On 24 april 1974, the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) – an organisation of low-ranking officers in the Portuguese Armed Forces – staged a coup in Lisbon. The fascist regime fell and anti-colonial activists in Portugal’s African colonies rejoiced, although many who had participated in the liberation war, including Viriato da Cruz, Cabral and Mondlane, didn’t live to see its end. The new Portuguese government led by Vasco Gonçalves pushed for a rapid transfer of power to the liberation movements in the colonies. In the case of Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau/Cape Verde, Frelimo and the PAIGC were obvious contenders. Angola was another matter. The rapid withdrawal of Portuguese troops created a power vacuum that none of the competing forces – the MPLA, the FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola) and Unita (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) – had the popular support or territory to fill.
The MPLA was in disarray. Viriato da Cruz had left the party and moved to China in 1966; Andrade had fallen out with Neto and set up the Active Revolt faction in the Republic of the Congo. Eastern Revolt, a splinter group of the MPLA that had formed around Daniel Chipenda, was mobilising its forces in Zambia, alongside Jonas Savimbi’s Unita. The International Department in Moscow worried that Neto had too little support among the Bakongo in northern Angola, and that his base didn’t extend beyond mestiço-assimilado intellectuals in Luanda: Holden Roberto, an ethnic Bakongo and leader of the FNLA, had strong support among the rural population in the north and the Soviets initially hoped he would form a ‘common front’ with the MPLA. They made contact with Roberto through Oleg Nazhestkin, a young Soviet agent who had been stationed in Léopoldville since 1961 (he had been briefly expelled after the coup). But Nazhestkin’s suspicions that Roberto was pro-Western proved correct. It transpired that he had been receiving funds from the CIA throughout the 1950s and 1960s; Washington had even hoped to involve him in one of its plots to kill Lumumba.
Neto’s close ties to Portuguese communists, along with positive reports from Pravda journalists such as Oleg Ignatyev – a close friend of Cabral’s – had eventually helped to consolidate his reputation in Moscow. The Soviets provided financial support to the MPLA throughout the 1960s, but, as Telepneva points out, ‘Neto never really established a close relationship with his Soviet liaisons.’ With its non-aligned status and Tito’s reputation as a ‘godfather’ of African liberation, Yugoslavia seemed a more useful ally than Moscow or Beijing. In the summer of 1968, Tito openly criticised Moscow’s decision to invade Czechoslovakia and put an end to the Prague Spring; Neto took the same position and when he refused to back down, the Soviets briefly withdrew their funding. Belgrade duly stepped up deliveries of medicine, cash, aid and arms to Neto’s movement. Yugoslav help was ‘constant, firm and generous’, Neto later wrote.
Jonas Savimbi had formed his own party, Unita, in 1966. His ideological commitments were vague. He was an anti-communist who had tried to get funding from the GDR, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union; he claimed to see Che Guevara as a model. Even Beijing, which had no military or intelligence presence in Angola, took a shine to him. Its association with Savimbi – and therefore with the US and apartheid South Africa – damaged China’s reputation as a leader of national liberation in the Third World. The decision not to support the MPLA was perhaps Maoist China’s greatest failure in Africa. Otherwise, it was a generous funder of Nyerere’s ujamaa socialism in Tanzania and Kenneth Kaunda’s Zambian ‘humanism’. It also played a decisive role in minority-rule Rhodesia by supporting Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union against Joshua Nkomo’s rival liberation movement, which was funded and equipped by Moscow.
A photograph from January 1975, reprinted in Telepneva’s book, shows Neto, Roberto and Savimbi at the signing of the Alvor Agreement, which set the terms for a transitional government in Angola: an arrangement that split power equally between the three liberation movements. Any hope of peace was shortlived. In a closed session of the Soviet Solidarity Committee in June 1975, Petr Manchkha, another second generation mezhdunarodnik and head of the Africa section of the International Department, argued (correctly) that the MPLA was caught up in a ‘serious international imperialist conspiracy’ involving the US, South Africa and Zaire. On 14 October, South Africa launched a full-scale armoured invasion from South-West Africa (now Namibia).
On 5 November, Castro dispatched Cuban troops to Angola, without alerting Moscow or the Warsaw Pact states. The Soviets were stunned. They had been slow to act because of disagreements between the KGB and the GRU, which had urged the Kremlin to hold back on its support for the MPLA. Moscow eventually extended official recognition to the MPLA, but it was the Cuban intervention that proved decisive. At the height of the civil war, Cuba had more than 50,000 troops stationed in Angola. John Stockwell, a CIA agent-turned-whistleblower, explained in 1978:
When Pretoria renewed its assault on Angola a decade later, Cuba and East Germany stepped in to support the Angolan armed forces. In December 1988, Cuba, South Africa and Angola agreed to the retreat of Cuban and South African forces. In 1992, Unita rejected the MPLA’s success in an UN-supervised election and tore the country apart for another decade. Savimbi’s disastrous vendetta ended when he was killed in an ambush in 2002.
Telepneva and Williams both trace with regret the arc of movements that started off calling for freedom and self-determination but ended up running neocolonial or authoritarian regimes. Williams’s portrayal of Lumumba and Nkrumah is hagiographic at times, but she also offers an alternative story of national liberation, told from the perspective of ‘minor’ characters, including Thomas Kanza (Lumumba’s ambassador to the UN) and Nkrumah’s secretary, Erica Powell. What emerges from these testimonies is not a picture of tragedy, romance or against-the-odds heroism, but a sober assessment of the tough and sometimes impossible choices facing left-wing anti-colonial activists who were under pressure from foreign enemies and foreign allies alike. ‘For better or worse,’ Telepneva concludes, ‘the Africans in this story were agents of their own liberation,’ however brief it turned out to be.
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