Nationalism, Liberation, and Decolonization in Angola Page 1 of 28 Nationalism, Liberation, and Decolonization in Angola Didier Péclard, Department of Political Science, University of Geneva https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.640 Published online: 31 August 2021 Summary Angolan independence was achieved on November 11, 1975, after a 14-year-long war. The war was the result of three overlapping dynamics. The first was Portugal’s refusal to consider the possibility of a negotiated settlement for the independence of its colonies in Africa. Under the dictatorial regime of António Salazar, Portugal had become extremely dependent on its colonies, both economically and politically, and was therefore, by the late 1950s, bent on maintaining its colonial empire. The second was the development of nationalist feelings among Angolan elites, which eventually materialized in the late 1950s to early 1960s in two—and, as of 1966, three—competing nationalist movements. The third constituted a series of popular grievances within sectors of the Angolan population, especially landless farmers and plantation workers in the north, against their growing marginalization and impoverishment due to exploitative colonial policies. This eventually led to three uncoordinated revolts in January, February, and March 1961 that marked the beginning of the war of independence. The division of Angolan nationalism into three competing movements—the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA)—was shaped by Angola’s long history of violent integration into Portugal’s colonial empire. The 20th-century Portuguese colonial state in Angola relied on the exploitation of the so-called native workforce through a vast system of forced labor and on taxation. It was also exclusionary and discriminatory, leaving very few avenues for upward social mobility for Angolan “natives.” It was therefore mostly at the margins of the colonial world that such mobility was possible, especially within Christian missions. The integration of these Angolan elite groups into the colonial world, or their exclusion, followed different paths according to local contexts and histories. As a result, the different lived experiences of the social groups that formed the backbone of the nationalist movement made it exceedingly difficult for them to agree on a common vision for independent Angola. This, together with the uncompromising thirst for power of the leadership of the three movements and Cold War logics, contributed to the civil war that engulfed the country at independence and lasted until 2002. Keywords: Angola, Portugal, nationalism, liberation struggle, decolonization, Christian missions, colonial state Subjects: Colonial Conquest and Rule, Political History Angola under Salazar: Diehard Colonialism Angola became independent on November 11, 1975, after a 14-year-long war of independence. The war was the result of Portugal’s refusal to consider the possibility of a negotiated independence for its colonies in Africa (Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands, Angola, and Mozambique). Since the late 1920s, Portugal had been governed by António Salazar, who was brought to power after a military coup overthrew the First Republic in 1926, first as an all- Didier Péclard, Department of Political Science, University of Geneva Nationalism, Liberation, and Decolonization in Angola Page 2 of 28 powerful minister of finance in 1928 and in 1932 as prime minister. In 1933, he founded the Estado Novo (New State), a corporatist state that turned growingly dictatorial under his leadership and was only overturned on April 25, 1974 , by the “Carnation Revolution.” The Carnation Revolution, named as such as a reference to the fact that it brought down the Salazar regime without hardly firing a gunshot, started as a military coup driven by middle-rank Portuguese military officers. The decolonization wars that Portugal had been waging since the early 1960s, during which, by 1974, proportionally more young Portuguese soldiers were drafted into the colonial army than US youth during the Vietnam War, had a profound impact on Portuguese society and reinforced internal opposition to Salazar’s regime, largely contributing to its eventual downfall. 1 By the mid-20th century, the Estado Novo had become extremely dependent on its colonies, both economically and politically. They produced the raw material and natural resources its metropolitan economy needed. They did so at very low prices thanks to a widespread system of so-called contract (i.e., forced) labor, which compelled young men to work in coffee, cotton, and sisal plantations, among others, for very low wages. The colonies also served as an outlet for Portuguese wine and other commodities. 2 Besides, Angola, and to a lesser extent Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, became as of the 1950s a prime destination for impoverished Portuguese emigrants, thereby providing Salazar’s government with a temporary solution to rampant unemployment and poverty in Portugal’s rural areas. 3 It is only when Portugal’s economy became more integrated into Europe in the early 1970s that the economic significance of its colonies receded, thereby paving the economic way to the Carnation Revolution. Politically, after the end of World War II, Portugal resisted the winds of change that swept through Africa and forced other colonial powers such as France and Britain to usher in reforms that eventually laid the ground, by the late 1950s, for independence. 4 By then, Portugal’s colonial possessions in Africa had become essential for the political survival of Salazar’s regime. In 1951, Portuguese colonies had indeed been transformed into “overseas provinces” and were thereby officially integrated into Portugal’s mainland territory. While this reform did not fundamentally alter the practice of power in Portugal’s African “territories,” it was the expression of an important ideological shift that came to legitimize Portugal’s refusal to decolonize. 5 This shift was based on Gilberto Freyre’s theory of lusotropicalismo . Freyre’s concept of lusotropicalism became central in Portuguese colonial discourse in the 1950s. It posited that through its colonial expansion, Portugal had “created a world” 6 devoid of racial prejudice and discrimination, thanks to the Portuguese particular “way of being in the world.” 7 Freyre’s theories allowed Salazar’s regime to recast the history of Portuguese colonialist expansion as a story of bonding across racial and colonial barriers, thereby legitimizing its refusal to envisage any form of decolonization. Not surprisingly, the gap between the theory of lusotropicalism and the lived experience of the vast majority of Africans in Portugal’s colonies was abyssal. It kept growing as lusotropicalism became more and more entrenched in colonial thinking, most prominently maybe in academic circles with the creation in 1954 of the Institute for Higher Overseas Studies (Instituto Superior de 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Nationalism, Liberation, and Decolonization in Angola Page 3 of 28 Estudos Ultramarinos, where colonial officials trained) and the research center founded by Adriano Moreira, the great architect of post-WWII Portuguese colonial ideology, the Centre for Political and Social Studies (Centro de Estudos Políticos e Sociais). 8 Angolan nationalism appeared in the form of more or less structured political movements in the late 1950s in various social groups who felt most sharply the growing marginalization and alienation caused by post-WWII colonial policies. Most importantly, Angolan nationalism mirrored the deep historical, social, and economic differences created by the history of Portuguese colonialism. Hence, it was not one nationalist front but several competing movements that developed in spite of the growingly repressive presence of Salazar’s infamous political police, the PIDE/DGS (Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado/Direcção Geral de Segurança). In 1961, a series of uncoordinated events launched a decade-and-a-half decolonization war in Angola, followed by Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. The decolonization war in Angola pitted two—and, from 1966 onwards, three—rival nationalist movements against the Portuguese colonial army, itself growingly manned with African troops, and against each other. 9 The decolonization war progressively froze in a sort of violent military stalemate, with the colonial army controlling most of the colony’s cities and productive centers and the nationalist movements battling for control over the interior of the country. In parallel, the rivalry between the three movements kept growing throughout the war. Therefore, on November 11, 1975, when President Agostinho Neto, leader of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) officially declared the creation of the Popular Republic of Angola in a packed stadium in the capital Luanda, two opposing nationalist movements, the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA, led by Holden Roberto) and Jonas Savimbi’s National Union for the Total Liberation of Angola (UNITA), declared the creation of the Democratic Republic of Angola in the country’s second-largest city, Huambo. Even if the alliance between the FNLA and UNITA proved short-lived and the Democratic Republic of Angola never actually materialized, this episode captures the profound tensions and divisions that existed within Angolan nationalism. It was also the prelude to the civil war that had actually started on the eve of Angola’s independence, and which, fueled by Cold War logics, would become one of the deadliest and longest lasting civil wars in Africa. The profound divisions between the protagonists of the Angolan civil war were in large part the result of the country’s long history of interaction with Portugal, its violent insertion into the global economy through the Atlantic slave trade, as well as 20th-century colonial policies. It was also the result of the thirst for power of the Angolan nationalist leaders. This article traces the historical roots of these divisions and their influence on the dynamics of state formation in Angola. 8 9 Nationalism, Liberation, and Decolonization in Angola Page 4 of 28 Late Colonialism and the Politics of Marginalization While the Portuguese presence on the Atlantic shore of what was to become Angola goes back to the late 15th century, actual military occupation of the territory was comparatively recent. It is only around 1920, after more than two decades marked by constant offensives and razzias by the colonial army as well as staunch resistance on the part of Angolan polities, that Portugal could consider it had militarily defeated its main opponents. 10 In the process, Angolan political authorities, sobas , were either forced to cooperate with the new colonial authorities or they were replaced by régulos , who were incorporated into the colonial administrative structure. But military control was not synonymous with hegemonic control, and Portuguese rule was submitted to a number of constraints. One of them was the result of Portugal’s relative economic weakness as compared to other European colonial powers. Portuguese investors were scarce, and Portugal had to rely on its traditional British ally as well as on other European investors, in particular for the building of crucial infrastructures such as the Benguela Railway that linked the port of Lobito to the mines of the Copperbelt, or for the exploitation of Angola’s mineral resources, as exemplified by Diamang, a company with South African, Belgian, and French capital that was granted a huge area in the Lundas, to the northeast of Angola. 11 This dependence on foreign capital was to remain until the end of Portuguese rule in Angola—and to continue in other forms after independence, making “extraversion” a key element of its modern history. 12 The colonial state in Angola was, like in most other African colonies, a gatekeeper state. 13 Economic activities until after the end of WWII centered around the extraction of raw material (diamond and, from the mid-1960s onwards, oil) and agricultural production for export (cotton, sisal, and coffee in particular). The control of the gate was all the more important as Angola became a privileged outlet for (cheap) wine and textiles produced in the metropole while it provided the metropolitan economy with raw material and agricultural products. In this context, the key issue rapidly became control of the labor force, and much of the rationale behind the colonial system that was put in place in the 20th century depended on this imperative. Control of labor in Angola was part of a long history, as it was one of the main places of export of slaves during the Atlantic slave trade since the early 16th century. 14 The slave trade, and later slavery itself were abolished in the 19th century, but the practice continued through various forms of forced labor until it became during the first quarter of the 20th century the cornerstone of Angola’s colonial economy. 15 Taxing played an important part in supporting the system. In 1906 , a “hut tax” was introduced, which was replaced in 1919 by a “native tax.” For the vast majority of Angolans, working as a so- called contract worker ( contratado ) was very often the only way to pay these taxes. Recruitment of the workforce was under the responsibility of local authorities. Under the supervision of the chefe de posto , the lowest echelon of the colonial administration, to whom private companies sent their request for contract workers, sobas and régulos were expected to recruit the workforce. While contract labor for private companies and large rural estates concerned mostly young men who could spend up to several months away from their families in plantations, mines, or fisheries, women and children were also sometimes recruited, directly by the colonial state, mostly to build roads and railways. 16 “In short, Africans did the heavy work of building an extractive colonial 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Nationalism, Liberation, and Decolonization in Angola Page 5 of 28 economy without receiving fair wages or the benefits of citizenship. White settlers often saw access to forced labor as a right of conquest and insisted on maintaining a racial hierarchy,” a situation that endured until the 1960s. 17 The system of contract labor ( contrato ) rested on a division between the vast majority of indígenas (natives), who were deprived of any rights in the colonial system, and a small but socially important minority of civilizados (“civilized”) or, as they came to be known later on, assimilados (“assimilated”). Up until the early 20th century, however, social divisions were not based on race or skin color, or only marginally. 18 Angola’s high society was not exclusively White and Portuguese, and in Angola’s trading economy, some African figures became famous, such as Dona Ana Joaquina, one of the most important slave traders of the 19th century. 19 The continuous presence of White, predominantly male, settlers since the 16th century in the capital Luanda, in the southern coastal town of Benguela, and in certain trading posts in the interior or the country led to the development of an important “creole,” mostly merchant, bourgeoisie who held prominent positions within Angolan society, and whose progressive marginalization in the course of the 20th century contributed to the rise of anti-colonial and nationalist movements. 20 In the course of the 20th century, social classifications between indígenas and civilizados were gradually formalized—and strongly racialized. The place of indígenas and the criteria for being considered as “civilized” or “assimilated” were codified in the Estatuto dos indígenas (Native Statute) in 1926, which was revised in 1954. Like other colonial legislations, these statutes, although they were embedded in a strongly assimilationist discourse especially after lusotropicalism became central in Portuguese colonial ideology, aimed at strictly regulating access to the colonial world and at creating a vast mass of disenfranchised Africans at its margins. 21 Criteria for being considered “civilized” or “assimilated” included language proficiency in Portuguese, a certain level of schooling, proof of sufficient income, and “good manners.” While these criteria represented for most Angolans an insuperable obstacle, the administrative and bureaucratic procedures necessary to request assimilation were at the same time extremely rigid and arbitrary. Rigid because of the sheer number of official documents and stamps needed and arbitrary because it all depended on the “good” will of chefes de posto who could easily delay and derail the process at any time. 22 Of course, Whites living in Angola were automatically recognized and treated as “civilized,” even if in 1950 an estimated 44 percent of the White adult population was illiterate. 23 The proportion of Angolans legally recognized as “civilized” or “assimilated” thus never went beyond 1 percent of the Angolan population. The situation became even tenser for indígenas after WWII. In the context of a booming economy, thanks especially to a sharp increase in coffee production backed by the availability of cheap labor with the contrato system, Portuguese immigration to Angola increased sharply. With the active support of the Salazar regime, between 1940 and 1960, the White population in Angola quadrupled, rising from 44,000 people to more than 170,000. 24 For these mostly poor and uneducated White settlers, emigration to African colonies represented the possibility of social upwards mobility that neither the metropolitan economy nor emigration to other destinations such as Brazil and Europe could offer. They rapidly came to takeover the only positions and jobs that indígenas could hope to occupy outside of the contrato system, pushing them even further to the margins of the colonial world. Due to their relatively low level of education, the social status 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 Nationalism, Liberation, and Decolonization in Angola Page 6 of 28 of the new settlers depended primarily on the color of their skin, and the assurance of a privileged status in the colonies was itself a pull factor for emigration toward Angola. This contributed massively to the “racialization” of Angolan society and to the rise in ordinary racism. Until it was eventually abolished in 1961 as a response to the beginning of the anti-colonial war, the indigenato system was characteristic of the contradictions of colonial power in Angola. While it was based on a claim to assimilate Angolans to the “World that the Portuguese created,” according to lusotropical ideology, the system in fact saw to the exclusion of the vast majority of indígenas from colonial society, thereby maintaining them in extreme financial precarity. Beyond its assimilationist rhetoric, the system was driven by a logic of political, economic, social, and racial segregation. Portuguese colonial rule in the 20th century therefore made sure that Angolans be cut off from the “colonial world” and move back to their “tribal life,” although the latter, ravaged by the colonial conquest and the consequences of forced labor, had practically vanished—and did not correspond to the aspirations of the younger generations. Social Mobility and Elite Formation at the Margins In this context, it is at the margins of colonial society that some indígenas managed to find a narrow path toward upward social mobility in the mid-20th century. Indeed, the Portuguese colonial state invested very little, if anything at all, into social services for the indígenas , especially health and education, and it relied heavily on private actors. In 1941, for instance, the responsibility for the whole primary education system for indígenas was officially “outsourced” to the Catholic Church after a “Missionary Agreement” was signed between the government and the Church. Protestant missions, present in Angola since the 1880s, also ran a vast system of primary, secondary, and vocational training schools. 25 Christian missions were therefore well into the 1960s the only possibility of social mobility for indígenas in two complementary manners. Firstly, they were the only institution where they could hope to obtain an education or a degree that could bring them to a position of economic and social accumulation. Secondly, missions and churches offered positions, as catechists, teachers, and nurses, among others, that could allow them, depending on the “good” will of local chefes de posto , to escape recruitment for the forced labor system (and later on, the army). The social and political role of Christian missions was however not restricted to education. In the Portuguese colonial system, structures of traditional power had been profoundly weakened by the colonial conquest and their violent integration in the forced labor system. Besides, “tribal life” was officially discredited by a colonial ideology that preached assimilation and the “portugalization” of the natives while the legislative system it developed and the policies it implemented were meant to “trap” indígenas in a “tribal world” that no longer existed or had been discredited. The model of “culturalist modernization” they developed rested on the idea that the righteous path toward modernization was embedded in “traditional” African societies, or rather in a reinvented version of that culture within a Christian mold. 26 Christian missions were sites where it was possible, therefore, to negotiate one’s entry into “colonial modernity” without turning one’s back on “traditional” life, especially in rural areas. They functioned as a sort of buffer zone between indígenas and the colonial state or, at times, as a refuge. These refuges 25 26 Nationalism, Liberation, and Decolonization in Angola Page 7 of 28 were ambivalent. For the younger generation that came of age in the late 1950s in particular, they had different yet complementary meanings: they offered a possibility of integration, albeit very partial and limited, into the fringes of the colonial world, but they were also the cradle of contestation of the colonial regime and an entry into the anti-colonial struggle. 27 Indígenas represented some 99 percent of the Angolan population in 1960. But, despite the many obstacles to social mobility that the colonial system put in their way, there existed a non-White elite, or several non-White elites, who were more or less integrated into the colonial world depending on the period and on the area. These elites consisted of a very heterogeneous network of people whose level of education, lifestyle, and aspirations corresponded to the legal criteria of assimilation but who were still legally considered as indígenas . Following Christine Messiant, we can distinguish between two categories of assimilados , old and new. 28 Old assimilados formed a small urban bourgeoisie, with a very strong presence in Luanda. Its members were part of the socially creole and racially mixed society that developed in the wake of the long presence of Portuguese and other European merchants, traders, and settlers in Angola. Their wealth and social status most often found its origins, at least partly, in the slave trade that dominated economic activity in the area for three centuries. 29 This urban elite developed its own urban creole culture, expressed mainly through literature and music. 30 Portuguese, both in writing and speaking, progressively became their mother tongue, and most of them lost their active knowledge and practice of Angolan indigenous languages. In the mid-20th century, this elite was therefore culturally closer to Brazil, Portugal, and the “Black Atlantic” than to the Angolan interior. Up until the first quarter of the 20th century, this urban creole bourgeoisie had the upper hand in cultural, social, economic, and political matters. But, with the advent of 20th- century colonial domination it started a slow but steady process of social downgrading. After WWII, this movement accelerated with the waves of poor White immigrants who started to push them toward the fringes of the colonial world based on the privilege granted to them by their skin color. This social and political downgrading fueled anti-colonial feelings and played an important part in the development of modern Angolan nationalism within these circles. New assimilados appeared in the course of the 20th century within the interstices of the colonial system. This group differed from old assimilados in a number of ways. It did not have the same kind of prolonged interaction with Portuguese settlers and was not exposed to the Portuguese language, which remained for the vast majority of them a second language. New assimilados were mainly Black and were not part of the creole societies of the Atlantic coast. While old assimilados had gradually moved away from their Angolan roots, at least in their linguistic practices and their cultural representations, new assimilados grew within the “buffer zones” provided mainly by Christian missions. Indeed, this new elite frequented missionary schools, where they learned to read and write not only in Portuguese, but also in Kikongo, Kimbundu, and Umbundu, among other languages. Some of them became pastors, nurses, and teachers and worked for their church, while others found work as clerks in the administration or in the private sector. While new assimilados remained legally considered as indígenas until the abolition of the indigenato system in 1961, they opened up new paths of upward social mobility toward the colonial world while not necessarily turning their back on their Angolan cultural roots. After WWII, new assimilados were also hit hard by the colonial support of White immigration from the metropole. 27 28 29 30 Nationalism, Liberation, and Decolonization in Angola Page 8 of 28 The subtle combination between their education and social level, their economic downgrading after WWII, and the links they kept and nurtured with their “traditional world”—or at least a Christian reinvention of this world—within which they could count on an important social basis gave these groups of new assimilados a particular role in the nationalist struggle. Old and new assimilados had very little possibilities of social interaction up until way into the 1960s—except in Luanda to a certain extent. They often went to different schools, did not play sports together, and they socialized in different clubs. Their lived experience of life under Portuguese colonialism was therefore also very different. In other words, Portuguese colonial laws and policies in 20th-century Angola created deep divisions, especially between the elites who managed to overcome the colonial obstacles to upward social mobility. This had a decisive impact on nationalism. Divided Nationalism The historical and social divisions outlined thus far, which largely resulted from the divisions created or entrenched by the Portuguese colonial state, were mirrored in the structuration of Angolan nationalism. While a first branch of early nationalism can be traced back to the first quarter of the 20th century, mainly in literary expressions, it is in the second half of the 1950s that modern political nationalism developed. 31 There were at the time two main foyers. The first one, out of which the FNLA eventually emerged, developed in the north of the country, in the Kikongo-speaking areas bordering the then still Belgian Congo, and in the latter’s capital, Léopoldville. In Luanda, various networks of political activists and nationalists were active in the late 1950s. They were severely repressed by the Portuguese political police, the PIDE/DGS which opened its offices in Luanda in 1956. It is out of this complex web that the MPLA was eventually formed as a nationalist movement, first in exile in 1960, and later on in Luanda and other parts of the colony. In the mid-1960s, a third current of nationalism formed under the leadership of Jonas Savimbi, who defected from the FNLA to create a third movement, UNITA, in 1966. UPA-FNLA: Bakongo Nationalism? The history of the UPA-FNLA is tied in part to the history of the former Kongo Kingdom. The kingdom, with its historical capital Mbanza Kongo (or São Salvador according to its official Portuguese name from the late 16th century to 1975) located in the Angolan province of Zaïre, stretched over what is today Northern Angola, the southwest of the Democratic Republic of Congo, including its capital Kinshasa. By the mid-20th century, the kingdom and its ruler had long lost its political power, but it retained an important symbolic value. Ever since the baptism of Nzinga a Nkuwu as João I in 1491, the Kongo sovereign, or Mani Kongo, has had a Portuguese name. In 1955, after the death of Dom Pedro VII, the nomination of his successor was strongly contested by a group of Protestant-educated nationalists based in Matadi and Léopoldville (Kinshasa) in neighboring Belgian Congo. While the group, led by Eduardo Pinock, Manuel Barros Necaca, and Holden Roberto, failed in its attempt to prevent the nomination of Dom António III as king because they considered him weak and too conciliant to the Portuguese authorities, the 31 Nationalism, Liberation, and Decolonization in Angola Page 9 of 28 contention over the throne provided the impetus for the creation, in July 1957 in Léopoldville, of the União das populações do Norte de Angola (UPNA). 32 In 1958, UPNA was invited, thanks to connections with the American Committee on Africa, to the All-African Peoples’ Conference held in Accra, Ghana. Following the advice of Kwame Nkrumah, Frantz Fanon, and other pan-African leaders, Roberto thereafter advocated for extending the contours of UPNA beyond the populations of Northern Angola and the reference to Bakongo identity and the history of the Kongo Kingdom so as to embrace Angolan nationalism as a whole. The movement therefore changed its name to União das populações de Angola (UPA). Holden Roberto’s rise to the leadership of the UPA was not uncontested and the movement struggled to establish a common line. But the leaders of the UPA shared three important elements of Portuguese colonial life in Northern Angola. First was an experience of exile, or at least transboundary mobility, since they spent important parts of their lives in the two main cities of southern Belgian Congo, Matadi and Léopoldville. This exile—or mobility—was in part the result of long-established pathways of social mobility within the Bakongo area across colonial borders. But it was also the result of Portuguese colonial policies. In the early 1910s, the colonial administration pressurized the king of Kongo, Manuel Kitudu, to recruit contratados for the cocoa plantations of São Tomé and Príncipe. While the king accepted, several Kongo rulers, led by Tulante Álvaro Buta, refused and eventually launched an attack on the Kongo capital, São Salvador, in December 1913. 33 The revolt was severely crushed, and the Portuguese administration thus entrenched its power at its northern border. This increased pressure on Bakongo farmers, who were pushed to sell their labor force in order to pay for the colonial hut tax, which eventually contributed to drive thousands of Angolan Bakongo families to the Belgian Congo in search of better economic opportunities. Many of the offspring of these families grew up in Léopoldville/Kinshasa, with the memories of colonial repression and nostalgia for the land they had lost to White settlers. For many educated Bakongo in the mid-20th century, Belgian Congo also offered more opportunities—or hopes—of upward social mobility. The second common experience was religion. The leaders of the UPA were all educated within the network of the Baptist Missionary Society, who had been present in the area since the 1880s. While a Protestant upbringing was not necessarily an entry point for political mobilization against Portuguese rule per se, it did set the generations of Angolan Bakongo youth that came of age between the 1930s and the 1950s against the ruling Bakongo aristocracy, whose Catholic roots dated back to the late 15th century. This partly explains why the succession of Dom Pedro VII was contested by the Bakongo reformists who later formed the UPA. Thirdly, they were typical examples of Bakongo new assimilados : their education and their lifestyle, and their personal and political aspirations were in total contradiction to their (lack of) opportunities within the Portuguese colonial world, a situation that was comparable to that of the Congolese évolués , whose own nationalist aspirations had a great impact on the UPA. 34 While the history of the Kongo Kingdom was the symbolic backdrop to the rise of nationalism in the north of Angola, it is the economic and political conditions of late colonialism that caused the conditions for the UPA’s projection into the armed struggle and onto the world stage. After the landing of Diogo Cão at the mouth of the River Congo in 1483, the Kikongo-speaking areas of what was to become Northern Angola were the first to be in contact with the Portuguese. By the 32 33 34 Nationalism, Liberation, and Decolonization in Angola Page 10 of 28 mid-20th century, however, it was economically, socially, and to a certain extent politically marginalized from the rest of the colony. 35 The situation changed drastically after WWII with a sharp rise in coffee production, boosted by high prices on international markets. 36 This put tremendous pressure on local farmers, who were in their vast majority dispossessed to the profit of White settlers, while a small minority of kulak farmers managed to benefit from the boom. 37 Coffee plantations in the north were also a massive driver of forced laborers, mainly from the Central Highlands, who would spend up to nine months away from their families, working for White plantation owners. The combination of land dispossession, widespread poverty, lack of opportunities even for the minority of well-educated Bakongo, rampant racism in the wake of poor White settler immigration, and the presence of thousands of contratados in the plantation had turned Northern Angola into a powder keg by the end of the 1950s. On March 15, 1961, after a (very reasonable) demand by plantation laborers about payment arrears had been squarely rebutted by their colonial “masters,” a very violent revolt exploded. The revolt led to the killing of a hitherto unprecedented number of White settlers in Africa, far more than the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya, as well as thousands of mostly Ovimbundu contract laborers. In retaliation, many more thousands of Angolans were massacred by private colonial militias and the Portuguese army. The decolonization war had officially started. MPLA: Nationalism in Angola’s “Creole Island” Officially, the MPLA was founded on December 10, 1956, making it the oldest of the three Angolan nationalist movements. 38 Indeed, in a pamphlet attributed to Viriáto da Cruz, one of the founders of the movement, dated from that same day, the author mentioned an “ample popular movement of the liberation of Angola.” 39 However, since the late 1990s the official version of the MPLA has been questioned and it now seems clear, even if it is still contested by some, that the MPLA as an actual nationalist movement did not exist before the early 1960s. 40 It was created in exile in 1960 and was present, alongside the UPA, at the second All-African Peoples’ Conference held in Tunis that year. After the beginning of the armed struggle in 1961, it started to operate in Angola, mainly from its rear base in Brazzaville. 41 The “ample movement” mentioned by Viriáto da Cruz, rather than an established structure, was, in 1956, the expression of a hope to see various political currents converge toward one movement. Anti-colonial political activism was extremely important in Luanda in the second half of the 1950s. 42 After the PIDE/DGS started to operate from Angola in 1956, these associations and movements became underground and clandestine due to repression on the part of the colonial state. In 1959, dozens of Angolans were arrested in the first massive operation led by the political police. Their trial, known as the Processo dos 50 (“Trial of the 50”), was a clear show of force on the part of the colonial authorities and a clear message sent to nationalists. The actual social composition of the fifty-seven who were tried and jailed, most of whom were nurses, teachers, and clerks, very often educated within (mostly Protestant but also Catholic) missions, also indicated that suspicion of political activism could be based on one’s background and social status as much as on actual political activities. Political repression in the 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 Nationalism, Liberation, and Decolonization in Angola Page 11 of 28 1950s partly explains why exile politics was so important for the MPLA as well, since most of its founders (Mário Pinto de Andrade, Viriáto da Cruz, Lúcio Lara, and Agostinho Neto) were living outside of Angola by 1961. 43 The MPLA grew out of a complex mix of political and social networks in Luanda and its hinterland until Malanje. It was socially much more diverse than the UPA, which turned out to be both a reason for its relative strength and a cause of severe divisions. In Luanda, the political and intellectual backbone of the MPLA was to be found among the creole elite of old assimilados . Many of them were mestiços , and if they were not necessarily all part of the creole families that ruled Angola until the beginning of the 20th century, they all had first-hand experience of the social downgrading that policies of late colonialism forced upon them, especially after WWII and the immigration of poor White settlers. Many of them were well educated, in Lisbon, Paris, or other European capitals, and also closely followed political developments in Africa, and their own engagement in the struggle echoed that of the likes of Kwame Nkrumah and Frantz Fanon. Luanda was the only social, racial, and ethnic melting pot in colonial Angola. Next to this first historical group, a number of Black new assimilados , who were either among the 1 percent who had acquired the official status or were assimilados de facto, shared the experience of growing marginalization and the racialization of colonial policies typical of the post-WWII period. Agostinho Neto, the son of a Methodist pastor who worked closely with the Methodist bishop in Luanda before studying medicine in Lisbon, was their main representative. They were joined by a very active minority of White sons and daughters of Portuguese settlers whose rejection of colonialism depended less on their lived experience than on their political ideology, especially within the Angolan Communist Party. This social and racial diversity had the advantage of providing the MPLA with a broader social base, or at least a broader potential recruitment basin, than the UPA. But it was also to be the source of many divisions. These divisions were of three kinds at least. Socially, the experiences of colonialism and the reasons for engaging in the fight against Portuguese rule varied widely between the different groups that made the MPLA. While all the movements that eventually coalesced to form the MPLA in the early 1960s were Marxist and modernist, there were significant ideological divergences that led to serious infighting in the 1960s. And, since the MPLA as a political movement developed first in exile among groups of highly educated men, the distinction between “those from within” and “those from the outside” was important, especially as the “outside” group represented an intellectual elite that at times had difficu