João Lourenço — politician; former army officer with roots in the USSR
João Manuel Gonçalves Lourenço was born in Lobito, in Benguela province, then in Portuguese Angola, on 5 March 1954. His father, Sequeira João Lourenço, a nurse from Malanje, had been imprisoned by the colonial authorities for clandestine nationalist activity; his mother, Josefa Gonçalves Cipriano Lourenço, was a seamstress from Namibe. He has no Russian ancestry; his connection to the Soviet Union is the four years he lived and studied there.
He went to school in Bié province and in Luanda, at the Industrial School and the Industrial Institute. After the fall of the Portuguese dictatorship, in August 1974, at twenty, he joined the MPLA's armed struggle and received his first political and military training at the Kalunga Centre for Revolutionary Instruction in Congo-Brazzaville. Around independence in 1975 he trained in heavy artillery and served as a political commissar at every level from platoon to brigade, and in 1977-78 for the 2nd Political-Military Region in Cabinda.
In 1978, as part of the effort to professionalise the Angolan armed forces, he was sent to the Soviet Union. For four years he studied at the V. I. Lenin Military-Political Academy in Moscow, emerging in 1982 with a master's degree in historical sciences, training as an artillery officer and good Russian, English and Spanish, according to his official biography and Portuguese and Angolan profiles.
Back in Angola he took part in military operations in the central provinces, and from 1983 to 1986 was provincial commissioner of Moxico and president of the Regional Military Council of the 3rd Political-Military Region. He was chief political officer of the armed forces in 1989-90, became a member of the MPLA Central Committee in 1985 and of its Political Bureau in 1990, and later served as the party's secretary for information and as its secretary-general. On 22 April 2014 President José Eduardo dos Santos, who had himself studied in Baku, appointed him minister of defence.
He led the MPLA list in the elections of August 2017 and was sworn in as President of Angola on 26 September 2017, the country's third. He was re-elected in August 2022 and in 2025 became chairperson of the African Union. His hobbies, his official biography notes, include chess and riding.
"Joined the MPLA's armed struggle in 1974, training in Congo-Brazzaville; studied in the Soviet Union from 1978 to 1982; returned to Angola."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Lobito (born); studied in Moscow, USSR, 1978–1982
No Russian ancestry. From 1978 to 1982 he lived in the Soviet Union, studying at the V. I. Lenin Military-Political Academy in Moscow, where he took a master's degree in historical sciences, trained as an artillery officer and learned Russian.
No Russian ancestry. Son of Sequeira João Lourenço, a nurse from Malanje, and Josefa Gonçalves Cipriano Lourenço, a seamstress from Namibe.
Lobito (born); studied in Moscow, USSR, 1978–1982. At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.