Nito Alves

After Portugal's Carnation Revolution of April 1974 brought down the Estado Novo, Alves, until then a guerrilla commander in Dembos, returned to Luanda, made contact with other anti-colonial figures, and came to be seen by Portuguese Communists as a genuine revolutionary leader. His work in the capital was the construction of a network of mass organizations on the principles of Popular Power (poder popular).

These organizations were not decreed from above. Inhabitants of the Luanda musseques had organized themselves to defend against white supremacist attacks and the FNLA, and Alves encouraged the development of this grassroots neighbourhood organizing. The current culminated in July 1975, when the forces of Popular Power expelled the FNLA from Luanda. The success of his organizational efforts carried him into the post of interior minister of the People's Republic of Angola established on 11 November 1975.

He saw the CPBs as the root of power. The Popular Bairro Committees were MPLA-aligned neighbourhood committees that had arisen during the liberation struggle alongside other grassroots bodies associated with poder popular, and were treated as a base-level institution that could go beyond mere partial power. What he stressed was unclipped, radical discussion. Here Alves connects to the youth committee movement: the freedom of association opened by the April 1974 revolution produced dozens of autonomous political micro-groups centred on Luanda, mostly led by a young generation that had not taken part in the liberation struggle. They were generally 17 to 27 years old and saw in him a representative of their generation. Together with figures such as Sita Valles, then a leading functionary in the government's Department of Mass Organization, and the army political commissar Jose Van Dunem, they formed one pole of the group known as the Nitistas.

From 1976 the MPLA tried to legislate people's power under party control. The Law on People's Power defined the CPBs as the smallest unit of people's power, and Decree 45/76 of the same year formalized their electoral process while tightly tying candidacy to MPLA loyalty. Even so, the CPBs remained the closest point at which the state reached Luanda residents. People turned to them for dispute resolution and assistance, and political education and mobilization were also their tasks. On housing too the CPBs registered and distributed abandoned properties themselves, and people could not move house without a CPB permit, the Guia da Transferencia; water and electricity companies were forbidden to cut people off without the relevant CPB's permission.

As interior minister Alves was centrally involved in the mobilization of people's power and in the workings of the CPBs in the capital's musseques. He had initially been central to rooting out ideological opposition to the MPLA, but he subsequently capitalized on the fact that many CPBs remained spaces for more autonomous thinking, encouraging critical discussions about race and inequality. Those discussions addressed the frustrations of the urban poor, the perception that the racial and socio-economic hierarchies of the colonial period persisted after independence. That the MPLA government dissolved Luanda's CPBs shortly after the uprising of 27 May 1977 was precisely because many of those committees had supported Alves's uprising.