Agostino Neto
Some revolutionaries carry a darker moral shade than others, and sometimes the tactics of the revolution must by necessity compromise its own ideals. Angola suffered arguably the most difficult revolutionary birth of all African countries, and the dramatis personae of its liberation proved to be a very mixed bag indeed.
Angola fell at the junction of three major ideological fault lines of the age: African Liberation, South African Apartheid and Soviet/United States Cold War imperialism. As the nation itself struggled to overthrow Portuguese colonial domination, these three forces fought to control and influence the process. The result was over forty years of bleeding war.
Agostino Neto was a poet, an idealist and a raw Marxist. In a rough-and-tumble corner of the world, he fought to control forces that in the end controlled him.
Neto’s early schooling in Luanda was, once again, achieved through local Christian missions, in his case a Methodist mission. From there he studied medicine at the Universities of Coimbra and Lisbon. While in Portugal, he was radicalized, developing a strong, Marxist-Leninist political identity that very quickly attracted the attention of the Portuguese intelligence services. Portugal was then under the fascist dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar, and in 1951, Neto was arrested and imprisoned for three months. This began a series of improvements, each attracting increasingly severe terms. The result, however, was even greater radicalization, and an even more uncompromising Marxist position.
In 1959, as a newly qualified medical doctor, and a poet of growing reputation, he returned to Angola where almost immediately he was re-arrested and imprisoned. This prompted popular demonstrations in Luanda that were violently suppressed. In an episode now known as the Massacre of Icolo e Bengo, 30 were killed and 200 injured when the army opened fire.
By then Neto had taken over the leadership of Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, or MPLA. The MPLA was a left-wing, pro-Soviet liberation movement, focused on the capital, Luanda. However, a more right-wing, pro-West movement National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA), was also in the picture, as was the South African-supported National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA)
The result was a liberation war against the Portuguese and an ideological war within the liberation movement. By the mid-1970s, as Portuguese rule in Africa was collapsing, the three liberation parties went to war with one another. The MPLA, after a bitter, bloody and divisive struggle emerged as the first among equals, and Neto took power in November 1975.
Unusually, Agostino Neto died of natural causes in 1979, but the war in Angola, this time civil war, would continue for another two decades. In the end, Angola was reduced to almost utter social and economic ruin. This was the legacy of the absolute determination of Agostino Neto, his successors and his rivals to achieve, and hold on to power.