Angola's forgotten war

Xan Smiley

Rhodesia's black guerrillas have been crassly incompetent but they are already being hailed as victors. Unita's troops have paralysed much of south and central Angola, yet they are all but forgotten. The Rhodesian insurgents have, it is true, shown that they are probably unbeatable—and so they should be. They have an easy supply of weapons, a terrain affording good cover, and above all the potential support of 61 million blacks most of whom abhor the narrow racial policies of Ian Smith and his tiny white community. It's also true that the Rhodesian guerrilla tactics have been, quite sensibly, to dominate their own black people first, rather than confront Smith's mobile, air-supported and efficient army. All the same, it is astonishing that last week's blowing up of a remote railway bridge—and it has, incidentally, already been repaired— was the first impressive act of sabotage since guerrilla operations began a decade ago. This can only point to huge incompetence or a lack of nerve.

Africa's frontline presidents have been complaining about Dr Kissinger's package because it allows Smith a main say in planning Rhodesia's future with the nationalists. The simple reason for that is his military power: it still shows little sign of crumbling in the face of the guerrillas. He now knows he cannot beat them (hence the sudden acceptance of the principle of black rule) but if he is to be kept out of negotiations, they must beat him. So far they haven't been good enough. No wonder the Mozambiquebased guerrillas are reluctant to come to the conference table. They lack the military clout to back their verbal militancy.

The Rhodesian insurgents—until last week—had failed to put Smith's glaringly vulnerable railways out of action for longer than a day. Unita's track record is incomparably superior. The movement has reverted successfully to rural guerrilla warfare after losing Angola's towns to the Marxistorientated MLPA in a conventional war which it could never have won. Unita's 'foreign minister' Dr Jorge Sangumba has informed me that in early September his men hijacked an eighteen-wagon train crammed with weapons and in another operation ambushed a twelve-car convoy and made off with two and a half million US dollars-worth of Angolan escudos. Exaggerated these claims may be, and impossible to investigate because there is no independent journalist left in Angola. But one fact is certain. Unita has severed Angola's main commercial artery, the Benguela Railway. The line through to Zambia and Zaire has simply failed to function, though MPLA had planned a grand opening in early August. The railway is no more vulnerable than Rhodesia's, but Unita's exploits pass unmentioned.

But why were Angolans killing each other? The message from Neto. well re ceived in Europe, was that he was harnessing the forces of equality and democracy against those of South Africa, Lonrho, tribalism, the CIA and a strange assortment of naughty bedfellows. But certainly democracy was never the name of the MPLA game. If there were what Smith disparagingly calls 'a headcount,' then Unita would win the bulk of the vote, for MPLA's support outside Luanda and some of the towns is thin.

There is a curious somersault at which Europe's Africa pundits are adept. Reasonably, it is argued that Africans should rule Africa because that's what most of them want. Democracy! But once Africans achieve power on the democratic platform, the problems of Africa, say the pundits, demand that willy-nilly the 'best equipped' group, whatever its popularity, should run the show. MPLA fits the bill nicely. Many, perhaps most of Angola's miniature intelligentsia, belong to it. Even Unita's Sangumba, with disarming honesty, confesses 'they have the better administrators.' Above all, they have an ideology. Only ideology, argue the pundits, can transcend colour and tribe. Only a coherent ideology, binding the MPLA together, can bind Angola.

It is wishful thinking. Look at the hilarious case of Daniel Chipenda. He was a vice-president of MPLA. In 1970 he won the Lenin Centenary Prize. He'd even been quoted approvingly and at length by that tireless chaperone of nice African socialists, Basil Davidson. Impeccable ideological credentials. But a tiff with Neto made Chips defect. A diabetic onetime Benfica footballer (a scheming inside-left), former scholar of Coimbra University in Portugal, he was shrugged off by MPLA as an overversatile opportunist. He was later widely accused of drunkenness, bank-raiding and diamond smuggling. Erratic he was indeed. But what was strange was that the bulk of MPLA army—about 4000 men—despite their 'ideological solidarity' went with him. Together they surfaced in the civil war, he as general of a notoriously undisciplined private army allied to the northern anticommunist faction FNLA. Bodyguarded by leather-jacketed white Portuguese cowboys with shoulder-length hair and stetson hats, this Leninist protégé of Basil Davidson actually hoisted the old Portuguese colonial flag in southern Angola's provincial capital of Sa da Bandeira, before he and his ex

MPLA socialists bolted for South African territory. Ideologically most confusing.

The Angolan war was (and is) not so much a battle of ideology as a clash of cul tures. That is not just a euphemism for tribal warfare. Unita's leadership is drawn from every part of Angola but in wartime the movement has benefited because it is strongly identified with Angola's largest people, the two million Ovimbundu who form 35-40 per cent of Angolans. Unita, playing sa fe, usually assigns its military commanders to the regions of their tribal origin, while MPLA, in the belief that ideology is stronger than tribe, have on occasions delib erately sent urban coastal mulattoes to proselytise deep in the hinterland where Chokwe hunters speak no Portuguese and file their teeth to stiletto points. (The only hitch was, the MPLA policy didn't usually work.) MPLA may, however, argue a better record on the tribal score, but it is not tribalism alone that divides Angola. It is generally said that the Kimbundu tribes, the other main group after the Ovimbundu and Kongo, is pro-MPLA. I wonder. For the real distinction between Unita and MPLA is class. Above all, it is a conflict between town and country. MPLA stands for the radical whites who stayed on, for the urban mulatto. Those two categories are almost embarrassingly prominent in the party. The landless slum dweller of Luanda where cholera is endemic, members of the fledgling trade unions, and the scanty but significant Kimbaris all back MPLA. Thus what binds MPLA is their landless urban culture. The slum dweller and the intellectual mulatto have nothing to lose but their wages—and the mulatto is ideally suited to become the

bureaucrat of the parastatal organisations that MPLA's• East European friends will soon set up.

The snag with M PLA's urban make-up is that Angola is overwhelmingly peasant.

Many MPLA leaders—to the disgust of Savimbi --are Portuguese-speakers who know no African language at all. This was no advantage in the bush when fighting the Portuguese. And sure enough, despite its slender resources, Unita, which was formed years after the MPLA, was by far the most effective in the guerrilla war against the Portuguese. After 1972, the Portuguese mopped up all but a few pockets of MPLA guerrillas.

The MPLA ethos is Portuguese. It has the same stamp as that of the downtrodden political student of metropolitan Portugal in the Salazarist era. Savimbi, despite his Lausanne law doctorate, has been able to proclaim himself plausibly as the champion of the 'real' African, the Angolan peasant. Nor is it surprising that the MPLA's complexion is tinted with anti-clericalismanother tradition culled from the MPLA's White mentors in their revolutionary Lisbon coffee-houses. Yet the African peasantry is nothing if not 'religious', whether that quality is manifested in Jehovah's Witnesses, Mau Mau or Methodism. There have indeed been MPLA priests: a mulatto exChancellor of the Luanda diocese,.Joaquiin Pinto de Andrade, was the movement's founding spirit. But needless to say he is already in disgrace under the new regime and his adherents inside the MPLA are already behind bars awaiting trial before Justice Minister Diogenes Boavida's 'people's tribunals'. But Savimbi despite his Politically-motivated polygamy—and most of the Unita leadership—profess Christianity. Many are protestant, and in colonial times the African protestants were particularly suspect to the Portuguese authorities. (Protestantism was pronounced in the FNLA, whose leader Holden is a Methodist Preacher's son.) It is a typical paradox that MPLA is predominantly pagan in a EuroPean metropolitan manner, while Unita accepts Christianity, imported from Europe but moulded to the African style. Savimbi has become a quasi-religious figure, deified by his supporters in a way which, despite Lenin and Stalin, is reprehensible to the Moscovite committee-mind of Dr Neto. But to the African countryman, the emotional appeal of the leader is as important as the policies he advances.

Not that Unita is all emotional froth and no policy. Its aims are actually much the same as MPLA's, but its methods gentler, less doctrinaire, more laitsez-faire. It recoils from Soviet economic formulae as violently as it resents the military influx of the Soviets' Cuban surrogates. An MPLA professor admitted to me: 'There is a danger of MPLA arrogantly imposing solutions on the people'. Unita claims—perhaps rather picturesquely—that it can learn from the people and has instituted self-criticism classes on the Chinese model, whereby even the highest leaders may have to justify themselves before village assemblies.

There is little doubt, however, that the 'socialism' which, like every African movement, Unita avows, would come closest to the Ivory Coast/Kenyan version. And despite the espousal of 'African values' Unita would welcome back many of the Portuguese managers and technicians who knew Angola of old, certainly in preference to Bulgars, Rumanians or Cubans. Investment from the West, not blanket nationalisation (an issue which now bitterly divides the MPLA), would be Unita's policy.

While Unita was fighting the Portuguese, MPLA consumed much energy in planning and theory. But those stifling years of frustration seem to have nourished an obsession with dialectic which now weakens the government and stimulates the factionalism that is shaking Neto's throne. The twin prospect of his fall and of arms from China could offer Unita the chance of at least a share in ruling. Angola will become increasingly powerful. As the day draws nearer for the Boer governments of the south to be dismantled, Angola's influence on the future of the south—and of the West—will grow weightier. The odds may be against. But Unita could yet become Angola. It should not be discounted.