8
The Angolan wars of liberation ended with the death of Agostinho Neto. Already, however, a new conflict was brewing which was once again both a civil and an international war. The key problem in understanding Angola’s postcolonial history is that of why, after the protracted and blood-stained birth pangs of the liberation struggle, the country failed to settle down and tackle the conventional problems of economic and social development which were the normal legacy of colonialism. The causes of the new war of the 1980s were many. The role of the Soviet Union in Africa during its last ten years of existence is one factor and it may be significant that Angola’s second president, José Eduardo dos Santos, was an engineer in the petroleum industry who had trained in Russia. Another long-distance factor that might be deemed important was the role of the United States which elected a president, Ronald Reagan, who adopted a virulently hawkish agenda during the Cold War confrontations of the decade. In the conflict between the United States and Russia one of the irritants was the political agenda of Cuba, which was anxious to build an international reputation of its own and, in the name of Third World freedom, provided extensive civilian and military support to the much-battered MPLA government of Angola. Over a fifteen-year period of rolling aid programmes, Cuba supplied Angola with cohorts eventually totalling 50,000 civilian teachers, doctors and bureaucrats as well as 200,000 military personnel.
At a more regional African level, the peace deal with Congo (temporarily known as Zaire) opened the way for the return to Angola of tens of thousands of old Kongo exiles. Making political and economic space for these returnees sometimes put strains on the fragile post-colonial government which was only slowly recovering from the virulent purges that had followed the attempted coup d’état of 1977. Meanwhile, on Angola’s southern front, South Africa was still smarting from the humiliation of having been defeated in Angola in March 1976. Moreover South Africa was deeply threatened by political unrest within its own territory when, in June 1976, the students of Soweto rose up in rebellion, partly fired with enthusiasm by the liberation from white rule which Angolans had achieved. The same stirrings of revolution began to mobilise the liberation forces in Namibia, which launched an armed struggle against South Africa in order to win independence. They used Angola as a training ground for guerrillas and as a haven for asylum-seekers. The last unfinished agenda which brought pervasive grief to the peoples of Angola was the inability of the new government, led by dos Santos, to satisfy the legitimate aspirations of the southern élite of Angola’s highland cities who had not been dealt an equitable hand in the settlements of the late 1970s. They remained isolated and aggrieved and therefore supported guerrillas on the remote south-eastern edge of the old Portuguese colonial world. The discontent of these southern peoples was probably the most important factor fuelling a war which lasted throughout the 1980s.
It was during the 1980s, beginning with the northern peace secured with Congo in 1978 and culminating in a southern peace agreed with South Africa in 1991, that Angola experimented with many political, diplomatic and economic survival strategies as the tide of war rose and fell in tandem with the politics of the Cold War—taking on a new intensity with the inauguration of Reagan as president of the United States in 1981 and diminishing with the gradual collapse of Gorbachev’s Soviet Union after the breaching of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Angola’s ruling élite earned money from the export of oil and, following international ideological shifts, moved from a Soviet style command-management in the early 1980s to an American style free-market in the late 1980s. All the while the South African ministry of defence perfected a policy of destabilisation directed against Angola. Cuba meanwhile persisted in raising the level of its military support for Angola, undeterred by Luanda’s shift from socialism to capitalism. The great survivor of the political opposition was Jonas Savimbi who constantly trimmed his sails to the prevailing wind. He armed his guerrillas on the proceeds of diamonds dug from Angola’s inland river beds.
The ending in 1978 of the old interventionist war between Angola and Congo brought about one of the most fundamental changes to postcolonial Angola. This was the mass migration of exiles who returned from their havens in the formerly Belgian Congo to their ancestral homes in the formerly Portuguese sphere of influence in the old Kongo kingdom. The men and women who came back from Kinshasa, accompanied by a new generation of northern Angolans who had been born in exile in Congo, had to work hard to find new niches of opportunity. Some settled in the villages of the north and took up farming but life was hard, the plantation industry had collapsed, the white bush traders had gone, and a meagre level of subsistence could only occasionally be supplemented by smuggling consumer goods across the border from Congo in exchange for bags of wild coffee beans or bunches of cooking bananas. Such austerity had little appeal for returnees accustomed to a much higher standard of living. Thus it was that many returning exiles moved on to seek their fortunes in the yet unknown city of Luanda.
The transition from city life in Congo to the urban centre of Angola was equally fraught with difficulty. Power and status in Luanda depended on a firm grasp of the Portuguese language but the returning exiles from Kinshasa had been educated in French. They were treated as foreigners by the proud and clannish people of Luanda, just as they had formerly been treated as foreigners while living on the Belgian side of the border. While in Congo, immigrant and refugee ‘strangers’ from Angola had had no access to government employment but became expert at carving out economic space in the private sector. They acted as butchers’ boys in the white-owned slaughter houses, became touts for taxi drivers, and sometimes even graduated to become drivers themselves. For some, petty trade was their mainstay, hawking shirts through the streets, minding barrows of produce from the countryside, staffing market stalls which sold everything from plastic sandals to kerosene-fuelled refrigerators. The Angolans who returned ‘home’ to Angola were not only the children of the northerners who had fled from the vigilante massacres of 1961 in the coffee groves. They were also the grandchildren of Angolans who had served the Belgians over three generations. They arrived in Angola with blue-collar skills which white-collar Creoles did not possess. They were seen, however, as ‘strangers’ without family networks to protect them and so they clung to each other, generating envy and suspicion among the native-born Luandans. The citizens of Luanda knew the workings of the public-sector employment which they inherited, but had no understanding of the commercial sector. Trade, even petty trade, had been in the hands of the departed Portuguese who had acted as cobblers and mechanics, hairdressers and barmaids, stall holders and bakers. The ‘returnees’ from Kinshasa identified opportunities which made them economically indispensable, though not popular, when they became the city’s new trading community. The drive commonly possessed by migrants with no access to landed property, or salaried jobs, made entry into the risk-taking crafts and trades the only option. Officially the MPLA looked askance at the rapid rise of the private enterprises which the northerners established. In practice, however, welcoming the scarce skills in business offered by returnees was an important survival strategy for urban-dwellers, whose needs could not be satisfied by the poorly-supplied and inadequately-staffed official agencies. ‘Parallel markets’ run by ‘Zairotas’, as the Kinshasa returnees were scornfully dubbed, sprang up everywhere and soon even the most hard-line ideologues of the MPLA found they were compelled to join the ranks of free-market customers.
The wildly-uncontrolled market of postcolonial Angola had many interesting effects on survival strategies, including the relationship between the state sector, in the hands of the ruling party which operated a Soviet-style economy, and the private sector, managed by the northern returnees. State employees, Portuguese-speaking Angolans with government-sponsored jobs, received coupons which enabled them to buy a range of authorised goods, in state-owned supermarkets, at controlled prices. These government-issued rations, including good-quality imported whisky, could later be sold off at deregulated prices on the parallel market in exchange for all the goods which the planned economy could not supply—ranging from a fresh chicken to spare parts for a Mercedes. In the process of exchanging coupon goods for black-market goods, money virtually ceased to be recognised and barter became the recognised medium of exchange. The twenty-four-pack of lager beer in aluminium cans became the nominal, and often the physical, measure of exchange, serving as a bulky pseudo-currency. To buy an expensive item on the parallel market, one that cost more than a head-load of beer cans, it was necessary to rent a pickup truck to deliver the negotiated price in hard produce. For large payments, as in the buying and selling of urban real estate, the informal sector sometimes measured value in uncut diamonds, illicitly traded in match boxes. The free-market barter system in Angola was far from being whimsical since the pseudo-currency values were underpinned by the export price of oil. Prices on the black market shadowed the international price of oil accurately and speedily, like an economic barometer. The ‘alternative’ economy fuelled by Congo returnees who had abandoned the political agenda of the FNLA and had become the economic partners of civil and military MPLA personnel, may have been unorthodox but it was not unsubtle and its scale became gigantic in a city which had risen from half a million to several million inhabitants.
While returned exiles established a private commercial sector which enabled urban Angolans to live through the uncertainties of independence, in the countryside it was working women who bore the burden of the struggle for survival. Young men were constantly liable to be conscripted, or kidnapped, to serve in Angola’s rival armies and it was therefore women, children and old men who were left to fend for themselves, inventing ever more imaginative economic strategies based on small-scale farming and petty barter. Survival in the villages of Angola was made enormously difficult by an almost continuous ‘war of destabilisation’ which gripped the country in the 1980s. Military planners in both UNITA and the MPLA were not averse to starving rural populations in order to drive them out of ‘enemy’ territory. Farm produce was a scarce strategic resource which could be used to sustain the opposing army. One cruel way of manipulating civilian populations was by laying minefields round farm-land and water sources. Women going out to their field, or children going down to the stream, were liable to have their legs blown off. The strategy maimed, rather than killed, many victims leaving the opposing society with the cost of feeding and caring for its crippled citizens.
Although counting unmapped minefields is difficult, it was roughly estimated that several million mines were laid in Angola to deny farmers access to land. Such a number made Angola’s killing fields comparable to those of Cambodia. The plight of the largely female victims was publicised to the world by Princess Diana, to the dismay of a British government which had hitherto sold anti-civilian weapons of every variety almost indiscriminately, and highly profitably. The British princess visited the minefields, spoke to women in rehabilitation centres, and cuddled children fitted with wooden limbs. In the savagely brutalised central region of the Kwanza valley, MPLA home territory and a prime target for UNITA, women remained defiantly self-sufficient. When well-meaning aid-workers tried to establish marketing cooperatives, the women declined the proposal, saying that any formally-constituted organisation would fall prey to the politics of men. Men, it was widely believed, would consume the profits of any organised cooperative by converting the produce into alcohol and tobacco. Women alone could ensure that the fruits of farming reached the mouths of children.
Subsistence was the key to rural survival, but some market strategies were put in place on farms south of the Kwanza. An astute trader was able to take maize to market by adapting a child’s scooter to carry a bag that was heavier than she could carry on her head. The wooden construction materials were entirely local and the frequently-needed repairs required no outside technology. As on the push-bike trails of wartime Vietnam, peasants carried tons of farm produce over long distances to add some market opportunity to their survival strategies. When each spasm of the war subsided, male-owned trucks returned to rural districts to buy ‘surplus’ food in exchange for city goods for consumption or for barter. Some of the owner-drivers of bush lorries were erstwhile Portuguese settlers who returned to their former stamping grounds and to their traditional trading pursuits. Neither the self-help scooters, nor the old colonial lorries, were ever adequate, however, to feed the swelling towns or the huge encampments of displaced war victims. In some provincial towns a web of air bridges had to be built by philanthropic organisations which flew in food to prevent the rival armies from starving out their enemies. Down on the coast it was displaced women from the highland who showed the utmost ingenuity in creating market gardens in old white suburbs and in growing onions and cabbages in former colonial playgrounds. They also cultivated the central reservations of carriageways to plant maize and used water from standpipes in the shanties to irrigate tomatoes. Thus did Angolans eke out a precarious living during the endless rounds of war.
One of the economic enclaves in which women gained both wealth and prestige was Luanda fish-mongering. The fishing boats were traditionally owned by coastal men and crewed by workers from the highland, some of them Bailundu migrants. The selling of the fish had traditionally been the preserve of women, but in the late-colonial period white entrepreneurs had encroached on their domain and diverted the considerable wealth generated by the industry into the male sector of the economy. When whites fled from Angola at the prospect of a turbulent independence, black women recovered part of their niche in the fish market. They celebrated their wealth as queens of the Luanda carnival, the epitome of prestige among true city natives. Rich female fishmongers ostentatiously decked their granddaughters out in the finest costumes of the carnival dance brigades. Even in the years of the most acute wartime austerity women wholesalers were able, thanks to relatives serving as international seamen, to order textiles from Europe, America and Asia for the competitive carnival displays. So prestigious were the carnival queens that the suit-wearing men of the MPLA appropriated the festival for their own political purposes. Each year they used the carnival to celebrate the March anniversary of their victory over South Africa in 1976. Among the dance companies it was almost always one of the fishing guilds which won the supreme prize. Their defeated farming opponents were cast into a shadow of despair which they, and their menfolk, drowned in palm wine, cane brandy and alcoholic oblivion.
Under colonialism working-class women, white as well as black, had often been downtrodden. Middle-class colonial women, on the other hand, had gained social and economic freedoms in Angola which went far beyond those available in authoritarian Portugal. This tradition of emancipated opportunity carried through into the years of independence and some women sympathetic to the MPLA were offered such prestigious posts as university rector or national librarian. Even UNITA, the ultra-macho liberation movement, appointed a woman as one of its senior economic advisers. In government, some token women were appointed junior ministers, but none played a role in running the oil sector or managing the army. A party organisation for women appeared to put women on a pedestal while effectively removing them from real access to power. High-profile women were more likely to play a role in the dynastic politics of the Luanda families than in political power struggles. Women in authority were deemed an offence to male African pride, as the United Nations discovered when it appointed a very senior female peace broker to serve in Angola. Margaret Anstee, for all her astute diplomatic activity, found that her Nigerian military commander of the UN force was barely able to address a civil word to her, so offended had he been at the idea of serving a woman with real power. Jonas Savimbi was even more outraged, describing her in his wireless tirades as little better than a whore. President dos Santos, meanwhile, prided himself not only on having a former Russian wife, but also one who belonged to one of the great Creole dynasties.
Although women who farmed the land were the heroic survivors of the war in rural Angola, they were also some of the most abused victims of the male armies which endlessly trampled across the countryside throughout the 1980s. Attitudes to women, both in the MPLA war for liberation and in the UNITA war for destabilisation, are portrayed in two of Angola’s prominent war novels, Pepetela’s Mayombe and Sousa Jamba’s Patriotas, in both of which frustrated conscripts fantasise about the supply of beautiful women whom their superior officers guarded for their own enjoyment. The colonial war of the 1960s had done nothing to protect Angolan women from predatory experiences and although the sexual activities which colonial conscripts indulged in were seen by some regime propagandists as evidence of racial toleration, they were actually the face of inhuman white arrogance. The long-term consequences were dire and the armies of the 1980s adopted the same predatory attitude to women as had the colonisers of the 1960s. One bombastic colonial officer had even proclaimed the hope that each white conscript would impregnate half a dozen African girls and so implant colonial culture in Angola by means of rape. The legacy brought intensified racial confrontation when some children of white fathers, whether legitimate or not, saw themselves as above other Angolans. In retaliation, true blackness was adopted by some politicians, including Savimbi, as a badge to proclaim superiority over the ‘bastard’ children of the Portuguese empire.
The well-being of the sophisticated élite which ruled Angola after the end of the liberation wars of the 1970s was enhanced throughout the 1980s by the growing supply of crude petroleum. The oil revenue cushioned Luanda from the austerity which the collapse of the colonial economy had inflicted on the countryside. It was also the economic fuel which made the war particularly ferocious. In Angola, as in Africa’s other oil-producing nation, Nigeria, which had also been wracked by a postcolonial civil war, those who held the oil wells were unwilling to share their bounty with those who did not. The oil industry had begun to transform Angola in the last years of colonial rule, but after the fall of Portugal petroleum became the country’s most important, indeed almost its only, source of export revenue. Unlike the formerly dominant agricultural economy, the oil industry was not an important source of employment generating salaried jobs or ancillary labouring work. Gulf Oil, renamed Chevron, serviced its Cabinda wells with American crews who came and went via French oil ports in Gabon, thus avoiding the effects of Angolan violence but leaving little positive mark on society other than the monthly payments to the government. These royalties grew during the 1980s as the great Atlantic oilfield spread south of the Congo River through the shallow waters of mainland Angola. When political conditions seemed right, new oil companies risked their venture capital in exploring blocks of concessions which stretched as far south as Luanda. Some companies even built on-shore facilities on the south bank of the Congo estuary, not far from the stone pillar erected in 1483 by an early explorer who wished to claim Angola for the Portuguese crown. It can be argued that it was oil which kept the several Angolan wars running for twenty-seven years. So long as the power-brokers of the city were unwilling to share the oil spoils, and recycle the national wealth in countrywide reconstruction, the politicians of south Angola refused to accept political or military defeat.
In Angola the centralisation of power was continually reinforced by oil revenue. Politicians who used oil royalties to pay for ever-more sophisticated weapons of war not only maintained their military advantage but also made substantial personal gains from bonuses and backhanders. City politicians creamed off the profits of oil and companies pumped the petroleum relatively unconcerned by the ebb and flow of traumatised war victims. The most corrupt of the politicians saw little advantage in ending the bloodshed, so long as they could close their hearts to the suffering in the provinces and rake in their personal bounty. The beneficiaries were kept on their toes by a constant game of musical chairs in which access to the benefits of office could be granted or withdrawn at a stroke of the presidential pen. The more tightly the owners of oil held on to their assets, the more open to Western corruption their political system became. This corruption was encouraged by every foreign interest, European as well as American. Expatriate businessmen and foreign politicians offered all conceivable types of illicit inducements in order to bypass any form of local consultation or any method of democratic accountability. Without any national auditing of oil revenue, the anger felt in the deprived provinces was all too understandable. Ironically it was foreign parties, some of whom were corrupting city politicians, who were also arming the rebellious provinces and stoking a war of destabilisation.
In 1985 there was a hiccup in the oil-fuelled war. This had less to do with the politics of Cold War interventionism and more with the need for the Angolan government to rethink its policies in the light of a drop in the international price of petroleum. Since 1979, when OPEC had negotiated a huge rise in the price of crude oil, Angola had been partially cushioned against any incompetence in its industrial planning system. The earnings from the colonial processing industries of the 1960s that had been nationalised, or confiscated, or simply abandoned, had been squandered in the first ten years of independence and manufacturing was down to little more than 30 per cent of former production levels. In 1980, an MPLA plenary congress had already recognised the problem but sought to put the blame for economic malfunction on individual speculation and administrative incompetence rather than on the theories adopted for the economic system. Until that time the government had more or less followed Soviet-style models of economic planning, though few if any of the leaders had much grasp of either the theory or the practice of Marxist-Leninism. Party members railed against embezzlement, illegal trading, inflation, unbridled corruption, unemployment, foreign debt, economic suffocation, poor education, and the failure of health services to fight both endemic and epidemic disease. They protested that the state had become parasitic. When the next party congress was called, in 1985, the crisis could no longer be blamed on individual failures. New ideological attitudes and administrative reforms were sought at a time of falling national income.
The crisis had bitten deep into the heart of Angola’s central economic system and into the welfare of Luanda’s peri-urban population which lived within sight of the affluent villas of the ruling élite. Economic decline was also leading to a serious brain drain. The departure of white technocrats and bureaucrats was followed by a crippling haemorrhage of black middle-class Angolans who left the country to seek job security and professional earnings abroad. Some went to more stable parts of the African continent but others went to Europe, including Portugal, and to North America. Trained and educated nationals who remained behind in Angola to work with the Cuban expatriates trying to keep industrial production and government services functioning, were constantly handicapped by shortages of imported raw materials, by an absence of spare parts for machines, and by frequent interruptions in the flow of water and electricity when storage dams and power stations were sabotaged by UNITA guerrillas.
The circular question of whether the war caused the economic decline or whether the economic decline was the cause of war could no longer be answered by blaming ‘brigands’, ‘saboteurs’ and ‘opportunists’ sponsored by Cold War protagonists. From 1985 a policy of ‘economic purification’ was therefore slowly embarked upon, leading to the introduction of at least some market principles and incentives. The mythical idea that Angola could plan for the development of heavy industry on a Stalinist model was dropped but any notion that light industry might be a viable form of economic diversification stumbled on the complete absence of a skilled workforce able to turn local raw material, even wood, into finished products. Equally difficult was the idea of reopening agriculture to the commercial sector. Civil servants and politicians had no concept of what risk-taking meant in the field of agrarian production and occasionally assumed, as had former planners in Eastern Europe, that workers could simply be directed into agriculture.
When reform of the economic production processes proved difficult, the government also embarked on a scheme for the purging of low and middle-level corruption. They were encouraged by Cuban advisers who had become sickened by the inefficiency that stymied all efforts to bring Angola out of its chaos. Gradually the beer-can system of barter was replaced by a twin currency with the local bank notes being used for soft-money transactions and American dollars employed for hard-currency purchases. Cracking down on the black market in uncut diamonds led to a degree of judicial ferocity in punishing those traffickers who were captured, but were unable to call on adequately powerful political friends to protect them. One senior Cuban commander without adequate political protection was taken home and shot for economic sabotage after allegedly being caught trading in diamonds, ivory, and ebony in exchange for hard currency and hard drugs. The adoption of market values, and of freely-traded currencies, may have facilitated the lives of those with access to valuable assets, but it put new pressures on the communities of displaced persons around the city. What is more, the economic reform programme did nothing to satisfy the aspirations of the southerners who continued to be excluded from new opportunities and so remained loyal to UNITA and to its leader.
Whether the war was largely fuelled by the frustrated ambitions of the UNITA leaders, or whether Jonas Savimbi was simply a puppet who opened Angola up as one of the convenient Asian, African and Latin American playgrounds on which the superpowers acted out their ‘wars by proxy’, is an intractable question. Without the Cold War, UNITA would probably not have survived, and southerners, like northerners, would have found a way to join the central bandwagon in the city. What made Angola different from Cold War confrontations in Nicaragua or Afghanistan was the presence on the southern border of the apartheid republic of South Africa, one of the most controversial pariah nations of the 1980s. The commitment of Angola, supported by Cuba, to freeing South Africa from the racial supremacy of its Afrikaans-speaking government, and the opposite commitment of South Africa to ridding Central Africa of a regime friendly to the ‘evil empire’ of the Soviet Union, gave the war of the 1980s an ideological edge. The war by proxy of the 1980s went beyond a domestic struggle for wealth and power, a struggle which was later revitalised during two civil wars in the 1990s. The key to Savimbi’s survival from 1979, the year of the death of Agostinho Neto, to 1991, the year of the fall of the Soviet Union, was his alliance with the United States before, during, and after the Reagan presidency.
The US intervention in the Angolan wars of liberation had been largely ineffectual, and a subsequent reluctance to be publicly involved in foreign wars led the United States Congress, through the 1976 ‘Clark Amendment’, to outlaw any sending of American weapons to the warring parties. Although the Carter administration, which took office in 1977, had a relatively liberal attitude in African affairs, and condemned South Africa for its repressive policies, it nevertheless remained a participant in the Cold War. Savimbi was discreetly permitted to visit Washington for talks with right-wing foreign policy experts such as Henry Kissinger. At the same time, corporate America remained keen to do business with the Angolan government, selling aircraft, electronic equipment, computers, and oil-drilling technology. When Reagan came to power in 1981 he was initially unable to persuade Congress to repeal the Clark Amendment, but he covertly fuelled the Angolan sector of the Cold War and vetoed attempts by the United Nations to restrain South Africa from ever-more frequent incursions into Angola. Although South Africa’s attacks were nominally in pursuit of Namibian guerrillas fighting for the independence of their country, in practice many of the targets were Angolan army installations. Even more directly, and illegally, Reagan used third parties to arm Savimbi’s southern guerrillas with weapons coming not directly from the US, but from Belgium, Switzerland, Israel and other American client states. The funding was channelled through Saudi Arabia and other Western trading partners. To facilitate the delivery of weapons to UNITA, a covertly managed Central Intelligence Agency charter firm won the air supply contract for Angola’s official diamond mines. While legitimate supplies of mining equipment were thus carried, it was also possible to ferry illegitimate supplies to opposition units camped out beyond the diamond fields.
Although euphemistically described in the United States as a’ low intensity’ conflict, the pressure of war on Angola eventually became such that in February 1984 the Luanda government felt compelled to seek a truce with South Africa. Savimbi, however, wanted victory, not peace, and so immediately vitiated the South African deal and pounced on Luanda’s largest hydroelectric plant with a terrorist attack. A few months later Reagan won his second term as president and rapidly stepped up his support for Savimbi’s campaign to defeat the MPLA and win power for the southern coterie. Reagan used the slogan ‘Africa has a right to be free’ and got the Clark Amendment repealed thus enabling him to supply war materials to Angola in a legal, if unpublicised, manner. Savimbi was presented to the American public not as a ‘freedom fighter’ but as a champion of ‘democracy’ and in January 1986 he was invited to the White House. Thereafter UNITA fought its way out of the empty savanna plains of the southeast and back into the populated highland, where it could pressurise conscripts into joining its fighting force. Civilian deaths rose to hundreds of thousands as ‘soft targets’ were captured, defended and then recaptured by the opposing sides.
South Africa had borne the brunt of the effort to support Savimbi and topple dos Santos ever since its return to Angola in the years following its expulsion in 1976. The main public justification for returning was the forward defence of Namibia, the ex-German colony which South Africa had conquered in 1915 and still held in 1980 despite international resolutions which determined that the United Nations, and not South Africa, was the rightful custodian of Namibian sovereignty. South Africa feared that irregular companies of Namibian freedom fighters would attack its occupying army across the Cunene River. The guerrillas had set up camps in Angola when they failed to get Western opinion to condemn the illegitimate occupation by South Africa. Even Britain’s Labour government was unwilling to jeopardise colonial stability in Namibia when oil prices rose and the industrial world became increasingly dependent on alternative nuclear energy for which Namibian uranium was one of the preferred fuels.
South Africa had an economic as well as a strategic agenda in Angola: it aspired to establish neo-colonial domination over a neighbour which, during the Portuguese colonial war, had been a valued ally. In order to restore ‘harmonious’ relations with Angola, South Africa had decided to ‘destabilise’ the government in the hope that when it fell it would be replaced by one that was more amenable to economic collaboration. One objective was the search for a supply of crude oil that would not be cut off by the economic sanctions imposed by suppliers hostile to apartheid. This search was made more urgent after 1979 when the pro-Western Shah of Iran, who had traditionally supplied South Africa’s oil, was overthrown. Another South African ambition was to widen the market for South African exports, both agricultural food-stuffs and manufactured consumer goods, at a time when boycotts were threatening traditional markets. Existing markets in Congo and Zimbabwe were too small to compensate for the lack of purchasing power of domestic black consumers inside South Africa.
International relations were important to South Africa, which needed to maintain good relations with the United States. So long as there was a Soviet presence in Angola, South Africa could always claim that it was a bulwark against Soviet global expansionism and Russian neo-colonialism. While Angola hosted an expeditionary army from Cuba, South Africa could also continue to play effectively on American fears that Cuban ideas of ‘freedom’ were being exported beyond the shores of the beleaguered island which American governments had for so long, and so fiercely, demonised. By playing up the danger of Soviet influence in central Angola, and by allowing its army to hold down the Cuban force in southern Angola, South Africa safeguarded itself from American interference in its domestic political agenda of segregation and repression. Whenever a Washington lobby, whether white or black, demanded sanctions against South Africa, in order to hasten the advent of democracy, Pretoria only had to point to the Russian ‘menace’ for the appeal to be brushed aside and the alliance between the United States and South Africa to be reaffirmed.
The changes which came to Angola in the late 1980s were brought about by a series of mutations in geopolitical relations. At the economic level, a fall in the price of world energy meant that uranium was no longer such a precious asset and the western members of the United Nations no longer felt the need to protect South Africa’s occupation of Namibia and thereby risk incurring the ire of liberal or black members of their electorates. At a strategic level, South Africa found that it no longer had the military capacity to carry on the war. The war had escalated from savannah skirmishes into a battle over a hard target, the former Portuguese military base of Cuito Cuanavale, held by the MPLA and the Cubans. The battle lasted for months and the cost in both men and materials escalated. The Cuban contingents in Angola reached 50,000 men and the MPLA war debt in Moscow reached a billion dollars. It was South Africa, however, which was forced to call a halt to the hostilities after the loss of irreplaceable French Mirage jets. South Africa also realised that the death of white conscripts could no longer be hidden by press censorship from the voting public.
The battle of Cuito Cuanavale, coming as it did at the end of the Cold War, had repercussions both for defeated South Africa and for victorious Angola. Namibia won its independence and so the issue of guerrilla camps on Angolan territory ceased to be relevant. The South African army lost its prestige at home and its key supporter, President Botha, fell from office, opening the way to a new era of reform and eventually to democracy. The Cuban army agreed to withdraw from Angola and could do so with its head held high after its success against a previously invincible South African army. In the United States, the hard-line regime of Ronald Reagan gave way to the slightly less doctrinaire one of George Bush senior, the old spymaster who back in 1976 had once withdrawn the CIA from Angola. The Soviet Union disbanded its empire in Europe and surrendered most of its interests in Africa.
The plethora of changes that affected Africa at the end of the 1980s brought real hope that without foreign interventions peace might at last be possible in Angola. The end of the Reagan era, the winding down of the Soviet Union, and the implementation of a peace treaty between South Africa and Cuba, did not, however, bring lasting peace. Despite all efforts, the domestic causes of the Angolan conflict were to resurface after the Cold War had ended. In June 1989 President Mobutu of Zaire, anxious to win favour with Washington, tried to broker an Angolan peace by inviting dos Santos and Savimbi to his great palace at Gbadolite, where the war leader from the highland and the war leader from the city were tricked into meeting for the first time and frigidly shook hands. Seven days later Savimbi’s commandoes destroyed the Luanda electricity supply. In retaliation dos Santos’s army launched an attack on Mavinga, the gateway to the rutted bush trails which led to Savimbi’s remote south-eastern encampment at Jamba. The United States felt temporarily compelled to re-enter the war with an airlift of weapons to save Savimbi from being ejected by Soviet-equipped forces. In March 1990, however, representatives of the United States and Russia met face to face at the Namibia independence ceremony in Windhoek. They negotiated their own terms for ending the Cold War in the Angolan theatre. A year later, in May 1991, the Angolans themselves reluctantly signed a ceasefire at Bicesse in Portugal after losing their Cold War patrons. This peace was to be monitored by the United Nations, which sent Margaret Anstee, a former deputy to the secretary-general, to supervise Angola’s first ever democratic election. Down in the Luanda slums the 1991 accord was gratefully known as ‘Margaret’s peace’.