President José Eduardo dos Santos of Angola had said that his country is working toward putting an end to Islamic influence in Angola once and for all.
Angola’s Minister of Culture Rosa Cruz e Silva said in an interview that Islam remains illegal in the country. According to him, “The process of legalization of Islam has not been approved by the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, stressing that their mosques would be closed until further notice.”
Government officials made the statement just as newspapers in the state reported that government has taken the first by destroying mosques in the country.
A French publication reported that a minaret of an Angolan mosque was dismantled last October, and that the city of Zango “has gone further by destroying the only mosque in the city.”
Angola is a majority-Christian nation of about 16 million people, an estimated 55 percent of whom are Catholic, 25 percent of whom belong to African Christian denominations, 10 percent of whom follow major Protestant traditions, 5 percent of whom belong to Brazilian Evangelical churches while only about 80,000 and 90,000 people are Muslim, says the U.S. State Department.
We gathered that 194 other ‘sects’ have been banned in Angola.
