6
In 1945 Salazar flew the flags at half-mast when he heard of the death of Hitler. The Portuguese colonies had gone through severe austerity during the Second World War but Portugal itself had made a few gains from its neutrality by trading tungsten to the German arms industry in exchange for gold bullion. In order—as a neutral country—to obtain essential supplies of wheat and petroleum from America the dictator had been required to lease a military air base on the Azores Islands to Britain and its allies. When the war was over Portugal was debarred from entering the United Nations and Salazar’s colonies were not put into trusteeship as were those of Mussolini. Salazar’s regime was authoritarian and racist but not really ‘fascist’, though it adopted some ‘corporatist’ policies from Italy. Poverty remained acute throughout the empire and in Europe only Albania was poorer than Portugal. Some British colonies, such as the Gold Coast, had by now achieved higher rates of literacy than Portugal itself. In Angola the colonial economy picked up slowly after the war and links to the mother-country improved with a makeshift air service which took five days to reach Lisbon. Shipping lines began once more to operate, bringing new white immigrants to Luanda. But above all Angola’s post-war peasants and planters began to meet the world’s deep craving for coffee. This brought a whole new dynamic to the economy of Angola.
The Angolan coffee industry had three different points of focus. The first and largest was in the old nineteenth-century coffee forests of the north, the second consisted of the Amboim plantations, and the third, more experimental, region was on a small corner of the Benguela highland where the climate was suitable for high-grade Arabica coffee rather than lowland Robusta coffee. High-grade coffee remained so scarce in Angola that when the directors of the Angolan coffee institute served their guests with coffee in porcelain cups on a silver salver they sourced it from Timor, at the furthest Asian end of the Portuguese empire. Quantity rather than quality was the basis of Angola’s rise to near the top of the global league of coffee producers. Over the thirty years from the end of World War II in 1945 to independence in 1975 coffee production rose to 200,000 tons a year. Much of it was bought by the Dutch with their long-standing trade links to Angola. Dutch wax-print cloth in bright colours was particularly popular in Africa and was often emblazoned with images of national heroes. When the Dutch tried to sell cloth bearing pictures of Salazar, however, they had rapidly to desist, since—according to one famous Amsterdam dealer—‘women were apt to display the dictator’s face on inappropriate parts of their anatomy’.
In northern Angola some coffee was still grown after the world war on small plots owned by black peasants. It was possible to shell and dry coffee beans on a household scale rather than on an industrial scale. The trading and transporting of coffee, however, increasingly fell into the hands of white businessmen who bought the crop in exchange for essential household goods stocked in their village stores. This system gave the whip hand to the immigrants since each time there was a credit crisis shop-keepers took over ownership of plots held as debt security and the once-proud peasants became day labourers. The white land-holdings gradually became plantations which spread ever further into the forested north. As they grew, no adequate supply of local labour was available and so the new breed of coffee planters began recruiting Gastarbeiter from the highland of south-central Angola. These Ovimbundu strangers were naturally much resented by Kongo northerners who had now lost their land and their economic independence. The compulsory labour recruits from the south were equally unhappy to be torn from their own savannah farms to work long hours on foreign plantations in an unfamiliar environment full of snakes and ghosts and wizards. This unhappy social mix was a powder keg which was to explode in March 1961.
There were social problems in southern Angola too. One of Africa’s leading historians, Basil Davidson, travelled across the region in 1954, opening the eyes of the world to the experiences of both the colonised and the colonisers. Among the colonisers he found that even a white engine driver in Angola earned less than a black one in Congo. The railway manager, on the other hand, thought Angola to be a ‘little corner of paradise’. Among the colonised, 2,000 of the 15,000 railway employees were, in Davidson’s words, ‘slaves’, compulsory labour recruits. The archives showed that 300,000 Angolans still lived under conditions of near slavery with minimal medical services and with wages of a few pence a day withheld until each labour contract had been satisfactorily completed. In 1954 a village chief who failed to supply a commissioner with the required number of conscripts was no longer given a shameful public flogging but he was bribed to meet a district quota laid down by the office of the governor-general. Labour was recruited not only formally for government projects such as road building, but also informally for private plantations which were each allocated about a dozen conscripts per planted acre of sugar cane or sisal fibres. A labour report of 1947 written by Henrique Galvão said that forced labour was used in Angola because of the continuing large-scale flight of workers to other colonies. The lack of social and medical services in Angola was reported to mean that infant mortality had reached 60 per cent. Privately-owned slaves, Galvão said, had to be kept as healthy as equally expensive horses, but there was no incentive to nurture government-supplied recruits in the same way. This report was soon suppressed and its author was thrown into gaol. Davidson noted that even in the towns few children were able to attend school and that by the age of ten they were liable to be arrested for ‘vagrancy’ and sent off to compulsory work-stations. He was so shocked by all that he saw and learnt that he remained a friend of Angola for the rest of his long life. He used his former skills as an intelligence officer among anti-Nazi guerrillas in the Balkans to gain an understanding of anti-colonial guerrillas in the Portuguese empire.
The key feature of the south remained the Benguela railway. Copper from southern Congo was a strategic world resource as it flowed across the highland to Lobito. The deep-water harbour had been built next to the railway on an ocean inlet during the 1920s. The trains carried cobalt as well as copper when mining prospered, particularly during the Korean War of the early 1950s. The up-trains also carried food supplies into Congo to feed the miners, dried fish from the barren coast and maize from the fertile highland. The old Scottish steam engines were still powered by wooden logs of blue gum and the company planted and harvested great swathes of Australian-type forest along the route. Thousands of Ovimbundu stokers fed the boilers and shovelled out the ash. Although these men enjoyed regular employment their rates of pay were minimal. Beyond the railway towns the government tried once more to establish white farming communities but, as ever, these could not be self-sustaining and required government compulsion to recruit black labour. Restiveness grew as the bush telegraph conveyed news of opportunities in Johannesburg where, it was believed, the streets were paved with gold. The Portuguese came to fear that exploiting peasant farmers for labour, be it locally, or by taking them to the desert fisheries, or by contracting them out to forest coffee estates, might cause an outburst of violent despair. Farmers were cautious people, however, and although their lives were hard they remained reluctant to listen to the siren calls that might bring forth a revolution.
In north-central Angola, on the dry and sparsely-peopled savannah lands beyond Ambaca, the colonial government thought that it could adopt policies previously tried by Germans in East Africa and Belgians in Congo. Instead of buying expensive cotton from America, the Portuguese would feed their domestic textile industry with home-grown cotton from the colonies. In each colonial case, however, the consequences of cotton policy were catastrophic: the Maji Maji rebellion shook German East Africa, harsh repression was applied in the Belgian Congo, and a blaze of revolution broke out in Angola. Cotton growing was a risky enterprise. The plant was introduced into areas where fertility was too low to grow commercial food crops but the cotton harvest could fail entirely in the event of drought or a plague of locusts. The risks were so high, and the rewards so low, that few white farmers were interested in venturing into cotton as some had thought to do at the time of the American civil war. Portugal’s government decided to compel its Angolan subjects, Kimbundu people in the deep hinterland of Luanda, to grow cotton even if the consequences were regular spasms of starvation. Alarm bells were sounded as early as 1945 when a district commissioner reported that the cotton policy was leading to famine. His report reached the desk of the dictator in Lisbon. ‘Famine’, Salazar proclaimed archly, ‘is a figment of the Bantu imagination’. He ordered his colonial minister, Marcello Caetano, to pursue the cotton policy with vigour and to drive ‘lazy’ Africans to work ever harder. The next dramatic spasm of famine occurred in January 1961 when desperate peasants burnt down the warehouses storing cotton seed for the new season’s crop. They then picked up their emaciated children and fled across a river into the forest of the Congo Republic. As news of the uprising spread, Salazar sent planes to bomb the cotton villages. In the same month one of his political opponents decided to mount an ambitious public-relations coup. Henrique Galvão, the labour inspector now released from gaol, knew full well the real pain which colonial exploitation was imposing on Angola’s farming communities. He therefore decided to hijack a cruise liner, the Santa Maria, and sail it to Luanda to awaken the world to the horrors that were being perpetrated in the name of civilisation.
The Santa Maria never did reach Angola but international journalists were excited by the adventure and hurried to Luanda to welcome a heroic Portuguese rebel. By happenstance these reporters were on hand when a quite different revolution broke out in the city streets on 4 February 1961. The February uprising, which culminated in Angola’s independence fourteen years later, has a complex history and contested roots. Several incipient political pressure groups of exiles claimed to have planned the outbreak of violence. Portugal was willing to believe that revolutionary opposition was being coordinated and orchestrated. It is more likely, however, that the protest and the ensuing massacre were spontaneously sparked off by young local hotheads. These youths decided that they would attack the city gaol in an attempt to release some of their friends who had been rounded up by the secret police as potential trouble-makers. Their mini-coup failed but sent a shudder of panic through the white city. The winds of change, about which Britain’s prime minister, Harold Macmillan, had recently made a famous speech, were sweeping through Africa. Settlers and expatriates were being widely replaced by black bourgeois entrepreneurs and bureaucrats as well as by politicians with neo-colonial supporters in Britain and France. The new nationalist governments elsewhere in Africa retained the old commercial, banking, insurance and transport links with former mother countries and continued to supply raw materials in exchange for manufactured consumer goods. Such a deal was not obviously open to Portugal in 1961 since the country still had a rather narrow industrial base. Colonists who had become accustomed to their racial privileges saw little advantage in returning to Europe and therefore took up spontaneous weapons to defend their status in Luanda. They set about attacking any educated black person who might aspire to become part of a middle class capable of administering the country, taking over white jobs and sending colonists back home to Europe. The government in Portugal approved the settler aspiration to defend privilege and, alarmingly, decided to issue gangs of vigilantes with real arms and ammunition. The ensuing massacre left a lasting legacy.
A few weeks after the Luanda uprising of February 1961, the northern explosion of March 1961 shook the colony even more violently. A dip in the market for coffee had meant that labourers were not being paid on time and so they politely marched up to a plantation office to ask for their arrears of wages. Their demonstration caused white panic. Settlers, having heard greatly exaggerated reports about racist confrontations across the frontier in Congo, assumed they were about to be attacked. As fear rippled through the north, settlers may have remembered the South African massacre at Sharpeville. White gunfire broke out. Black counter-attacks were orchestrated across the region, some of them co-ordinated by an exiled political organisation across the border in Congo. Several hundred members of white families were killed, ten times more than all the Europeans who had been killed in the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. Several thousand black people were killed too, some of them compulsory Ovimbundu migrants who had been deeply resented by the population of the north. The colonial administration took action and issued weapons to white vigilantes. On one English mission station the pastor, Archibald Patterson, was given twenty-four hours to leave the country. The next day all his teachers and catechists were killed and were buried under the school football pitch. Portugal cried ‘wolf, wolf, the communists are coming’. America’s new president, John F. Kennedy, was at first reluctant to come to the rescue having assumed that ‘Africa for the Africans’ would open doors to United States investment and opportunity. Salazar quietly told Kennedy that if the president did not help a staunch anti-communist ally such as Portugal his government would feel compelled to close America’s mid-Atlantic air-base on the Azores Islands. American policy did a sharp U-turn and President Kennedy supplied Salazar’s air-force with napalm to bomb rebellious forest villages. Thousands of Angolans fled across the northern frontier to the lower Congo where fellow countrymen, fellow members of the Baptist Church, welcomed them for a fourteen-year exile. In Kinshasa many petty bourgeois fishmongers, butchers, tailors and motor mechanics were white Portuguese from Lisbon who readily hired black Portuguese-speakers from Angola as helpmeets. Meanwhile the Angolan homeland underwent a generation of guerrilla warfare and of colonial counter-insurgency.
In 1961 Portugal feared that Angola’s colonial days might be numbered. A radical change in imperial policy was therefore adopted by the dictatorship. A huge conscript army was built in the mother country and sent out to Africa, first to Angola but later also to Guinea and Mozambique. Army officers, who had put Salazar in power on condition that they should be purely ornamental, with smart uniforms and polished brass buttons, rather than an active force at risk of being called to arms, were so doubtful about the virtues of sending an expeditionary force to Africa that there were some attempts at mutiny. Soon the army’s capacity for war was deeply challenged, not in Africa but in Asia where India conquered the Portuguese colony of Goa in 1961. Senior army commanders eventually realised, however, that a colonial war in Africa might be financially profitable. Informal trading deals developed and some members of the army gained control of a black market in currency. The Angolan war was nicknamed ‘the war of the multi-stories’ as each corrupt army officer used each of his furloughs to build a block of rental flats in Lisbon. Such high-level corruption was one of the legacies of colonialism in many parts of Africa. For the foot-soldiers the war was a much less happy experience. Death rates were high from road accidents, diseases, and even from fighting. Young men in Portugal began to migrate clandestinely to France, preferring to work in car factories rather than risk being conscripted for four years’ dangerous and ill-paid service in Angola. The number of Portuguese in Paris soon far exceeded the number who served in Angola. To make good the shortfall in metropolitan conscripts, the colonial army, like other colonial armies, recruited black subjects as troops trained to target their own kith and kin. One of the most dangerous tasks facing the army was patrolling any dirt road into which nationalist guerrillas had planted anti-personnel mines. To avoid losing white soldiers and expensive equipment, black recruits were ordered to walk the sandy routes and so suicidally detonate the mines before the real army moved forward. In the longer term, strategic roads were tarred to make troop deployments faster and to hinder the planting of mines. Within a few years war had reached a virtual stalemate in the heartlands of Angola.
Salazar’s second war strategy was economic. His nationalism had never been wholly successful in limiting foreign participation in Angola’s economic development. The railways had been built by the British, the diamond mines were controlled by South Africa, the cotton agencies were financed by Belgium, and the Dutch sold textiles for coffee. When in 1963 the cost of defence required a dynamic search for new wealth which could be taxed, a policy of industrialisation was encouraged. The brewing of beer had been one of the first import substitution industries in African colonies and in Angola brewing became so successful that it not only supplied local markets but also met the thirsty demand of western Congo where colonial industries were collapsing. Enterprises producing textiles, furniture, house-paint, dry foods, cigarettes and building materials all proliferated. A relaxation on foreign investments allowed European and American management methods, technologies and patents to enter the country. The big investment, however, was in petroleum, though Salazar mourned the opening of the first oil wells. He said that they would bring an end to his dream of a land fit for poor, happy, peasants who needed little by way of manufactured consumer goods and did not hanker after expensive government services in education, or health, or housing. The great dictator apparently believed, quite genuinely, that he was doing the best for his peasants and was therefore deeply mortified when in 1963 Charles Boxer, the grand master of Portuguese imperial history, published a devastating book, Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, which demolished some of Portugal’s patriotic myths about its colonial achievements.
When oil wells were opened in Cabinda the royalties which flowed from Texas did enable Salazar, despite his reservations, to finance his army. Military success was further ensured with subsidised war materials from South Africa which was anxious to hinder the spread of African nationalism down to the border of Namibia. The United States also continued to help the dictatorship by illegitimately allowing Portugal to use NATO weapons officially designed to protect the north Atlantic from communism. These were now deployed to defend the Portuguese colonies against the alleged threat of communism in Africa.
The insurgents, seeking the freedom which Salazar so feared and detested, came from a variety of regional backgrounds and had different ideologies. When the war for independence broke out in 1961 the first group which tried to ride the tiger of anti-colonial rebellion was a union of northern peoples with a variety of safe havens in Congo where Belgians had allowed the proliferation of ethno-cultural associations. Various factions eventually came together as the Front for the National Liberation of Angola, FNLA. Angola’s northern political union was able to gain international sponsorship and even set up a provisional government-in-exile modelled on the exiled government of Algeria. In addition to recognition by several newly-independent African governments, and by a Pan-African committee devoted to the furthering of decolonisation, the so-called ‘national’ front of the north managed to get support from both China and America. It was not, however, favoured by the Soviet Union. A different liberation movement, which did enjoy Soviet backing, arose in Luanda and its hinterland. This Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola, the MPLA, was loosely the heir to the clubs, associations and newspapers which successive colonial regimes has suppressed. It tried to establish its exiled leadership in Congo-Léopoldville but was soon driven out by its rival and took refuge in Congo-Brazzaville, on the opposite bank of the river. There it had no frontier with mainland Angola but only with the famous enclave of Cabinda, on the coast north of the Congo River. It was there that the movement set up a small guerrilla army. Pepetela, a white activist in the campaign for Angolan liberation, portrayed the army’s every-day life in his novel Mayombe. Fear and boredom, he said, were the twin hallmarks of guerrilla warfare. The young volunteers in forest camps in ‘ex-French’ Congo constantly longed for better food or a cigarette and then suddenly they were hurled into a cross-border raid from which many did not return. Their political masters, meanwhile, moved some of the senior staff far away to the safe city of Dar-es-Salaam, cheek by jowl with exiled leaders from Mozambique and South Africa, and received support from the government of Tanzania.
The leader of the MPLA was Agostinho Neto, a typical product of Angola’s complex cultural history. He came from the Kimbundu hinterland of Luanda but spoke excellent Portuguese and used it to write poetry. Although a black African, he associated freely with city Creoles and mestizos. His father had been a Methodist minister who gave his son such a good western education that he won a scholarship to study medicine in Lisbon. Like several other African statesmen, Neto married a white woman which caused some purists to be suspicious of his commitment to the black cause. He was surreptitiously active in student circles in Portugal, and even more surreptitiously established links with the outlawed communist party in Lisbon. He served at least one term in a Portuguese prison when the secret police feared his subversive influence. When Amnesty International was founded, it chose Neto as its first prisoner of conscience and when he escaped from Portugal he arrived at the London office, a bemused and bespectacled poet. He thereafter unexpectedly grew to become a guerrilla commander and the treasurer of the popular liberation movement. It was Neto who gained the resources to be able to hand out carrots, wield sticks, orchestrate policy, and promote guerrilla officers. He set up his bush camps in Zambia and supplied them as best he could with weapons hauled up the 1,000-mile dirt road from Dar-es-Salaam. On one of his forays across the border into Angolan territory he took Basil Davidson with him. Davidson’s classic book, In the Eye of the Storm, revealed the aspirations of the liberation movement to its worldwide sympathisers.
The south of Angola had a different political trajectory from the north and the centre of the country. A few southern exiles joined the northern FNLA bandwagon in Kinshasa, providing some of the military and political leadership. Soon, however, they felt despised and instead of their haughty Ovimbundu pedigrees being recognised they were marginalised like country bumpkins. By 1964 the southerners had virtually broken their ties with the élitist Kongo and within two years had created a liberation movement of their own, UNITA, the Union for the Independence of the Totality of Angola. They eventually gained an exile base in newly-independent Zambia. Their leader, an ambitious young man of boundless confidence, used every possible network to create a united southern political movement. His association with the churches, which had been installed on the highland by Swiss and American missionaries, enabled him to use old-boy networks from the Protestant schools to mobilise some support. He also had good contacts with the Benguela railway on which his father had been employed, and a group of people linked to each other through service on the railway was able to use its telegraph to maintain subversive communications. Last but not least, Jonas Savimbi was one of the few Ovimbundu who did know his way around the diplomatic circuit. He had been a student in Portugal as well as in Switzerland, though his attempt to study medicine had proved abortive. Instead he had taken courses in politics at the University of Lausanne and called himself ‘Doctor’ in the way the honorific title was used in Portugal to denote any university graduate. As Dr Savimbi he moved to the United States to further his political ambition, but for all his personal drive and cosmopolitan experience, he was initially unable, on his return to Africa, to build either an effective political movement or a competent guerrilla army. By the early 1970s he had entered into secret negotiations with officers in the Portuguese army over the possibility of obtaining a neo-colonial settlement of the liberation stalemate. He naturally sought a powerful personal role for himself despite his as yet minimal grassroots support in the country.
Writing a history of the FNLA, MPLA, and UNITA represents a tough challenge. Guerrilla movements do not have the resources to store many archives, or even the paper and ink to write many records. Oral testimonies, on the other hand, had constantly to be modified to meet changing scenarios and, with hindsight, place the narrator in the best available light. When a coup d’état occurred in Lisbon in April 1974, however, it opened up an astonishing new source of information. The archives of the secret police were thrown wide open. This police force had been introduced into Angola in the late 1950s to monitor any subversive activity among settlers, some of whom had voted for a presidential candidate who proposed to dismiss Salazar. Some restless immigrants might even have aspired unilaterally to declare white independence in Angola. Once the liberation war had broken out, however, the main purpose of the political police was to monitor black subversion. As a consequence the police held a much better paper trail of changing rebel aspirations than did the liberation movements themselves. Scholars, exploring the newly-opened Lisbon range of civilian, diplomatic, economic and military archives, fell thankfully on the police harvest of ephemeral memoranda, handbills, speeches and committee minutes produced, but rarely saved, by rival liberation movements. Ironic though it may seem, the defeated colonising enemy preserved a better set of records than the victorious liberation movements. The documents frozen in police files had not undergone the process of adaptation which oral records underwent as each survivor tried to reinterpret his or her personal trajectory in the light of changing circumstances. The value of the police records has to be tempered with sensitive care, however, when dealing with interview materials. In Angola torture was used in dark cells to extract information from victims screaming with pain. The army also used terrorism openly when village leaders were publicly beheaded to dissuade colonial subjects from even thinking about independence. Terror and torture did not lead to reliable oral testimonies.
Many of the attempts to understand Angola’s history in the second half of the twentieth century were undertaken by foreign scholars who were deeply sympathetic to Angola’s protracted traumas but who came from another world, or wrote in another language. Their work often depended on diplomatic documents or on interviews with exiled leaders. Gradually, however, the voice of the voiceless began to be heard through interviews with ordinary survivors. In 1997 Drumond Jaime and Helder Barber published extensive interviews with the founding fathers—Angola has very few founding mothers—who had survived the vicissitudes of independence in their local communities. The oral record is naturally controversial as Christine Messiant, with humorous perspicacity, once pointed out to a large history congress which included war veterans assembled in Luanda’s old Monumental Cinema. ‘Here in Angola’, she said, ‘even the past is unpredictable’. One of the outstanding historians of the anti-colonial campaigns was a Brazilian scholar, Marcelo Bittencourt, author of two volumes on the subject, Estamos Juntos, ‘we all stand shoulder-to-shoulder’. Bittencourt digested the work of the international scholars, expanded the range of interview materials, and made extended use of the new archives. His work enabled a rising student generation to get a better grasp of the factionalism which marked the kaleidoscope of Angola’s political history. Bittencourt’s convincing understanding of the interaction between daily life and liberation politics is partly based on interviews conducted in Luanda between 1995 and 2000. His timing was felicitous since some old men had survived the wars and were still able to respond to detailed questionnaires which sought to clarify, from various vantage points, the issues which newly discovered archival papers had raised. Political movements formed, splintered, and re-formed in cities of exile or in rudimentary forest camps. The very creation of the MPLA was subject to rival memories and interpretations. The study of factionalism in the Angolan liberation struggles had gone in cycles of academic fashion which at one moment emphasised ideology, at another ethnicity, at another foreign sponsorship, at another education and culture. Always the skills, ambitions, and weaknesses of individual militants, politicians, diplomats, entrepreneurs, played a role. So too did the minor irritants or comforts of life on the move, in exile, in rudimentary camps, in rented mud huts. And always race remained a part of the colonised mindset, an awareness so prevalent that foot-soldiers, perceiving little progress on the ground, wondered whether leaders with white spouses might not have made secret deals with the ‘tribes’ of their in-laws. Being even half white in Angola could lead to accusations of petty bourgeois snobbery and a suspicion of neglecting the welfare of the 2–3,000 men in the MPLA’s various mini-regiments of guerrillas.
In Angola, the years before the fall of Portugal’s dictatorship were those in which lassitude and disenchantment overcame optimism and ambition after ten years of ineffectual struggle. Blame and counter-blame, leadership bids and counter-bids, solidarity and fragmentation, class rivalry and ethnic fraternity, all of them affected both the FNLA and the MPLA, and even the still minuscule UNITA, with its 300 isolated militants covertly attempting to seek military alliances with disaffected Portuguese troops in the deepest east. Rumblings, accusations, arrests and executions accompanied the political evolution of each faction. A ‘readjustment movement’, which came from China, a distant and little-known force on the nationalist scene, attempted to bring clarity to MPLA ideology, and one of Angola’s founding fathers, Viriato da Cruz, retired from active politics to settle in the People’s Republic. The Chinese fashion for self-criticism took hold in the Angolan camps and created seminars attended by numbers of middle cadres and common foot-soldiers. They discussed the predicaments of exile, the successes and failings of the leadership, the injustices and inequalities which separated the ‘civilised’ nationalists from Angola’s towns and the ‘indigenous’ guerrillas from the countryside. None of the leaders was comfortable with such grass-root criticism and Agostinho Neto was particularly bitter in his condemnation of dissidence. As the absolute ruler of his movement he controlled the money and rewarded the faithful while punishing those who were disloyal—a style of political management which survived into independent Angola. The last colonial years did not augur well for the creation of a vibrant new civil society with a climate of open debate.
The end of empire was brought nearer when António Salazar, Europe’s most durable dictator, finally died in 1970 after ruling Portugal and its colonies with an iron fist for no fewer than forty years. When he was struck down by a stroke, power passed to Marcello Caetano, his former minister for colonial affairs. Although some hoped for change, they discovered that when Caetano appeared to signal left, he actually turned right and in the last five years of colonial rule, from 1969 to 1974, practice remained largely autocratic. One change of policy in the early 1970s did, however, concern Angola’s all-important coffee industry. Instead of repression, as practised on the highland, the new imperial government decided to adopt a policy of conciliation towards the black élite of the north and allow its members a limited return to independent coffee growing and marketing, with transport in the hands of co-operatives managed by local members of the Baptist church. The initiative was much resented by white businessmen but it was seen by the Portuguese military as creating reliable allies, wedded to market principles, and therefore unlikely to be seduced by any virulent nationalistic aspirations advocated by Marxist or Maoist political exiles. A policy of winning hearts and minds, however, came too late, and Angola began to disintegrate.
By the early 1970s the MPLA was also beginning to fall apart, with violent rivalry breaking out along ethnic, ideological and class lines. Two rebellious factions split from the party. The ‘eastern rebellion’ took some of the leadership, along with militants and guerrillas who had been recruited in the highland, out of the camps in the eastern savannah and eventually into alliance with rival movements. The ‘active rebellion’ of some of the more intellectual members of the Angolan élite despaired of making any progress under the command of Agostinho Neto and adopted its own breakaway ideological agenda. The Soviet Union, weary of this factionalism among its erstwhile protégés, suspended accreditation and logistical support.
A new future for Angola suddenly and unexpectedly began on 25 April 1974 when the world turned upside down. Angola’s politicians were as surprised as those of Portugal when the Lisbon government was overthrown without a shot being fired. The coup which felled Caetano and packed him off to exile in Brazil had little to do with either the FNLA or the MPLA but was mounted by young military captains in the Portuguese army. These junior officers had decided that they were not going to win lucrative benefits from the colonial war in the way their elders had done in the 1960s. Simultaneously Portugal’s leading industrialists came to the realisation that their Lisbon enterprises would face a better future in democratic Europe than in colonial Africa. Business also resented the everlasting burden of war taxes. It was well-informed, though secretive, bankers who predicted the fall of the dictatorship while both Western and Eastern intelligence agencies, as well as Portugal’s own security services, were completely oblivious to any change in the air.
The unexpected events in Lisbon led to a re-alignment of forces in Angola. Exiles began to arrive in Luanda and factions negotiated deals with their rivals. The Soviet Union reversed its decision to abandon Angola and hastily arranged for weapons to be supplied, advisers to be trained, and Cuban troops to be put on standby, for any vicarious intervention that might seem appropriate as the Portuguese prepared to leave Africa. In January 1975 an interim government was established. Its four-power executive included not only the old imperial power, Portugal, but also all three nationalist parties, FNLA, MPLA, and UNITA.