Angolan War of Liberation: Colonial–Communist Clash, 1961–1974

INTRODUCTION

In 1961, Portugal found itself fighting a war to retain its colonial possessions in a desperate bid to preserve the historical remnants of its Empire. Under its dictator Antonio de Salazar, an economist by profession who had taken over the country in 1932 and was already seventy years old when the African wars started, both he and his nation were almost completely unprepared to do what was needed to repel an invasion of large numbers of hostile revolutionaries from the Congo.

Lisbon knew it was coming, or rather that hostile forces would stoke a revolt, but nobody was prepared for the sheer scale of thousands of half-clad primitives swarming into Angola to overthrow the government.

The army and the navy were guarding the colony and they would soon start cracking heads and turning the recalcitrants on their heels, Lisbon responded, adding that any kind of uprising by the locals would be suicide. The consensus in Europe was that it had happened before and always failed: in the upper echelons of state it was believed that this revolt would also collapse.

Portugal poured troops into the colony as fast as its creaking logistic system would allow, but at the start, most of those efforts were piecemeal. The guerrillas made a lot of headway, grabbed several northern towns and even managed to establish a revolutionary government in a small colonial settlement in Angola’s northern jungles. They called it The Socialist Republic of Nambuangongo.

In April 1961, when the assault came, Portugal sought to deploy its forces as rapidly as possible to the territory to restore order. While some troops such as the paratroopers were airlifted to Africa, the majority came from the metrópole, or continental Portugal, by ocean transport, a lengthy and expensive business. Between the months of May and December 1961, troop strength was augmented from about 8,000 security personnel, army and police to something like 35,000.

The troops landed in Luanda and, as they became available over this eight-month period, the majority were deployed in bids to subdue the escalating threat and regain control in the north of the colonial territory. This transition from a small colonial force aimed at reaction, defence and subjective rule to a large one of reoccupation and neutralization was gradual: it was dependent both on transportation resources that were not designed for military power projection and the reorientation of ground and air forces to counter a modern guerrilla insurrection, something that almost none had faced before.

To be fair, the guerrillas had similar problems, probably worse because many had been hauled off the streets in the villages and towns where they lived, the fortunate ones given a rifle and ordered to head into the jungle and get on with it. The uprising teetered along, the rebels neither adequately armed nor trained and for the most part illiterate and brutal.

Angola was a tough war, fought by resolute adversaries in extremely difficult conditions—an army convoy struggles in northern Angola.

Squads of new Portuguese army arrivals—equally new to the game—were pushed northward from Luanda and soon displayed their own inadequacies. Indeed, government forces were not competent; those involved were badly trained and ill-equipped and did not possess the skills needed to fight what had transmogrified into a vicious counterinsurgency. As one observer pointed out at the time, while any form of military retaliation, by its nature, requires substantial numbers of light infantry, the force sent in to do the necessary must first be trained in the craft of fighting a ‘small war’ to be effective; second, it has to display a measure of determination, if only to get the job done.

In Lisbon’s new emergency, that was not the case because in those early days Portugal did not have the ability to alter age-old traditions. The last time its army had fought a significant battle was during World War I when German forces invaded both Angola and Mozambique and had given Lisbon’s troops a thorough drubbing. In truth, the majority of Portugal’s forces arriving in Angola in 1961 had no real military orientation and matters were compounded because these troops had to be made ready to fight at an accelerated pace. Even their uniforms were hastily crafted and not ideally suited to fighting in the African bush. Their weapons, too, were dismal. When the war started, the Portuguese were still using antiquated Karabiner 98k rifles—a controlled-feed bolt-action rifle based on the venerated Mauser M 98 system that traced its roots to the Lebel Model 1886—with some units equipped with the pre-World War I German MG 13.*

Army battalion insignia, the entrance to a base.

President Antonio de Salazar who took his nation to war.

And while some rebels had Kalashnikovs, the majority of the invading force did not. In fact, some of them were armed with their trusty old 19th-century flintlocks that they had used for generations to hunt. The vast majority had machetes and spears, but when a defending force of a few dozen is faced with a surge of a thousand or more screaming belligerents headed in their direction, only a fool would stand and fight.

In reoccupying the north and addressing the enemy threat, Portugal quickly realized that its most effective forces were those with special qualifications and advanced training: unfortunately there were only small numbers of such elite forces. The maturing experiences of the Portuguese in those early days during which anything could happen—and the tactical advantage swung to and fro—the consequential adjustments of the colonial Portuguese to fight a counterinsurgency war had to lead to the creation of many more specialized units to narrow the gap between the ability of the insurgents to take the initiative and government forces to respond.

Gathering of guerrillas prior to an attack. (Nordic Africa Institute)

That initiative started to emerge among the defenders very early on, in large part because the rebels—now referring to themselves as ‘liberating’ guerrillas—were not at all organized, and unquestionably, liquor and drugs had a lot to do with it. Both the MPLA and UPA/FNLA certainly shared very little with the ability, for instance, of the Viet Cong or Algeria’s FLN to effectively fight a war. There were two dissident political groupings in the Congolese capital Leopoldville at the time, the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola or People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) which displayed a clear Marxist, anti-colonial penchant and the União das Populações de Angola (UPA), which became the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) a year after the revolution started.

For the Marxist ‘Popular Movement’ this soon changed. A group of Moscow hardliners started to take control and dictated the way things should be run and what would happen to those who were not prepared to accept the dictates of the so-called ‘New Order’. The MPLA’s Agostinho Neto was true to his word when he declared that he would bring the revolution to the people of Angola and anybody—man or woman—who stood in his way was to be quietly taken into the jungle and shot.

Away from the main road, such as that was, it was always difficult country, in Cabinda especially.

Essentially, Angola’s war might never have happened had the colonizers not been so severe on their subjects. Work conditions for the average labourer in the colonies— and this applied to Angola as well as Mozambique, Portuguese Guinea and the offshore islands of São Tomé and Cape Verde—were atrocious. Pay was minimal and any money earned usually had to be spent in company stores owned by the employers, most times with prices inflated. So the capitalists gained both ways: from their workers and fairly good returns from the money paid to that labour in buying goods from company shops. If anybody complained or resisted this kind of exploitation, they were brutally dealt with by the police. Deaths of suspects in custody were not uncommon.

Events leading up to what is today referred as the ‘Baixa de Cassanje Revolt’ started with a boycott by workers who had been labouring in extensive cottonfields owned by the Cotonang Company which belonged to a European cartel of Portuguese, British and German investors. The boycott was led by two aspiring young political firebrands Antonio Mariano and Kulu-Xingu who urged workers to burn their identification cards and then encouraged them to attack Portuguese traders. This revolt caused a lot of damage and injuries but, as far as is known, no deaths, though the authorities in Luanda, the Angolan capital, claimed otherwise. The local governor of the territory sent in the air force in reply and bombed twenty villages. Critics of this action claimed the Portuguese used bombs and napalm and that there were more than 400 deaths, but the truth is another story.*

Unquestionably, there was a lot of damage done in these retaliatory raids and after that, many of the local population retreated into the bush. The large groups of rebels that had entered the country had very clearly been prepared for just such an eventuality. The bottom line here is that it was all planned beforehand and there is a lot of evidence: groups of rebels gathered just across the unmarked Congolese frontier, some having been trained in other countries, as well as the clear distribution of weapons and ammunition. Though limited, this did make a difference in the ultimate objective of trying to drive the settlers off their lands and from their shops and factories and finally, a command structure, though primal and lacking communications, became almost fit for purpose.

Initially military activities were restricted to the regions immediately north of Luanda, at one stage penetrating to within about forty kilometres of the capital before the guerrillas were driven back. But already there were a perspicacious few in the Portuguese capital who acknowledged that conditions had deteriorated to the point where Angola was faced with the prospect of a full-scale civil war. More to the point, they were not afraid to say to so to their superiors.

For once, the unusually reticent President Salazar listened and he had good reason to do so because this is what happened:

Earlier, on 4 February 1961, using arms which had been captured from Portuguese soldiers and police, MPLA guerrillas attacked Luanda’s São Paulo fortress prison and police headquarters in Luanda in an attempt to free a bunch of political prisoners who were being held there. While the attack was unsuccessful and no prisoners were released, seven Portuguese policemen and forty Angolans were killed, mostly MPLA insurgents. The authorities responded with alacrity in a series of sweeping counterinsurgency responses in which over 5,000 Angolans were arrested. Thereafter, a Luanda mob, almost all of them white, raided the city’s shanty towns—musseques— and killed dozens in the process.

In a draft thesis written by two Stanford University students, James Fearon and David Laitin, in 2005, titled ‘Portugal’ the sequence of events is very well encapsulated. Several factors helped translate these grievances into actual revolution, say Fearon and Laitin. First, quite a few neighbouring African countries were in the process of either getting their independence or planning for the official handover of power. This included the two Congos, one formerly Belgian and the other, Congo-Brazzaville, which had been administered under the Tricolor for half a century or more.*

One of the answers to the war was to gather locals in protected villages or aldeamentos, one seen here over the barrel of a 20mm cannon.