Blowback - S6 Episode 3 - "The Stand"

Episode Date: December 29, 2025

Angolan anti-colonial rebels challenge Portugal. Cuba brings its revolution to Africa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, President John F. Kennedy took time out of managing potential nuclear apocalypse to meet the leader of one of the youngest countries in the world, Ahmed Ben Bella, the Prime Minister of Algeria. As more liberal Cold Warriors saw it, stopping global communism wasn't just about Soviet nukes, but winning the hearts and minds of the third world. After all, Ben Bella was a statesman on the make.

The Algerians had won their independence from France just a few months earlier. Visiting the UN in New York that October for the official admission of Algeria to the UN, Ben Bella was toasted personally by JFK at the White House afterwards. His government was a recipient of American aid. Quote, only one cloud marred the visit, writes historian Piero Glehesas. Ben Bella was going to Cuba. Quote, on October 16th, he boarded a Cuban plane in New York for a two-day visit to the island. At the airport, Castro was waiting, end quote.

The two men bonded over the following day and a half. Never had 36 hours seemed so short, Bella later remembered. It was also during this visit that one of Cuba's foremost legacies was born, its medical missions abroad. Teams of doctors sent to help the world's poor and needy. Most of the doctors in Algeria were French, Castro explained in a speech, and many have left the country. There are four million more Algerians than Cubans, and they have been left a great many diseases by colonialism, but they only have a third, or even less, of the doctors we have.

In terms of health care, their situation is truly treading. And quote. Cuba had supported the Algerian struggle against the French, taking in war orphans as Cuban guests. But medical brigades were something different. And when Algeria would go to war with another American friend, Morocco, the following year, Cuba gave Algeria modest military assistance on top of the doctors. As it would turn out, Cuba had many friends in Africa.

rebels in Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania and East Africa, rebels in Guinea-Bissau in West Africa, fighting against the Portuguese, not to mention their allies in the Republic of the Congo and Zaire in Central Africa, where Che Guevara himself fought in 1965. Why did Cuba, already a poor embattled island in the Caribbean, decide to dedicate resources to support so many struggles

on a continent so far from home. One answer comes from the first country in Africa that Cuba helped. In 1964, Algeria's Ben Bella explained his point of view in a speech. If our country feels so close to Cuba, it is because we have endured the same trials, faced the same obstacles, and accepted the same enormous sacrifices. It is also because we have nurtured and still nurture the same generous dreams. If we feel so close to our Cuban brothers, it is because they too refuse to bend. It is because given the choice to bend or to stand firm, they, like us, have chosen to stand

firm against the aggressor, end quote. Even Cuba's arch nemesis agreed. According to historian Piero Glehessus, quote, not once did U.S. intelligence reports in the 1960s suggest that Cuba was acting in Latin America or Africa at the behest of the Soviet Union. Instead, they consistently stressed that self-defense and revolutionary fervor

were Castro's main motivations. These two motivations ran along parallel tracks, writes Clehesis, until Angola. Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwyn. And this is Season 6, Episode 3, The Stand. Last episode, we sized up the history of Portugal's colonization of Africa, specifically its largest holding in Angola. After centuries staking out a relatively small presence at Angola's west coast, mainly serving Portugal's interest in the slave trade, in the 19th century the Portuguese inaugurated a takeover of Angola until it carved out the borders we know today.

With its grip on the entirety of modern Angola, as well as Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, Portugal sought to catch up to its rival empires in Europe and extract what it could from the industries of coffee, diamonds, and eventually oil. While Portugal quite belatedly outlawed slavery, the forced labor system that succeeded slavery was, in many ways, indistinguishable from what had come before. By the 1950s, the government of Antonio Salazar kick-started a new wave of white settlement in Angola,

which already enjoyed an apartheid-like system that left little room for black subjects to advance in society. And some had begun to organize modern nationalist movements against all of this. From the mid-50s onward, the two main groups, the progressive MPLA and the anti-communist FNLA, competed for leadership of Angola's nascent liberation movement. At the dawn of the 1960s, Salazar proclaimed that his Portuguese empire would stand firm against the rising tides of post-war progressivism and anti-colonialism. But in fact, Portugal presided over an unsustainable hierarchy, and now will face a moment

at the dawn of the 1960s in which decolonization elsewhere in Africa will give the MPLA and the FNLA the confidence and ambition to bring the fight to the Portuguese. we'll see in this episode the explosion of violence just after the year of Africa and the start of a full-on guerrilla war. And as one white power recedes in Angola, another to the south prepares to sabotage any possibility of an independent Angola, the Republic of South Africa. By 1960, the contradictions in Angola had reached a critical point. Quote, the colony's wealth matched that of the French Empire in West Africa, writes historian David Birmingham.

And the size of its settler population equaled that of the British in Rhodesia. But Portugal's colony was about to face the fiercest wave of resistance yet. 1960 was hailed worldwide as the year of Africa, in which 17 states and nearly 200 million Africans gained independence, some peacefully, some through violent struggle. In particular, the examples of Algeria and the Congo, where Holden Roberto was building his movement, inspired fellow African colonial populations and terrified the colonial masters. After a moment of hope in which the Congo had negotiated independence from Belgium and its highly esteemed leader Patrice Lumumba had won an election, anti-Lamumba factions, and soon the Belgians themselves,

made war on his new government. This plunged the country into a crisis. By September of 1960, Lumumba was dead, killed following a CIA-backed coup. His rivals, now in power, would soon expel all Soviet diplomats and technicians. Algeria, meanwhile, had since detached from the French Empire, but Algerian nationalists and France's government of Charles de Gaul, were facing revolts from far-right French groups opposing any decolonization, no matter how gradual. By the following year, they would attempt a coup on Charles de Gaul himself, and despite successive talks between France and the Algerian liberationists,

The far-right forces dragged Algeria into a war of terror on terror. Lastly, the apartheid regime in South Africa massacred nearly 100 people demonstrating against laws requiring black citizens to carry inspection papers in their own country. This massacre in Sharpeville in the South kick-started a new era of underground resistance in the form of the African National Congress, or the ANC. Both the peaceful and violent moments of this year of African independence inspired the black majority in Angola,

who appeared to be left out of any kind of progress toward liberation from Portugal. There had, of course, always been a drumbeat of violence opposing colonial rule. Revults and subversions shook the Portuguese military framework every few years, writes journalist Basil Davidson. Ever since the mid-19th century, revolts in the north and later in the south persisted into the 20th. Quote, in these resistances too, there came a certain modernization.

Increasingly, after 1900, Africans were able to buy guns. All these big revolts were fought out with guns on both sides, though the Portuguese had more. Africans seemed gradually to have accepted that no serious revolt could be started without at least some supply of guns. So it was that the Eastern peoples were to judge the efficiency and seriousness of the nationalists who came among them, after 1964, by the nationalist's capacity to bring in rifles.

End quote. With the Roberto Group and its strategy of armed struggle, feeding into popular discontent, the inequality and apartheid-like conditions in Angola gained a new and dangerous edge heading into 1961. It wouldn't take much to set off a serious revolt. The first sign of trouble came in January, 1961. Angola was in the middle of a recession,

writes historian Natalia Telapneva. Quote, a few years earlier, world prices for coffee, Angola's most significant export commodity, had dropped, leading to wage cuts in the coffee-producing areas of, the north. In addition, 1960 was not a good year for the cotton farmers of the Kassanga region, also in the north. In January 1961, wage cuts in Kassanga spurred a wave of protests, which were

answered by arrests, end quote. Many fled to the nearby Congo as Salazar ordered the Portuguese Air Force to bomb his troublesome Angolan subjects. Things lurched further the very next month. provides the picture. Quote, on February 4th, 1961, gathering before dawn, a crowd of Africans from the Luanda sand slums attacked the capital's chief prison. The goal was to release political prisoners, but police cracked down on the crowds, which stoked an even hotter resistance. Quote, at the same time, writes Birmingham, the white settlers in Angola were hot under the collar, observing the more modern economies run by Portugal's rivals, producing some black bourgeois, and whittling down the privileges of the petty white farmers, end quote.

In turn, writes Davidson, quote, they set about attacking any educated black person who might aspire to become part of a middle class capable of administering the country, taking over white jobs, and thus sending colonists back home to Europe. The government in Portugal approved the settlers' aspiration to defend privilege, and, alarmingly, decided to issue gangs of vigilantes with real arms and ammunition. The ensuing massacre left a lasting legacy, end quote. One American missionary told Davidson he knew of 300 people murdered. Telepneva estimates that the Portuguese killed thousands.

This time, Lisbon had gone to... far. What came next was over a decade of war against the colonial apparatus. But who would lead it? The violence of February 61 was, by most accounts, spontaneous. Several incipient political pressure groups of exiles claimed to have planned the outbreak of violence, writes Birmingham. Quote, and Portugal was willing to believe that revolutionary opposition was being coordinated and orchestrated. It more likely, however, that the protest in ensuing massacre were spontaneously sparked off by young local hotheads. The MPLA, for its part, had neither the capacity nor the desire to mobilize a mass insurrection, let alone by force of arms. 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 in 1959 and 1960. Wright's historian Martin Meredith, the MPLA thus became an organization in exile, establishing offices first in Paris, then moving in 59 to Canocry, the capital of Guinea, and then in 61, transferring to Leopoldville in the Congo, close to the Angolan border, end quote. per Davidson, quote, There is not much doubt that in the previous months the Angolan's had been urged to embark on violent action,

notably by some of the leaders of the Algerian Front de Liberation Nacional, who had embraced the Angolan cause, and who, arguing from their own experience in Algeria, believed that it was necessary for Angolan's only to begin and the rest will follow. But the MPLA exiles had dissented. They believed the time was premature, the MPLA's apparent squishness

redounded to the benefit of Holden Roberto and his group, the FNLA. The celebrated Algerian radical, Franz Fanon, reportedly stated the Algerian attitude as such. I know Holden is inferior to the MPLA men, but Holden is ready to begin, and they are not, and I am convinced that what is necessary is to begin, and that an Angolan revolutionary movement

will be forged in the enslave. suing struggle, end quote. That struggle would now begin. If February 61 had rattled the colony, the wheels came off entirely in March. Quote, a dip in the market for coffee had meant that laborers were not being paid on time, writes Birmingham. And so they politely marched up to a plantation office to ask for their arrears of wages. The demonstration called. caused white panic. Settlers, having heard greatly exaggerated reports

about racist confrontations across the frontier in the Congo, assumed they were about to be attacked, end quote. Taleb never writes that while things appeared to spiral off this organic event, in fact, it was Holden Roberto's group that had planned it, and Lisbon was utterly unprepared. In the north, local Bokongo joined the Roberto group, attacking fire,

arms, destroying property, and killing European farmers. The Angolan uprising was a violent rebellion against the forced labor system, and the scale of the violence was unexpected, even among the nationalist leaders." Several hundred members of white families were killed, ten times more than all the Europeans who had been killed in the Mao Maum uprising in Kenya, writes Birmingham. The colonial subjects, armed with machetes, killed several hundred whites, including women and children, writes Martin Merida. The chaos was such that the rebels did not limit their attacks to whites.

Quote, they hit with the same savagery at assimilados, whether black or mulatto, writes Davidson, evidently regarding these people as mere agents of the Portuguese. Of long-term military and political objectives, they appear to have had none, end quote. Indeed, writes Meredith, several thousand black people were killed, too. Some of them compulsory Ovambundu migrants who had been deeply resented by the population of the northern Angolans. This chaos was amplified when the colonial authorities once again supplied white settlers with weapons and set them loose on native Angolans. As all this was happening, back in Lisbon, Antonio Salazar was busy outman

maneuvering a coup. And once this challenge to power had been avoided, Salazar took no chances on Angola, initiating a new terror campaign. After all, notes Meredith, quote, some 56 administrative posts and settlements were overrun. It took six months for the Portuguese to regain control, end quote. And so the Portuguese army bombed and raided

entire villages looking for suspects, killing thousands on the spot and arresting many more per Telapneva. Quote, by the end of the year, 50,000 Africans had been killed in the conflict, and 300,000 Angolan refugees had crossed the border into Zaire. Meanwhile, the number of European casualties ranged between several hundred and two thousand, according to different estimates. Davidson, who was in the region during this time, provides finer detail. quote, the ruin in the north was only a small part of the picture. The Portuguese massacre of Angolans, whether black or mulatto, continued well into June, but not only in the north.

There came a bloodthirsty hunt for every African with any kind of education, however minimal, a poor white onslaught on black competitors that was eagerly seconded by the army and the political police, and quote. One British missionary wrote of the nightly murder of innocent Africans in the outer suburbs of Luanda and that the authorities were aware of all of it but did not want to rein it in and anger the white settlers. In the British tabloid the Daily Mirror, an army officer was quoted saying, I estimate that we've killed 30,000 of these animals. There are probably another 100,000 working with the terrorists. We intend on killing them when the drive.

season starts in about six weeks time." In another British paper, The Telegraph, a Portuguese defense minister told troops leaving for Angola that they were, quote, not going to fight against human beings, but against savages and wild beasts. Davidson relays that these same reporters had stories of white mobs tearing Africans limb from limb. This explosion of violence could not be ignored. The United Nations condemned Portugal, and in Washington, the newly elected John F. Kennedy

broke a Cold War pattern by siding with the Soviet Union to condemn Portugal at the UN Security Council. But any real action against Salazar was off the table. The U.S. had no particular love for Salazar, or his backward colonial empire. The U.S. had, as we've seen, thrown money to the anti-Portuguese Holden-Raberto. in order to get its beak wet in the growing anti-colonial movement in Africa. But when the chips were down and violence broke out, organized by their own customer, Roberto, the U.S., backed Portugal. Why?

Kennedy was at first reluctant to come to the rescue, having assumed that Africa for the Africans would open doors for American investment and opportunity, writes Birmingham. Quote, but Salazar quietly told Kennedy, that if the president did not help a staunch anti-communist ally, such as Portugal, his government would feel compelled to close America's mid-Atlantic airbase on the Azores Islands, end quote. And so Kennedy, abiding by the logic of the Cold War, quote, supplied Salazar's Air Force with napalm

to bomb rebellious forest villages. Thousands of Angolan's fled across the northern border to the Congo, where fellow-country fellow members of the Baptist Church welcomed them for a 14-year exile, and quote. Everyone knew that the Azores-NATO base had just played a key role in the recent superpower showdown over Berlin, which had become a divided city after World War II and the center of a nuclear-tipped confrontation in the summer of 61. After the U.S. unilaterally attempted to create a new government in West Germany, the Soviets imposed a land blockade on Western supplies entering the eastern zones of Berlin. The U.S. defied the Soviets with an airlift. That's where Salazar came in.

Quote, the base in the Azores was used heavily during the Berlin airlift in the summer of 61, thus strengthening the arguments of State Department and Pentagon officials who had warned against alienating Salazar, writes Telapneva. And so, the U.S., despite its condemnation at the UN, actually supplied Salazar with napalm to drop on the colonial subjects of Angola, not unlike America's own developing tactics in its war against Vietnam. So much for the American superpower. But what about the other side in the Cold War, the Soviet Union?

If America was talking out of both sides of its mouth, or talking out of one side and spraying napalm out of the other, the Soviets were carefully building support for the anti-colonial movements in Africa. It was, in fact, at this moment, somewhere of 61, that the USSR sent their first batch of aid to the MPLA, which it was hoping would ally with the U.S. supported Holden-Roberto. In a policy devised by a growing stratum of mid-level bureaucrats, the Soviets were pulling for a coalition of the MPLA and Roberto's group. Ideologically, the Soviets favored the MPLA for its socialist leanings, but they recognized the superior organization and influence of Roberto and sought to infiltrate his group with their own agents. The violence of March 61 had kicked off a war for liberation in Angola, a low-level but long-term war, with the Portuguese army and its colonists on the one side and on the other the African liberation movements and their allies.

Salazar spared no expense, sending a gigantic conscript army to all Portugal's African colonies. quote, in the 1960s, Lisbon rapidly expanded the size of the colonial armies, writes Telepneva. By 1974, there would be 70,000 troops in Angola, 43,000 in Guinea-Bissau, and 60,000 in Mozambique, end quote. There was a distinct sense that the Portuguese Empire was finally becoming outmatched. That same year, in December 61, India snatched Goa, out of the Portuguese grip. In Tungeon Harbor, the only sign of war was a sunken Indian fishing boat. Otherwise, the Portuguese had nothing to show.

Their colony of Goa fell to the victorious Indian army, like the flame of a taper blown out by a gentle breeze. Salazar, after throwing his outnumbered forces into the meat grinder, had to eat that loss. Within a few years, the war would reach a virtual stalemate in the heartlands of Angola, writes Birmingham, while the United States also continued to help the dictatorship by illegitimately allowing Portugal to use NATO weapons, officially designated to protect the North Atlantic from communism.

Sometimes, I think the imperialists take a very short view, without thinking about the future. All intelligent people know that the Portuguese have no chance of holding on to their colonies in Africa. So if the imperialist corporations keep investing their capital in Angola, they must have some other objective in mind. But if they think that we are prepared to become neo-colonies of the U.S., West Germany, and so on, they are very mistaken. Daniel Chependa, a prominent leader of the MPLA. Despite, or in fact as a result of Angola's descent in into war. The early 1960s looked bright for Holden Roberto and his organization, now officially christened the FNLA, the National Liberation Front of Angola. Roberto declared a government

in exile from his perch in the neighboring Congolese capital of Kinshasa, not only to send a message to the Portuguese, but also to freeze out the MPLA. In 1962, Ben Bella, the leader of Algeria's liberation movement and subsequently of an independent Algeria, recognized Roberto's self-described exile government. Algeria gave him hundreds of tons of arms

according to a young FNLA fighter named Jonas Savimbi. As Davidson puts it, Roberto's victory over his rivals in the liberation movement seemed complete. But under the surface,

things were turning sour. Roberto's support, specifically from Kinshasa, was actually corrupting the FNLA. Quote, Roberto himself became increasingly a Kinshasa businessman. One of the Congo's politicians was to describe the Angolan Revolutionary as, quote, completely bourgeoisified. Owning four or five buildings in Kinshasa bought partly with the money that the Angolan Liberation Committee had placed at his disposal, and partly thanks to American and Mobutu's aid. In these years, while the Portuguese dumped napalm on Angolan's actually living in country,

Roberto's group was hell-bent on destroying its rivals in the MPLA, which accused Roberto of murdering entire detachments of MPLA troops who crossed paths with FNLA units. When the MPLA attempted to move to Kinshasa as well, its members were detained and harassed by government authorities allied with the FNLA. What great value was Holden Roberto to the Congolese government? Well, for one thing, he was family, half-brother to Mobutu Sezu Sikku. Roberto, who had once played semi-pro football with the Prime Minister,

helped his patrons by sicking his well-armed and well-placed men to help wipe out the fighters of a separatist movement in the Congo. Kinshasa, in turn, helped Roberto crack down on the MPLA. After Roberto spooked the Americans by taking a meeting with the Soviets, the Americans upped their financial assistance to Roberto, though they stopped short of direct military aid. With a reported but unconfirmed 25,000 fighters to their cause,

the FNLA claimed to be spread out quite comfortably across Angola. As Holden-Roberto's FNLA retained the prestige of leadership, the MPLA realized it was at risk of total disintegration. In the early 1960s, the old MPLA was, quote-unquote, practically dead, writes Davidson, the victim of Portuguese settler and army massacres in 61. Following the 61 uprisings, the MPLA finally slipped out of Luanda and dove into the war. the guerrilla war against Portugal. Quote, they had considerable support outside the capital among the Umbundo people of the hinterland, although the movement's enemies made out that Luanda

was the MPLA's only constituency, writes British journalist Jeremy Harding. And there was a grain of truth to this broadside against the MPLA. Quote, the Bush did not suit the MPLA, predominantly an urban movement with models of struggle and development based on an urban sensibility. Less than 15% of the country's population lived in towns during the 1960s.

Yet for the MPLA, the masses of Angola were its working class, that is, city dwellers. Eventually, great stress was placed on the idea of the worker-peasant alliance. The MPLA even put a hoe, machete, corncob, and sprig of cotton in the national emblem, end quote. The MPLA gained from the arrival of Augustino Netto,

late in the summer of 1962. A doctor and a poet, Netto became a celebrated leader in the eyes of many, able to steer the ship of his organization, as well as deal with allies on the international stage. Quote, it was Netto who gained the resources to be able to hand out carrots, wield sticks, orchestrate policy,

and promote guerrilla officers, writes Birmingham. Quote, he set up his camps in Zambia and supplied them as best he could with weapons hauled up the thousand-mile-dirt road from Tanzania. This would become known as the Netto Trail. But Netto had his detractors, not least of those who had been running the movement while he had been abroad, cavorting with Portuguese communists and earning his stints in prison. When he arrived back in Africa, he scrapped the vision of fellow organizers, and restarted the cycle of the MPLA's chronic internal conflicts.

And those were just the internal affairs. The rivalry with Holden Roberto's FNLA was a whole other matter. Late in the summer of 62, Netto had arrived in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa, the stomping ground of his rivals in the FNLA, and Netto tried, not for the first time, for unity with Roberto's group. And he was, again, rejected. Quote, it was not long before Roberto was talking of the MPLA as the long arm of Russian communism. The language grew sharper with corresponding action.

Despite Roberto's fancy new digs, a key complaint lodged against the MPLA was its elitism and multiracialism, notes Harding. Due to its mortal rivalry with the FNLA, the MPLA was unwelcome in Mobutu's country, so they shifted next door. to what we now call the Republic of the Congo, a smaller country, which was nevertheless, far more hospitable and also strategically helpful. This move gave the MPLA far greater influence over the Cabinda province. Cabinda lies at the tip-top of Angola,

off the coast, separated by the rest of the country by a small strip of territory belonging to the Republic of the Congo. Apart from being far and away the richest oil reserves in the country, Cabinda's exclave provided a buffer for the MPLA to train their forces undisturbed. Quote, the MPLA leaders collected arms and recruited volunteers for Cabinda.

Though boycotted by possible Western suppliers, they were able to find a hearing in the communist countries. A little aid began to arrive from the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere. A few young men were sent to these countries for military training. The MPLA was getting on its feet, things were degenerating somewhat for Roberto. July 1964 brought bad news, which had massive implications for the future of Angola. The foreign minister of Roberto's Kinshasa cabinet resigned in sensational style, taking with him several others, reports Davidson.

Quote, a product of Luanda's secondary school formation, Jonas Malero Savimbi was in assimilado from the B district of Central Angola. Having escaped to Switzerland, where he pursued his studies at the University of LaSanne, he seems for a while to have vacillated between joining the MPLA or the FNLA, but eventually accepted the post of Roberto's foreign minister. Now, however, the young gunn Savimbi accused Roberto of being a U.S. creation, quote, to be held in reserve as a buffer inside a divided Angolan nationalism, end quote. And by 1966, Savimbi had founded his own new organization.

United. Still, for now, Savimbi was a footnote. In the late 1960s, the competition for leadership against the Portuguese was primarily between the Roberto Group, which was wobbling, and the ascendant but also unstable, MPLA. Indeed, both Netto and Roberto, quote, spent a great deal of time stepping from airplanes and mounting podiums in unfamiliar cities,

looking for potential investors in the political future of Angola, reports Jeremy Harding. Quote, Roberto found favor with the Chinese and Romanians, Neto with the Russians, and, through Che Guevara, with Cuba. End quote. The internationalization of the Angola struggle was underway. As we mentioned at the top of the show,

Cuba's international commitment to socialist revolution flowered in the 1960s. Fidel Castro directed support to guerrillas throughout Latin America, as well as Asia and Africa. Like African Americans in the United States, notes historian Elizabeth Schmidt, Cuba also had an emotional link to Africa,

approximately one-third of all of all of the United States, third of all Cubans could boast some African blood. At first, starting in 1963, Cuba sent doctors and small military support to Algeria's government. Not long after, Che Guevara personally visited the smaller Congo, whose capital city of Brazzaville was also playing host to Angola's MPLA. In mid-1960s Africa, writes historian Piero Glehessas, it was Daris Salas. It was Daras Salam, however, the capital of Tanzania, which served as, quote, the Mecca of African liberation movements.

There, Cuba operated its largest diplomatic station in sub-Saharan Africa and freely mingled with leaders from guerrilla movements fighting against the Portuguese, South Africans, Rhodesians, and other white-backed armies. But the granddaddy of African revolutionary struggle at this time remained in the big Congo, formerly called the Belgian Congo, today the Democratic Republic of Congo, which we will call Zaire for simplicity. There, leftist rebels called the Simbas were challenging the autocratic, American-backed government run out of the capital Kinshasa. Quote, if the imperialists succeed in tightening their grip over Zaire, said Che Guevara in a

January 65 speech, many progressive governments in Africa will be imperiled." And quote, Cuba was paying more and more attention to Africa, particularly as counter-revolutionary forces were racking up wins against guerrillas in Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, and elsewhere, on top of the pro-American military coup in Brazil. Just a couple years after the Cuban missile crisis, Fidel Castro and Cuban leaders still saw their struggle with Washington on global terms. This was why, in January 1966, Cuba held the Tri-Continental Conference. Hosting delegates from Guinea-Bissau, Congo, Chile, Vietnam, and other Asian, African, and Latin countries, the conference sought to link different peoples facing the same threat of Western, particularly American, government.

governments. For example, notes Glahesas, right-wing Cuban exiles were manning planes on behalf of Mobutu, boasting that all of this was simply, quote-unquote, target practice for Fidel Castro himself. Thus began a relationship in which the Cubans supplied and trained the Angolan's. The Cuban-Angolan friendship got off to a rocky start. In fact, on Christmas Day, 1965, The MPLA, led by Cuban advisors, attacked Portuguese forces in the oil-rich province of Cabinda. The surprise strike was a failure. The soldiers had been under-trained, the target not well-selected. And Neto and the MPLA were chagrined by Castro and the Cubans,

who were, quote, less than discreet in expressing their frustration. By 1967, the Cubans had pulled back substantial. Italy from Africa. Che Guevara had been back from Zaire for a year and would soon die at the hands of a CIA manhunt in Bolivia. And most of the other revolutionary efforts in Africa had stalled out. With one notable exception, Guinea-Bissau, the Portuguese colony on the Atlantic coast. In Angola, historian Piero Glejas told us that Cuba did not have especially high hopes at this time. Still, Havana kept warm relations with the MPLA. This military cooperation ended in 1967, and then the Cubans actually were a little disappointed

with the MPLA. They didn't think that the MPLA was fighting very well. Between 1967 and 1974, they had friendly contacts with the MPLA. The MPLA, the representation, the representative in Havana, the Cubans gave some economic aid a little bit, diplomatic aid very much. Indeed, Angola itself had been only one of many campaigns on the continent, and not a particularly promising one at that. Probably no one, from Havana to Washington to Moscow to Luanda, could have predicted that in just a few years, Cuban combat troops would be deployed into Angola by the tens of thousands. As the rivals inside Angola's revolutionary groups squabbled with each other,

and the groups themselves clashed over leadership of the nationalist cause, the guerrilla war against the Portuguese ground on. Only a decade after Salazar had declared his empire would not waver in the face of the modern world, his regime was sending thousands of troops to crack down on its insurgent colonies. By the late 1960s, Portuguese military effectives totaled over 182,000, or just over 10% of potential military age men, according to the Institute of Strategic Studies in London. That was the highest world percentage, followed by the USA, with over 8% under arms,

and, further down the list, the USSR, with 7% under arms. quote, nearly all of Portugal's divisions were committed to the wars in Africa, and quote. British Baptist missionaries stationed in Angola's north provide snapshots of the Portuguese killing and burning. In December 1964, a list of some dead, quote, Louisa Daniel 22, with one child and younger brother, husband, Antonio Vicente, killed in an air raid. Antonio Dundo, 68, two wives and two children. Elsewhere, August 1965.

Monto Mukazi, 35 with wife and three children, from Kindembe Ambris, group of 130 folk, had crossed the Bembe Road to the coast and were near the river Embrys when they were spotted by a plane. The plane dropped bombs and later more planes came with parachute. students who had machine guns. One woman, Maria Miyaku, was taken prisoner, but 20 adults and five children were shot dead or died of wounds. Writing of the general situation. Very few new refugees arrived in this area of Congo from Angola. With 400,000 already here, the northern part of Angola must be very depopulated. A senior Portuguese government official wrote

at the time, quote, The soldiers rob and pillage food, animals, clothes, radios almost any objects of value, indiscriminately, and without justification. They have also raped women in the villages, killing anyone who attempts to intercede, then later justifying the killing by accusing the man

of having collaborated with the terrorists, end quote. Indeed, armed with NATO weapons, the Portuguese were mimicking the American policies of the Vietnam War. quote-unquote rural improvement, carried out by reason of local military needs, could only generate into coercion, if not corruption, as in other cases of this kind, not least South Vietnam, per Davidson. The Portuguese forcibly resettled native Angolan's the same way

that they had been forcibly contracting them into work for so many years. Angolans, particularly in Luanda, were also under the surveillance of Portuguese secret police. according to Professor Marissa Mormon. So what they feared was intervention by the PED, which was the International Police for the Defense of the State. And the PED operated equally in Portugal, as it did in Portugal's colonies, as a kind of repressive secret police.

And so one of the sources that I looked at, extensively when I was writing my book, were the old secret police files. And it was pleased to me that they would send informant, And people knew. They were sending informants, for example, to clubs where people would go to hear music. They would send informants to places where people organized football or soccer matches. They would send informants, you know, to all these kinds of organizations, to student organizations and things like that. So there was, there was concern. That's what people were worried about was that you would somehow get caught up in the dragnet of the secret police, essentially.

and that was a real fear for people. Yet the fact remained, Davidson continues, that the Portuguese commanders, no matter how hard they tried to conceal it, were in greater difficulties than a few years earlier. Quote, this, in a war of this kind, was the same as saying that the Portuguese were slowly being defeated.

End quote. The MPLA, against expectations, was finding success in the eastern, of Angola, where neither the Portuguese nor the Roberto group thought they even had a chance. Internal messages between MPLA commanders describe their war against the colonists, quote, On June 9, the guerrilla detachment of the MPLA operating in the area of the Musuma River, near the post of Sessa, shot down a B-27 bomber of the Colonialist Air Force. The aircraft was on a destroy-by-fire mission when it was downed by our forces.

On June 19th, our guerrillas operating on the left bank of the River Kwando ambushed a group of colonialist soldiers on patrol. In combat lasting about four minutes, the enemy lost 13 men killed and others wounded. End quote. The MPLA had broken out from Cabinda and the frontier regions, and despite its continued fragile power balance inside its own leadership, It had defied the expectations of the Portuguese, the FNLA, the Americans, the Soviets, and perhaps even its own members. By 1971, in fact, the Portuguese found it was the MPLA that was probably the most effective nationalist party.

A South African journalist reported at the time, quote, Whereas MPLA men will ask villagers for food, FNLA fighters will simply take it. MPLA guerrillas rarely touch the women of their hosts, something apparently drummed into them while they undergo training. FNLA men have no qualms whatsoever about attempting to seduce women of local tribesmen. It's one of the reasons why they have alienated so many tribal Africans in northern Angola. Young MPLA guerrilla trainees are more reliable than both the Portuguese officials with whom they have fleeting contact and the grab all FNLA terrorists. Hope is the supreme motivating force in Africa, and the MPLA offers oodles of it, end quote.

Perhaps it's because of this dual threat now not only from Roberto, but also the MPLA, that the Portuguese in the early 1970s got creative. Specifically, they teamed up with the odd man out in the Angolan nationalist movement. That is how the revolutionary firebrand, the friend of Portuguese communists and African radicals, Jonas Savimbi, ended up collaborating with the Portuguese colonial authority. This bombshell was first revealed a few years later in the Paris-based Afrique Azei, which published translations of documents from Jonas Savimbi to the war. the Portuguese military authorities in eastern Angola. Savimbi, quote, has been, at least since 1972, an agent of the Portuguese, end quote.

The rationale from the Portuguese side came from a general Costa Gomez, who eventually told reporters that the contact through local woodcutters with Savimbi led to a gentleman's agreement in 1971. It would have been easy, says one account, to have eliminated Unita's several hundred guerrillas, but from a military point of view, it was better to use them against the MPLA. Historian Piero Glaheses adds some detail. In early February 1972, he writes, Savimbi proposed that, quote,

our forces, both his Unita and the Portuguese, cooperate against pre-established objectives. The Portuguese responded favorably. They agreed not to harass Unita within specified borders, quote, where it could even receive some human, humanitarian and logistical assistance. In return, you need a promise to attack guerrillas of the other two movements. Savimbi proved to be a loyal ally. As Savimbi wrote to another general in 1972, we have done everything we could to weaken the forces of the common enemy.

Glehesus adds that supposedly Savimbi had even made signals to the Portuguese that he was willing to accept Portuguese sovereignty in Angola when the war was over. But as Glahesus writes, whether Savimbi was sincere or whether he was buying time until Portuguese rule collapsed, one may only wonder. In the meantime, he enjoyed the best of two worlds, helping to destroy his rivals while safeguarding his own weak military forces. If the MPLA was finding some success and managing to hang on, Roberto's FNLA was losing the plot. No longer the only game in town, the FNLA's corruption, authoritarianism, and mud-slinging, was not helping its image as a click of privileged guests at the service of the increasingly

powerful president for life, Mobutu Seze Seku. Within a few years, Mobutu would have to rescue Roberto from a mutiny of his own forces, which were thinning out. But if the MPLA wanted to sustain its growth, it would need more outside help than ever before. As we've seen, Roberto had cornered the market and aid from Washington. And though the MPLA hosted a big tent of progressive opinion in its organization, the leadership's Marxist ideology meant that it was unlikely to find any friends in Washington. Though Netto and company would talk to anybody,

the socialist bloc was a much more suitable sponsor. But the first major guarantor of aid for the MPLA didn't come from Moscow. It came from the communist government of Czechoslovakia, which had a well-developed modern arms industry. The Soviets were, in fact, far more careful and slow to approach the MPLA and sink money or time into working with the Angolan revolutionaries. They condemned Portugal at the United Nations, but otherwise stuck to putting out feelers, trying to get a better sense of the players on the ground.

Overall, writes Telapneva, Soviet support for liberation movements during this period was limited to financial assistance and scholarships. The onset of guerrilla campaigns meant a much greater commitment was required, especially from the Soviet military, end quote. By the mid-60s, Moscow was redirecting its energies to develop relations with the security and military services of African allies, Telepneva continues. Quote, the mid-60 saw a revision of Soviet foreign policy as a result of the coup contagion, which led to the downfall of the first generation of Africa's post-independence leaders, including Lumumba, Ben Bella, and others. In the Soviets view, the revolutionary states had underestimated the value of traditionally mobilized armies and would push the Angolan's in this direction as well.

But the Soviets weren't the only ones interested in Angola. The People's Republic of China was increasing its involvement as well. The Sino-Soviet split, which we covered extensively last season, had created a contest of influence in Africa. And in the late 60s, while the Soviets did take a hit by rolling into Czechoslovakia, the cultural revolution, quote, prevented Beijing from capitalizing on that. While China had been an active player in Africa since the early 60s, the cultural revolution ushered in a period of self-imposed diplomatic isolation, writes Telapneva.

The Chinese also started to pursue more aggressive anti-Soviet tactics in the third world, pressuring African liberation movements to break contact with Moscow. As she notes, quote, since China's idea of anti-imperialism based on race could be employed to mount a critique of African leadership, it is not surprising that Augustineau netto, as well as fellow revolutionary Amilkar-Kabral in Guinea-Basau, grew skeptical of Maoism, end quote.

The People's Republic of China would end up joining the U.S. which had still referred to at this time as a fascist empire in supporting Holden Roberto and Jonas Savimbi. The Soviets and their Czech partners had firmly, if cautiously, chosen their side as well. They had plenty of criticism for the MPLA, and they weren't shy about voicing it, sometimes from embassies, sometimes directly from Moscow. The MPLA, they would say,

was not pursuing good strategies in the southeast, where Savimbi was getting a toehold. It was not politically well-organized. Even its slogans and propaganda were wanting. Still, the USSR had staked its claim against Portuguese colonialism and white regimes in southern Africa. Soviet military aid to Angola would increase year after year, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions in today's money. And Soviet journalists began to cover the exploits of the MPLA, generating enthusiasm at home for the progressive African nationalists and Moscow's generous assistance. There was one more foreign player getting into the mix. In 1968, an MPLA commander remarked,

We have already found young South African soldiers among the Portuguese troops. From the capital of Pretoria, White South Africa now watched the old, African order fall apart and prepared to expand its apartheid system. Quote, a Portuguese defeat in Angola could only be a severe blow to White South Africa's developing plan of political and economic penetration through Central Africa, writes Davidson. Quote, White South Africa could accommodate any fake autonomy that Lisbon might concede to Angola, it could accommodate a settler regime if that proved possible. It could similarly accommodate a black regime that was elitist and cooperative in character. But what white South Africa could

not accommodate was an Angola governed by a genuinely independent national movement? end quote. In Angola, Davidson continues, as in Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, the Portuguese army was fighting in the front line of South Africa's envisaged apartheid system for the whole subcontinent. The last time many citizens of Portugal saw Antonio Salazar as leader was during his trip to the Lisbon Zoo in the spring of 1968. A few months later, he suffered a stroke, falling in the bathtub, which soon after sent him into a coma.

The custodians of Salazar's Estado Novo officially dismissed him from power and replaced him with the old man's best guest successor, Marcelo Caitano. The problem was, within a month, Salazar woke up. V has come too. But rather than break it to the dictator that he'd been replaced, the entire Portuguese leadership assured Salazar that he was still head of government. And they pretended to enforce his will. The New York Times reports, quote, fearing that the shock might kill him. His doctors and colleagues did not tell him that Catano had been installed. They kept up a charade of talking with Salazar as if he were still head of state, nodding to his directives. He was denied access to newspapers,

radio, and television on the grounds that they might overtire him. Occasionally, Salazar would appear in public in a wheelchair, and it was apparent that his right side was paralyzed. He continued to live in Saubente Palace, the premier's official residence, from which his successor refused to dislodge him, end quote. This high-level facade continued for two years. years, until Salazar's heart finally gave out, killing him in 1970. The Times writes, quote, Salazar died without knowing that he had been replaced as Premier. But Salazar's successor, Caitano, wasn't about to be the guy to lose Portugal's empire.

And the United States, which had just brought to power the two-for-one package of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, stood by Portugal. Like John Kennedy before him, Nixon decided to once again cut back on aid to Holden Roberto's fighters as a gesture to Lisbon. Quote, Washington thus came to an understanding with Catano, writes Telepneva, which involved cutting off all aid to Roberto's FNLA and expanding trade with Portugal. None of this, however, soured Washington's relationship with Roberto's sponsor Mobutu, upon whom the Americans still depended as their key friend in Central Africa.

Mobutu, through his iron grip at home and his influence in the region, was one of their cops on the beat cracking down on African socialism and communism. Meanwhile, quote, Nixon and Kissinger also believed that white minority rule in southern Africa would continue. and favored closer relations with Rhodesia and South Africa, end quote. But, as we've seen on this program before, Dick and Henry were always spitting plates. Despite all of this, they still intended to pursue detente with the USSR. As we know, Angola was one of several colonies that Portugal was trying to neutralize.

Mozambique was another, and by the end, of 1970, Salazar's successors had a reason to smile. By Christmas, Portuguese forces had driven thousands of guerrillas out of their bases. It was a blow to the liberation movement of Mozambique, and a new sense of optimism for the Portuguese army, as would soon be clear in the other African colonies. Similar offensives were launched in Angola, writes Martin Meredith, with similar results. To Portugal's generals, it seemed that their new counter-insurgency members, measures, using airborne assaults, building airstrips and roads in remote regions, and constructing fortified villages to deprive guerrillas of contact with the local population.

This was all having the right effect, end quote. Lisbon was also happy to see how many African recruits they could still get into their colonial armies, about half of the manpower of the Portuguese ranks. But all this was surface-level stuff. Henry Kissinger had commissioned a secret National Security Council report issued in 1969 evaluating the Portuguese wars. The outlook was not good. The rebels cannot oust the Portuguese and the Portuguese can contain, but not eliminate

the rebels. The report concluded. And despite a fresh leadership upon Salazar's death in 1970, Lisbon was past the point of offering any kind of compromise, be it some kind of. quasi-independence or semi-autonomous status. Quote, yet the drain on Portuguese manpower and morale was considerable. Writes Meredith, nearly 100,000 metropolitan troops were needed to contain three simultaneous wars.

Most were conscripts drafted for four years, increasingly disaffected by long spells of service abroad, and unwilling to take risks, end quote. It was looking to everyone that, at the very very, least Lisbon's empire was an aging beast. In South Africa, had already begun to build a buffer state between itself and Angola. As Angola began to wrestle away from Portuguese rule, a country to its south began to make similar moves. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Namibia was colonized by Germany, and the horrors of German colonization were world famous in their time, a genocide in the 1900s that, in addition to tens of thousands of

people killed, included the creation of concentration camps for African peoples. Namibia's was a founding horror of the 20th century. According to historian Richard J. Evans, the dark khaki uniforms of German colonial police were later repurposed as the literal brown shirts used by the Nazi Party paramilitary, the SA. World War I put an end to German rule in Namibia, but what came next was not much better. It was then that white South Africa began in occupation and quashed any attempt at independent black rule. And just as Angolans began to challenge Portuguese rule in the 1960s, Namibia, after decades under South Africa, thumb was seeing the stirrings of its own national liberation movement.

In 1966, nascent guerrilla activity coalesced under the military wing of one central group, the Southwest Africa People's Organization, or Swapo. Swapo's guerrilla fighters were, in effect, fighting a two-pronged war. One prong was against apartheid South Africa, which administered a brutal military occupation, and which imported many features of the apartheid system into Namibia. The other prong of Swapo's fight was pointed at the Portuguese. Many Swapo guerrillas were based in camps in the country of Zambia, which meant that in order for them to reach Namibia,

they had to cross the southeastern edge of Angola. It was logistically torturous, writes journalist Jeremy Harding, as, quote, Portugal and South Africa were cooperating closely at that time, and Swapo was involved in regular clashes with the Portuguese army. In 1971, South Africa's brutality reached its first real breaking point. That June, following years of similar UN resolutions, the International Court of Justice ruled that South African presence in Namibia was unlawful, a decision that sparked protest in Namibia itself. And as clashes between workers and police picked up, organizers put

together plans for a major strike. Strikes reached from the capital city of Windhoek to the port town of Walvis Bay to the mines located all across the country. It took until the spring of 72 for South Africa to negotiate an end to the strike, agreeing to abolish the contract labor system. But the fuse had been lit. Many of the thousands of people who had participated in the strike and who had survived the South African police raids and military assaults to repress it, they were now part of a more militant Swapo cause. It was now South Africa fighting a two-pronged war. First, much like Portugal and Angola, South Africa now found itself under constant diplomatic assault for its Namibia policy, as the list of UN resolutions demanding Namibian independence

got longer and longer throughout the 70s. And second, South Africa was now under literal assault. Namibia's resistance group, Swapo, was now running an effective insurgency. And so it was faded that the Angolan resistance movement of the MPLA would form a long and fruitful friendship with Namibia's resistance movement. of Swapo. Professor Antonio Tamas sketched for us

South Africa's fears about Namibia should it lose Portuguese collaborators. When Swapo start to operate in northern Namibia, right?

The Portuguese and South Africa create a sort of military or exercise. They called Alcora, right? Al-Qaeda was like a sort of, was an agreement, a military agreement that allow South Africa to hit

Namibian nationalists in the Angolan territory. A problem with South Africa when Angola became independent was that Angola would be with support swapples and would not allow South Africa to fight Namibian nationalists in the Angolan territory. The aforementioned Portuguese offensives in 1970 were a disaster for the MPLA. As a result, Augustinio Netto and his colleagues were more than happy to receive increased weaponry from the USSR. Quote, by 1971, the MPLA and the anti-colonial movements in Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau had made new plans to ramp up the intensity of attacks. And thus, they received new weapons systems, end quote.

But to supply this, the Soviets felt they had a right to advise and criticize the MPLA as to where it was going wrong. For its part, the MPLA, eager to get help from whoever listened, began courting favor with the Chinese and Europeans, specifically Nordic countries. In 68, Guinea-Basau's revolutionary leader, Amil Kar-Kabraal, went to Stockholm and met the Swedish Social Democratic Party leader. and after the meeting, Sweden became a significant donor of humanitarian assistance such as food, clothing, and medicine. The governments of Norway, Denmark, and Finland followed with assistance to the MPLA and its cousins in Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, end quote. With this help, the MPLA was able to survive the latest onslaught from Portugal, but both the Portuguese and the MPLA were resorting to nasty.

methods. Quote, in 1970, the Portuguese launched a major offensive against the MPLA. Its architect, a general borrowed from the French in Algeria, divided the country into sectors, each permanently controlled by troops to isolate the guerrillas. The army launched a renewed bombing campaign and started dropping industrial chemicals on the fields to destroy crops. These tactics caused widespread deprivation and starvation in MPLA-controlled zones. In one of the darkest chapters of MPLA history, its troops in the East began to enforce local accusations of witchcraft. According to scholar Inga Brickman in the Journal of African Studies,

quote, accusations, trials, and executions of witches and sellouts frequently occurred at the MPLA's Eastern Front in Angola, between 66 and 75. Witchcraft cases were often initiated by civilian families, and the accused were mostly people who had a long-standing reputation of being a witch. While the MPLA leadership was often suspicious of the accusations of witchcraft, many civilians regarded the trials of witches as more legitimate than those of treason.

Civilians held that the accusation of treason was often used by the guerrillas to get rid of political or personal rivals and to control the population." For these and other reasons, the Soviets still insisted to the MPLA that it was too aloof from the black population of Angola and weak to charges of a confused and divided leadership. Perhaps the biggest open split was known as the Eastern Revolt, where one MPLA leader and Nettos' rival, Daniel Chependa, broke away from the group. quote, these disagreements exploded into a major internal crisis by 1973, writes Telepneva.

The Soviets suspended assistance to the MPLA to put pressure on Netto to come to an agreement with his eternal critics, end quote. Still, the Soviets did not break with Netto entirely, and in fact, they may have saved his life. According to the historian Edward George, quote, the Soviets stopped short of giving rival Daniel Chappendez. their full backing, and instead they invited Netto to Moscow in 73 and informed him that Chupenda was planning to assassinate him. This was possibly a fabrication, but it showed that the Soviets

were keeping their options open, end quote. The MPLA was once again in danger of collapsing as a coherent liberation movement. It was losing popular support. A new rival, Jonas Savimbi, was gaining momentum. And the MPLA's key patron, the Soviet Union, had, for the time being, frozen them out. But, 4,000 miles away, there was a conspiracy brewing, one that would change everything.