Angola Revisited

This portrait of Angola in 1987 was written shortly before great changes came to the region. Within three years South Africa had been militarily defeated in Angola and its army had surrendered power to reforming Afrikaners and nationalist Africans, the Cuban expeditionary force of 30 000 soldiers had returned to the West Indies, and the Soviet Union had collapsed as a global power and rival to the United States. This chapter therefore analyses Angolan society and politics in the last year of powerful political intervention and five years before the outbreak of the country's third, and particularly destructive, civil war. In that war, which raged from 1992–1994, some of the provincial cities mentioned in this chapter were starved and destroyed as war moved from the countryside into the towns. The chapter was first published in the Journal of Southern African Studies (1988) and is reprinted by permission of Carfax Publishing Ltd, Box 25, Abingdon, OX14 3UE.

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