Graeme Addison
25 February 2008
opinion
Johannesburg — THE African National Congress's (ANC's) call to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the battle of Cuito Cuanavale as a victory for the liberation of Africa raises all sorts of questions about what is meant by victory and who should be celebrating.
The Polokwane resolution was right in drawing attention to the significance of the engagements that took place in southeastern Angola between August 1987 and May the following year. But precisely what happened, and what it all portended for the future of the subcontinent, was by no means clear then, and maybe even now.
Secrecy and propaganda are opposite sides of the same coin, and on all sides, concealment, distortions of the truth, claims and counterclaims regarding victory continue to make this one of the most controversial episodes in the story of the fall of apartheid.
The retirement of Fidel Castro as Cuban president ought to mark the end of the war of words and the beginning of a historical reassessment founded on fact. Unfortunately the trend is just the opposite. The internet is full of diatribes against the ANC's latter-day declaration of victory. Though little that is new can be discerned through this fog of digital warfare, it is apparent that both liberationists and their foes will continue trying to prove that they came out on top.
Fought in the dense bush, sandy valleys and marshlands of southeastern Angola, along the banks of the Lomba River, Cuito Cuanavale can best be described as a bloody confrontation that went nowhere. The real front lines were Luanda, Pretoria, Havana, Washington, Moscow and the United Nations in New York. In a reversal of Clausewitz's famous dictum that war is politics by other means, this series of battles became a feint for political manoeuvres in the capitals of the world.
Which is not to say there was a phantom war, nor that the conflict on the ground was inconsequential -- far from it. As a set-piece of warfare between conventional armies, Cuito Cuanavale has been described as "Africa's Stalingrad" in which troops died wholesale. They were numbered in the hundreds, rather than hundreds of thousands as at Stalingrad, but it was still a brutal episode.
Some of the fighting could be better described as "Africa's Kursk", recalling the 1943 tank battle between Germany and Russia. Well-gunned South African Ratel armoured cars and newly developed Olifant tanks confronted Russian tanks on soft, woody terrain that tested their technologies to the limit. Heavy South African field guns pounded the opposing Cuban and Angolan government forces, exacting severe casualties and stopping their advance.
Military analyst Helmoet-Romer Heitman has observed that the South African armour and infantry fought with "their usual verve", showing an ability to move rapidly and deliver massive violence once in contact. The Cubans and their Angolan allies, under Russian generalship part of the time, fought bravely, but so did the opposing Unita forces alongside the South Africans.
It was after the major engagements of mid-November 1987 that Pretoria openly admitted its role in Angola and revealed that more than a dozen of its troops had died. The scale of the fighting emerged from statistics showing that more than 500 South African/Unita men had been killed and 33 tanks captured or destroyed.
Throughout the Angolan civil war that began in 1975, the South African Defence Force (SADF) had played a covert role, along with the US, in propping up the guerilla insurgency of Jonas Savimbi and his Unita movement. On the other side, the Cuban presence was known but the extent of funding and weaponry supplied by the Soviet Union was hidden. The "internationalists", as Castro would later describe them, supported the Fapla army of Agostinho Neto's MPLA government in Luanda.
The 1987-88 battles were not fought at the town of Cuito Cuanavale -- which makes the name something of a misnomer -- but further south near Mavinga, which was the Angolan government's objective. The idea was to destroy Unita's base at Jamba and drive the SADF out of the country. This would put the Cubans and Swapo forces in a position to threaten what was then South West Africa (SWA) and so compel its liberation from South African hands.
In the event, the SADF and Unita pushed the Angolans back to Cuito Cuanavale but this provoked a strong Cuban counterattack, which threatened the border with SWA. There was increased tension but a stalemate ensued. At this point, international diplomacy came into play as the major sponsors of the war -- the US and USSR -- saw the wisdom of getting their surrogates to sit down and deal.
Prolonged negotiations between Angola, Cuba and SA, urged on by US assistant secretary of state for African affairs Chester Crocker, led to a peace deal at the end of 1988. The countries signed an agreement on the withdrawal of Cuba's 50000 troops from Angola by mid-1991, and in a sense, everybody got what they wanted.
The USSR and Cuba afforded SA a chance to get out clean and emerge as a regional peacemaker as it set about granting independence to Namibia. The Cubans, relieved at last of the unpopular burden of a far-off war, were able to go home as heroes, as Castro claimed in a 2005 speech that finally lifted the lid on his view of events.
Pretoria's strategy had been to keep the "border war" as far from the country's actual borders as it could, while it dealt with growing internal unrest following the Soweto uprisings of 1976 and 1984. Above all, white elites in SA now realised that apartheid was morally and practically indefensible and the economy was being ruined.
The ANC, meanwhile, having been active in Angola on the side of the MPLA and Swapo but not an important role-player at Cuito Cuanavale, accepted that the Angolan peace deal meant it must depart for elsewhere in Africa. It had certainly gained a political victory through Pretoria's concessions on Namibia, and it was now apparent to all that contacts and negotiations were getting under way over the future of the apartheid state.
Here, then, was the paradoxical outcome of the violence that had aimed to put one side or the other in a commanding position over the subcontinent. Peace and a negotiated settlement was suddenly more attractive than victory at any cost. The irony of it all was that both ANC and SADF were forced to pull out of Angola. Yet both had attained key strategic objectives.
It is as true to call the outcome of the battles a defeat and mutual withdrawal for both sides, as it is to say that all participants emerged with tokens of success. The result was a triumph of peaceful settlement in Namibia and then SA, involving a rapprochement between the US and the Soviet Union that prepared the way for the ending of the Cold War.
But lest this leave the impression that all's well that ends well, the horrible sufferings and sacrifice of lives in the Angolan conflict cannot be charmed away by self-congratulation. Cuito Cuanavale was nobody's victory, but all of ours, on the bloody road to our difficult peace.
Graeme Addison is a freelance writer who wrote his MA thesis in journalism on SA's secret war in Angola.
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