The largest opposition party that the MPLA still allows in Angola denounced two cases of offenses to the physical integrity of a deputy and a UNITA leader. The National Assembly awaits formal denouncement.
A The complaint was made by the deputy of the UNITA parliamentary group, Monteiro Eliseu, when he spoke in the national language Umbundu, in this Wednesday’s plenary, after being asked to translate it into Portuguese, the official language of Angola, by the president of the National Assembly, Carolina Cerqueira.
Carolina Cerqueira asked the UNITA parliamentary group for clarification, as “information was given during the session regarding the attack against the integrity of a deputy”.
“We would like UNITA’s bench to be clearer and to inform us effectively of what it is about”, he exhorted.
On the subject, the vice-president of the UNITA parliamentary group, Mihaela Weba, informed that written information will be submitted to the president of the National Assembly “about what happened with deputy Peregrino Huambo Chindondo”.
The President of Parliament insisted on clarifying, given the fact that the session was being broadcast live and it was not convenient to “leave suspicions in the air”.
“It was said publicly here, the session is being broadcast to the public, we cannot leave suspicions in the air, we think that even if we write to the President of the National Assembly, the plenary has the right to know what is going on, it is a deputy”, he stressed.
Responding to the request, the UNITA deputy, Américo Chivukuvuku, said that the matter was raised at the session with the aim of “calling the attention of the competent authorities and national and international public opinion on the serious problems that plague the country”.
“Reaffirming that Angola is a democratic State of law and we hope – and this is our concern – that this premise should not only be theoretical, but has to be translated into practice and into the day-to-day lives of citizens, the that is not [feito]”, he referred.
“We believe that people’s lives and the dignity of the human person are above everything else, there are a variety of cases that have been evoked here, including this one”, he added.
According to Américo Chivukuvuku, deputy Isidro Peregrino Huambo Chindondo and UNITA leader Abílio Kamalata Numa saw their physical and moral integrity threatened.
“It is important to mention that they have already implemented the measures leading to the State bodies about what is going on and the proof of all this is that the honorable general Numa, a member of the UNITA board, was even urged to respond to the Attorney General’s Office. of the Republic about facts that are not real, that are not true”, he highlighted.
Américo Chivukuvuku reaffirmed that the information will be provided in writing to Parliament, with the position taken serving to draw attention to the very serious problems in the country, “where unequal treatment, discrimination, exclusion continues to be a reality and goes against the primacy of law and the Constitution”.
Carolina Cerqueira said that she will wait for the information to be sent in writing, so that measures can be taken in accordance with the law.
“And we also wanted to reiterate that any concern linked to the attempt on human life is also our concern. Security, stability, protection of deputies, belongs to all elected deputies and we will take the measures that are urgent so that stability, respect and common sense reign in this house of laws”, he stressed.
Making an accusation of this gravity, in the National Assembly, even more so in Umbundu and not in the country’s official language, is either cowardice, irresponsibility or ignorance. Could it be that, one of these days, UNITA deputies will address the issue of the 20 million poor, speaking of Kikongo, Kimbundo, Tchokwe, Mbunda, Kwanyama, Nhaneca, Fiote, Nganguela…?
Does it make sense, today, to want to choose one, or more than one, of our national languages as the only National Language, leading it to replace Portuguese? Or is it more viable to bet on “Portuguese from Angola” (similar to “Portuguese from Brazil”)?
The adoption of the former colonizer’s language as an official language was a decision common to the vast majority of African countries. In the case of Angola, there was the unusual fact of an intense dissemination of Portuguese among the Angolan population, to the point that there is a significant portion of the population whose only language is the one inherited from the colonizer.
Only during the 20th century did Portuguese gradually become the most widely spoken language in urban areas of Angola. This fact was essentially due to the increase in the number of Portuguese settlers, both men and women, most of whom preferred to settle in coastal urban centers, to the detriment of inland areas. And it was only in the 1950s that the conditions were met for the generalization of Portuguese throughout Angola, as it was only then that the majority of the population effectively needed to master this language.
Several factors contributed to this situation. On the one hand, during the Estado Novo, to be recognized as assimilated, Angolans had to demonstrate how to read, write and speak fluently in Portuguese, as well as dress and profess the same religion as the Portuguese and maintain standards of life and customs similar to those Europeans. Mastery of a rudimentary variety of Portuguese would therefore not make them eligible. It was mandatory to master European Portuguese, even though access to education had been forbidden to most Angolans for a long time.
On the other hand, in the 1960s, in response to the growing influence of nationalist movements in Angola, Portugal invested massively in intensifying its presence in the interior, namely by encouraging the creation of large agricultural settlements.
Finally, during the 1970s, the Portuguese army grouped a large part of the population in the interior, especially in the east, in aldeamentos, that is, in “vast villages organized by the military, often surrounded by barbed wire, where previously dispersed Africans gathered. ”.
Despite being an imposing process, the adoption of Portuguese as the current language of communication in Angola also facilitated the propagation of emancipation ideas in certain sectors of Angolan society, facilitating communication between people of different ethnic origins. The period of the colonial war was the fundamental moment of the expansion of the Angolan national conscience. From an instrument of domination and cleavage between the colonizer and the colonized, Portuguese acquired a unifying character among the different peoples of Angola.
With independence in 1975, the spread of the civil war in subsequent decades led to the flight of many hundreds of thousands of Angolans from rural areas to the big cities — particularly Luanda — leading to their cultural uprooting. This internal displacement would, however, favor the spread of the Portuguese language, as this would become the only language of contact between internal refugees and with the inhabitants of these cities. After the peace between UNITA and the MPLA, the refugees who returned to their rural regions of origin already took Portuguese as their first language.
The construction of the administrative structure of the new national State reinforced the presence of the Portuguese language, used in the army, in the administration, in the school system, in the means of communication, etc. Although, officially, the Angolan State declares, in the Constitution itself, that “ values and promotes the study, teaching and use of the other languages of Angola”, in practice it has always tended to value exclusively those aspects that contribute to the unification of the country – Portuguese as the only unifying language – to the detriment of anything that could contribute to group differentiation and tribalization – the myriad of regional and ethnic languages and dialects. A particularly critical aspect in a continent with recent and artificial borders.
Political power in Angola speaks in Portuguese. The MPLA elite, in a large percentage, have Portuguese as their mother tongue. It is an urbanized elite that has lost something of its ethnic roots.