Goldman Sachs’s Angolan interests

When the Financial Times commits an entire article to topics Angolan, it fills my Google news alert for a week.

"Washing the windows of the Porsche dealership on Avenue Amilcar Cabral in central Luanda"

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 FT (…) that they and another general have held shares in Nazaki Oil and Gáz, the local partner in a Cobalt-led deepwater venture launched in early 2010.” The Financial Times is no slouch of a newspaper. When they commit an entire article to topics Angolan, it fills my Google news alert for a week.

The Angolan press, both official and independent, has been largely silent. The website Club-K (their slogan is “We Report, You Decide”) posted an article from the Portuguese press and the usually lively comments section had nothing beyond the predictable: “band of thieves”; “now maybe Marques’s case will get somewhere”; and “if the Americans really wanted to catch them they could…this is one more distraction.” What’s really going on here? The FT cares because one of Cobalt’s backers is Goldman Sachs. Angola matters little to them. Angola matters only insofar as it rattles Wall Street. Life there matters only insofar as it touches on life, or rather, the bottom line, the U.S.

Further Reading

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.