Discover the inspiring story of the Angolan refugee who was applying for residency in Canada

At Fale Alfa, we specialize in the internationalization of people and companies. We serve people all over the world, and we take real pride in being part of each of their stories — whether it’s someone applying for a job in England, someone visiting a boyfriend in New York, or an Angolan refugee seeking residency in Canada.

Our work is about helping people communicate. But have you ever thought about what it means to live in a country where that’s practically forbidden?

Freedom of expression — the right to share, seek, and receive ideas and information through speech, writing, art, or any other medium — is protected under Brazil’s constitution. In some countries, it isn’t.

In Angola, the press and the public alike feel intimidated by even the possibility of speaking freely.

This is the story of M.F. — we’re using his initials to protect his identity. He was born in Luanda, Angola, in the middle of the country’s civil war, which began the moment Angola gained independence from Portugal in 1975 and lasted until 2002: a power struggle between two anti-colonial guerrilla movements,

the MPLA and UNITA. Though they shared the goal of ending colonial rule, the two movements had different roots and clashing leadership, and were backed by outside powers including Cuba, the Soviet Union, and the United States. The MPLA won. By the end, cities and villages had been devastated, an estimated one million people had died in combat, and four million had fled the country as refugees.

M.F.’s father was one of the early guerrillas in that period. Because he refused to join the MPLA, he was arrested, tortured, tied up, and dragged behind a car through one of Luanda’s neighborhoods. During the fighting of 1992, M.F. — seven years old at the time — remembers more torture inflicted on his father over his political stance: “for more than a year my father was taken by state security, tortured, they pulled his toenails out with pliers,” he recalls, describing other horrors as well.

While his father was being tortured, M.F. says gunfire in the neighborhood was a regular occurrence. One memory stands out clearly: the killing of a neighbor and his pregnant wife, allegedly for supporting UNITA. “That image never leaves my head. They made them run and shot him in the head, and her in the back. They were left in the street like so many other bodies already there.”

As a young man, M.F., his brother, and some friends formed a rap group, writing lyrics that criticized the government, spoke to their reality, social problems, and government mismanagement. They tried to get airtime on the radio but were turned away — every station, he says, was tied to the state.

They started receiving threats over it and decided to move to another city, Lubango, where for the first time his father was allowed to work — as a hospital driver, despite being an educated, multilingual man with, by M.F.’s account, considerable work experience.

“Out of fear of suffering the same retaliation my father had, we chose silence, for love of life. But it hurt to watch what was happening and not be able to voice my frustration,” he says.

Censorship was a constant in M.F.’s life, and common across Angola. Angolan journalist João Katombela has said the intensifying censorship proves that “press freedom is still a utopia in this country: censorship continues in many newsrooms. It’s a situation that worries the union and any journalist.”

As an adult, married with a family, M.F. rebuilt his life. He and his wife worked at a public bank, Banco de Poupança e Crédito (BPC), and lived an upper-middle-class life by the country’s standards. In January 2011, they were transferred to Luanda and lived in a luxury condominium with no financial difficulties. In 2012, M.F. met two war veterans — we’ll call them A.K. and I.K. — who needed help with a banking procedure. He connected with them immediately; they shared the same views on the country’s problems.

The activists’ idea was to train young people to hold peaceful protests demanding basic things: clean water, electricity, medicine, schools. In Angola, nearly half the population has no electricity at home, only 22% have access to clean water, and life expectancy is among the lowest in the world, at 42 years. M.F. supported their efforts with financial help, transportation, and flyers.

Months later, M.F. learned the two had been kidnapped off a public street in Luanda while trying to organize a protest against MPLA policies. In the years that followed, local news reports suggested they had been tortured, killed, and their bodies thrown to crocodiles — their remains were never found. Angola’s Attorney General’s office later stated the two activists had indeed been murdered by national police and state security agents. Trials identified some of the agents and the officer in charge of the operation, but according to M.F., nothing conclusive ever came of it.

He remembers being stopped by two police officers in 2012, who asked what his relationship was to the two dead activists. He denied any connection — and regretted, once again, staying silent. That urge to speak, to lay out the facts, to name what was wrong and be unable to do anything about it, had been eating at him for as long as he could remember.

In 2016, he was invited to join a magazine project reporting on the country’s political reality — stories about alleged corruption involving Angola’s former vice president, Manuel Vicente, and about abuses by the Criminal Investigation Service (SIC), which M.F. describes as operating as the MPLA’s enforcers, publishing accounts of torture, and covering the lack of oversight over basic goods available to the Angolan public, among other issues.

Two days before one of the stories was set to run, M.F. received an anonymous call threatening his family. The voice on the line said they knew which school his son attended and where his wife worked, and that they would die if the story was published.

After that, he — still working at BPC — began facing discrimination at work, lost responsibilities and privileges the bank had granted him, and even had his computer monitored. One day, while driving, his wife was surrounded by three armed men on motorcycles; she managed to escape. The episode repeated itself almost a year later — this time with their oldest son in the car, and, he says, by two SIC agents.

The situation had become unsustainable. Eventually, with his family’s agreement, M.F. decided to leave Angola with his wife and children. He arrived in Canada in 2022, needing entry authorization documents to finally build a new life. One of those documents was a certified translation — and that’s how we came to know this warm, generous Angolan man. Fale Alfa’s work made it possible for M.F. to move to Montreal with his family, where he lives today.

We understand what a certified translation can mean in the life of someone like M.F. — someone seeking nothing more than the right to move freely. Through our work, we make communication possible across cultures, through translation. We take real pride in being part of stories like this one, because certified translations carry a deep, meaningful weight, as this case shows. If you need certified translation services, count on Fale Alfa. We’ve been in the market for more than 27 years, bringing our clients experience and quality translation — practical, fast, and reliable.