Angolans beat the drums for the African Cup of Nations

The African football fans will enjoy as from today, Sunday, a colorful opening ceremony at the new stadium of Luanda.

• The Angolan president Edouard Dos Santos will give the start to a two hour ceremony which will precede the opening match of the tournament that will oppose Angola to the Malian side, the future components of the Algeria squad.
• The new stadium, baptized November11, has a capacity of 50 thousand spectators and was built last on the model of the Chinese “pearl” the bird’s nest.
• Poverty and wars in a big oil producer country.  
• While in a recent past the Angolans were afraid to wander in the streets, today the situation is quite different as everybody is eagerly waiting the start of the tournament. The capital city, Luanda, is rocking to the rhythms of this competition.
• The whole population is overwhelmed by an unprecedented feeling triggered by the competition’s fever in an oil rich country. Angola was the second oil producer after Nigeria in Africa this year.
• Objectively… we are targeting the second round.
• One of the fans has declared “ It’s nothing more than a continental competition, our chances will not exceed the quarter finals at best because if we succeed to pass to the second round, we will play either Ivory Coast or Ghana”. But he went on saying “ It’s a big challenge for us because the event goes beyond a football competition; Fear took over the Angolan people in the past, the country was a ghost town… The African Cup of Nations is a chance for the Angolan people and gives them the opportunity to show to their guests that the civil war stigmas are over and are part of history”.
• Football has succeeded where the politics failed; Angola has become a welcoming place for all the Africans and Europeans alike, despite the tragic attack that targeted the Togolese team.