To understand our world, we must use a revolving globe and look at the earth from various vantage points. If we do so, we will see that the Atlantic is but a bridge linking the colorful, tropical Afro — Latin American world, whose strong ethnic and cultural bonds have been preserved to this day. For a Cuban who arrives in Angola, neither the climate, nor the landscape, nor the food are strange. For a Brazilian, even the language is the same.
The export of slaves was the main reason for the Portuguese presence in Angola. To round up as many of them as possible, the Portuguese conducted ceaseless wars here. “The Portuguese contact with Angola,” write the historians Douglas L. Wheeler and René Pelissier in their book Angola, “began with war and, as some believe, will end with war.
The Portuguese politics of penetrating Angola began with a military expedition which was to be the start of a series of wars lasting for centuries. The state of war did not abate by the end of the seventeenth century; to the contrary: war was the rule rather than the exception during the entire period between 1579 and 1921. Unpublished documents in Portuguese archives prove that in the course of 350 years there were barely five during which the Portuguese did not conduct war in one place or another in Angola.”
This rapacious theft of human beings brought Angola to such ruin that at the beginning of the twentieth century England and Germany actually conducted secret negotiations to take the colony from Portugal and divide it between themselves. In any case, the Germans occupied southern Angola until 1915, and the Afrikaners (the so-called Boers) occupied the southern province of Huíla (with its capital of Lubango) until 1928.
For several centuries Portugal directed its best elements to Brazil, its worst to Angola. Angola was a penal colony, the place of deportation for all manner of criminals and outcasts, for all those on society’s fringe. In old Lisbon, Angola was referred to as the país dos degredados , the country of the deported, the expelled, the finished. The low quality of Angola’s colonists helped Angola become one of the most backward of African countries.
The struggle for the liberation of Angola begins on a significant scale only in the middle of the twentieth century. Here are a few of the more important dates:
1948
The creation of the cultural movement “Vamos descobrir Angola” (Let us discover Angola). It is the brainchild of a group of young Angolan intellectuals. They publish two issues of the literary periodical Mensagem (“The Message”), subsequently closed down by the police. Its editor, and the leader of the movement, was the eminent Angolan poet Viriato da Cruz. His closest associates were two other poets, Agostinho Neto and Mario de Andrade. The rise of the Angolan liberation movement is attributable to these three poets.
1953
The creation of Angola’s first liberation organization, PLUA (Partido da Luta dos Africanos de Angola, “Party of the Struggle of the Africans of Angola”). Like all other subsequent organizations in Angola, PLUA comes into being and operates in conditions of conspiracy.
1954
The creation, in Kinshasa, of the organization UPNA (União das Populações do Norte de Angola, “Union of the Peoples of Northern Angola”). It is the tribal organization of the Bakongo, the germ of the later FNLA.
DECEMBER 10, 1956
From the union of PLUA with other, small liberation groups, the MPLA (Movimento Popular para a Libertação de Angola, “Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola”) arises in Luanda. At its head stands the thirty-four-year-old doctor and poet Agostinho Neto.
1958
UPNA changes its name to UPA (União das Populações de Angola, “Union of the Peoples of Angola”).
During this period, as a result of the stormy events in neighboring Congo (Zaïre), many Angolan tribal parties and organizations, mostly small ones, come into being. Until 1967, 58 such parties and 26 organizations appeared on the political stage and then disappeared. The fragmentation of Angola’s political life was greater than Congo’s.
FEBRUARY 4, 1961
The armed attack of MPLA fighters on the prison in Luanda (the so-called Casa de Reclusão Militar), where Angolan patriots are incarcerated. It is the commencement of the armed struggle for the liberation of Angola.
MARCH 15, 1961
In the north, the UPA gives the signal for a racist uprising of the Bakongo against all non-Bakongo. Armed bands of Bakongo murder Portuguese civilians, Angolan mulattoes, members of the Ovimbundu and Kimbundu tribes. The insurrection is suppressed by the Portuguese army and ends with a dreadful massacre of the Bakongo and the emigration of large numbers of Bakongo to Zaïre.
MARCH 23, 1962
The UPA changes its name to FNLA (Frente Nacional da Libertação de Angola, “National Front for the Liberation of Angola”). Its leader is the president of the UPA, a longtime employee of a Belgian company in Congo, Holden Roberto. Roberto was born in 1925 in Angola (in São Salvador), although he spent his whole life in Congo, where he still lives and where he possesses vast business holdings: hotels, restaurants, etc. FNLA was and remains a strictly tribal organization, the party of the Bakongo, whose ambition is the rebirth of the kingdom of the Bakongo and the incorporation into it of the rest of Angola. In 1970 the Bakongo made up eight percent of Angola’s population. Holden Roberto’s group, whose members belonged to the Protestant Church, was always bankrolled, through the Baptist Church, by the American Committee on Africa. The struggle between the FNLA and the MPLA had the additional overtones of religious conflict: the FNLA are Protestants; the MPLA counts many Catholics in its ranks.
NOVEMBER 1963
The government of Zaïre ousts from Kinshasa the headquarters of the MPLA, moved here from Luanda in 1961 after the Portuguese repressions. Conakry, Guinea, becomes the MPLA’s new seat, and then Brazzaville. Beginning in 1965, Brazzaville is home to a one-hundred-strong Cuban military unit, which acts as a security force for the then-president of the People’s Republic of Congo, Massemba-Debat. It is in Brazzaville that the MPLA establishes its first contacts with Cubans.
1964
A split in the so-called Government of the Republic of Angola in Exile (GRAE), created two years earlier by the FNLA. Among those quitting the GRAE is the minister of foreign affairs, Jonas Savimbi, who, in the periodical Remarques Africaines of November 25, 1964, publishes a letter accusing Holden Roberto of corruption and nepotism. First, Savimbi cites the names of CIA agents working within the FNLA, then lists the roster of the FNLA leadership, which is worth quoting: “Holden Roberto, president, born in São Salvador; John Edouard Pinock, born in São Salvador, Holden’s cousin; Sebastião Roberto, born in São Salvador, Holden’s brother; Joe Peterson, born in São Salvador, Holden’s brother-in-law; Narciso Nenaka, born in São Salvador, Holden’s uncle; Simão de Freitas, born in São Salvador, Holden’s nephew; Eduardo Vieira, born in São Salvador, Holden’s cousin.”