In a report of , Manuel Rodrigues spoke of making many converts and imagining that many more priests would be needed, but gave few specifics. The arrangement did not suit the Jesuits who did not put much trust in the educational acumen of the secular priests.
The case of a long-standing ally, the ruler of Quitelle, who the highly active Jesuit priest Pedro Tavares visited in nearly fifty years after the process began is typical. Further investigation revealed that the ruler of Quitelle had been baptized by a secular priest who had pointedly allowed him to keep every element of the older religion. The Jesuits had strict standards for what elements of traditional religion they would tolerate, but they were also prepared to make almost as many compromises with indigenous beliefs as the Kongolese church had, when approaching the people of Ndongo and their northwestern neighbors, the Mbundu, who spoke a related but different language called Kimbundu.
The Jesuits began deciding what was licit and what was not, and how elements of traditional religion could be reconciled with Christian theology, in fairly close conjunction with the existing Kongo church which controlled Luanda. When they arrived, they met a parish priest in Luanda who had come from Kongo, and Kongo lay teachers had been active in the kingdom as well.
From a religious perspective, the practices of the Mbundu people and those of Kongo were very similar, just as their languages were closely related.
The results of the first generation of missionary work in Angola are revealed in an examination of the Kimbundu catechism, composed probably in the s by Father Francesco Pacconio just as the renewed Portuguese military establishment encroached on the heartlands of Ndongo. Comparing the two catechisms enables us to see the differences in Jesuit strategy which resulted as the two church structures diverged. The Kimbundu catechism was probably the result of a generation of linguistic work by people who knew the religious system of Kongo, like the residents and teachers in Luanda, but also applied it to Kimbundu.
An Mbundu priest named Dionisio da Faria Baretto, praised by the governor as being learned in theology, accompanied Paconio in his initial trip to evangelize the kingdom of Ndongo in That the Mbundu had similar spiritual conceptions to the Kongolese is demonstrated by the detailed description of religious practice in the Mbundu area made by Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo, composed between and Both religions had a strong attachment to the idea that the dead could influence the living and that it was appropriate to propitiate them with regular offerings at their graves.
The Kimbundu catechism did not specifically attack the idea of the ancestors any more than the Kikongo one did: both explained Christian ideas without attacking African ones. Nevertheless, missionaries sometimes reported on what they considered to be theologically unacceptable ideas from some of their baptized parishioners.
The two peoples approached divinity differently, at least insofar as that approach manifested itself in Christianity. An important difference between the Kikongo and Kimbundu catechisms is their attitude toward traditional African religion.
The Mbundu territorial guardians were responsible for the general welfare of the locality, bringing sun, rain, bountiful harvests, and good luck to the people in their common endeavors. Tavares devoted a great deal of attention to attacking these shrines, and made a special trip just to seize and burn one at Golungo.
At times the popularity of the new shrines benefitted from a co-revelation, or the occurrence of a reported miracle that was religiously significance in multiple ways, for both the missionaries and their targets. If the specific nature of the kiteke was the subject of Jesuit criticism and even violent action, its religious nature continued to be respected by local Christians.
The kilundas who were worshipped at the shrines gave their communities rules and taboos to follow as a means of ensuring their continued protection.
The language of the catechism effectively transferred this idea to the otherworldly beings of the Christian cosmology. Kongo was already Christian, and devotion to the faith there was held to be high.
In Angola, conversion was often linked to conquest, so that allies or the defeated accepted conversion as a matter of political expediency or necessity. In Angola, the Jesuits were fierce advocates of war against the Mbundu to convert them by force.
Their lengthy correspondence reads as much like the chronicle of conquest as the report of missionary activities, and they saw, early on, that conquest would be a crucial part of their idea of spreading the faith. Sometime between and , following a long period of war and evangelization an anonymous Jesuit wrote that it had proved impossible to introduce true Christianity anywhere in Angola except the areas around Luanda which had been Kongo territory and the forts that Portugal controlled directly.
From this, he drew the conclusion that a complete conquest of Angola was necessary. On the other hand, in the Jesuits opened a formal mission in Kongo, though there had been visits and reconnaissance before then. The approach to Kongo was very different from that in Angola. It did not concern itself with African religious practices, but focused on rounding up New Christians descendants of Jews who had converted to Christianity in accused of practicing Judaism in secret or denouncing the church.
In this round, African religious practices were denounced as witchcraft fetishism or idolatry, but with interesting regional distinctions. In Kongo, all the denunciators of what could be called religious crimes, such as idolatry, were themselves Kongolese, while Jesuit denunciations were aimed at the secular clergy serving in the country.
In Angola, on the other hand, religious crimes were denounced by Jesuits, especially Tavares. Thus, despite the substantial differences in their political situations, missionaries both in Kongo and the Kimbundu-speaking areas of Angola developed Christian theologies that essentially incorporated large components of indigenous spirituality.
These two syncretic systems could then potentially have been carried across the Atlantic, where so many Central Africans served as catechists, and also be translated into other African religious systems. The role of Kongolese clergy and lay catechists in developing a syncretic form of Christianity in conquered Angola may just as well have served the same purpose in the America of the slaves. The conversion of Angolans had its reflection in the religion of slaves in Brazil. The same wave of Portuguese conquest and colonization that had led to the formation of Kimbundu Christianity also brought thousands of slaves to Brazil, and there in the most successful of the sixteenth-century captaincies, Bahia and Pernambuco, the Jesuits took the lead not only in converting the indigenous Brazilians but also the African slaves who came among them.
In this, they employed the language of their early catechisms. Jesuits in Pernambuco, for example, studied Kimbundu and learned to read and even to compose in the language, as sixteenth-century sources reveal. The specific Central African variant of Christianity discussed here, which incorporated African concepts into Christian theology, very likely was at the root of later forms of Brazilian Christianity that have become world famous.
In the late seventeenth century, West African spirituality was also incorporated into this tradition of Christianity. He is the author of several books, including the winner of the Herskovits Prize for , Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles and the Foundation of the Americas, — Cambridge University Press, , which he co-authored with Linda M.
Venice: Curia Provinciale dei Cappuccini, — Henceforward MMA. Ravenstein London: The Hakluyt Society, , 64—5. Unlike the Kikongo catechism, which was a translation of a well-known Portuguese catechism, the Kimbundu one seems to have been made especially for use in Angola. Wiesbaden: Steiner, —88 , , n. A, book 1, 72— Despite the title, the manuscript is primarily about the Mbundu, and only peripherally about Kongo. Additional information on seventeenth-century Mbundu religion is supplied in an earlier text of Pero Tavares.
See ibid. A, book 1. It is worthwhile to remember that this blame comes from a governor who never opposed to the slave trade. By the way, no Portuguese writer of that period seems to feel horrified by the transformation of African people into pieces.
The moral indifference of the Lusitanians toward the enslavement of Africans is not too surprising: the use of slave labor was traditional in the Mediterranean area Saco ; Capela ; Maestri Filho a.
Modern European or African historians also admit the existence of slavery in ancient Africa. But what was slavery in the African tradition? According to Portuguese sources of that period, slavery in Central Africa was based on a conjunction of traditional rules. War prisoners, traitors, and criminals were taken as slaves, but neither noble persons nor women and children could be sold as pieces.
Sometimes, slaves could also be given as a tribute to a more powerful chief. Besides, slaves became part of the family of their master and could not be sold, usually, to anybody else. The most noteworthy novelty of the Atlantic trade was, however, the mass deportation of slaves to a distant continent. The voracity of the American markets was to increase the demand for slaves to a degree never before seen. During the seventeenth century, Brazil alone imported no less than 44, pieces yearly Glasgow In the mind of the slaves, to be a slave in Africa or to be deported to the Americas was not the same.
There is a big difference between the slaves of the Portuguese and those of the negroes [Africans]. The first do not only obey words, but even signs. They are especially afraid of being taken to Brazil or to New Spain, because they are convinced that when they arrive at those lands, they will be killed by the buyers, who, as they think, will make gunpowder of their bones and extract of their brains and flesh the oil that is sold in Ethiopia [….
The reason they invoke is that they sometimes find hair in the leather bottles, which in their opinion comes from humans skinned for that purpose. Therefore, out of fear of being sent to America, they get frantic and try to run away to the forest. Others, at the moment of embarking, challenge the blows and kill themselves, jumping into the water Cavazzi []: I. Aside from such individual acts of resistance, we also know about mass rebellions. In , a Portuguese navigator, Joseph Antonio Pereira, tried to obtain a refund of the damages caused to his ship in the port of Cabinda present-day Angola by the rebellion of the slaves he had on board my cursive [6] from an insurance company in Cadiz.
In the words of Jan Vansina ,. Its effects must have been equally impressive. However, unlike the industrial revolution, which was home-grown, the Atlantic trade was accompanied by foreign values, attitudes, and ideas. It therefore posed even more of a challenge to the old ways than the industrial revolution did in Europe.
In his wide-ranging study about the rise of the first states in Central Africa, Vansina emphasizes the importance of the rainforest in the ancient history of the area. He argues that these states rose in accordance with the regional environment, characterized by the existence of a tropical forest sprinkled with savannas.
In Central Africa, the rain forest played a decisive part in the war between Africans and Portuguese. Outside the forest, Africans had only few possibilities to escape the Portuguese aggression. In the villages and in the open savanna, their sole options were slavery or death. Difficult to access, the rainforest was, certainly, the strongest ally of Africans who fought — for different reasons — against the Portuguese.
For these, men of the Atlantic, the tropical forest was an unknown and unfriendly space, or even a military and theological inferno. The General History of The Angolan Wars by Cadornega [] reveals the obsession the forest aroused in the imaginary of the Portuguese.
In the work of this early historian, the forest becomes the quintessential expression of a hostile continent. It represents everything that hinders the advancement of Portuguese penetration. What really troubles the governor is, of course, that the hidden slaves are out of his reach.
Instead of recognizing the advantage the knowledge of territory offers to the Africans, he disqualifies them by accusing them of grave crimes against humanity. In his narrative, the forest — like in the famous novel by Joseph Conrad - is the heart of darkness , the very seat of barbarism.
When the Africans discovered that the mato inspired such horror in the Portuguese, they made it their habitual refuge, patiently negotiating from there with the intruders. Queen Njinga, in Angola, played this game to perfection, thus provoking the increasing anger of the Portuguese. By withdrawing to the forest, the queen was not only obeying a military imperative, but also putting pressure on the Portuguese.
If they wanted her to get out of the forest, they had to fulfill a series of conditions. Meanwhile, she would resist: that was, in her political language, the sense of her withdrawal to the matos. By giving themselves names of plants, stones or animals, the natives manifested the intensity of their relation with the natural cosmos. It is true that in the texts written by functionaries of the Portuguese empire, the quality of the relationship the Africans maintained with the mato or the forest as a sacred space is not described precisely.
In the mambos I had the opportunity to hear in Havana , an ever present word is n finda [8]. N finda is invoked by the palo monte communities as the residence of the spirits of the dead and the spirits of nature.
It is the the space of the origin and of tradition. For the Africans the war was never a purely military matter. On the contrary, they dedicated to it with the whole stock of their traditional beliefs. The Africans did not always show a great hurry to accept those conditions. Any war, whether they were victorious or not, was always an opportunity for the Portuguese to obtain large quantities of slaves. Through their specific way of making war, the Portuguese sought to demonstrate their superiority and their ambition of total control over the territories.
It happened here that a father fleed with his child from our troops, and seeing that he could not save his son he turned to us and shot all his arrows until they killed him; he never abandoned his place so that his son could hide, and the father died and went to hell. Another man was in a house with two women and defended himself without any intention to surrender, so strongly that they put fire to the house, and burnt all three of them.
This caused such a terror amongst our enemies that the whole of Angola was afraid of us Afonso []: Another frequent practice of the Portuguese, mass decapitation, was the signifier of a similar message. According to Cadornega, the real goal of this encounter was to stage. The Africans fully understood the meaning of such messages. According to the stories of their adversaries, they used to respond with verbal violence. Did he actually eat them?
In fact, far from being based on actual observation, allusions to African cannibalism mostly derive from an inaccurate interpretation of certain African speech patterns.
As we heard before, African threatened the Portuguese by boasting that they would eat all of them. By using a speech pattern I call boasting speech , they only intend to scare their enemies. The messages exchanged through this channel always bore the mark of the European written tradition and the feudal language used in the Spanish-Portuguese empire.
Of course, epistolary communication was radically alien to the local oral tradition. No expression of autonomous African thought would fit in a letter which respected the rules of feudal correspondence.
By writing or dictating a letter, African kings or chiefs implicitly recognized their submission to the Iberian crown. That means that the channel or medium - diplomatic correspondence, in this case - decisively shaped the content of the message. If they wanted to speak out their refusal, they would lay hand on other means like orality, body-language, and - last but not least - war. He begged me to catch the free maroon negroes in order to people with them his kingdom.
He explained he could not open the [slave] market for not being ready yet. Arguing that people said that the jaga Caza and [the queen] Ginga Ambande were between Zungui Amoque and Andalla Quesua causing great damage and threatening war, he begged for protection and security of life. He asked me for an umbrella and a hat for himself, similar to that worn by the king of Congo, some tambourines and some bells, a carpet and a silk blanket and paper, and he sent me a black woman with hanging breasts, a bearded negro, and four negroes Sousa A thorough reading of his letter, however, shows that he does not offer anything concrete to the Portuguese.
Pointing to the difficult situation of his kingdom, Angola Aire refuses, without saying so explicitly, to create the slave markets and to pay the tributes the Portuguese expect from him. As we will see later on, the puppet king would finally get tired of this role. Notwithstanding the hate she always seems to have felt for the Portuguese Sousa , she knew perfectly the rules of diplomatic correspondence:.
The Ovimbundu Kingdoms were all integrated into the Colony of Angola by The last people to be subjugated was Kwanyamo, a subset of the Ovambo peoples, in Southern Angola. In September the last king of the Kwanayamo, King Mandume, was defeated by the Portuguese [cxviii]. The defeat of the Kwanyamo marked the total domination by the Portuguese over Angola, and at this point the Colony reached the boundaries which had been stipulated in the Berlin Conference of — by the European colonial powers.
None of the people of Angola was present or had any say at the conference, and the boundaries which were set would cut through already existing social formations. The Kingdom of Kongo, which had been one of the largest kingdoms in Africa, was split between Belgium and Portugal.
In the British Empire halted any attempts by the Portuguese to expand Angola any further east [cxix]. By the mids the Angolan colony had about the same borders as the modern nation state.
In the southern border shared with South West Africa which officially came under the control of South Africa in was negotiated with South Africa, settling the last of the border disputes with other European colonial powers [cxx]. It was the lure of commercial farming cocoa and sugar cane , diamonds, and rubber, which had made the Portuguese want to expand their colony from the coast to further inland.
Once the actual mineral resources were firmly under Portuguese control the colonial administration now needed workers to extract those minerals. This labour would come at a huge cost to the local Angolan people. Life was hard for the majority of African people living in the colony. While the trans-Atlantic slave trade was made illegal in it was still legal to own slaves in Angola until [cxxi] [cxxii]. In many places various forms of slavery would continue long into the s. Various forms of slavery and forced labour was common into the mids.
The colonial authorities would regularly round up Angolans and through violence and intimidation conscript them into work regiments for various colonial projects [cxxiv]. For the people recruited into forced labour life was hard and short. Plantations rarely paid any remunerations, and when they did it was inconsistent, minimal and sometimes only usable at the local plantation shop.
Angry at a worker for his suicide the bosses of the plantation denied him a dignified funeral and instead burnt the body on the local highway [cxxvii]. The similarities between the slavery of the previous centuries and the labour system of the late s and early s were uncanny.
In a chocolate producer, William Cadbury, walked up a labour recruitment trail and found wooden shackles all over the sides of the road. People coerced into forced labour would have their shackles removed only the moment they signed their labour contracts and then they would be sent off to their designated place of work [cxxviii]. It was usual for colonial administrators to go to inland villages and recruit mostly young men to various work on plantations and colonial projects.
The young men would sign contracts which were meant to be for between two and five years, but in most places they were automatically renewed upon expiration. This meant that very few of the people recruited from the various inland villages would ever return home again [cxxix].
The British, who had for centuries had a special relationship with Portugal, made arrangements for Angolan and Mozambican people to be sent to work in their gold and diamond mines in the Transvaal or in the Cape Colony [cxxx]. This relationship between British and Portuguese colonies created the foundations for a migrant labour system which would encompass most of Southern Africa up until the after the s.
Up until the s Angolan people was coerced into travelling to South Africa to work in the mines there [cxxxi]. For European settlers the Angolan colony was enticing place to move as it offered opportunities denied in Europe. In there was an attempt at establishing a Jewish homeland in Angola, and while it failed, Angola would draw a reasonable amount of Jewish settlers as an effect of the persecution of Jews in Portugal since the s. By there were about In the s there was a great influx of Boer settlers from South Africa, but large scale settlement was held back by the lack of arable land in Angola [cxxxiii].
Local Angolans also fought fiercely against attempts at setting up farms. In , and attempts at setting up plantations close to the town of Porto Amboim was ended by local uprisings. The farms were burnt and the settlers were killed or driven out of the area. The Portuguese army would then come in and protect settlers as they rebuilt the plantations [cxxxiv]. The white population of Angola was not to work in the farm, but should become managers and shop keepers.
This meant that the poor and uneducated in Portugal could rise fast in status and economic prosperity by moving to the colony.
After Angola began to create legislation which advocated strict segregation between the European and African people. To become a citizen a person had to prove to the colonial authorities that they were monogamous, spoke fluent Portuguese, ate with a knife and fork, and wore European clothes [cxxxvii].
In reality the Native Statute of was used as a gate keeping tool to regulate who could access economic and social opportunities. In the early s the idea, imported from Victorian Britain, that based on skin colour some people are inherently better than others became prominent in the colony.
This divided people into the racial categories of black or white. After this time a black and white racial divide would increasingly become the proxy for whom was allowed to gain citizenship and the privileges that went with it. In Luanda there was a class of black Angolans who had gained a European education and had lived in the colony and mixed with European people for generations.
They had experienced a limited amount of privilege compared to other black Angolans, but they were in the early s increasingly marginalised because of the introduction of an oppressive ideology based on race [cxxxviii].
Postcard of Luanda from the s. After World War II in there was a great demand for coffee in the world, and in the next 30 years Angola's coffee industry would expand producing Most of the coffee was produced on larger plantations owned by white settlers, but in northern Angola there were still coffee grown on small plots of land owned by African peasants. Yet the settlers would control storage, transport and the export part of the supply chain, including shops where people could buy household goods.
The black peasants would use their future crops to buy everyday needs, and when there was a credit crisis or failure in the crops the shop-keepers would take ownership of the land which had been used as collateral [cxl]. The plantations therefore slowly spread north and the peasants became labourers on land which they had previously owned. Plantations also meant an increased need for labour which the plantation owners mitigated by bringing in workers from south-central Angola, where the Ovimbundu people lived.
The Bakongo northerners were upset with the newcomers as they had lost their land, and the southern Ovimbundu were angry about being forced into labour and moved away from their families.
Things were not good in the rest of Angola either. In an estimated On February 4, , a large group of Angolan people stormed several prisons in Luanda. It is debated between historians whether the rebellion was a spontaneous uprising or directed by the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola MPLA [cxliii]. The uprisings in Luanda and in the north became the starting point for the Angolan national revolution to free themselves from Portuguese rule [cxliv].
MPLA which was Marxist in ideology had been founded by an amalgamation of several smaller parties in The party was rooted in urban areas and particularly strong in Luanda. They wanted a socialist revolution as well as independence from Portugal, and in Agostinho Neto was elected president of the party [cxlv]. The UPA wanted to restore the Kingdom of Kongo to what it was in its glory days, and the party leader was called Holden Roberto [cxlvi].
The uprising in the north was by far the most lethal as an estimated In Januray, , the Portuguese forces sent airplanes to bomb several villages involved in a strike in the cotton industry in northern Angola. The bombings is estimated to have destroyed 17 villages and killed about The leader of the FNLA, Holden Roberto, established a government in exile in an attempt at making his party the legitimate representatives of the Angolan liberation struggle.
UNITA launched itself as a party for the African peasants of Angola, yet it remained a very small force over the course of the independence struggle and would draw its support mainly from Ovimbundu peoples. By the MPLA had established itself internationally as the primary force of the national revolution for independence [clii]. To limit further uprisings and rebellions Portugal began making investments in infrastructure, building schools, and assist struggling farmers.
They also sent an additional The Angolan struggle for liberation was met with severe retaliation from the Portuguese government. This would make it difficult for the liberation movements to recruit from the countryside. By there was about In addition to this there was infighting between the different liberation parties.
All of the above factors meant that the liberation struggle had little success up until What the uprisings did do was to become a great expense on the Portuguese economy. Between the uprisings in Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau there were, in , This was a great cost to what was at the time one of the economically poorest nations in Europe.
To try and make the colony of Angola more economically self-sufficient a beer industry was encouraged in , which created a thriving economy for the export of alcohol in Angola [clvi]. The colony was also opened up for investments, and at the end of the s American and European companies began great investments in the search and extraction of oil [clvii].
The royalties on oil extracted by Texan oil companies would to a large degree help fund the Portuguese armed presence in Angola. Both South Africa and the United States of America also supplied the Portuguese forces with war materials and arms [clviii].
In turn the United States of America would support various sides in the long running conflicts in Angola, but initially they supplied weapons to the Portuguese dictatorship [clix]. Even with an influx of money from the oil revenues it was impossible for the Portuguese to hold on to Angola in the long term.
The financial and social strain on Portugal to keep up the fighting was too high. Marcello Caetano took power in Portugal , but would never have the solid hold over the country as Salazar did. The movement was founded by members of the armed forces in Portugal and they believed that the colonial wars could never be won. They were abhorred by the colonial conflicts and government policies in general. On April 25, , the MFA overthrew the Portuguese government in a coup, and in July that same year they promised independence to the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Angola [clxii].
The liberation struggle had been won by not allowing Portugal to win and through the liberation movements actively protracting the struggle over almost 15 years. Portugal would in turn give up power over Angola on the 11 November, Angolans who had lived in exile for decades, many part of one of the three liberation movements, returned to Angola and particularly to the capital in Luanda [clxiv]. All the three parties mobilised their irregular militias, and fighting ensued in the streets of Luanda.
The MPLA had historically the strongest support in the city, and could also call on a large force of militias from the countryside. Together with about While the fighting was still going strong in the south and north, the last Portuguese governor left Angola, and on 11 November, , Agostinho Neto proclaimed the establishment of the Peoples Republic of Angola [clxxi].
UNITA ensconced themselves in the southern and eastern highlands, while the MPLA occupied the western and northern parts of the country and in the urban areas as well.
This territorialisation would cause people in various areas to strictly identify with one or the other party and help fuel the conflict [clxxiii]. Agostinho Neto declares independence 11 November, The United States of America was forced to cut much of their support and make it secretive as their people was not interested in any new foreign adventures after the fiasco of the Vietnam War [clxxiv].
The South Africans received massive international condemnation as they were already greatly unpopular because of the apartheid regime, and their intervention was seen as them spreading the apartheid system [clxxvi]. At the same time the MPLA was trying to set up a post-colonial government and was weakened by the multitude of factions in the party. The power dynamics and segmented hierarchies in colonial Angola had been very complex.
MPLA consisted in of Mestizos people of mixed backgrounds and Assimilados Afrian people which had attained a Portuguese education and habits , white left-wing radicals, urban radicals, the party leadership who had gone into exile, peasants who had been guerrillas in the countryside, or fighters who had held their stance close to the city of Luanda [clxxix].
In addition to the many factions within the MPLA the flight of all of the white public-service personal who had been the core of the governmental bureaucracy created great problems in early days of the new independent government [clxxx]. The Portuguese also left very few functioning institutions a lot of the newly independent African countries inherited a legal framework, civil service, and an internationally recognised currency which would be useful to the new political project which the MPLA was engaged in.
The factionalism and ideological divisions within the MPLA would exacerbate these issues which in turn made governing the nation even more difficult. He also stoked racial tension by accusing the MPLA government of being overly white, and of Luanda being a city of foreigners [clxxxi]. For various reasons stated above and because of the continued conflict with UNITA, the MPLA government struggled to live up to the expectations which general people had of an independent Angola.
The MPLA's core constituency in Luanda was particularly disappointed with the lack of any radical change [clxxxii]. In May some of the poor and working-class people were fed up and launched a coup against President Neto's government. The political philosopher and soldier, Nito Alves, was the most prominent leader of the forces behind the coup.
Alves was from the area around Luanda and had been one of the seminally independent MPLA commanders who had commanded militia forces in the forests around Luanda [clxxxiii].
His biggest concern with Neto's government was that they had abandoned too much of the Marxist ideology they claimed to support, and that the party was led by elites with no connections to the peasants they represented. It is disputed amongst historians whether the government or the Nito Alves faction initiated the subsequent violence [clxxxv]. Nito Alves hoped that his popular appeal would inspire to Soviet Union to shift their support to him, but the Russians sat on the fence while the Cubans decisively fought for Agostinho Neto.
The rebellion was brutally put down and most of its leadership, including Nito Alves, was executed [clxxxvi]. Thousands of civilians were killed by forces aligned with the ruling regime [clxxxvii]. The attempted coup made the MPLA increasingly authoritative and they now abandoned the egalitarian mass movement model in favour of a more top down dictatorial approach [clxxxviii].
In the Democratic Republic of Congo agreed to stop their support for the FNLA this spelt the final end of the party and its participation in the civil war. The northerners, mostly Bakongo people, who had all fled the country after the uprising in and the losses in were now allowed to return home. While the leadership of the FNLA returned to their local towns and villages in obscurity some would return to the political scene over a decade later [clxxxix]. The South African army decided to pursue the retreating Angolan soldiers all the way to a city called Cuito Cuanavale [cxcii].
The Cubans sent in more soldiers to defend the city, and the battle of Cuito Cuanavale turned into a siege in Neither side managed to win over the other. Eventually both sides claimed that the victory was theirs, partly because of events outside of Angola. Both South Africa and Cuba had experienced many causalities, and the Soviet Union was looking towards improving their relationship with the West [cxciii]. Cuba and South Africa would withdraw support and South-West Africa would become an independent nation under the new name of Namibia [cxciv].
This was a major setback particularly for UNITA as they were dependent on the apartheid regime in South Africa as a neighbour to effectively continue military operations [cxcv].
However in March the Russian and American governments met in Namibia, at the independence ceremony in Windhoek, and agreed to withdraw economic and material support to their respective allies in Angola [cxcvii].
The two parties agreed to demobilize their forces and hold national elections for a new government the following year. Election ballot from the national elections. The peace treaty was widly celebrated by the people of Angola. There was a general sense of optimism that the democratic elections would bring a period of peace and growth [cxcviii]. When the election came on 12 September, , the country was deeply divided in their vote.
The MPLA won a majority in the new national parliament and also won the presedency. It came as a suprise to Savimbi that the Ovimbundu people, who were supposed to be his support base, had voted against him in the urban areas. The elections had to some degree been a zero sum game, and the loser would be left with no power at all.
Savimbi understood that he could only gain power through the barrel of a gun [cc]. On November 1, , war broke out again. This time with increasing intensity and causualties. Most of the disarmament had been a show for international observers, and both sides were prepared for the renewal of the conflict [cci]. As opposed to the previous Angolan conflicts the cities became a battelground this time in this last phase of the civil war [cciii].
UNITA on the other hand was attempting to punish the urban centres which had voted against them [ccv]. The countryside was also experiencing brutal violence. Landmines had always been in use in the countryside during previous conflicts in Angola, but after there was an increased use by both sides, and civilians would continue to feel the effects of this for years after the war had ended [ccvii].
Towards the end of the war UNITA, especially, became increasingly brutal against the civilian population and particularly towards refugees trying to escape the war [ccviii]. In the Lusaka protocol was signed by both sides ensuring a short cease fire, but both sides continued to arm themselves [ccix].
The peace did not last long and in the two sides were again engaged in open war against each other [ccx]. On Februrary 22, , there was a suprising turn of events. Jonas Savimbi had been cornered by government forces near the town of Luena and was killed and secretly buried [ccxiii].
With Savimbi out of the way peace could be a posibility, and representatives from the two parties met to discuss a cease fire.
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