Cesaltina Nunda, Angola

Building Peace in Angola

Almost 30 years of civil war in Angola has led to a humanitarian tragedy of monumental proportions. UN data indicate that over four million people have been displaced and more than 50 percent of those are children.

One of those was Cesaltina Nunda. Born in a forest and moving from place to place with her family, Cesaltina largely grew up in Jamba—an encampment of Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA force in the southeastern part of the country. The war eventually took her father and brother-in-law, but Cesaltina survived. She went to live and study in South Africa for six years and, thus, had a chance for a fresh start.

An opportunity to work at the Angolan Embassy in South Africa led her to Angola 2000, a non-profit started by Angolan refugees in South Africa. When she returned to a more stable Angola in 2004 to help her ill mother, Cesaltina started working in the capital city of Luanda as a volunteer for Angola 2000, and later joined the staff.

“When the organization started,” said Cesaltina, “the main focus was working with the reintegration and disarmament process because the country was coming from a war and we needed to help the government reintegrate people and refugees.”

Cesaltina said “it was important to sensitize the population to give up their arms. We started with peace education and conflict resolution.”

The organization went to communities to train them about peace. But over time, the organization has shifted some of its work toward human rights and good governance, including sponsoring roundtables and training campaigns for police and government staff.

In her work, Cesaltina has gleaned some interesting observations about women and war. “When we started working with communities,” she said, “men were coming to the table, but, when you go deep into the story, you find that, during the war, women were there. Women were using guns to defend themselves and they knew where men were keeping the arms.”

Cesaltina also admitted that women needed to be encouraged to participate in discussions and that men often had problems with women being at the table—claiming, for example, that women knew nothing about disarmament. Angola 2000 tried to make the case that, on the contrary, women were very involved with transporting armaments, that everyone had guns, and it was affecting whole families.

To improve the status of women in Angola, Cesaltina believes strongly in the need to invest in education for women. She notes that one of the problems is that women in Angola “don’t believe in themselves and they cannot stand up for themselves,” so investing in them to “discover all this hidden potential” is key.

She said that “we need to train women in leadership skills and motivate them more and, in that way, we’ll get more feedback from the community.”

Cesaltina is one of CEDPA's more than 5,200 training alumni in over 150 countries worldwide. Learn more about CEDPA's training workshops