% voted against the ruling party. As my journalist friend put it: "The MPLA knows it is losing support." This is why they are increasingly afraid of the people and rattled by the youngsters who keep on braving the police to protest.
While Nito Alves is by no means the only Angolan in jail for opposing the regime, his case is compelling. Rightly or wrongly, he views the man who led the 27 May uprising in 1977 as a fallen hero, a symbol of popular resistance to the entrenched – and extremely wealthy – MPLA elite. In a note smuggled out of Alves's cell earlier this week, the teenager claims that because of his name and because he supports a local association that seeks justice for the victims of the 1977 purge, he has been threatened with death. Despite their shared name being coincidental – his mother says she just liked the sound of it – the authorities appear to dislike the historical symbolism.
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