Angola, the Alves Coup and Massacre - a Rejoinder to Paul Trewhela
It is never a good way to start one's week reading an attempted character assassination, especially when yours is the character someone is trying to assassinate. That is my situation today having read Paul Trewhela's very personal attack on me in a piece that starts off discussing the upcoming Mandela conference that I have co-organized with Martin Plaut at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies on the legacy of Nelson Mandela. Paul has been invited to attend the event and we are looking forward to his observations on the array of papers being presented.
But it is easier to weather sniping and attacks on one's integrity when they are inaccurate, highly selective and in that selectivity totally ignore aspects of one's work that would be inconvenient for the focus of the criticism. That is the case with the rather bitter, strange attack he has embarked upon - I say strange as I have never met Paul or done other than exchange a few e-mails with him.
The focus was on the links between South Africa and Angola in the context of Mandela's membership of the South African Communist Party. Paul seems to think it a problem that I am organising the conference having written a book 28 years ago on Angola's attempts to develop a Marxist-Leninist system.
I'm not quite sure I see the problem, but Paul's view is that I write the book from a Marxist perspective and without mentioning the Alves massacre of May 1977. It is true that I do not report that appalling and very widespread killing of real or imagined supporters of the former Angolan Interior Minister Nito Alves. But I do mention the events surrounding them, the violence of the coup attempt, its repression and the purging of Alves supporters from the MPLA.
Why did I not cover the massacre? That is quite simple. Because it was hidden - not by me as Trewhela states, though certainly by other journalists closely connected with the MPLA government and uncritically sympathetic towards it. When I was approached to write the book in 1984, I tried to get a visa to carry out research in Angola.