Angola: Inside Lourenço’s Head (Part I)

President João Lourenço has one head. Angola has more than 38 million. Yet a single head does the thinking, makes the decisions and disposes of everyone else’s resources. There is no indication that the presidential head is unusually large or endowed with supernatural intellectual powers. What is extraordinary is that so many institutions — the National Assembly, the defence and security forces, the judiciary, the ruling MPLA and the opposition UNITA — and so many citizens still behave as…