7
The birth-pangs of the new independent nation of Angola were protracted and bloody, compounded by the presence of a multiplicity of midwives: Congolese, Russian, Cuban, South African and American. The colonial war had ended abruptly in April 1974 and by January 1975 the four-power executive was established. The colonial war and the colonial truce were soon followed, however, by a new war, the war of foreign intervention. Each of the three indigenous military movements wanted to establish its own supremacy and each called for support from neighbours and allies. Rivalry led to conflict and the first salvoes of a fratricidal war which led to the war of intervention were fired in July 1975. MPLA troops, summoned from guerrilla camps in the remote east and havens of exile abroad, converged on Luanda. In the ensuing week of violence the Luanda returnees were supported by irregular militias mobilised by the local party leadership which had been organising activist cells of ‘people power’ in the city. Their opponents were the rather smarter army of exiles which came down from the north. Within days the four-way power-sharing executive, established as an interim government, was disbanded. The armies and politicians of both the northern FNLA and the southern UNITA were driven out of the city, leaving the MPLA and the Portuguese in control.
The leaders of UNITA had to make a quick decision. Should they sue for peace, and form a political alliance with the MPLA, or should they re-join their uncomfortable former allies in the FNLA? Savimbi’s initial inclination, as a one-time admirer of Mao Zedong, was to accept the advice of radical Portuguese soldiers and join forces with the MPLA. He soon realised, however, that neither South Africa nor the United States was likely to tolerate the advent of a ‘Maoist’ or ‘Marxist’ regime in independent Angola. Savimbi therefore decided to look for an alternative alliance. He hoped that he and the other southern leader, Daniel Chipenda, might negotiate a deal with the FNLA which would give them significant military purchase and access to foreign support. Chipenda was apparently in contact with South Africa, a neighbour which later became a key supporter of Savimbi. By September 1975 the MPLA was being held at bay in much of the south and UNITA dominated the old kingdoms of Bihé and Huambo.
The MPLA offensive then had to turn to the north but the FNLA had gained the support of General Mobutu, the president of Congo. American policy, governed at the time by Henry Kissinger, in covert association with the secret services, put its faith in the FNLA to install a pro-Western regime in Luanda. The methods adopted were deeply flawed, however, and an incompetent band of multinational mercenaries was soon worsted, leaving the United States angry and embarrassed. Worse was to follow when it emerged that American oil executives had been keeping their own options open by paying petroleum royalties to an interim MPLA administration which the American government had been attempting to overthrow by violent means.
After the American discomfiture in the north, it was in the south that a more dramatic foreign intervention occurred. South Africa sent advisors to counsel UNITA on ways of outwitting the MPLA. Later the South Africans supplied combat troops as well, although they took care to mask their identity and avoid a world outcry at the sight of Afrikaner soldiers appearing to spread apartheid. At the same time the MPLA equally discreetly received a first contingent of 500 Cuban military instructors to help stiffen resistance against the resurgent south. Military instructors from the Caribbean proved quite insufficient, however, to stop what became a full-scale South African invasion when a ‘Zulu Column’ of armoured vehicles was sent up the Angolan coast road and captured the port of Lobito. In retaliation for the South African invasion Cuban commandos were sent down the road between Luanda and Lobito to prevent further lightning South African progress along the seashore. A second South African column, code-named Foxbat, took an inland route and drove much deeper into Angola. It only halted when it reached the northern edge of the highland, poised to advance on Luanda, but it was cautious lest it meet Cuban troops head-on.
The night of 10 November 1975 was an eventful one in the city of Luanda. In years to come Angolans keen to share the camaraderie of momentous memory would ask each other ‘Where were you on the November night in 1975?’ It had long been agreed that Portugal would grant independence to Angola the following day. As the MPLA prepared to celebrate the arrival of freedom, excited but apprehensive citizens could hear Congolese guns pounding the northern city suburbs in support of the FNLA. Meanwhile, to the south, Cuban guns, partly staffed by the militants of the MPLA, held at bay the Blitzkrieg columns of South Africa’s expeditionary force. Off-shore, Portugal’s last governor-general sailed away declaring that ‘sovereignty’ had been transferred to ‘the people of Angola’.
The battle for Luanda is documented by several different sources which dovetail in an unusually satisfying manner. Marina Rey Cabrera edited accounts of the Cuban participation in the Angolan wars, complete with battle plans and diagrams written by senior officers in the Cuban expeditionary army. John Stockwell published a first-hand history of the American involvement in the war of intervention, giving details of the type and quantity of weapons that he had supplied to the Central Intelligence Agency’s prospective client armies. Ryszard Kapuscinski wrote a vivid description of the battle fronts, and also of their wider context, for his Polish news agency as he hitchhiked his way around the country, by road and by air, in the last days before independence. Franz-Wilhelm Heimer analysed the political significance of the events, and Christine Messiant wrote a thesis on the sociological background to the competing factions in Angola’s militarised society.
As so often, fiction provides an insight into the variety of expectations among those caught up in the war. The old Benguela trader, Alexander Semedo, the hero of Pepetela’s novel, Yaka, had both white and mestizo grandchildren whom he greatly cherished as he watched them playing football. When the crisis of intervention broke some white members of his family sought to find a racial haven in South Africa. Others, equally white, became wildly excited by the radical new ideas of nationalism and therefore supported the MPLA. The rest of the family, by contrast, kept their heads down and tried to persuade their grandfather to emigrate to Portugal, the land of his forefathers. Alexander, however, had been born a white Angolan and trusted in the protection of the family fetish, the Yaka with the amber eyes, who had guarded his loved ones through all the upheavals of the twentieth century. He lived on in Pepetela’s fictional world.
The MPLA enjoyed the support not only of some of Pepetela’s fictional characters but also of a great many Angolan citizens, some of whom flocked to join its volunteer army. Others, however, both north and south, opposed the party’s dominance in Luanda and, helped by 6,000 South African troops, established an alternative highland capital in Huambo, unofficially known as the headquarters of the ‘Democratic’ Republic of Angola. After celebrating independence day on 11 November 1975, the MPLA attacked its rivals. Within weeks the Cuban soldiers who had been flown in during the last days of colonial rule were reinforced by a seaborne expeditionary army which outnumbered the South African invading force. This Cuban contingent soon rose to 10,000 men equipped with heavy long-range guns and armoured personnel carriers. The MPLA recovery of the provinces began with an attack on the north where the United States covertly but ineffectually tried to maintain its support for the FNLA with its borrowed regiments from the Congo army. This American backing could be neither extensive nor public since, in the months following the loss of Vietnam in April 1975, the US Congress was reluctant to approve any new foreign adventures. The Washington government had been compelled to use stealth in building up armed clients capable of supporting its preferred political options in Angola. A dozen small rented planes flew consignments of weapons to the raw recruits of both the FNLA and UNITA but attempts to stiffen United States’ allies proved to be another humiliating fiasco which further tarnished Washington’s post-Vietnam reputation.
Worse was to follow when news of the South African invasion of Angola became a global news story. Such was the profound horror with which the West viewed the racial policies which South Africa practised at home that attitudes towards Angola, and to the war of intervention, changed throughout Africa and beyond. Sympathy for the Huambo ‘democratic’ regime rapidly dwindled and toleration of the Luanda ‘popular’ government grew even among members of the Organisation of African Unity who were traditionally suspicious of Soviet adventurism in Africa. By January 1976 the MPLA forces had effectively recovered the north and were strong enough to attack the south. The alliance between FNLA and UNITA began to unravel in factional disputes. The South African expeditionary army, dismayed at the military incompetence, the administrative waywardness, and the black racism of its UNITA allies, decided to cut its losses. As South Africa drew back into Namibia, both UNITA and the FNLA collapsed. The MPLA took over the whole of the country. Only roving bands of dissidents continued to operate in remote districts of the south-east. US intelligence estimated that its covert contribution of $30 million to the arming of the FNLA and UNITA had been dwarfed by a Russian grant of $400 million, spent on arming the MPLA and its Cuban allies. The South Africans had spent $130 million on their cross-border campaign by March 1976 when they pulled out in a glare of unwelcome publicity. But the biggest loser had been Congo whose large and well-funded army had proved to be a paper tiger.
No sooner had the war of intervention ended than the new Luanda government had to put all its scarce political skills and energies into building the future. The MPLA inherited colonial legacies which were deeply entrenched and Angolan society was found to be as complex as any in Africa. Creating a viable civil society for the nation as a whole would be difficult. Some old Creoles, whose status had dwindled in the later colonial years, and who had discreetly associated with the 1960 nucleus of the MPLA, saw their stock rise again. Other future leaders gained their academic qualifications and world experience in exile in France or Germany or in newly independent African nations like ex-French Guinea. Some made subversive contact with radical politicians in the underground opposition to Salazar’s dictatorship. Bringing Angolan radicals together to form an effective ruling party which bridged the differences between a black class of new assimilados and the competitive sons and daughters of white settlers with black marriage partners who could give them status, sponsor their education, or find them suitable employment in business or in the civil service, was a challenge. As it grew, the MPLA had also attracted radical white members and some members of the historical class of old Creoles. After independence, the colonial niceties of race, pedigree, language, education, and ambition were to haunt the MPLA as it struggled to create a stable ruling establishment in the capital city. Despite their differences all of the assimilated factions of urban society, new and old, black and brown, had a significant advantage in terms of opportunity when compared to the throngs of job-seekers who flocked to the city from the largely illiterate hinterland. The educated minority also had a political edge over the people of the far interior—whether in the south or the north—when it came to bargaining over the future of Angola. Language was power in postcolonial African politics and it was the assimilated class which spoke Portuguese, the language of command.
Once the MPLA had secured its hold on the country, disputes within the ruling circle over the nature of the new nation were many. Was Angola to be a radical country with an ideology of egalitarianism which broke with the traditions of class, race and privilege that had been so prominent in the colonial period? Or had the struggle for survival been so disruptive of the élite’s way of life that continuity needed to be tightly clasped and old institutions tenaciously maintained? The party also asked itself whether the new leadership was to be the one which had spoken to the world from exile in Dar-es-Salaam, or was power to be placed in the hands of those Angolans who had lived in Luanda during the long night of the colonial occupation? Was authority to be exercised by political theorists or pragmatic administrators, and would power go to the civilian committee men or to the military who held the guns? Equally controversial was the question of whether the senior military men would be those who had fought the colonial forces to a standstill on the remote savannah frontier or the proud pioneers who had maintained the flag of liberation in a rural fastness outside the city of Luanda. Rarely had the political heirs in any African colony been more faction-ridden than those who took up the reins of power in Angola. The responsibilities facing the inexperienced cadres who constituted the new government were awesome.
The MPLA soon discovered that coming to terms with the management of a city, a bureaucracy, an economy and a country was a greater challenge than driving out their regional enemies with the help of a disciplined Cuban military force. In the long term it was political, economic and administrative mismanagement which brought systematic instability to postcolonial Angola. Although nearly half of the Cubans in the country were civilians deployed in rebuilding the infrastructure, the city and the country were nonetheless profoundly disrupted by the flight of 90 per cent of white public-service personnel. Disorder regularly opened up opportunities for rivals to seek power, and brought a return of interventionist foreign armies both from the Congo north and from the South African south.
The mismanagement of government was caused both by inexperience and by fatal rifts in the ideological positions of the members of the ruling party. Most colonial heirs, particularly in Francophone Africa but to a lesser extent also in Anglophone Africa, inherited an entrenched legal framework, a functioning civil service, an internationally recognised currency and an integrated army. In Angola the abrupt departure of most of Portugal’s soldiers, bankers, administrators and lawyers left few functioning institutions which could be adapted to the new political circumstances. But the failure of the MPLA to pick up the colonial mantle and create a recognisably normal postcolonial, or neo-colonial, state was not exclusively due to a shortage of experienced personnel. Difficulties were compounded by a resurgent military insecurity in the all-important oil province of Cabinda. A separatist movement aspired to gain independence for the enclave, which was cut off from the Angolan mainland by the Congo River and by a finger of Congo territory. The rulers of Congo would naturally have liked to annex this once-Portuguese territory which had become the source of most of Angola’s petroleum. Congo gave discreet support to any troublemakers whom it could sponsor and the military insecurity in Cabinda had far-reaching consequences. Instead of reducing the size of the Cuban expeditionary force after the South Africans had withdrawn, the MPLA was obliged to maintain, and pay for, a continued Cuban presence strong enough to protect the Cabinda oil installations. These oil wells were operated by the Texan firm Gulf Oil and, paradoxically, it was out of oil royalties that Cuban military salaries were paid. Since the United States was at odds with Cuba over its revolutionary propaganda in the Caribbean and Latin America, and also with Angola over its friendship with the Soviet Union, Washington was somewhat dismayed that Texas was sponsoring ‘Moscow’s Ghurkhas’ to protect its oil assets in Africa. Rather more serious than Washington’s coolness was the fact that insecurity in Cabinda prevented the Angolan government from concentrating on the building of a stable political system and on repairing the damage done to the national economy by the interventionist war.
While security in the oil fields was distracting the government from the task of national reconstruction, another irritating legacy of the interventionist war began to fester in the south. The leader of UNITA, Jonas Savimbi, built up racial tension by accusing the Luanda regime of being in the pocket of foreigners. He alleged that the MPLA government was not only staffed by whites but was excessively parochial in its ethnic preference for Kimbundu citizens. Savimbi’s xenophobic, racist and ethnic rhetoric culminated in a strident proposal for the creation of a ‘black republic’ of Angola to replace the one which allegedly favoured old Creoles, assimilados, mestizos, and white immigrants. By playing the race card, and thereby opening a whole box of repressed colonial neuroses, the UNITA leader was lighting the fuse of a powder trail which had long and painful consequences for any postcolonial reconciliation and reconstruction. Savimbi, who had once been sponsored by China, also tried momentarily to play the ‘socialist’ card. He gambled that this was a direction which Africa would favour and so he tried to prove that the MPLA were not the ‘true’ socialists of Angola. These strategies did not succeed, however, since the race theme did not play well with potential UNITA supporters in Washington or Lisbon and the socialist one did not gain UNITA any credit with Pretoria or Kinshasa. Savimbi had to modify his stance on both scores in his search for international backing. In the meantime, however, the MPLA once more had to postpone the demobilisation of its army in order to keep a wary eye on the disaffected south where Savimbi’s voice was heard most clearly.
While the Luanda government was putting scarce political and military energies into resolving issues of intervention and regional security, it was seriously neglecting its own constituency in the city where it expected its core support to be solid. Thus it was that while the infant government was distracted by distant horizons, it suddenly found that the ground had been dramatically cut from under its feet in its own urban backyard. In May 1977 an attempted coup d’état came perilously close to overthrowing the government of Agostinho Neto and resulted in the death of several senior members of his cabinet. In the city, the expectation that independence would bring rich rewards to young black people had led to constant disappointment through no less than two years of austerity. Suddenly the frustration of those who had won little from independence, and who were intensely jealous of the cosmopolitan élite which had inherited the colonial trappings of power and the visible symbols of prosperity, exploded in violent despair.
The political thinker behind the attempted coup was Nito Alves, a black military leader from the Luanda backlands. Although he was subsequently accused of being a racist who had incited the black masses of the slums to rise up against the lighter-skinned cadres in the popular movement, he was in fact more concerned with high-minded ideals than with race-based jealousies. He gained some of these political ideas from his female ideological sparring partner, Sita Valles, a radical whose father had come to Angola from Portuguese India and who was familiar with Marxist forms of discourse. Nito Alves’ authority stemmed largely from having been a self-reliant military commander who had held out in forest hide-outs for more than a decade. His men attacked military patrols, ambushed convoys on the roads from the city to the north, and threatened the heavily-fenced plantation houses on the coffee-estates. His guerrilla heroism, his radical turn of phrase, and his initial support for Agostinho Neto, won him the right to political office. They did not, however, make him a member of the inner circle of cosmopolitan leaders who had spent the liberation wars travelling in exile and who expected to be the unchallenged masters of the country on their return.
As the fruits of freedom eluded the populace, the marginalised militants turned from the politics of compromise to the mobilisation of ordinary people. In the poor quarters of Luanda Nito Alves organised study groups in which to debate the ideal of independence, the belief in equality, and the strategy for finding employment after the departure of the 200,000 whites who had fled the country in 1975. At first Agostinho Neto and his party leaders had applauded the mobilisation of street power among ‘their people’. ‘Peasants’ and ‘workers’ had always been the heroes of the MPLA’s armed struggle although the peasant credentials of the leadership were conspicuously thin and their understanding of the aspirations of workers was quite naïve. Once the foreign invaders had been driven out in 1976, the MPLA relaxed and failed to perceive the danger signals emanating from the townships on its doorstep. While members of the central committee shared out the spoils of affluence, helping themselves to the villas and sailing yachts left behind by the fleeing white community, people in the street were having difficulty finding enough to eat.
As power and wealth corrupted the victors, the poor began to realise that their own aspirations required a different agenda. Out in Sambizanga, on the edge of the asphalt city, it was the local football club that became the venue for illicit political debate. Football had been the circus which Salazar, like Mussolini before him, had offered his people to quench their otherwise dangerous political thirst, and football was accepted by the new nationalists as an appropriate focus for patriotism. In Sambizanga, however, the passion for the sport did not obliterate the desire for social justice or assuage the anger of the people when an incompetent regime was unable to make good a lack of food. So serious did shortages become that the government sent troops into the slums to search out ‘hoarders’ who could be blamed for withholding stocks of flour from ‘the people’. Incensed football fans met to plot subversion.
When the revolution of 27 May 1977 broke, inspired by Nito Alves’ study groups, the attack on the government was actually orchestrated by a faction of the army led by José van Dunem, a member of one of the most distinguished of the Creole families. The military rebel had spent the last years of the colonial war in a concentration camp in the southern desert. On release his associates, known as the ‘prison graduates’, kept their ears close to the ground. After two years of austerity and disappointment the rebels confidently expected to receive mass support from the city slums should they attempt to replace Neto’s ministers with new leaders. The radicals who launched the uprising against the old MPLA stalwarts also assumed that their populist credentials would win them approval from the Soviet Union. When the crunch came, however, the Soviets were slow to decide whether to support Agostinho Neto, the elderly leader, or Nito Alves, the vigorous young ideologue. It was the Cubans who made the decision to back the old guard rather than support the younger generation. Cuban troops moved with alacrity, seized the Luanda radio station, broadcast the news—in Spanish—that the putsch had failed, and briskly set about making sure that Agostinho Neto and his surviving cabinet colleagues retained power. Coup leaders were caught and indiscriminately killed. Their radical sympathisers were terrified into submission.
The reprisals which the rattled government subsequently took against anyone who might have been involved in the uprising were so savage that Angola was set on a downward path of spiralling violence outstripping the cruelties of the colonial war and the brutalities of the war of intervention. From 1977 fear stalked the land and guns outweighed ideals in determining the path to the future. Far from disbanding the much-hated secret police, a Portuguese legacy initially built on a Gestapo model, the coup survivors used political security forces to repress any independence of thought that might inflame the aspirations of the urban population. The blood-stained crisis of May 1977 led to fundamental changes in the country’s management. From aspiring to be a mass movement, seeking support throughout the city, the ruling MPLA turned itself into a self-selected élite party mendaciously calling itself ‘the vanguard of the workers’.
At the same time that the government was adopting its new dictatorial mode at home, it was also bringing to a conclusion the 1970s phase of the wars of intervention on the frontiers. The ending of the war between Angola and Congo was made possible in 1978 by the resolution of an acrimonious Belgian colonial legacy which had long affected the security of both countries. Angola discovered that it could hold Congo to ransom through the presence on its side of the border of rebel troops from the wealthy copper province of Katanga in southern Congo. These troops, known as the Katanga gendarmerie, had been refugees in Portuguese Angola ever since they had been driven from their homeland by a United Nations multinational army following a failed secessionist rebellion in 1963. The gendarmes had allegedly been used by the Portuguese to hunt down nationalist guerrillas in the colonial war but when Portugal was defeated they formed an alliance with the MPLA. Their ambition was to seek a way of returning to Congo and recapturing political power in their old province of Katanga. Angola was delighted at the prospect that these exiles might be able to weaken the Congo government of Mobutu, which had done so much to hinder a peaceful transition to independence in Angola. A first attack on Katanga by the gendarmerie was launched in 1977 and caused the Congo army to crumble when some of the local population of the copper province welcomed the invaders as liberators. Western investors in the copper mines were appalled, however, at the concept of ‘liberation’ from the safe rule of their chosen dictator, General Mobutu. France hastily recruited a client army in Morocco and flew it to Katanga to drive out the cross-border invaders. Such neo-colonial interference was only a temporary deterrent, however, and in 1978 the gendarmerie invaded again. Once more Mobutu’s defence forces were worsted. This time the United States intervened and flew in an even heavier assortment of regiments borrowed from regimes sympathetic to the West. The copper mines were rescued, again.
After facing two potentially lethal attacks, Mobutu recognised that it would be in his best interests to negotiate a long-term peace with Angola. Congo agreed to withdraw support for anti-government rebels associated with the FNLA which might threaten the stability of the Luanda government. Mobutu thereby gave up, for the time being, any hope either of capturing the Cabinda oil wells or of helping to install in Luanda a government which would be friendly to his own brand of rampant capitalism, a capitalism in which private participation in business and industry by politicians was strongly favoured. Congo also hoped that peace with Angola might enable it to reopen the direct railway line from the Congo copper and cobalt mines to the Atlantic harbour at Lobito, thus greatly facilitating the traditional export of heavy minerals. Mobutu’s peace proposals were accepted by the now ailing Agostinho Neto and Angola moved the Katanga gendarmerie back from the frontier while keeping it on standby for any future operations that might serve the government’s strategic needs. The peace of 1978 made it possible for tens of thousands of Angolans to leave their adopted homes in western Congo and return to their ancestral homes in northern Angola. Their defeated military and political leaders slipped into the shadows of an unpublicised exile from which they only emerged fourteen years later when, after the end of the Cold War, the United Nations was able to bring temporary stability to Angola and organise a multiparty election for which all the surviving old guard politicians came home. Long before that, however, the ‘old man’ of Angolan politics, Agostinho Neto, was struck down with cancer. In 1979 he died in a Moscow hospital.