Angola from Afro-Stalinism to Petro-Dollar Capitalism (review)

This bookis an excellent study of Angola, which has remarkable resource endowments but, paradoxically, has been"associated not with development and relative prosperity but years of conflict, economic decline, and human misery on a massive scale" (p. 1). Tony Hodges has written extensively on postcolonial Africa and its traumas. Here, his approach is multidisciplinary: he crosses the boundaries of history, economics, political science, and sociology to provide an introduction to the political economy of Angola from the end of the colonial period to 2000. In doing so, he explains how Angola's resource endowments, especially oil and diamonds, interacted in complex ways with several other factors to plague the war-torn African nation.

Hodges delineates how, over a period of forty years, a combination of forces—such as massive population displacements, rapid urbanization, strains on the family structure, deepening poverty, widening social inequality, and changes in ethnic relations and perception of identity—has transformed postcolonial Angola (pp. 21-41). He examines Angola's four decades of war and upheaval and identifies the war's major causes, including the nature of Portuguese colonialism, Portugal's failure to prepare for a stable transition to independence, the competition for political succession by rival nationalist movements with different ethnolinguistic bases, leaders without vision (bent on achieving absolute power at the expense of their rivals), and competing external supporters. Thus, he shows how the conflict had little specifically to do with the country's oil and diamond resources, which, however, eventually fueled it.

The largest and richest of Portugal's African colonial territories, Angola was unable to liberate a single inch of its territory from Portuguese control. The collapse of Portugal's African empire in 1974 threw the Angolan liberation movements into a turbulent and protracted war of political succession. The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), and National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) were unable to mount a united front. They frequently spied and fought against each other. They thereby rendered themselves easy prey to external forces—the United States, the Soviet Union, the Republic of South Africa—which exacerbated the conflict as they sought to promote their own geopolitical interests. The outbreak of the war, accompanied by the exodus of skilled Portuguese settlers, commercial farmers, and traders, who hitherto had employed cheap indigenous labor, "plunged Angola into a deep economic crisis from which it has never really recovered" (p. 10). In the meantime, the MPLA, which controlled the capital, Luanda, on independence day (11 November 1975), held precariously to power with the assistance of Cuban troops and Soviet weapons. Its rivals' major supporters, the United States and South Africa, had withdrawn, following the passage of the Clark amendment, forbidding U.S. support for any of the factions.

Focusing on South Africa's resumed intervention in the war, Hodges discusses the external dimensions of the conflict. South Africa sought to weaken the Angolan regime and Namibian nationalists by directly assisting UNITA. But FNLA, part of the coalition that had fought the MPLA, collapsed for lack of such external support, especially after the Angolan government reached a rapprochement with Mobutu of Zaire, in 1978-1979. Also complicit was President Reagan, who, after persuading the U.S. Congress to repeal the Clark amendment in 1985, returned to a de facto alliance with the South African government, providing in the process assistance to UNITA. This intervention precipitated large Soviet arms transfers to Angola, prompted Cuba to increase its expeditionary forces in the country to 50,000, and deepened Angola's foreign dependence.

Surprisingly, Hodges ignores the policy the Reagan administration, for its own geopolitical interests, initiated in 1981, linking the independence of Namibia with the removal of Cuban troops from Angolan territory. This linkage policy emboldened South Africa's defiance of U.N. decolonization measures in Namibia. It delayed until 1990 the implementation of...