A few months late to this story, the Wall Street Journal published a piece last Wednesday entitled “Angola Wealth Fund is Family Affair.” This was widely reported in the international press back in the fall when the Fundo Soberano de Angola was officially announced. The Fund, started with $5 billion, now puts Angola in line […]
Last week the Portuguese Attorney General’s office dismissed a case of libel and defamation against Rafael Marques and the Portuguese publisher Tinta da China. The criminal case against Marques and Tinta da China was filed by nine Angolan generals, all of whom own are part owners in Sociedade Mineira do Cuango, a mining company, and […]
Earlier this week, the award-winning production studio/marketing group MediaStorm launched their short film Surviving the Peace, to promote Mines Advisory Group’s de-mining operations in Angola. Mines Advisory Group (MAG) launched with a premier in DC and a fundraiser in Angola (go figure, but hey, attendees in Luanda got free copies of the film).
Sometime after the end of the São Silvestre foot race through the streets of Luanda and the start of any of the many New Year’s Eve parties (this one, worthy of both Marilyn Monroe and De Beers, caught our attention), a tragedy occurred. Sixteen people died (among them three children) and one-hundred and twenty were […]
Axe of Vengeance: Ghanaian Film Posters and Film Viewing Culture opened last week in Bloomington, Indiana. This exhibit features hand-painted Ghanaian film posters made by Ghanaian artists in the late 1980s to mid-1990s advertising Hollywood, Kung Fu, Bollywood, Nollywood, and Ghanaian films. This was commercial art for urban film houses and theaters that consisted of a […]
Earlier this summer Paulo Flores launched Ex-Combatentes Redux, a 15 track version of his 3 CD Ex-Combatentes (2009) at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris and then played at the Rio Loco Festival in Toulouse. If you are an assiduous consumer of Putamayo compilations or of Portuguese language music you may know Flores’s work. […]
The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating Cobalt International Energy, a Houston based company with investments in the Angolan oil sector, for possible violation of anti-corruption legislation. Last week the Financial Times reported that three Angolan officials – the same three officials named in muckraking journalist Rafael Marques’s case now waiting before Angola’s Supreme Court – “confirmed to […]
The photographer Stan Douglas’s new project “Disco Angola,” a work in progress, is on display at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York until April 28, 2012. The New Yorker announced the show in Goings on About Town with the image above. What’s amazing is that Douglas has not been to Angola, though from what […]
Kuduro has already received some attention on AIAC. (Is this Cabo Snoop clip intra-continental cultural colonialism?) Kuduro means ‘hardass’ or ‘in a hard place’ in Angolan Portuguese or a mix of Portuguese and Kimbundu, depending on how you parse it. And unlike most kinds of Angolan music it has garnered something of an international audience […]
It’s been a busy week for Angolan politics. Elections are precisely six months away. On Wednesday, the long-time second-generation UNITA politician Abel Chivukuvuku officially split with his party to declare his candidacy for the presidency and his formation of CASA (meaning home in Portuguese) — short for ‘Ample Convergence of Angolan Salvation’. That same day, […]
