These videos were recorded in August 2019 in Luanda, Angola and were sent to me via WhatsApp by Hitler Samussuku, an activist from the so-called ‘Revús’ (short for Revolutionary Movement), a civic movement that emerged in the aftermath of the Arab Spring and has since consistently staged a protest route against the Angolan regime, marked by a self-perpetuating autocratic rule (see e.g. Faria, 2013; Dala, 2016; Buire, 2017). The Revús can be described as a confluence of activists from disparate backgrounds that mobilised, for the first time in Angolan independent history, explicitly against the country’s ruling party (the MPLA) and president (until 2017, José Eduardo dos Santos). While demographically residual, the Revús were able to stir national politics to a significant extent, in particular in what concerns the regime’s accountability in terms of human rights, transparency and financial justice.

In the videos, we see a group of about twenty to thirty protesters, trying to demonstrate in front of the National Assembly of Angola, demanding the ‘effective implantation’ of municipal elections in the country. While this demand might not immediately seem like an urgent political issue, in Angola it has taken interesting proportions, to the point of becoming the main political debate in recent times (Blanes and Samussuku 2020). Municipal elections are a crucial step towards the long-expected implementation of a decentralised governance and considered by many Angolans as the one instance in which the country can actually experience a non-MPLA government. It is around these issues that new civic organisations, such as Projeto AGIR (where Samussuku participates), PLACA, and Handeka, have emerged, actively participating in the public discussion and combatting the MPLA’s gradualist autarchic strategy, perceived as a form of self-perpetuation.

In one of the videos, we can observe an act of playful provocation, as the frontline protesters turn their backs on the police and gleefully chant ‘Queremos autarquia no município do polícia’ (we want local authority in the policeman’s municipality). While this seems like an imprudent option, in the images we can appreciate how the security forces remain impassive, resisting violent reaction to the provocation. However, in Video 2, the demonstration ends when the police get fed up and start dispersing the protesters with batons and tasers.

This is a familiar scene. Since 2011, when the Revú movement emerged, the vast majority of the civic demonstrations and other anti-governmental initiatives were invariably met with police and security forces brutality: aggression, torture, imprisonment and, in three occasions, death. So, looking at these images, one might think: there is something of a futile gesture in these acts, a quasi-juvenile political statement that invariably ends up with consequences ranging from a concussion in the best of chances, and prison and/or torture in the worst? In another article, I explored other similar gestures promoted by the Revús, challenging the police and security authorities to the limit, and thought of them as ‘provocations’ (Blanes, 2020). I saw these provocations not as mere unconscious acts, but rather as methods based on humour and irony that transcended the ‘victim logic’ of political resistance and in fact opened a space of optimism and unconformity through the creative interlocution between the ‘reductive’ repressive apparatus of the state and the activists’ ‘constructive’ politics.

Hitler Samussuku and other activists take a selfie with their backs turned to the intervention police. Luanda, August 2019. Author: Hitler Samussuku

These videos raise two major questions in my current reflections on civic activism in authoritarian regimes, and which intersect with the issue of political futility. The first question refers to the intentionality of political gesture. To talk about futility requires a previous conversation about intention and objective, in order to establish its subsequent failure. This is the rationalist backbone of mainstream political thinking. However, history has also given us countless examples of ‘accidental’ or ‘unintended’ politics, either through involuntary protagonists – think e.g. of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia – or through the contextual imposition of political content to even the most antipolitical gestures (Yurchak, 2009).

In March 2018, I briefly discussed this with Luaty Beirão, one of the most notorious figures of the Revú movement. In the headquarters of the Handeka civic association, I shared my thoughts on how the activists were playing an important role in their deconstruction of the Angolan regime’s ‘victorious history’ and the subsequent erasing of episodes of ‘uncomfortable’ episodes such as the massacres of oppositionists in 1977 and 1992/3, for instance (see Blanes, 2017). Luaty cut me short and opined that perhaps I shouldn’t over-rationalise as academics typically do and look too much into a masterplan in the movement. In fact, he continued, most of their initiatives and interventions should be understood more as ‘reactions’ rather than ‘actions’. For instance, in the movement’s history, many demonstrations that they staged were not anticipated by predesigned political objectives, but instead responses to previous ones where they had suffered state and police brutality (see Blanes, 2020). In other words, many of the political discussions among the Revús were ad hoc, and many of their actions in the moments of (political and physical) confrontation were impromptu, spontaneous.

The second question, stemming from the first, has to do with political effect, or consequence. In other words, what kind of acknowledgements allow for a political statement to be deemed futile or instead consequent? In the case of Angola, this question cannot be disconnected from that of revolutionary politics. Revolution has a long history in the country, stemming from the liberationist period (1961-1975) and morphing after independence into the MPLA’s hegemonic narrative, ideologically motivated by socialist (Marxist-Leninist) praxis in its early years. From this perspective, if there is such a thing as an ‘Angolan Revolution’ (Marcum, 1969), it was quickly subject to a process of ‘sovietisation’, the semantic conflation of a series of revolutionary processes into an ‘event’ (the ‘Soviet Revolution’). In Angola, as in Cuba (Gonçalves, 2017), this meant the perpetuation of the revolutionary discourse and semantic through time and space and its simultaneous disconnection from actual revolutionary praxis, on behalf of an increasingly dictatorial party/government/regime.

Thus, the Revú movement can also be understood as a deconstruction of the historical co-optation of ‘revolution’ on behalf of the Angolan regime, by establishing a previously inexistent public space of critique and scorn against its repressive and self-protective measures (Blanes, 2015). Here is where the seeming futility of the activists’ turning their backs on the police disappears.

At the same time, the Revús’ idealised revolution – the fall of the old MPLA regime and the conversion into a true democratic Angola – has not yet occurred, and could eventually be rendered futile. Revolution is a powerful, adversarial trope, seemingly impossible to think of without some sort of dramatic, overwhelming systemic rupture. However, the Revú praxis is one of micro-revolutions, operated through provocation and humour.

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