Episode 4 - Cold War race-paranoia and how the Portuguese faced an Angolan knife-edge in 1961

Welcome back to the South African Border Wars Podcast with me, your host, Tiers Latham. This is episode 4, and we're going to take a hard look at race, ideology and the start of the Angolan War of Independence. South African Angola share a border that stretches around 1500 kilometers starting at the Atlantic Ocean in the West and heading virtually directly east all the way through most of the Capri-Bee strip north of Botswana. It was this lengthy frontier zone that was to cause the South African's great deal of trouble and grief later when the war began in earnest in the mid-1970s, and that is the reason why we must spend some time looking at Angola. As we heard last episode, by the early 1960s, a low intensity guerrilla war was being waged in Angola, and there were three main armed groups fighting the Portuguese there, the FNALA, MPLA and UNITA. We're going to focus on the first two years, 1961 and 1962 in this episode, which was about the same time as the South African peoples organization really took off. South Africa was supported by America until it became clear that the threat of nuclear war reduced the possibility of a conventional war between the US and Russia. For those who did not live through this period, it is quite difficult to understand the visceral fear conjured up by the idea of a communist and spied revolution, and the global instability the two superpowers had caused. In Latin America, indigenous struggles had also accelerated. Che Guevara was an almost mythical capitalist fighting Casanova, who helped Cuban revolutionaries overthrow the US-backed government, and Eastern Europe, Russia and China began exporting massive volumes of low-cost firearms to any group that bought into the Marxist playbook. It was a book full of chapters, the armed struggle, peasant class ceases power, the state takes over all business, the proletariat defeats the bourgeoisie, communist versus capitalist. The Americans, the British, French and other NATO countries, were as busy as the communists trying to woo developing post-colonial nations into their ambit. Every kind of cloak and dagger could be found. But the colonizers now licking their wounds after the Second World War, new stepping stones emerged for Marxism to spread. The superpowers fed the flames of African, Latin American and Asian wars with low-cost arms and ammunition, technical advisors, food and money. But Cold War consciousness filtered throughout the world like an ass-called poison, infiltrating everything. Brazil turned into a military dictatorship, so did Peru. China was a little late off the starting blocks, exporting weapons to Africa, but made up for it in pure, blooded single-mindedness once they realized there was a long-term pseudo-Marxist barter to be had. We'll give you the guns. You give us the resources after booting out the Western capitalists, easy peasy. So the Chinese shmuz political organisations like Zanyu and Rhodesia were evolutionary movements in Tanzania, as well as African National Congress in Zambia. It was a form of ideological colonisation cloaked in promises of ideological divana. The Chinese left Mozambique alone, of course, the Russians and Cubans were already nosing around in that beautiful backwater, and it was important not to fight other Marxist allies. Back in South Africa at this time the major issue which began to cause disaffection amongst the black and coloured population was the lack of the vote. There was no right to vote, and as long as South Africa was governed by an external power, the reality was that Pretoria was a colonising power, and worse it ran on apartheid principles. By 1960, Pretoria had instituted a form of bunch of standard administration in South West Africa, copying its playbook back home. This would lead to the South African Minister of Foreign Affairs addressing the UN General Assembly in October 1966, but saying that the South West African peoples' progress in self-determination was supported by Pretoria, but people and self-determination he meant whites only. A year later, the South African UN Representative repeated this and said, "The principles of basic justice require us not to follow the development of a single colonial group. On the contrary, each group should be able to benefit from all rights, whites, revambos, arrows, or kawangos, namas, tamaras, and busters." Which sounded just fine, and remains fine for many whites who hold this view, except for one fatal logical flaw in the argument. And that was the glaring difference between whites as a group and blacks as a bunch of different groups. "Well," said the black intellectuals. "If that was the case, each group has an individual and single right, then why aren't the whites broken up into German, Africaner, Portuguese, English, Swiss, and other nationalities, like we are based on our different languages and cultures, after all, the whites in South Africa were two main groups, English and Africans, just like the Isizulu and Isikkosa. So why weren't they put into ethically demarcated suburbs, too? Why was it only the blacks earmarked for this special individual classification if it was such a good idea, and don't tell me that it's because whites lived in the cities, because they didn't. They were rural and urban." This crude concept had its roots in the interneesian warfare of the 19th century, which colonial sought to exploit in the divide and rule philosophy. Victoria and Vintok monitored with alarm the growing signs of revolution in Africa, where political commissars trained in Russia and China, emerged back home, traveling from village to village, speaking against the local leadership system that had been hijacked by the colonial administration. The French and Indochina, or Vietnam, had faced exactly the same process, so too the political administrations in places like Peru, which faced Maoist guerrillas called Sendero Luminosa, or Shining Path, which was to explode into public view by the 1970s. Blacks in South West Africa had zero power over the economy, and we were really helpless in the face of this external administration, the South Africans in Victoria. Given the destabilization caused by post-colonial wars nearby, the prognosis for continued peace was not good even at this early stage, the early 1960s. For Swapu, there us and them narrative developed by the South African National Party worked like a charm. Swapu's view was that if the whites want to separate themselves and then use divide in rule, there was actually quite a simple message to use in turn. That was to deflate ethnic identity and accentuate black identity. If Victoria once and us versus them war, we'll give them one. They went non-what, we'll give them black. And who cares if the skin colour was a various hues of brown, whites were determined to use the blunt force of a party, so they could very well just face an army of multi-ethnic countries who called themselves black. Easy to play the history 2020 vision game, but even at that time in the early 1960s voices were warning that the insane ideology was doomed by demography. The speech by British Prime Minister Harold McMillan in South Africa's Parliament in February 1960, for example, the winds of change speech, where he had visited African countries of the Commonwealth and ended in South Africa and then made it clear that the British Conservative party was not going to oppose those winds of change. That philosophy was being driven by their ally, the United States as well. McMillan's main reason for making the speech was an attempt at swaying white South Africans to abandon Hendrick for Wut's apartheid dogma, but it failed. It was seen as selling out white settlers rather than welcoming black freedom, and of course, Wut's positions were linked back in 1960. After the speech, there was visible shock on Wut's face in Parliament. He leapt up from his seat and immediately responded to McMillan having to save face when McMillan had dropped a ticking time bomb into his speech. Wut famously responded by saying, "There must not only be justice to the black man in Africa, but also to the white man." The unintended effect of the speech was to help empower Wut by reinforcing his dominance over domestic politics, and by assisting him make two separate strands of his political career seem mutually reinforcing. The two were Republican nationalism on the one hand and apartheid ideology on the other, from now on both were intrinsically bound together. Watching all of this in South Africa and in exile was the South West African people's organization. It built its propaganda around the concept of non-racialism, but in reality, they were organizing black groups around the simplified concept of blackness versus whiteness, African versus European, which is exactly what Wut had said from the other side, so to speak. Furthermore, Swapo had an entire army of heroes of the past to use as propaganda. All those leaders who struggled against the Germans' brutal colonization were resurrected as heroes of the coming struggle against the whites. The fact that many of these had actually fought against each other was quietly suppressed in the Swapo narrative. The instability of the Buster and Nama civil wars was cynically submerged under a flood of ethnic harmony as they all faced the common enemy. at the same time. time, South West Africa's business farming and urban community had allied themselves with Petrovia, setting up a classic post-colonial playbook, which was also being used in Guinea-Bissar, Algeria, Mauritius and Kenya amongst other countries. Meanwhile, further north in Angola. The armed movements we heard about last episode were beginning to exploit the oscillation of colonial administration and launch their war for independence. The Portuguese government at first failed to recognise the danger that faced their local officials, but a few incidents changed that pretty rapidly. By 1960, security forces in Angola were under the control of civil authorities headed by the governor-general of each province. The main forces engaged in the war were the public security police, or PSP, which had around 10,000 constables, and the PID, which was the international and state defence police, and that was around 1100 strong. The public security police were uniformed policemen and molded in the same tradition as the Portuguese police back in Europe. The general command was based in Luanda, and each province was divided into district commands. The PID were responsible for border control and for secret police missions. They were the intelligence armour of the Angolan colonial authorities, and they were pretty hopeless at first. Angola was a miniaturised state long before the war of independence started. Besides these two uniformed units, civilian units had also been created. Their provincial organisation of volunteers and civil defence of Angola, or OPVDCA, was a civil defence minister mostly whites who operated in the units on a part-time basis. Later, the OPVDCA would become multi-racial, as the independence war developed to steam and would number close to 20,000 men by the fall of the Portuguese state. There were actually a host of other forces which would later become more difficult to manage, including the special groups or GE and special troops or TE. They were platoon sized and made up of volunteers. We heard about the FNLA last episode. Many of the GE and TE troops were former FNLA guerrillas who switched sides. Folks, this war will be full of people switching sides, as you can see here. These FNLA defectors were known as the FIASH or Faithfuls, and they were made up of three battalions of Catangui's jaundoms opposed to the Mabutra regime in the Congo, and the Leish on loyals who were political exiles from Zambia. This is such a regional story that to focus exclusively on South West Africa to tell the tale of the South African border war is a mistake, so bear with me as we follow the smoke trails of Angola and Warfare. The first sign of violence in Angola exploded in 1960 with what is known as Maria's War or the Baisha that Cassandra revolt. Bordering the Belgian Congo, this area was flashed with valuable cotton farms and about the size of Portugal. Most of the farms were run by a company called the Cotanung, the general company of the cotton of Angola, funded by Belgian money in Europe. So there is the Belgian Congo connection. There were complaints that this company was mistreating black workers, and we've already heard how Belgians mistreated blacks in the Congo. Portuguese authorities turned a blind eye, money after all was being made. By December 1960, workers went on strike and of course, watching in the wings were nationalists inspired groups, including a Congolese PSA or the African Solidarity Party. They may have been from across the border, but borders mean nothing and is there enforced. There was a single Portuguese army unit station there called the Third Special Cato Dores Company or CCE, which had followed up complaints that local white settlers felt threatened. Then the local governor of the Moulanger district, who was Julio Montero, ignored their pleas and refused to allow whites to on themselves. Montero had his own point of view being a non-Angolan. He was from the Cape Verde Islands and didn't much care for the settlers. By February, clashes broke out between the Congolese PSA who crossed the border and the CCE. The 11 were killed and the uprising was spreading across the Moulanger. In some cases, the PSA doled themselves with moody or traditional medicine believing the bullets would turn to water. There was a distinct Africanist flavor to the uprising. This further motivated troops far away in Luanda, the capital, as reinforcements were dispatched from Luanda to the north. Rebels stormed several military and police barracks in the capital itself. So, by late February, battalions of reinforcements had managed to suppress the Moulanger uprising, but it didn't come without a price. The Portuguese used australite observation aircraft, working together with PV2 ground attack planes to bomb civilian targets, killing hundreds. The exact number is debated, some say 400, some say 7000. Whatever the total, the effect is important. Rebels claimed the Portuguese had used Mayparm. This was denied. We don't know, but it radicalized the region. By May, new legislation was passed to improve the working conditions on the Belgian-owned Katanang farms, and rebels from across the border found it more difficult to arouse the labourers, who by now largely had returned to work. But something was about to happen, which was the start of their ongoing war of independence, and a much wider Portuguese overseas war, which we would eventually see Guinea Bessar and Mozambique up in flames as well. Watching in the wings was Holden Roberto, and his union of peoples of Angola organisation, or UPA. As we heard last episode, Roberto would end up renaming his organisation the FNLA, but at this stage he was still the UPA. He launched an attack from his base in Congo-Lepidble, with close to 5,000 militants attacking Northern Angola on 15 March 1961. His forces over ran farms, government outposts, and trading centres that killed and mutilated officials and civilians. Most of his victims were Black Obam Bundu from the central highlands of Angola. 1,000 white settlers and 6,000 Blacks died in this assault, and the UPA blew up most of the bridges and other government structures as they went about their deadly business. Ironically, many of the survivors fled into the Congo as well as making the way to nearby forests inside Angola itself. Roberto thought that this attack and its shock would cause a collapse of authority in Northern Angola, but he was wrong. Many of the colonial officers and white inhabitants remained inside towns, such as Karamona, Nagarge, Sanzapombo, and Makabi, and sent their women and children to safety in Luwanda while they fought off the UPA. By the 25th March 1961, the 7th, 9th, and 16th Special Cutler Daughter's companies and the first paratrooper company had arrived in the region and took up positions to fight back. The war that was to wreck southern Africa had begun. A few days later, in April 1961, something took place which shook the resolve of the rank and file Portuguese soldier. Up to this point, the UPA had concentrated their attacks on civilian targets who were actually sitting ducks, but they now began to focus on the army itself with some success. The village of Kaluah was attacked and most inhabitants massacred. When a military battalion was sent to clean up two officers who were separated from the group were killed, along with the platoon of soldiers sent to find them. All were chopped up and rumours spread that the UPA was practicing cannibalism. This is one of the turning points in the war in Angola. UPA rebels admitted later that they had eaten bits of the bodies which was a shock for the average Portuguese soldier and had an immediate effect on politics back in the home country in Europe. There, the Minister of National Defense Julio Moniz was so incensed that he led a coup d'état which failed, but it did prompt Prime Minister Salazar into action. The war in Angola was shocking in his extremeness and action was required, so he gave a speech to the nation in Portugal using the famous phrase "parra Angola rapidamente emforza" to Angola rapidly and enforce the dire was indeed cost. The Portuguese armed forces were mobilized and more battalions were dispatched to Angola. By June many of the towns occupied by the UPA were retaken and by the 10th of July 1961 these new units launched Operation Verriato aimed at taking the important time of Nambua Gongo in the Dimbos Forest, which the UPA had declared was their capital. This was a conventional attack led by two cathodores battalions and a cavalry squadron which converged on the town from three directions. Sappers and artillery were involved along with the Air Force. The town was retaken with 21 Portuguese killed, 75 wounded and a few hundred UPA as casualties, but the Portuguese weren't finished. They cut off the retreating UPA by taking the northern village of Quipedro in Operation Nema, which included the first ever airborne attack in Portuguese military history. The first company of the 21st Paris Troopers battalion surprised the UPA and took the village almost unopposed. Troops then set about building an improvised runway to await the arrival of the 149th cavalry squadron. The Portuguese, however, realized that they had to make significant changes to laws governing Angola in an attempt at redressing the wrongs committed against the locals after generations of colonial control. With that in mind, they withdrew the decree known as the Statute of the Indigenous Portuguese of the provinces of Guinea, Angola and Mozambique, which had given Wyatt's control of the economy. With the abolition of the decree, all Angolans had been granted identical civil rights, independent of the race and ethnicity, but this did not placate those involved in the war for independence, a fact noted by the hardliners and hawks in both South Africa and South West Africa. There we got the rights issue as a weakness, and it was better to fight against the tide of black nationalism. An administration area was then created, an administration area, was then created in the north of Angoda, encompassing the districts of Luanda, Caminda, Wiege, Xie, Malange, and Quanzanorte, which was called the Northern Intervention Zone, and another was set up on the east, along the Congo border, although this area, around Luanda and Mojico, had been quiet. This was to facilitate paramount action in the future, just in case. While all of this was going on, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 163 in June 1961, which declared Angola a self-governing territory, a resolution approved by the votes of China, the United States, the Soviet Union, and all non-permanent members, but both France and Great Britain abstained. London and Paris had their own colonial territories to think about, of course. With that thought to be end for this week, next episode the Angolan War of Independence becomes even more complex, as the Portuguese fight in more than one front, but the UPA and the MPLA independence movements start fighting each other at the same time, which creates chaos and anarchy, and about to arrive are the Cubans and the Russians. Please check out the website abwarpodcast.com for the page on the South African Border Wars. It's still in its infancy, but I'm building content into the site slowly. Please also rate the podcast on iTunes if you have time. You can also contact me directly on my Twitter feed @Daislaven. Until next, goodbye. [BLANK_AUDIO]