Empire in Africa: Angola and Its Neighbors
By David Birmingham
200 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/5
ISBN: 0896802485
Paper $22.00
David Birmingham’s Empire in Africa is an informative look into the politics of southern Africa and how internal and external forces have impacted Angolan politics. Southern Africa is a unique region in Africa. It was the last region in Africa to get its independence (Angola, Sao Tome & Principe, & Mozambique in 1975, Zimbabwe in 1980, Namibia in 1990, and South Africa in 1994), almost two decades after the rest of sub-Saharan Africa had begun to gain its independence. The region is also distinctive because of the influence of South Africa and white settler communities in the region. Add to that the colonial style of the Portuguese and one cane understand why domestic and regional politics in southern Africa have differed from any other region on the continent.
Birmingham takes us through the violent conquest of southern Africa by the British and the Dutch and the exploitation of Africans in the region. Africans who were used as slaves and workers in the region’s mines. Alcohol played a major role in weakening Africans in southern Africa, making the sell and pacification of African slaves and workers much easier. Africans were often worked coffee estates in Angola, plantations in Sao Tome, and mines in South Africa. Birmingham says that those who were sent to the island of Sao Tome rarely made it back home, creating generations of Sao Tome citizens of Angolan descent. Birmingham says that Angola would become a society where Black men were forced to work for the state and Black women were often condemned to sexual slavery. Birmingham’s description of colonial labor policies is disturbing but helps explain the future troubles Angola would face.
One other aspect of Angolan society would impact its future troubles. Birmingham talks about class and color lines in Angola. Like in most of Portugal’s colonies, mixed race children and assimilados held a different status in Portuguese colonial society. Birmingham breaks down the assimilados in Angola into three categories: 1. Colored Angolans who were usually born of a white father and a non-white mother. 2. “Civilized Angolans” who were members of the old, high-status “Roman Catholic colonial nucleus and who had ten generations of urban living. 3. Then, among the “native” population emerged another group who had reach reached assimilado status.
Throughout the text Birmingham compares Angola to Portugal’s other African colonies of Mozambique and Sao Tome & Principe, South Africa’s apartheid system and the Belgian colonial system in the Congo. Congo-Kinshasa and South Africa seem to have had the most influence on Angola’s domestic turmoil. South Africa especially used its influence as a tool of destabilization in the country and had its hands dirty throughout Angola’s civil war. Angola was a threat to South Africa for many reasons, the primary being the influence Angolans were having on anti-apartheid struggles within South Africa. Once Angola gained its independence, the country openly supported freedom fighters from South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe.
While under the Portuguese, Angolans grew restless as other African nations were securing their own independence. Birmingham says that during the revolution of 1961 Angolans went to the streets over such issues as competition over urban employment and dissatisfaction among Angolan coffee pickers.
Soon after Angola’s independence in 1975 the country plunged into civil war, during the height of the Cold War. Angola became polarized as both the United States and the Soviet Union turned the country into a tug of war over which ideologies would prevail in the new nation. Three parties emerged in Angola, each with its own political agenda and each representing a very different constituency. The Angolans living in the north, in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa, formed the capitalist leaning National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA). Their support came from the Congo, where many of them had gone in search of an education and employment. These Angolans spoke French and distinguished themselves from the Angolans who fled Angola after the upheavals in 1961.
From the southern Angolan port of Lobito emerged National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). Lobito was populated by highland immigrants who had migrated to the area, were drafted, or forced to work the ports. UNITA got much of its early support from South Africa and the United States.
The Population Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) was the party left standing with political power after independence. The MPLA leadership was a group who had been educated in Lisbon and who advanced socialist ideologies. Much the MPLA support came from Cuba and the more than 3,000 troops sent in by Fidel Castro to help the MPLA cause, much to the despair of Portugal, Western Europe, and America.
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UNITA’s inability to accept MPLA rule led them on a campaign of terror with their leader Jonas Savimbi at the helm. UNITA terrorized the regions of the country under government control. They looted and killed, and are infamous for their use of land mines, which in the 1980s killed half a million children. Angola remains the country with the largest number of landmines. In response, Birmingham says, the MPLA assumed all free peasants to be UNITA sympathizers and forcibly displaced Angolan citizens, placing them into guarded and bared-wire villages.
Throughout the 1980s Angola was ripped apart by violence, hunger and poverty. In 1992 UNITA and the MPLA stopped fighting long enough to have elections, which the MPLA won. UNITA’s inability to accept the election results renewed the violence and the country returned to civil war. As a result, the country delved deeper into poverty, crime, and corruption. With the death of Jonas Savimbi in 2002 Angola is finally finding peace. Though, even with the country’s diamond and mineral wealth, revenues have only lifted a select few from poverty. There is also a lack of access to resources and services like water, education, and healthcare, which are daily realities for Angolans. Class, cultural, and linguistic divisions also still haunt the country.
