Empire in Africa: Angola and Its Neighbors

10. The Struggle for Power

10 The Struggle for Power In addition to a colonial war (1961–74) and an international war (1975–91), the history of Angola was darkened by two civil wars that pitted two surviving liberation movements against one another. The MPLA and UNITA fought each other mercilessly in both 1992–94 and 1998–2002. A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa (2002), edited by Patrick Chabal, carried three chapters on Angola: one on the wars of the 1970s, one on the war of the 1980s, and a third on the wars of the 1990s. The third chapter is reprinted here by kind permission of the publishers, Christopher Hurst and Indiana University Press.1 When Angola emerged from the cold war in 1991, it was a different country from the one that had emerged from the colonial war in 1974. In 1974 the major export had been coffee, efficiently carried by truck on asphalted highways built for strategic purposes. In 1991 one of the exports that exceeded coffee was scrap metal, quarried from the half a million tons of nonferrous junk attached to thousands of military and civilian vehicles that had been blown up during the years of bitter conflict and left along Angola’s ruined roads. The graveyard of military vehicles was matched by the graveyard of human victims. Those who had died—of hunger, 139 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. wounds, disease, or gunshots—were buried and uncounted, but those who survived—maimed, crippled, displaced, and unemployed —were all too visible and had to be counted by the agencies that supplied them with basic meals and artificial limbs. The war of destabilization, begun on the southern plain in the early 1980s, had spread through the highlands and lowlands until conflict reached Angola’s northern frontier by the later 1980s. Only the larger urban enclaves of the highlands and the cities strung along the Atlantic shore were spared day-to-day fighting. Even these cities, however, felt the rigorous consequences of war when hundreds of thousands of war victims emerged from the countryside to seek refuge from the trauma that had engulfed all of village Angola. It would be too simplistic to say that the reason a southern army had moved through the countryside destroying everything in its path was in order to terrify rural Angola’s peasants into accepting the rule of Savimbi and UNITA and rejecting the rule of dos Santos and the MPLA. Much of the success of the southern army had been due to widespread rural disaffection with the MPLA government, and a civil war had therefore gone in tandem with the cold war, the war of destabilization. The difficult initial struggle of the MPLA to gain and hold the capital city had meant that rural Angola had been neglected. One of the causes of the great uprising of 1977 had been the suggestion that unemployed urban youths should be dispatched to the country as work brigades to pick the unharvested coffee crop. The youths were alarmed at the prospect. Their dignity depended on being sophisticated urbanites with, despite their minimal amount of schooling, a taste for sharp dressing. To be sent to a countryside full of yokels and wild animals, not to mention magicians and poisonous snakes, would have been a terrifying experience. Their disdain for the countryside was shared by salaried workers in the city, who contemptuously described the people of the countryside as the “Bantu,” vernacular-speaking rustics quite unlike themselves with their smooth Portuguese manners. The antagonism between the town and the countryside had paved the way for the war of the 140 / Empire in Africa 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. 1980s to spread like a bush fire from neglected province to neglected province. Regional distrust remained a dreadful burden as the nation sought a sustainable peace for the 1990s. Burdensome though the legacies of war may have been, the eighteen months from May 1991 to September 1992 were the most spectacular months of optimism and freedom that Angola had ever witnessed. Savimbi and his entourage of generals moved down...