Empire in Africa: Angola and Its Neighbors

8. Destabilizing the Neighborhood

8 Destabilizing the Neighborhood The 1980s were a peculiarly distressing time for the peoples of Central Africa, including Angola. Wars of destabilization, partly orchestrated by the superpowers, broke out between South Africa and its neighbors. This chapter is a modification of the penultimate chapter of Frontline Nationalism in Angola and Mozambique , a small book written at the request of Unesco and published in 1992.1 Nation building would have presented quite enough difficulties in Angola and its sister colony of Mozambique if the new generation of black leaders had been left to attend to their task unhindered by outside influence. Instead, outside powers became increasingly involved in forcing their choices and undermining their actions. The oldest foreign influence in the region (apart from colonial Portugal itself) was the Republic of South Africa, which had long cast its shadow over its northern neighbors. When the two new lusophone nations gained independence, they almost immediately accentuated their ideological and economic differences with South Africa by assisting the struggles for independence in Zimbabwe and Namibia. Spasmodic South African interference in the affairs of its 110 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. neighbors gradually became a systematic policy of destabilization. Intervention increased after the fall of John Vorster when the army became the key political actor inside South Africa. Foreign hostility to Angola and Mozambique brought together an unholy alliance of enemies from the Congo River to the Cape of Good Hope. The forces of destabilization were recruited among black exiles as well as white settlers, among commandos from the former colonial armies, and among disappointed politicians from the nationalist movements. South Africa’s policy brought damaging foreign intervention from outside Africa. Superpower involvement in Mozambique was predominantly covert, but in Angola a war by proxy between the United States and the Soviet Union replaced Vietnam as a focal point of cold war confrontation. The victims were now African rather than Asian, and they were deliberately hindered from building proud, independent nations with the freedom to choose their own development strategies. During the old colonial war South African military intervention in the affairs of its neighbors had been limited. Some military equipment of American origin was sold or leased to the Portuguese at nominal prices. Counterinsurgency experts made strategic recommendations on guerrilla warfare, though Portugal was too proud to accept South African advice readily. South African assassination experts might have had a hand in making the parcel bomb that killed Eduardo Mondlane, the first president of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo), though internal conflicts within the movement may have created the opportunity. South Africa was not above the use of murder, as demonstrated by the 1982 killing of Ruth First in her university office in Mozambique. It is symptomatic of the climate that when President Machel of Mozambique was killed in a plane crash in 1986, observers were predisposed to suspect foul play and blame the South African policy of intervention in Mozambique. The military origins of intervention concerned the war of liberation in Rhodesia, which had escalated in 1972. When Mozambique won its independence two years later, it decided to support Destabilizing the Neighborhood / 111 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. the freedom fighters in Rhodesia and help impose economic sanctions on the white regime of Ian Smith. When Mozambique, one of the poorest nations in the world, followed UN requests to suspend communications and transport services to the Rhodesians, it immediately became a victim of Smith’s economic reprisals. The political cost of imposing sanctions on Rhodesia was even higher than the economic loss of earnings. Mozambique provided a haven for refugees escaping from the Rhodesian war and offered training grounds for soldiers going into the war. This black solidarity with black Zimbabweans brought commando reprisals by white Rhodesians and air raids by white South Africans. By 1979, however , South Africa, fearing that any prolongation of the Rhodesian war might spill over its own border, brought the antagonists to the negotiating table, and a cease-fire opened the way for a black government to rule Zimbabwe. The...