The Angolan War of Independence (Portuguese: Guerra de Independência de Angola; 1961–1974), known as the Armed Struggle of National Liberation (Portuguese: Luta Armada de Libertação Nacional) in Angola, was a war of independence fought by the Angolan nationalist forces of the MPLA, UNITA and FNLA against Portugal. It began as an uprising by Angolans against the Portuguese imposition of forced cultivation of only cotton as a commodity crop. As the resistance spread against colonial authorities, multiple factions developed that struggled for control of Portugal's overseas province of Angola. There were three nationalist movements and also a separatist movement.
The war ended when a peaceful coup in Lisbon in April 1974 overthrew Portugal's Estado Novo dictatorship. The new regime immediately stopped all military action in the African colonies, declaring its intention to grant them independence without delay.
The conflict is usually approached as a branch or a theater of the wider Portuguese Colonial War. This included the independence wars of Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique.
The Angolans waged a guerrilla war, to which the Portuguese army and security forces conducted a counter-insurgency campaign against armed groups, who were mostly dispersed across sparsely populated areas of the vast Angolan countryside. Many atrocities were committed by all forces involved in the conflict.
After the Portuguese withdrew, an armed conflict broke out in Angola among the nationalist movements. The war formally came to an end in January 1975 when the Portuguese government, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), and the National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA) signed the Alvor Agreement. Informally, the civil war resumed by May 1975, including street fighting in Luanda and the surrounding countryside.
Background of the territory
In 1482, the Kingdom of Portugal's caravels, commanded by navigator Diogo Cão, arrived in the Kingdom of Kongo. Other expeditions followed, and close relations were soon established between the two kingdoms. The Portuguese brought many technological advances including firearms, and a new , Christianity. In return, the King of Kongo offered slaves, ivory and minerals.
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Reference material for this entry is drawn from the open encyclopedic record, including Wikipedia , available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Images are credited individually beside each photo.
Paulo Dias de Novais founded Luanda in 1575 as São Paulo da Assunção de Loanda. Novais occupied a strip of land with a hundred families of colonists and four hundred soldiers, and established a fortified settlement. The Portuguese crown granted Luanda the status of city in 1605. The Portuguese founded and maintained several other settlements, forts and ports, such as Benguela, a Portuguese fort from 1587, and a town from 1617.
The early period of Portuguese incursion was punctuated by a series of wars, treaties and disputes with local African rulers, particularly Nzinga Mbandi, who resisted Portugal with great determination. The conquest of the territory of present-day Angola started only in the 19th century and was not concluded before the 1920s.
In 1834, Angola and the rest of the Portuguese overseas dominions received the status of overseas provinces of Portugal. From then on, the official position of the Portuguese authorities was always that Angola was an integral part of Portugal in the same way as were the provinces of the Metropole (European Portugal). Angola’s status as a province was briefly interrupted between 1926 and 1951, when it was governed as a "colony" (itself administratively divided into several provinces). The provincial status was restored on 11 June 1951. The Portuguese constitutional revision of 1971 enacted progressive autonomy.
Angola has always had very low population density. Despite having a territory larger than France and Germany combined, Angola's population was only 5 million in 1960, of which around 180,000 were whites, 55,000 were mixed race and the rest were blacks. In the 1970s, the population had increased to 5.65 million, of which 450,000 were whites, 65,000 were mixed race and the rest were blacks. Political scientist Gerald Bender wrote "... by the end of 1974 the white population of Angola would be approximately 335,000, or slightly more than half the number which has commonly been reported."
The provincial government of Angola was headed by the Governor-General, who had both executive and legislative powers, reporting to the Portuguese Government, through the Minister of the Overseas. He was assisted by a cabinet made up of a Secretary-General (who also served as his deputy) and several provincial secretaries, each managing a given portfolio. There was a Legislative Council – including both appointed and elected members – with legislative responsibilities that were gradually increased in the 1960s and the 1970s. In 1972, it was transformed in the Legislative Assembly of Angola. There was also a Council of Government, responsible for advising the Governor-General in his legislative and executive responsibilities, which included the senior public officials of the province.
Despite being responsible for the police and other civil internal security forces, the Governor-General did not have military responsibilities, which were vested in the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Angola. The Commander-in-Chief reported directly to the Minister of National Defense and the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces. On some occasions however, the same person was appointed to fulfil both the roles of Governor-General and Commander-in-Chief, thus assuming both civil and military responsibilities.
In 1961, the local administration of Angola included the following districts: Cabinda, Congo, Luanda, Cuanza Norte, Cuanza Sul, Malanje, Lunda, Benguela, Huambo, Bié-Cuando-Cubango, Moxico, Moçâmedes and Huíla. In 1962, the Congo District was divided in the Zaire and Uige districts and that of Bié-Cuando-Cubango in the Bié and Cuando-Cubango districts. In 1970, the Cunene District was also created from the southern part of the Huíla District. Each was headed by a district governor, assisted by a district board. Following the Portuguese model of local government, the districts were made of municipalities (concelhos) and these were subdivided in civil parishes (freguesias), each administered by local council (respectively câmara municipal and junta de freguesia). In the regions where the necessary social and economic development had not yet been achieved the municipalities and civil parishes were transitorily replaced, respectively, by administrative circles (circunscrições) and posts (postos). Each of these governed by an official appointed by the government who had wide administrative powers, performing local government, police, sanitary, economical, tributary and even judicial roles. The circle administrators and the chiefs of administrative posts directed the local native auxiliary police officers known as cipaios. In these regions, the traditional authorities – including native kings, rulers and tribal chiefs – were kept and integrated in the administrative system, serving as intermediaries between the provincial authorities and the local native populations.
Belligerents
Portuguese forces
The Portuguese forces engaged in the conflict included mainly the Armed Forces, but also the security and paramilitary forces. Oil deposits found off the coast of Cabinda in 1966 were used to fund the war by the Portuguese, as well as other wars against independence movements in their colonies.
Armed forces
The Portuguese Armed Forces in Angola included land, naval and air forces, which came under the joint command of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Angola. Until 17 June 1961, there was no appointed Commander-in-Chief, with the joint command in the early stages of the conflict exercised by the commanders of the land forces, generals Monteiro Libório (until June 1961) and Silva Freire (from June to September 1961). From then on, the role of Commander-in-Chief was performed successively by the generals Venâncio Deslandes (1961–1962, also serving as Governor-General), Holbeche Fino (1962–1963), Andrade e Silva (1963–1965), Soares Pereira (1965–1970), Costa Gomes (1970–1972), Luz Cunha (1972–1974) and Franco Pinheiro (1974), all of them from the Army, except Libório from the Air Force. The Commander-in-Chief served as the theatre commander and coordinated the forces of the three branches stationed in the province, with the respective branch commanders serving as assistant commanders-in-chief. During the course of the conflict, the operational role of the Commander-in-Chief and of his staff was increasingly reinforced at the expense of branch commanders. In 1968, the Military Area 1 – responsible for the Dembos rebel area – was established under the direct control of the Commander-in-Chief and, from 1970, the military zones were also put under his direct control, with the Eastern Military Zone becoming a joint command. When the conflict erupted, the Portuguese Armed Forces in Angola only included 6500 men, of whom 1500 were metropolitan Europeans (23% of the total force) and the remainder locals. By the end of the conflict, the number had increased to more than 65,000, of whom 57.6% were metropolitans and the remainder locals.
The land forces in Angola constituted the 3rd Military Region of the Portuguese Army (renamed "Military Region of Angola, RMA" in 1962). The Military Region was foreseen to include five subordinate regional territorial commands, but these had not yet been activated. The disposition of the army units in the province at the beginning of the conflict had been established in 1953, at that a time when no internal conflicts were expected in Angola, and the major Portuguese military concern was the expected conventional war in Europe against the Warsaw Pact.
The previous organization of the former Colonial Military Forces, which had been based on company-sized units scattered across Angola and tasked with internal security duties, was restructured along conventional lines.The new structure consisted of three infantry regiments and several battalion-sized units from various military branches, concentrated in major urban centers.This reorganization aimed to enable the rapid formation of an expeditionary field division that could be deployed from Angola to reinforce the Portuguese Army in Europe in the event of a conventional war.
The regiments and other units were mostly maintained at cadre strength, functioning primarily as training centers for conscripts drafted within the province. During the conflict, these units were responsible for forming locally recruited field forces. In addition to these local units, the Army forces in Angola included reinforcement units raised and deployed from mainland Portugal.
These reinforcement units were temporary formations, composed mainly of conscripts—including most junior officers and non-commissioned officers. They existed only for the standard two-year tour of duty and were disbanded once their members completed service.The majority of these units consisted of light infantry battalions and independent companies known as caçadores. These formations were designed to operate autonomously, with minimal support from higher command levels, and were therefore equipped with robust service support components.
They were deployed in a grid system (quadrícula) along the theatre of operations, with each one responsible for a given area of responsibility. Usually, a regiment-sized agrupamento (battlegroup) commanded a sector, divided into several sub-sectors, each constituting the area of responsibility of a caçadores battalion. Each battalion, in turn, had field companies distributed across the sub-sector, with each company responsible for a specific portion of it.From 1962, four intervention zones (Northern, Central, Southern and Eastern) were established – renamed "military zones" in 1967 – each consisting of several sectors. Due to the low scale guerrilla nature of the conflict, the caçadores company became the main tactical unit, with the standard organization in three rifle and one support platoons, being replaced by one based in four identical sub-units known as "combat groups". The Army also fielded regular units of artillery, armored reconnaissance, engineering, communications, signal intelligence, military police and service support. Army also fielded special forces units. Initially, these consisted of companies of special caçadores, trained in guerrilla and counter-insurgency warfare. The Army tried to extend the training of the special caçadores to all the light infantry units, disbanding those companies in 1962. This proved impracticable and soon other special forces were created in the form of the Commandos. The Commandos and a few specially selected caçadores units were not deployed in a grid, but served instead as mobile intervention units under the direct control of the higher echelons of command.
An unconventional force also fielded by the army was the Dragoons of Angola, a special counterinsurgency horse unit created in the mid-1960s.
The Portuguese Navy forces were under the command of the Naval Command of Angola. These forces included the Zaire Flotilla (operating on the river Zaire), naval assets (including frigates and corvettes deployed to Angola in rotation), Marine companies and Special Marine detachments. While the Marine companies served as regular naval infantry with the role of protecting the Navy's installations and vessels, the Special Marines were special forces, serving as mobile intervention units, specialized in amphibious assaults. The initial focus of the navy was mainly the river Zaire, with the mission of interdicting the infiltration of guerrillas in Northern Angola from the bordering Republic of Zaire. Later, the navy also operated in the rivers of Eastern Angola, despite it being a remote interior region at around 1000 km distance from the Ocean.
The Portuguese air assets in Angola were under the command of the 2nd Air Region of the Portuguese Air Force, with headquarters in Luanda. They included a central air base (the Air Base 9 at Luanda) and two sector air bases (the Base-Aerodrome 3 at Negage, Uíge and the Base-Aerodrome 4 at Henrique de Carvalho, Lunda). A fourth air base was being built (Base-Aerodrome 10 at Serpa Pinto, Cuando-Cubando), but it was not completed before the end of the conflict. These bases controlled a number of satellite air fields, including maneuver and alternate aerodromes. Besides these, the Air Force also could count with a number of additional airfields, including those of some of the Army garrisons, in some of which air detachments were permanently deployed. The Air Force also maintained in Angola, the Paratrooper Battalion 21, which served as a mobile intervention unit, with its forces initially being deployed by parachute, but later being mainly used in air assaults by helicopter. The Air Force was supported by the voluntary air formations, composed of civil pilots, mainly from local flying clubs, who operated light aircraft mainly in air logistics support missions. In the beginning of the conflict, the Air Force had only a few aircraft stationed in Angola, including 25 F-84G jet fighter-bombers, six PV-2 Harpoon bombers, six Nord Noratlas transport aircraft, six Alouette II helicopters, eight T-6 light attack aircraft and eight Auster light observation aircraft. By the early 1970s, it had available four F-84G, six PV-2 Harpoon, 13 Nord Noratlas, C-47 and C-57 transport aircraft, 30 Alouette III and Puma helicopters, 18 T-6 and 26 Dornier Do 27 observation aircraft. Despite the increase, the number of aircraft was always too few to cover the enormous Angolan territory, besides many being old aircraft difficult to maintain in flying conditions. From the late 1960s, the Portuguese forces in southern Angola were able to count on the support of helicopters and some other air assets of the South African Air Force, with two Portuguese-South African joint air support centers being established.
Security forces
The security forces in Angola were under the control of the civil authorities, headed by the Governor-General of the province. The forces engaged in the war were the Public Security Police (PSP) and the PIDE (International and State Defense Police which was renamed DGS in 1969). By the middle of the 1960s, these forces included 10,000 PSP constables and 1,100 PIDE agents.
The PSP was the uniformed preventive police of Angola. It was modeled after the European Portuguese PSP. It covered the whole territory of the province, including its rural areas and not only the major urban areas as in European Portugal. The PSP of Angola included a general-command in Luanda and district commands in each of the several district capitals, with a network of police stations and posts scattered along the territory. The Angolan PSP was reinforced with mobile police companies deployed by the European Portuguese PSP. The PSP also included the Rural Guard, which was responsible for the protection of farms and other agricultural companies. In addition, the PSP was responsible for organizing the district militias, which were primarily employed in the self-defense of villages and other settlements.
The PIDE was the Portuguese secret and border police. The PIDE Delegation of Angola included a number of sub-delegations, border posts and surveillance posts. In the war it operated as an intelligence service. The PIDE created and controlled the Flechas, a paramilitary unit of special forces made up of natives. The Flechas were initially intended to serve mostly as trackers, but due to their effectiveness were increasingly employed in more offensive operations, including pseudo-terrorist operations.
Para-military and irregular forces
Besides the regular armed and security forces, there were a number of para-military and irregular forces, some of them under the control of the military and other controlled by the civil authorities.
The OPVDCA (Provincial Organization of Volunteers and Civil Defense of Angola) was a militia-type corps responsible for internal security and civil defense roles, with similar characteristics to those of the Portuguese Legion of European Portugal. It was under the direct control of the Governor-General of the province. Its origin was the Corps of Volunteers organized in the beginning of the conflict, which became the Provincial Organization of Volunteers in 1962, also assuming the role of civil defense in 1964, when it became the OPVDCA. It was made up of volunteers that served part-time, most of these being initially whites, but latter becoming increasingly multi-racial. In the conflict, the OPVDCA was mainly employed in the defense of people, lines of communications and sensitive installations. It included a central provincial command and a district command in each of the Angolan districts. It is estimated that by the end of the conflict there were 20,000 OPVDCA volunteers.
The irregular paramilitary forces, included a number of different types of units, with different characteristics. Under military control, were the Special Groups (GE) and the Special Troops (TE). The GE were platoon-sized combat groups of special forces made up of native volunteers, which operated in Eastern Angola, usually attached to Army units. The TE had similar characteristics, but were made up of defectors from FNLA, operating in Cabinda and Northern Angola. Under the control of the civil authorities were the Fieis (Faithfuls) and the Leais (Loyals). The Fieis was a force made up mostly of exiled Katangese gendarmes from the Front for Congolese National Liberation, which opposed Mobutu regime, being organized in three battalions. The Leais was a force made up of political exiles from Zambia.
Race and ethnicity in the Portuguese Armed Forces
From 1900 to the early 1950s, the Portuguese maintained a separate colonial army in their African possessions, consisting mainly of a limited number of companhias indígenas (native companies). Officers and senior NCOs were seconded from the metropolitan army, while junior NCOs were mainly drawn from Portuguese settlers of the overseas territories. The rank and file were a mixture of black African volunteers and white conscripts from the settler community doing their obligatory military service. Black assimilados were in theory also liable to conscription but in practice only a limited number were called on to serve. With the change in official status of the African territories from colonies to overseas provinces in 1951, the colonial army lost its separate status and was integrated into the regular forces of Portugal itself. The basis of recruitment for the overseas units remained essentially unchanged.
According to the Mozambican historian João Paulo Borges Coelho, the Portuguese colonial army was segregated along lines of race and ethnicity. Until 1960, there were three classes of soldiers: commissioned soldiers (European and African whites), overseas soldiers (black African assimilados or civilizados), and native soldiers (Africans who were part of the indigenato regime). These categories were renamed to 1st, 2nd and 3rd class in 1960—which effectively corresponded to the same classification. Later, although skin colour ceased to be an official discriminator, in practice the system changed little—although from the late 1960s onward, blacks were admitted as ensigns (alferes), the lowest rank in the hierarchy of commissioned officers.
Numerically, black soldiers never amounted to more than 41% of the Colonial army, an increase from just 18% at the outbreak of the war. Coelho noted that perceptions of African soldiers varied a good deal among senior Portuguese commanders during the conflict in Angola, Guinea and Mozambique. General Costa Gomes, perhaps the most successful counterinsurgency commander, sought good relations with local civilians and employed African units within the framework of an organized counter-insurgency plan. General Spínola, by contrast, appealed for a more political and psycho-social use of African soldiers. General Kaúlza, the most conservative of the three, feared African forces outside his strict control and seems not to have progressed beyond his initial racist perception of the Africans as inferior beings.
Native African troops, although widely deployed, were initially employed only in subordinate roles as enlisted troops or noncommissioned officers. As the war went on, an increasing number of native Angolans rose to positions of command, although of junior rank. After 500 years of colonial rule, Portugal had failed to appoint any native black governors, headmasters, police inspectors, or professors, nor a single commander of senior commissioned rank in the overseas Army.
Here Portuguese colonial administrators fell victim to the legacy of their own discriminatory and limited policies in education, which largely barred indigenous Angolans from an equal and adequate education until well after the outbreak off the insurgency. By the early 1970s, the Portuguese authorities had fully perceived these flaws as wrong and contrary to their overseas ambitions in Portuguese Africa, and willingly accepted a true color blindness policy with more spending in education and training opportunities, which started to produce a larger number of black high-ranked professionals, including military personnel.
Nationalist and separatist forces
UPA/FNLA
UPA was created on 7 July 1954, as the Union of the Peoples of Northern Angola, by Holden Roberto, a descendant of the old Kongo Royal House, who was born in northern Angola but had lived since his early childhood in the Belgian Congo, where he came to work for the local colonial authorities. In 1958, the movement adopted a more embracing designation, becoming the Union of the Peoples of Angola (UPA). In 1960, Holden Roberto signed an agreement with the MPLA for the two movements to fight together against the Portuguese forces, but he ended up fighting alone. In 1962, UPA merged with the Democratic Party of Angola, becoming the National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA), positioning itself as a pro-American and anti-Soviet organization. In the same year, it created the Revolutionary Government of Angola in Exile (GRAE). UPA and later the FNLA were mainly supported by the Bakongo ethnic group of the old Kingdom of Kongo, including the Northwestern and Northern Angola, as well as parts of the French and Belgian Congos. It had always had strong connections with the former Belgian Congo (named Zaire since 1971), because Holden Roberto was the friend and brother-in-law of Mobutu Sese Seko among other reasons.
The armed branch of the FNLA was the National Liberation Army of Angola (ELNA). It was mainly supported by Congo/Zaire—where its troops were based and trained—and by Algeria. They were financed by the US and—despite considering themselves anti-communists—received weapons from Eastern European countries.
MPLA
The People's Movement of Liberation of Angola (MPLA) was founded in 1956, by the merging of the Party of the United Struggle for Africans in Angola (PLUAA) and the Angolan Communist Party (PCA). The MPLA was an organization of the left-wing politics, which included mixed race and white members of the Angolan intelligentsia and urban elites, supported by the Ambundu and other ethnic groups of the Luanda, Bengo, Cuanza Norte, Cuanza Sul and Mallange districts. It was headed by Agostinho Neto (president) and Viriato da Cruz (secretary-general), both Portuguese-educated urban intellectuals. It was mainly externally supported by the Soviet Union and Cuba, with its tentative to receive support from the United States failing, as these were already supporting UPA/FNLA.
The armed wing of the MPLA was the People's Army of Liberation of Angola (EPLA). In its peak, the EPLA included around 4500 fighters, being organized in military regions. It was mainly equipped with Soviet weapons, mostly received through Zambia, which included Tokarev pistol, PPS submachine guns, Simonov automatic rifles, Kalashnikov assault rifles, machine-guns, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank mines and anti-personnel mines
UNITA
The Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) was created in 1966 by Jonas Savimbi, a dissident of FNLA. Jonas Savimbi was the Foreign Minister of the GRAE but in the course of time clashed with Holden Roberto, accusing him of having complicity with the US and of following an imperialist policy. Savimbi was a member of the Ovimbundu tribe of Central and Southern Angola, son of an Evangelic pastor, who went to study medicine in European Portugal, although he never graduated. The group followed a Maoist ideology initially and received support from the People's Republic of China, although they switched to a more broad anti-communist platform after 1975.
The Armed Forces of Liberation of Angola (FALA) constituted the armed branch of UNITA. They had few fighters and were not well equipped. Its difficulties led Savimbi to make agreements with the Portuguese authorities, focusing more on fighting MPLA.
When the war ended, UNITA was the only one of the nationalist movements that was able to maintain forces operating inside the Angolan territory, while the forces of the remaining movements were eliminated or expelled by Portuguese forces.
FLEC
The Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC) was founded in 1963, by the merging of the Movement for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (MLEC), the Action Committee of the Cabinda National Union (CAUNC) and the Mayombe National Alliance (ALLIAMA). On the contrary of the remaining three movements, FLEC did not fight for the independence of the whole Angola, but only for the independence of Cabinda, which it considered a separate country. Although its activities started still before the withdrawal of Portugal from Angola, the military actions of FLEC occurred mainly after, being aimed against the Angolan armed and security forces. FLEC is the only of the nationalist and separatist movements that still maintains a guerrilla warfare until today.
RDL
The Eastern Revolt (RDL) was a dissident wing of the MPLA, created in 1973, under the leadership of Daniel Chipenda, in opposition to the line of Agostinho Neto. A second dissident wing was the Active Revolt, created at the same time.
Pre-war events
International politics
The international politics of the late 1940s and 1950s was marked by the Cold War and the wind of change in the European colonies in Asia and Africa.
In October 1954, the Algerian War was initiated by a series of explosions in Algiers. This conflict would lead to the presence of more than 400,000 French military in Algeria until its end in 1962. Foreseeing a similar conflict in its African territories, the Portuguese military paid acute attention to this war, sending observers and personnel to be trained in the counter-insurgence warfare tactics employed by the French.
