Angola's 1977 massacre: Tragic twist for orphans of mass killings
Decades of silence and fear followed the 1977 massacre of perhaps as many as 90,000 people in Angola, but as the families of the disappeared started to speak out, demanding answers, the government took action in an attempt to promote reconciliation. Though in some cases its attempts appear to have gone cruelly wrong.
Angola's justice minister appeared on national television last year to announce that the remains of his mother and father had been found after 45 years, along with those of other people.
"I thought maybe finally I would have my parents back," he tells the BBC. Sita Valles and José Van Dunem were two of the leaders of an uprising in 1977.
They were young members of the MPLA government disaffected by what they saw as the venality of their colleagues. What exactly happened that May is still a source of controversy.
The exhumation of the bones of those who had been dumped in mass graves was supposed to be part of a process of official reckoning.
