Blowback - S6 Episode 2 - "Economy of Terror"

Episode Date: December 22, 2025

A look into the Portuguese empire in southern Africa and the stirrings of nationalism in Angola. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the beginning of the Renaissance, the Portuguese set out in 50-ton caravals to push back the frontiers of the unknown by their skillful exploration. The Azores in 1423, Cape Bogodore in 1433, and on through West Africa crossing the equator in 1473. After the Congo, the Cape of Good Hope was reached in 1488, opening the way to East Africa and And in 1498, the sea route to India and the Far East. In her defense forces, too, the best of Portugal's past goes hand in hand with her present. Portugal's air squadrons are equipped with NATO jets. Welcome to blowback. I'm Brendan James. And I'm Noah Colwyn.

And this is season six, episode two. economy of terror. In our first episode of this season, we introduced you to our subject, a Cold War showdown in Africa, specifically Angola. This encompassed a vast tangle of conflicts, the collapse of an empire, a post-colonial revolution, a proxy war between superpowers, and a campaign of international solidarity between third world nations. In this episode, as always, we'll wind the clockback to cover the early seeds of these events at the dawn of modern Angola. After surveying the African kingdoms that greeted the Europeans in the 15th century, we'll see the Portuguese empire, by now one of the lesser gods of colonial Europe, attempt to build an African franchise

based on slave labor. Come the 19th century, Native Angolan's will lose ground to a voracious campaign to settle white immigrants in their lands and to consolidate a new African colony. In the early 20th century, a new class of modern right-wing nationalists will take over Portugal, unembarrassed by their backward status, even among fellow European empires.

It's the era of Portuguese dictator, Dr. Antonio Salazar. But uprisings from native Angolans, both in the capital, Luanda, and the coffee-producing northern, will explode against the colonial government and jumpstart a slow burn, a war for independence that will forge the main resistance groups to colonial rule. But these groups will end up almost as fiercely opposed to each other as they are against the Portuguese Empire.

By now, the Cold War will have arrived. The Americans will ultimately be compromised when it comes to opposing Salazar, as we'll see, but to the degree they will support his opponents, their chosen one, is Holden Roberto, a stylish firebrand with connections to Franz Fanon and Joseph Mobutu in Zaire. The Soviets, meanwhile, will expand their contacts with anti-colonial groups and their favored Augustino Neto, the doctor and poet who will opt for the socialist path. And finally, constantly angling, constantly negotiating, will be the young cosmopolitan commander, Jonas Savimbi, who has not yet earned a famous or rather infamous reputation. We'll see how the Portuguese Empire uses Angola, how it lusts after coffee and diamonds,

and how it extends its slave labor regime into the 20th century. We'll study the cracks in the edifice of Salazar's shimmering presentation of a modern Christian empire, and we'll keep an eye on yet another player in the shadows, apartheid South Africa, which is nervously, yet excitedly eyeing opportunities as all these changes sweep Africa. I was a chief before the Portuguese came. My power was from the ancestors. An Mbundu chief living in Angola's Mexico Province, 1970.

The land we know as modern Angola, more than twice as large as France and nearly one sixth the size of the United States, was centuries ago home to several distinct kingdoms in central and southern Africa. These kingdoms themselves began as loose associations, though it was the Congo kingdom whose southern territory made up the north of today's Angola that became a powerful, centralized state and dominated its neighbors and rivals. The many Congo, or the king, welcomed a small contingent of Portuguese to his shores in the late 15th century, which inaugurated an era of trade, not only of copper, of salt, and of sugar, but most significantly of African slaves. Over the centuries, the leaders of the Congo

kingdom alternatively fought and collaborated with the Portuguese until the once powerful kingdom withered into a compliant trading partner. In Africa, writes scholar Natalia Telepneva, the Portuguese used a combination of infiltration, persuasion, and coercion to extend their influence. They co-opted the rulers of Congo, who adopted Christianity and welcomed Catholic missionaries. End quote. Another kingdom south of Congo was the Nongo Kingdom. Its leaders held the title Ngola, the origin of Angola's modern name. Here too the Portuguese gained greater influence by allying.

with various royals, facing particular trouble from one queen in Ziga. Until one day, the Andongo Kingdom was more or less neutralized as well. Journalist Basil Davidson provides a portrait of one of Portugal's first emissaries, or pirates, depending on your perspective. Quote, in 1574, a chunk of coastal territory south of the Kwanza estuary was indicated vaguely on a map and given to the would-be conqueror Paolo Diaz deus de'in-vice. The charter of donation, including a certificate by two theologians affirming that conquest by force, would be beneficial to the interests of the faith,

made him governor of the royal colony north of the Kwanza estuary, and assured him of the right to push the frontiers of this colony as far to the east as his troops could carry them. Diaz was to bear all the costs. In return for these gifts, writes Davidson, Diaz was to receive for himself all the taxation he could squeeze from the inhabitants of his own colony, as well as a third of the royal colony's taxes and sundry other benefits. The Portuguese would cite these early dealings on the coasts of West Africa as proof that they had been in Angola for 500 years and had every right to white settlement of the territory. But significant as this light presence was, it was ultimately light. It was first and foremost an outpost of the slave trade.

For those four to five centuries, the Portuguese did not make much of a dent inland, as the aforementioned African kingdoms, at times, adjusted and even accommodated trade with the Europeans. Quote, some of these consequences were absorbed constructively into the fabric of African society, writes Davidson, of consequences of this kind, probably by far the most important was the inland spread after about 1600 of American food crops such as cassava and maize. Other consequences, however, went toward social disintegration. Of these, the worst beyond any doubt, was the steady inward spread of the slave trade and its search for captives who could be marched westward to the coast and sold there.

Through the years, there was stiff resistance, either from African leaders commanding armies or more spontaneous uprisings from natives against high-handed Portuguese. As in many cases throughout colonial history, there was religious resistance from those who had adopted the Europeans' own Christianity, only to mobilize African adherents against Western presence. Take the most famous case of Donia Beatrice, or Kimpavita, whom historian John Thornton profiles, Quote, in the 18th century, a Congo woman possessed by St. Anthony led a mass movement to restore the kingdom of Congo. The movement was violently suppressed by the religious and political authorities,

and she was burned at the stake as a witch and heretic in 1706. But not before she had drawn thousands of people to her in the ruins of the country's ancient capital. But in the end, these native kingdoms broke down, as the Portuguese clung stubbornly onto their sparse and fragile outposts trading gold and slaves. In Mozambique, in Guinea-Bissau, and in Angola. Quote, fastened into the coastal regions, Portugal's presence, and all it meant, had moved from being a small parasite into a big one,

writes Davidson. That is, until the 19th century, when the imperial court in Lisbon decided it was entitled to much, much more. The modern history of Portuguese colonization of Angola might be said to begin around 1820, according to the historian David Birmingham. Quote, in 1822, Angola's major trading partner and Portugal's largest colony, Brazil, declared itself independent. By this time, Portugal's old Asian empire, now reduced to Toholds in China, Indonesia, and India, was little more than a memory and celebrated an epic poetry and hauntingness.

music. The Asian Empire was very gradually replaced by a new African Empire, end quote. A new imperial mission, born out of competition with fellow Europeans, would supposedly lift Portugal out of its doldrums. Throwing its hat into the so-called scramble for Africa, the Portuguese Empire aimed to finally stand toe-to-to-to with the British and the French, not to mention the Germans and Dutch. Quote, the forging of a large and complex colony of half a million square miles in Angola took a whole century from the 1820s to the 1920s. By the middle of the 1920s, the frontiers of the colony were finally fixed.

As a Portuguese administrative presence spread slowly inland, about a quarter of a million Africans were classified as colonial subjects, deemed liable to pay tithes or poll taxes. End quote. The extension of formal control beyond the coastal areas was also closely connected to the need to acquire cheap African labor, writes Telapneva. Quote, laborers were required to work in coastal fisheries on agricultural plantations and to build roads and railways. In the late 19th century, Angola began exporting coffee, sugar, and rubber, while the British chocolatiers, the Cadbury Brothers, began importing cocoa from the plantations of Sao Tamay.

Portugal was covetous of its rival's thriving industries, and in its drive to catch up in the 19th century, it copied from them everything it could. Lisbon knew it had to invest in modern railroads, the way, for example, the British did in their Indian imperial. Rail transport was not only a growth industry in and of itself, it was the essential technology that linked up the burgeoning centers of commerce, in a colony. Think of the tracks of the railroad as the long fingers of the empire,

digging deeper into the colony. Another of Lisbon's priorities was to further entrench the Angolan colony in the merciless system of slave labor. The administration of the colonies was as unapologetically racist as anything Americans may think of in their own history. As public opinion demanded in Britain and France, this governor said, for what reason may the African people, African Negro who exercises no useful profession not be subjected to forced labor. We spoke with Professor Antonio Tomas, who hails from Angola, and he estimates that around 40% of African slaves came through the Portuguese. Angola has contributed very significantly in this, to the slave trade, because a great

part of the slaves, I think, account for about 40% of slaves, taking from Africa or enslaved people taken from Africa west through the agency of the Portuguese, 40%. The Portuguese were indeed out of step with the times. The British had outlawed slavery in the home country near the end of the 18th century, allowing it to continue in its colonies. Revolutionary France, meanwhile, completely banned it until Napoleon walked that back. As the 19th century

rolled on, the Brits pushed abolition for once more, abolishing the slave trade within the empire in 1807, then banning the ownership of slaves in the 1830s, shifting to a system of indentured servitude. Portugal was determinedly slow to follow its rivals, reaching each of Britain's milestones about 30 years late every time, give or take. Even then, chattel slavery did continue to exist in the Portuguese Empire, especially domestic slavery, in towns and cities, and, not least of all, on plantations such as the island of Sao Tame, north of Angola, where slavery was modified into the more modern system of forced labor.

Mandatory work without the literal ownership of human beings, it remained nearly as brutal. Whether by old-school slavery or the adjusted conscripted or contract labor, the Portuguese colonists ruled through terror. torture, and institutionalized rape. Quote, fear and pain were the incentives which drove Africans, who were no longer technically slaves, to work as conscripts for colonial masters,

writes Birmingham. Any economic incentives were limited and unpredictable. Even when remuneration was promised, it was sometimes in the form of tokens that could only be used in a plantation store where prices were higher than on the open market. Even by the early 20th century, one Portuguese journalist described the system as the economy of terror, end quote. Lisbon did not escape the scandal around its, relatively speaking, outdated labor practices.

Henry Nevinson, a liberal British journalist, wrote in Harper's magazine what he saw while following the trail of what he called modern slavery. wrote Nevinson, quote, Every bone scattered along that terrible footpath from Machiko to the Kwanza is the bone of a murdered man. The man may not have been killed by violence, though in most cases the sharp cut hole in the skull shows where the fatal stroke was given. But if he was not killed by violence,

he was taken from his home and sold, either for the buyer's use or to sell again to the Portuguese trader or to the agents who superintend the contract labor for sound time. and are so useful in supplying the cocoa drinkers of England and America, as well as enriching the plantation owners and the government. Nevenson's account, and those like it, gave rise to boycotts of the Angolan colonies owned by Portugal. Quote, the treatment of plantation workers in Sao Tomé was so dire, writes Telepneva,

that the international scandal even caused Cadbury to suspend cocoa imports in 1909. Not only that, but, as Davidson points out, the old-fashioned barbarity of slavery and forced labor was far less productive than the mechanized and dynamic system fueled by free labor in Portugal's rival empires. Quote, so little was there any true development within the Portuguese system that the transfer of technology insofar as there was any sometimes went from blacks to whites, end quote. One 19th century Swedish mining engineer noted that the Portuguese were learning how to extract iron ore with African methods and equipment. But what did all this forced labor actually produce? I have a bag of jewels for you.

They're jewels, Betty. They're jewels. One major industry, notorious to this day in Southern Africa, was diamonds. Lisbon was already into diamonds centuries before its modern colonization of Africa, back when Brazil was part of its empire. Quote, many thousands of imported Angolan slaves spent their lives up to the wastes in cold water washing river mud for precious stones, writes Birmingham. With Belgian capital and South African technology, it was now time to hunt for gems in Angola. quote, the colonial government gave a company, Diamang, virtually all the rights of a state within a state.

To prevent diamond diggers from escaping home to their families and farms, or from smuggling gems out of the compounds, some workers were enclosed in wired prisons. The management of the enterprise was in the hands of white technicians. In compensation for the hardship posting, these expatriates enjoyed a privileged lifestyle of segregation, similar to them. that practiced in South Africa, end quote. And from the above-ground quarries, the product went to cutting and polishing markets in Antwerp, and then on to the retail outlets of London's Hat and Garden, with a monopoly handed to the De Beers Consortium.

Future leaders of African politics were paying attention to how this system of extraction worked. The Angolan Diamond industry would come up in the works of future Ghanaian president, Kwame and Krumah, in his treatise, neocolonialism. Through the colonial administration, he writes, quote, the Portuguese government holds 200,000 shares,

slightly in excess of the 198,800,800,000, held by Belgian bankers. About half the African workers for the company are forced laborers, rounded up by the authorities, and receiving a monthly wage of around 70 escudas, equivalent to about 16 shillings, end quote. So far, so good for Portugal's imperial comeback, but things got more complicated when, in the early 20th century,

Lisbon decided to introduce an entirely new element to their colonization of Angola. White settlers. A new governor of the colony, Norton de Matos, soon to be famous as a World War I hero, a Freemason, and a statesman at the League of Nations, quote, Norton aspired to replace the old mixed-race Angolan elites with a new generation of white Portuguese immigrants, writes Birmingham. Quote, this racism had adverse effects on the elites who were Creole, which in this context means mixed race. The new carpetbaggers, to whom the Republic promised white-collar jobs in the colonies, were particularly hostile to black and brown Angolans, who already had the training and experience which the semi-literate white settlers,

did not possess, end quote. Despite promises of an apartheid state, not dissimilar to what would grow out of the white republic further south, it was actually quite difficult to get white settlers from Portugal to relocate to Angola. Quote, the offer of a 15-year mortgage,

a 100 hectare farm, and the loan of plow oxen was not enough to attract farmers. The optimistic vision of health workers, of educational missions, of cadres of technicians, of secular priests to raise the moral standards of illiterate white peasants, was insufficient to stimulate immigration. Norton had failed to realize that little of Angola's vast territory had the soil fertility or rainfall

to make farming viable. He also failed to see that the most productive soils were already occupied by indigenous populations. When immigrants did arrive, conflict between white land-hound, hunters and black land losers became endemic, end quote. Indeed, indigenous Angolan's living off subsistence farming, threatened white pretenders and burned down plantations. Still, the settler colony began to take shape. Quote, unlettered Portuguese immigrants from the rough hills of northern Portugal were brought in and taught the art of estate management on a hundred small plantations per Birmingham. Here's how it worked.

The poor white managers supervised black bailiffs who summoned the work teams to the fields with the great plantation bell, which rang out in the cold dawn, and regulated the routine. The heavy work of humping sacks of coffee beans was undertaken by porters recruited from the kingdom of Embalundu. Weeding, pruning, and harvesting were done by the unskilled conscripts. End quote. By the mid-1920s through a statute known as the, the native law. Quote, the old-class gradations of colonial society were legalistically replaced by the simple two-way barrier between citizens and natives. To be recognized as civilized under the new ideology, and Angolan had to prove to a moral inspectorate that he or she was

monogamous, spoke fluent Portuguese, ate with a knife and fork, and wore European clothes. anyone who did not meet this criteria, however loyal a member of the Catholic Church, and however distinguished his or her family history, was deemed to be a native. Once you were classified as a native, you were assigned papers that restricted your movement and employment, and you were forced to pay a poll tax. You were also subject to the forced labor system. This two-tiered system of citizens and natives, in its very terminology, openly declared the Angolan colony to merely be a variant of what would one day be called South Africa's apartheid system.

Seeing as how the South African apartheid government will play a rather large role in this season's story, this is as good a time as any to review a truncated version of its history. In the jungles of darkest Africa, a Bulgarian army has dared to point its cannon at our imperial mother. The scum race of the Trump's vall, half man, half elephant, commanded by a fanatical psychopath, field marshal Cornelius von Kruger. Kruger, that drunkard. Kruger, that's glutton. Kruger were waging a perverse crusade against the cause of good.

The European colonists who founded South Africa were the Dutch, the first round of whom were known as Trek-Bores, often impoverished semi-migrant farmers who fanned out over the best arable lands found on South Africa's coastal plains. They'd become known as Boers or Afrikaners. Originally found on the Cape of Good Hope, the Boers began migrating inland in the early 19th century as a response to the United Kingdom seizing the Cape Colony. They set up their own series of small countries, or Boer republics, which successfully negotiated for recognition by their former British masters. Neither party, of course, seemed all that concerned with the vast majority of the population, black Africans who had already been living there. Eventually, in no small part due to the discovery of diamonds and gold in the late 1860s, imperial competition intensified in Southern Africa. The European empires negotiated for themselves which country got which stretch of territory.

While the Brits got South Africa, the Germans received the country to South Africa's north, on its western edge, along the Atlantic Ocean. The Germans called their colony German Southwest Africa, but today we call it the nation of Namibia, which you'll hear more about later this season. In any case, the boars of South Africa were once again chafing against British rule. After a small Boer War between the Brits and the Boers in 1880, tension shot up until there was a giant Boer War in 1890. Just after the turn of the century, the Dutch Republics agreed to a peace with the Brits and set up a relationship to the British Crown

similar to that of Canada or Australia, the Union of South Africa. But from the jump, it was Afrikaners who retained most of the political power. They'd go on to create a kind of Jim Crow. nation. Despite composing the majority of people in South Africa, black South Africans were treated as cheap labor, given

few political rights, a situation that only worsened with time. Not only did whites earn as much as 15 times more than their black counterparts, the infamous Native Lands Act barred sales of land between blacks and whites, restricting blacks to live on only 7%

of the country's land. Blacks who sharecropped on white owned land were not allowed to leave without a pass supplied by their white boss. For black South Africans who resisted, white landowners meted out violence, destroyed property, and evicted any perceived threats. Threats like the African National Congress, the ANC. But it would be decades before groups like the ANC could genuinely challenge the rule of the Afrikaners. After 30 years of struggle to bring his country out of crisis and debt, the man in the street makes the best use of his vote, for he knows only too well the value of stable government. This spirit can be seen in the respect shown towards the man who in 1928 began to steer his country towards its present stable economy.

Prime Minister Salazar. A military coup toppled Portugal's government in the 1920s. The new government's finance minister was one Dr. Antonio Salazar. At Coimbra University, the ancient Portuguese seat of learning, the honorary degree of doctor of civil law is conferred on the Prime Minister, Dr. Antonio de Olivier Salazar. Osteer, professorial, and voraciously Catholic and anti-communist, Salazar reordered Portugal's shaky finances,

and by 1932 had risen to the top of the port. pile and became the country's president, seeking to reorder the entirety of Portuguese society. But this he could not have achieved, writes Davidson, without the leading men and interests who backed him. These were partly large landowners, military leaders, and bishops, and partly financial and commercial interests in Lisbon and Aporto, the last being linked to similar, though stronger interest abroad, chiefly in Britain. End quote. The strategic position of this air and sea base gives defense in depth to an area of the Atlantic protected by the oldest unbroken alliance in history. The Treaty of Friendship that has bound

Britain and Portugal since 1373. Indeed, the British Navy is no stranger to Portuguese waters. Salazar's government suppressed unions, stamped out political opposition, and legislated his Catholic conservative values, such as the patriarchal nuclear family and restrictions on women's voting. Despite decades of underground opposition, sporadic uprisings, and occasional political challenges to his rule, no one ever dislodged Salazar from power. Portugal's colonies would not be left out of Salazar's Estado Novo. Quote, empire was fundamental to Salazar's vision for Portugal, writes Telapneva, as cheap raw materials for Portuguese industry and a market for Portugal's imports.

A colonial act centralized control over finances and took steps to diminish the role of foreign capital in the colonies, end quote. A U.S. Army handbook details how all this shook Angola. Quote, its major effect was to bring the economy of Angola into line, with the economic belt tightening that the new regime was implementing at home. A recent drift to autonomy in Angola was brought to a halt, end quote. The new plan, according to Birmingham, quote, recognized that the only highland production of Realworth was the cultivation of maize and beans by ultra-cheap African plantation workers.

Instead of becoming toiling sons of the soil, the next generation of settlers would become shopkeepers, end quote. In the city of Wamba, which the colonial government wanted to turn into the capital of New Lisbon, Angolan's trekked in from the outskirts, where they lived in largely pre-modern huts, to work for a growing class of white merchants, shopkeepers, and technicians. Quote, segregation was far from complete, but both black and white communities were acutely aware that whiteness provided a status that could be materially beneficial, however poor one's level of skill or education, end quote.

And there was a sphere of inequality particular to Angolan women. White employers or superiors could father children with black women only for those children to be denied the benefits of whiteness. The women were left to raise and support the children on their own. This is London calling. Here is a news flash. The German radio has... just announced that Hitler is dead. I'll repeat that. The German radio has just announced that Hitler

is dead. The day that the world learned of Adolf Hitler's death, the flags in Lisbon flew at half-mast. Despite their similar sentiments toward the organization of society, however, Salazar came out of World War II, in which Portugal remained neutral, in very different shape from the Axis powers. His colonies, unlike those of fascist Italy's, were left alone. Quote, the Portuguese colonies had gone through severe austerity during the Second World War, but Portugal itself had made a few gains from its neutrality by trading tungsten to the German arms industry in exchange for gold bullion, writes Birmingham. the other hand, in order to obtain essential supplies of wheat and petroleum from America,

Salazar had been required to lease a military air base on the Azores Islands to Britain and its allies. Portugal's air squadrons are equipped with NATO jets. These fighters also help guard the Atlantic approaches to Europe, commanded by the Azores Islands. Originally an obligation, control of the Azores' Islands soon turned into the most valuable bargaining chip for Portugal as the West's new campaign against communism kicked into gear. Quote, as the Cold War gained traction in the late 1940s, writes Telapneva, continuity of access to the Azores was one of the main reasons why Portugal was invited to join NATO in 1949. A secret clause in the agreement to join NATO allowed Lisbon to make use of U.S. aid in Africa, end quote.

This we shall see will come up again. Still, while Portugal escaped the physical destruction of other European countries, Telepneva writes that, quote, the spiraling costs of living and problems with rationing resulted in food shortages and hunger in the countryside, end quote. Inside of Europe, only Albania was poorer than Portugal. Birmingham notes that some British colonies, such as the Gold Coast, had by now achieved higher rates of literacy than Portugal itself. Meanwhile, for Lisbon's colonial subjects, life continued to deteriorate.

Quote, the archive show that 300,000 Angolans still lived under conditions of near slavery, with minimal medical services and with wages of a few pence a day, withheld until each labor contract had been satisfactorily completed. end quote. Lisbon's fears of modern education among the indigenous population further meant that up until the mid-1960s, despite rudimentary schooling by missionaries, the Portuguese refused to sculpt a system of education in Angola.

There was also a renewed, revitalized campaign to settle Angola with white Europeans, after certain facts on the ground sent a shiver down Lisbon's spine. The white settlers sent to Angola, often criminals and convicts, looking for a new start, had integrated too much with the native population. As one minister put it, quote, white convicts were living with black concubines and breeding a new generation, which brought out the worst of the criminal element and the most base of the African one, end quote.

There would need to be a new and improved program of settling whites, upstanding whites, upstanding whites in the Angolan colony. Indeed, rolling into the 1950s, Salazar saw a bright future for his Portuguese imperial. Quote, other peoples, such as British and French, might lose their nerve, sapped by godless heresies or communistic plots, and give way in their weakness to the powers of evil, writes Davidson.

But not the Portuguese. They would brave the devil and outdo him. they would hold firm. In tones that may sound familiar in our times, Salazar raged against the globalists encroaching on his traditional Catholic domain. Quote, we will not sell, we will not seed, we will not surrender,

we will not share the smallest item of our sovereignty. Even if our constitution would allow this, which it does not, our national conscience would refuse it. But if Salazar was beating the drum of traditionalism, his empire's rule in Angola was anything but. Colonization had, in fact, completely destabilized traditional life and society in Angola, as people from the countryside flooded into cities and towns, often to come up with the tax money needed to escape forced labor. Davidson lists the effects, quote,

the intensive use of African labor outside the rural African economy, the imposition of cash crop cultivation even within that economy, and its effects in African impoverishment, the suppression of all indigenous forms of self-rule, however humble, the abusive practices of poor settlers often little above the hunger line themselves, the still more abusive practices of rich settlers, whose plantations called for an ever-enlarged, because ever more wasteful, use of contract labor, end quote.

Portugal, as Salazar said, would not seed nor surrender. The 1950s would simply mark the biggest influx of white settlers into Angola yet. Just like Portugal, South Africa's government was lurching to the far right. In May 1948, to great surprise, the recently formed National Party won close elections, assuming power in the capital city of Praetoria. Hardcore Afrikaner nationalists, the party got quick to work, building an even more intense regime of racial hierarchy, the kind demanded by white farmers intent on retaining control of black labor.

The election, writes historian Robert Ross, was one under the slogan, apartheid, literally separateness. The Population Registration Act, meanwhile, provided the machinery to designate the racial category of every person, writes Leonard Thompson. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act and the Immorality Act created legal boundaries between the races by making marriage and sexual relations illegal across the color line. In 1953, after a court had ruled that segregation was not lawful if public facilities for different racial groups were not equal, Parliament passed the reservation of

separate amenities act to legalize such inequality." If the core idea of apartheid was to categorize the races, white, colored, which meant mixed race, Indian, and African, and to keep them separate, then the core policy of apartheid was the physical separation. Ever since the Native Lands Act, blacks were pushed onto lands called reserves, which the apartheid government reconsecrated as homelands or Bantustans. The education system there was remade to promote apartheid ideology as newly created villages became slums with no real sources of employment. Malnourishment and extreme poverty was the norm. Where did the Americans stand on apartheid?

After all, the sun was setting on the British Empire. World War II was over and it was the Cold War the Soviets that demanded America's attention. What was Washington's view on Pretoria? The historian Tom Borstelman calls the United States apartheid's reluctant uncle in a book of the same title. According to Borstelman, quote, as American concerns about Soviet aggression and communist expansion grew rapidly after the Second World War, the anti-communism of the Pretoria government and the British, Belgian, and Portuguese colonial administrations made them increasingly precious in the eyes of American policymakers. It was the Korean War, Bostelman writes,

that cemented the relationship between America and South Africa. Quote, the South African government's dispatch of a squadron of airmen in September 1950 to aid the American cause won it considerable credit with American policymakers. Although American officials worried amongst themselves about South Africa's unfolding program of apartheid and its negative impact on American prestige in Africa and beyond, it didn't amount to much.

In some, concluded one State Department memo from 1952, we need more from South Africa than she does from us. Coffee. You ready. Well, you pour without scalding me, huh? Let's talk coffee. Global demand for the bitter bean and its cousin, Coco, or a godsend for Salazar's otherwise unseemly and backward empire.

And these commodities were as much a driver of increasing racial inequality as anything else, as the hierarchy of whites over blacks and citizens over natives sped up the transfer of indigenous farming plots to the white immigrants, many of whom soon became plantation owners. Over the next three decades, the production of coffee rose to 200,000 tons a year, with particular demand coming from the Dutch, which had long-standing trade with the Angolan colony. In fact, as a sidebar, Birmingham notes amusingly, quote, Dutch wax print cloth in bright colors was particularly popular in Africa and often was emblazoned with the images of national heroes. When the Dutch tried to sell cloth-bearing pictures of Salazar, however, they rapidly had to desist since,

according to one famous Amsterdam leader, women were apt to display the dictator's face on inappropriate parts of their anatomy. End quote. The coffee boom times required more workers. And so a new army of labor was brought in from the highland of South Central Angola. One of many issues here was that the southern provinces were largely populated by the Ovimbundu ethnic group. Quote, these strangers, writes Birmingham, were naturally much resented by the Congo northerners, who had now lost their land and their economic independence. The compulsory labor recruits from the South were equally unhappy to be torn from their own Savannah farms,

to work long hours on foreign plantations in an unfamiliar environment. Coffee wasn't the only thing on the menu. The Portuguese oil company, SACOR, discovered oil in Angola in the 1950s, another ace in the hole for the Pariah State. The Cabinda Enclave, a snatch of Angolan territory separated from the rest of the nation by the Congo River, will play an essential role in the events to follow. These oil revenues, though they were dependent on capital supplied by Texas companies, would allow Salazar to finance his Estado Novo.

And pretty soon, he would need the money. Historian of Africa, Martin Meredith, writes of this period, quote, By outward appearances, the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique under Dr. Antonio Salazar's dictatorship, were tranquil backwaters, enjoying increasing prosperity and seemingly free from the ferment of African nationalism sweeping other African territories. In Angola, the discovery of oil, the expansion of mining,

and the buoyant coffee industry had produced boom conditions. Both Angola and Mozambique were attracting new foreign investment. The cities of Portuguese Africa, Luanda, Lorenzo Marquez, Beira, Lobito, and Beaux, Bengela, were among the most modern on the continent, well served by their own newspapers, broadcasting stations, sports clubs, and museums, end quote. And the project of white settlement and building a segregated urban life was also moving along, as scholar Marissa Mormon told us in an interview. So the city, for example, the Luanda, the capital, becomes much more starkly segregated

across the 1950s and 1960s. And whereas Angolan's African people once lived in the center part of the city, they get pushed out, beginning kind of in the 1940s, into the Mouss, which are these informal neighborhoods that surround the edges of the city. As the city starts to boom and people build high rises and apartment buildings and things like that. The only problem then was that Angolan's themselves were at that very moment mobilizing to liberate their country. The Nationalists of Angola came from very different walks of life.

After an explosion of activity in the 1950s, the three groups that will ultimately emerge to lead and fight over the lead of the anti-colonial movement will be the MPLA, largely backed by the socialist bloc, the FNLA, backed by America, China, and Algeria's revolutionaries, and further down the road, Unita, a relentless yet opportunistic group of the Ovumundo people run by Jonas Savimbi.

Through the 50s, the leaders of these modern nationalist movements gathered their energies and charted their strategies largely outside of their native land. As we've seen elsewhere in this program, nationalist exiles abroad, in this case, chiefly Lisbon,

began to dream dreams of revolution in Angolan, Augustino Netto, Daniel Chippenda, Lucio Lara, Holden Roberto, and Jonas Savimbi. A lot of men, but one of their female contemporaries stands on her own. They Olinda de Almena. Davidson writes of her. She had studied at Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Drew University in the U.S., Madison, New Jersey, on Methodist scholarships before abandoning her career and throwing herself into political work. Her fate was to be a tragic one. In 1962 to 63, she organized the movement's women's section at Leopoldville in the Congo

and was secretary of its medical wing. With several leaders of the movement, she was arrested in the Congo and perished there from the prison treatment, end quote. By far the strongest and most promising group in the early days was the organization that would come to be known as the FNLA, the National Front for the Liberation of Angola, run by Holden Roberto. It went through a couple names until settling on this one, so we'll refer to it here as the Roberto Group. Born in 1923 in South Salvador, Holden Roberto would become a favorite both of the CIA and Algeria's anti-colonial movement, including the writer Franz Fanon. Roberto was all-in on armed struggle, but also a staunch anti-communist.

His operation, founded in the early 50s, was a supergroup of northern Angolan fighters that enjoyed, in these early days, a strong ethnic connection. to the neighboring country of the Congo, and a strong political connection to its capital of Leopoldville, as we'll see. Roberto established relations with the U.S. early on, writes Telepneva. Quote, in late 1955, Roberto first met with the U.S. consulate in Leopoldville. He managed to impress the consul general so much that the CIA station allocated him $6,000 in direct monthly payments.

Much later, Roberto claimed that when Soviet officials approached him during his time in Accra, the capital of Ghana, he refused all attempts to turn him to their side, end quote. He visited the United States in 1959 to make contacts and preach against Portuguese colonialism at the United Nations. Roberto's visit was well-timed. Up until this moment, President Eich Eisenhower had favored a far more gradual. decolonization following World War II, but the inroads made by the communist bloc appears to have sparked a drive to get involved and for the Americans to have some control over anti-colonial movements. If revolution was coming to Africa, the United States wanted its finger in the pie. Roberto, with his anti-communist outlook, made for an easy choice. His capitalist ethos,

in Birmingham's words, could be explained by the adamant. of many Angolan's living in the north. Although whites dominated the coffee economy, there were African farmers who saw an interest in this system of free enterprise. On the other end of the ideological spectrum was the MPLA, or the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola.

Arising out of Luanda, the capital, and its surrounding hinterland, the MPLA was, quote, loosely the air to the club's associations, and newspapers which successive colonial regimes had suppressed, writes Birmingham. Like Roberto's group, it emerged in the mid-50s as the product of many smaller groups coming together. But the MPLA was not only regionally specific to the Luanda area, it also brought together smaller left-wing groups, including the Angolan communists.

Many of its leading lights were, per Martin Meredith, quote, dissident civil servants and students in Luanda and other towns in the Kimbundu hinterland, end quote. These progressive and socialist Angolans, like their fellow revolutionaries in the Portuguese holdings of Mozambique and Guinea-Basau, had extensive links with Portugal's Communist Party. Still, relations with the PCP were often strained over the colonial question until the Portuguese Party, quote, formally approved support for the independence of the colonies at its fifth Congress in 1957, end quote. After publishing its manifesto the year before, which called for a popular

government with the working classes at its forefront, quote, for several years, the MPLA managed to operate clandestinely, but most of its leading members were caught in a wave of arrests carried out by the secret police. The MPLA thus, writes Meredith, became an organization in exile, establishing offices first in Paris, then moving in 1959 to Connacry, the capital of Guinea, end quote. The man who would soon lead the MPLA was Augustino Netto. Netto, the son of a Methodist minister and once a student of medicine in Lisbon, was an assimilado, or a black Angolan from a family of relative social privilege.

In fact, Netto's access and good relations with Angolan's of mixed race, not to mention his marriage to a white woman, made him an easy target of Roberto's propaganda against race-mixing Angolan revolutionaries. But Netto was hardly a non-threatening political moderate. His political activities in Portugal and his association with the Portuguese communists got him locked up by Salazar's secret police, once in 52 and again in 55. few years later, a recently founded human rights group Amnesty International named Augustinio Neto, its first prisoner of conscience. When Nedo returned to Luanda in 1959, to practice medicine as well as politics, he was detained now in his homeland by the Portuguese. But by now he was greatly admired among his fellow Kimbundu and those in the Luanda region anyway, as a potential leader of the MPLA. In response to protests surrounding his detainment, the colonial army was forced to deploy and break skulls.

Around 30 people were killed, according to the British journalist Jeremy Harding. Despite the promise of Augustinio Neto, however, the MPLA was at this point a brittle thing. By the end of the 50s, the MPLA had been left in the dust by Roberto's group. Meredith describes it at this juncture as, quote, largely an ineffective organization, debilitated by internal power struggles. End quote. There was one promising young Angolan

who had by now become associated with the MPLA. Jonas Savimbi. Hailing from Central Angola, from an Ovimbundu Christian family, Savimbi had earned a scholarship in Portugal and soon took his studies to Switzerland, where he scored yet more scholarship funds from American missionaries.

All the while, he mixed with young communists and members of Angola's nascent MPLA. But it wasn't long before his countrymen, Holden Roberto, expressed an interest in recruiting Savimbi to his anti-communist nationalist organization. For the moment, Savimbi was uncommitted. He weighed his options, sizing up the political landscape, something he would do for the rest of his life.

In the final months of the 1950s, Angola seemed ready to burst. A sense of undeclared war now seemed to divide the sand slums from the European city of Luanda, writes Davidson. The colonial government responded to increasing protests with waves of arrests.

The night of a Portuguese air raid on dissenting colonial subjects the Governor General of the colony explained in an after-dinner speech that same evening, quote, The Air Force is not here to make war, but peace in our time is only possible when states can wield enough force. He decried the arrival of revolutionary politics and propaganda in Angola, quote, We are living in the time of the leaflet. The leaflet has appeared in Angola.

Paratrooper. bombing planes, and more infantry, writes Davidson, might seem a somewhat overdone reply to leaflets. But Europe's master and example of the colonizing process was now sorely alarmed. Independence came to over a dozen states peaceably, but in the Belgian Congo, freedom was followed by rioting and army mutiny, reign of terror and disorder.

United Nations troops were called in to avert total chaos. For months, the political pattern kept changing with kaleidoscopic speed until pro-red Premier Lamumba was seized by the forces of strongman Colonel Mobutu, but the struggle for power was far from over. By this time, the Belgian Congo, one of the most explosive examples of resistance to European rule in Africa, remained a boogeyman among all the remaining colonists. Our native, warned the governor of Angola's Congo frontier district in a confidential report, quote, quote, has learned many things in the Belgian Congo these past years, end quote.

The Portuguese would not let this happen to them. They locked up dissidents or executed them. Speaking to his National Assembly on the eve of chaos, as the tumult in Africa threatened to become, in late 1960, Salazar declared, quote, We have been in Africa for 400 years, which is rather more than to have a arrived yesterday. We are present there with the policy that authority is steadily affecting and defending, which is not the same as to abandon human destiny to the so-called winds of history, end quote. Unfortunately, for Salazar and his entire Imperium, the winds of history

would prove more powerful than anyone thought.