February 4, 1961 – Unrest spreads in the Angolan War of Independence
On February 3, 1961, farm laborers in Baixa do Cassanje,Malanje, rose up in protest over poor working conditions. In the following days, the protest quicklyspread to many other regions, engulfing a wide area. The Portuguese were forced to send warplanesthat strafed and firebombed many native villages. Soon, the protest was quelled.
Occurring almost simultaneously with the workers’ protest,armed bands (believed to be affiliated with the MPLA) carried out attacks in Luanda, particularly inthe prisons and police stations, aimed at freeing political prisoners. The raids were repelled, with dozens ofattackers and some police officers killed. In reprisal, government forces and Portuguese vigilante groups attacked Luanda’s slums, wherethey killed thousands of black civilian residents.
Africa showing location of present-day Angola and other African countries that were involved in the Angolan War of Independence. South-West Africa (present-day Namibia) was then under South African rule.(Taken from Angolan War of Independence – Wars of the 20th Century – Volume 1)
Background By the1830s, Portugal had lost Braziland had abolished its transatlantic slave trade. To replace these two valuable sources ofincome, Portugalturned to develop its African possessions, including their interior lands. In Angola, agriculture was developed,with the valuable export crops of coffee and cotton being grown in vastplantations. The mining industry wasexpanded.
Portugal’s development of the local economy, including theconstruction of public infrastructures such as roads and bridges, was carriedout using forced labor of black Africans, a system that was so harsh, ruthless,and akin to slavery. Consequently,thousands of natives fled from the colony. Indigenous lands were seized by the colonial government. And while Angola’s economy grew, only thecolonizers benefited, while the overwhelming majority of natives were neglectedand deprived of education, health care, and other services.
After World War II, thousands of Portuguese immigrantssettled in Angola. The world’s prices of coffee beans were high,prompting the Portuguese government to seek new white settlers in its Africancolonies to lead the growth of agriculture. However, many of the new arrivals settled in the towns and cities,instead of braving the harsh rural frontiers. In urban areas, they competed forjobs with black Angolans who likewise were migrating there in large numbers insearch of work. The Portuguese, beingwhite, were given employment preference over the natives, producing racialtension.
The late 1940s saw the rapid growth of nationalism in Africa. In Angola, threenationalist movements developed, which were led by “assimilados”, i.e. the fewnatives who had acquired the Portuguese language, culture, education, andreligion. The Portuguese officiallydesignated “assimilados” as “civilized”, in contrast to the vast majority ofnatives who retained their indigenous lifestyles.
The first of these Angolan nationalist movements was thePeople’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola or MPLA (Portuguese: MovimentoPopular de Libertação de Angola)led by local communists, and formed in 1956 from the merger of the AngolanCommunist Party and another nationalist movement called PLUA (English: Party ofthe United Struggle for Africans in Angola). Active in Luanda and other major urban areas, the MPLAdrew its support from the local elite and in regions populated by the Ambunduethnic group. In its formative years, itreceived foreign support from other left-wing African nationalist groups thatwere also seeking the independences of their colonies from European rule. Eventually, the MPLA fell under the influenceof the Soviet Union and other communistcountries.
The second Angolan nationalist movement was the NationalFront for the Liberation of Angola or FNLA (Portuguese: Frente Nacional deLibertação de Angola). The FNLA was formed in 1962 from the mergerof two Bakongo regional movements that had as their secondary aim theresurgence of the once powerful but currently moribund Kingdom of Congo. Primarily, the FNLA wanted to end forcedlabor, which had caused hundreds of thousands of Bakongo natives to leave theirhomes. The FNLA operated out ofLeopoldville (present-day Kinshasa) in the Congo fromwhere it received military and financial support from the Congolesegovernment. The FNLA was led by HoldenRoberto, whose authoritarian rule and one-track policies caused the movement toexperience changing fortunes during the coming war, and also bring about theformation of the third of Angola’snationalist movements, UNITA.
UNITA or National Union for the Total Independence of Angola(Portuguese: União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola) was foundedby Jonas Savimbi, a former high-ranking official of the FNLA, overdisagreements with Roberto. Unlike theFNLA and MPLA, which were based in northern Angola, UNITA operated in thecolony’s central and southern regions and gained its main support from theOvibundu people and other smaller ethnic groups. Initially, UNITA embraced Maoist socialismbut later moved toward West-allied democratic Africanism.
