On the first day of Angola's taxi drivers' strike, two teenage cousins left home in different parts of Luanda on ordinary errands. One would not return alive. The other has spent more than six months in prison without charge.
José Ngola was 14 years old. Benvindo Ernesto João Zanga was 17. Their stories reveal not an isolated tragedy, but the routine mechanics of repression in Angola -- a system in which lethal police force, prolonged pre-trial detention, and political cover converge, while courts remain silent.
On the morning of 28 July 2025, José Ngola left his home in Golf II to buy a spare part for his father's sewing machine. His cousin Benvindo left Camama to purchase a phone battery. That same day, amid police operations linked to the strike, José Ngola was struck by a tear gas canister, inhaled the gas, collapsed, and was trampled in the ensuing chaos. He later died in hospital.
What followed was not accountability, but concealment.
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José's father, Adão Tiago Cariche, who is blind, recounts being approached at the Luanda morgue by plainclothes security agents. They told him the state would cover funeral expenses -- "on superior orders".
"I was threatened to deny that there was a death in my household and not to speak to the press," he states. He further recounts being taken, under coercion, to the home of an agent in Viana, where he spent the night under control. "They said it was for my own safety".
The family realized that they were no longer merely mourning a child. They were being rigidly controlled "by five or six agents surrounding the house," Adão Cariche reports.
The burial itself was conducted by the state. According to the father's account, the same agents placed the teenager's body in the coffin and conducted the burial at Benfica Cemetery, allowing only his presence. José's mother, Juliana Catambe, was prevented from attending her own son's funeral.
Such practices are not incidental. According to the family, similar procedures were imposed on two other households in the same neighborhood that day -- families forced to deny deaths attributed to police action. Mourning was managed, grief contained, truth suppressed.
After the burial, the promises of state support and compensation were never fulfilled. "It was all lies," Adão Cariche summarizes.
How can the state act with such a degree of cruelty -- to the point of deceiving, threatening, and controlling a blind father -- without anyone being held accountable?
What kind of government needs to lie to a blind father and remove a mother from her child's body to assert itself?
Meanwhile, Benvindo Zanga was arrested near the Camama roundabout, along with other young men. He was not caught in the act, shown no valid arrest warrant, and no concrete evidence links him to acts of violence or vandalism. Yet he was placed in pre-trial detention.
Six months later, he remains imprisoned.
Angolan law is unambiguous. Ordinary pre-trial detention may not exceed four months without formal indictment. Beyond that limit, detention becomes illegal and release is mandatory. Benvindo has no known criminal record.
The habeas corpus petition submitted by lawyer Hermenegildo Teotónio describes a case marked by insufficient evidence, a lack of judicial reasoning, and repeated obstacles to accessing the case file -- all serious violations of due process.
During the taxi drivers' strike, police repression left more than 30 people dead, hundreds injured, and over 1,200 detained. In response, President João Lourenço publicly declared that security forces had "acted within the scope of their duties" and that order had been restored.
No independent investigation followed. No disciplinary measures were announced. No public accounting was offered for the deaths or the arbitrary detentions. The presidential statement functioned not as reassurance, but as political authorization.
This matters because the president is not a court of law. He has no constitutional authority to validate police conduct or pre-empt judicial scrutiny. In a state governed by the rule of law, such determinations belong exclusively to independent courts.
Yet Angola's courts have remained largely absent. Cases like Benvindo Zanga's echo others documented in recent years -- including that of the street vendor known as "General Nila" and journalist Amor Carlos Tomé -- where pre-trial detention becomes punishment, legality is suspended, and justice operates as an administrative extension of repression.
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Angola's problem is not a shortage of constitutional language or official rhetoric about legality. It is the systematic erosion of the judiciary as a neutral arbiter. Without independent courts, the rule of law is reduced to a slogan -- invoked to justify force, not to restrain it.
The case of Benvindo Zanga now stands as a test. The court can either validate an illegal detention or restore constitutional order by enforcing the law it is sworn to uphold. The choice will signal whether Angola's justice system still serves as a check on power -- or merely its echo.
In Angola, repression is not a malfunction of the system. It is how the system operates.
The question is no longer whether this cruelty exists, but how long it will continue to be normalized -- and who will finally be held accountable.
