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Africa Today 49.4 (2002) 141-143



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Guimarães, Fernando Andersen. The Origins Of The Angolan Civil War: Foreign Intervention And Domesitc Political Conflict. London: Macmillan, 2001. xvi + 250 pp. List of Tables. Abbreviations. Notes. Bibliography.

The book is easy to read. The structure of the text is well laid out. The narrative of each chapter is prefaced with a set of provocative nuggets to chew on as the text gallops from topic to topic with an eye to keeping it supremely simple. The objective of the book is twofold: strip the literature of bias to reveal the real roots of the Angolan conflict and then augment them with new gems on the "hidden" history of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) using new materials, presumably collected by the author. The book does neither.

The literature used in the book is selective. Contained in the seventeen-page bibliography, it constitutes more than one hundred and seventy-one sources. Most of these sources are secondary, inclusive of eleven journals and periodicals. No evidence is provided that the sources used in the secondary works utilized in the book were checked and examined for their individual subjectivity. Some evidence exists of oral interviews, five or six on record, in support of the text. The provenance, context, and methodology used to garner oral information for the discourse are omitted.

Further, there is little evidence on record that the text mined several archival and nonarchival sources crucial for a discourse of this kind. Clear and overt evidence of consultation of documents from U.S. archives for the period under review is missing, except perhaps tangentially via José Freire Antunes' works. Archival and printed materials from important sources—repositories in Cuba, Yale, and Miami; Lisbon's two key archives on Angolan ephemera; Italy's Franz Fanon Institute collection; archives housing the files of the Portuguese secret police, Polícia Internacional de Defesa do Estado (PIDE)appear to have been set aside. Perhaps what is most disturbing is the omission of more than fifty or so secondary works in the Portuguese language—intimately rich sources by Portugal's own daughters and sons—and works by Piero Gleijeses.

The result of these omissions is a stunningly elegant, highly readable, but simplistic study of a complex period in Angolan history. What could have been a work studded with near-fictional potency turns into a script [End Page 141] etiolated of originality and profundity of discourse. The late-Savimbi tactics are left underexplored, as are their connection to the economic dynamics of underwriting insurgency, tax-free diamond supplies for the world market, and superpower politics. These issues were every bit as complex as skulduggery in Byzantium, and as lethally arcane as poisoned mushrooms served to anti-Claudian senators in a Roman court. However, much of these gut-wrenching politics mired in the personal fail to seep through the pages here. How did Angola's struggle for liberation turn into an irredentist cocktail involving racism, petro-dollars, Henry Kissinger and his minions, and constructively engaged bush wars backed by Boers? Some of these issues are discussed, but we get these in eighty pages of supremely masticated summary, deploying dated secondary works.

The first of three core chapters is heavily reliant on six seminal monographs. The text here strips the Salazarist regime of its fascist legacy, yet no definition of fascism is provided. Where does the text stand on Howard Wiarda's 1977 thesis on the issue of ideology and national development? In addition, the text essentializes the social and cultural impact of colonialism on Angola, reducing Gerald Bender's seminal work as all too simplistic in perspective. Matrimonial mores in cities shifted during Salazar's regime, making way for emergent Lusophonic matrices.

It is really unconvincing to argue that Angolan colonialism did not impact the formation of nationalist ideology—and that the latter was truly an act of choice, and a rational one at that! Not only did colonialism affect the social fabric, albeit asymmetrically, but the accompanying repression laid the foundation for the...

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