On Saturday, September 3, 2011 a group of around 200 young people assembled in Luanda, Angola to protest lack of freedom and the 32-year reign of President José Eduardo dos Santos. According to witnesses, the protest ended with police beating a number of protesters.
A video call to protest, uploaded on September 1, featured bold, personalized calls to protest by a number of the protest's organizers, many of whom are hiphop artists. The tagline of the video “32 anos é muito” means simply “32 years is a lot.”
Early Saturday morning, word spread on Facebook that one of the men in the video, Pandita Nerú, had been “disappeared” by police prior to the protest. He later spoke to the press saying he had been dropped in an abandoned field and told he had “72 hours to live”.
Protesters are attempting to organize in spite of these effective forms of intimidation. This video of yesterday's gathering in Independence Square, taken from a car shows how scared even citizen journalists are to document events as they occur.
Another video surfaced of a young man apparently injured and on the ground, with anxious onlookers shouting criticism to police in the distance. It is entitled “Police Brutality, Sagrada Família, Luanda”.
Previous protests
This protest follows one convened in March 2011 via the internet but undone by maneuvers by the ruling party, and another in May.
The May protest in Independence Square was well captured on video, with speakers criticizing the President for corruption and for his control over oil resources.
The May protest brought together an animated crowd, filmed here doing a “Down with the MPLA” dance.
This protest was later broken up by aggressive police measures, as this video shows police corralling protesters, arresting some and shoving people off of Independence Square, as well as threatening the cameraman.
