Angola's murderous legacy

23 September 2022

No country in Africa has left such a damning legacy in South Africa as Angola. This blazes out from the British historian and journalist Fred Bridgland's new book, The Guerrilla and the Journalist: Exploring the Murderous Legacy of Jonas Savimbi, a horrifying history published by Jonathan Ball in paperback this month - much of it from Bridgland's first-hand experience, with a scarring effect on his life.

How does one write about the mass murder of a dear friend and his entire extended family, bar a single survivor, carried out by a psychopathic dictator tutored by Mao Zedong, funded by the United States and miltarily supported by the apartheid state? The trauma of post-colonial Angola has had its effect on the lives of thousands of South Africans, black and white, from the ANC's army in exile Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) to the professional soldiers and conscripts in the former South African Defence Force - a trauma haunting Bridgland from nearly 50 years ago, when as correspondent for Reuters news agency in central Africa in November 1975 he was the first to report the SADF's incursion into Angola in an article published in the Washington Post and "in hundreds of newspapers and on broadcasting stations across the world."

Bridgland was later correspondent for seven years in South Africa on behalf of the Sunday Telegraph and The Scotsman in the UK, covering the unbanning of the ANC and other organisations, the release of Nelson Mandela and the first democratic elections. He is the author of a major military study with a focus on Angola, The War for Africa: Twelve Months that Transformed a Continent (Casemate, 2017); a biography of Savimbi published by Macmillan in London in 1986, fundamentally revised with his interpretation in this new book; and two studies of Winnie Mandela's reign of terror in Soweto, Katiza's Journey: Beneath the Surface of South Africa's Shame (Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1997) and a wider survey, Truth, Lies and Alibis: A Winnie Mandela Story, published by Kwela Books in Cape Town in 2018.

I urge South African veterans from that war in Angola, whether from ANC or SADF, to read this new book. It is beautifully and clearly written, accessible for all readers, a history strictly factual and well-sourced yet rich in personal feeling. It will not leave any reader untouched, penetrating deep in the psyche.

It sets a question not only for Angola, where the official result of the general election on 24 August this year remains sharply contested between the election's alleged winner, the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and its main loser, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). As Paula Cristina Roque explained in an article, "Angola: Anatomy of a stolen election", posted on African Arguments on 15 September, this contested result is a continuation - at the time of writing, mainly non-violent - of the same political conflict as the war between MPLA and UNITA which is the foundation of Bridgland's book.

Fundamentally, the conflict in Angola fought by SADF and ANC on opposite sides between 1975 and 1988 was, and remains, a tribalist issue - encapsulated by the Cold War, with devastating effect.

As Bridgland explains, "Angola was never a simplistic battleground between right and wrong, between light and darkness. Its politics were a complex weave of tribalism, self-interest, ideology and racial conflict. And as for the MPLA's 'communism', many of its leaders were more familiar with Mercedes-Benz owners' manuals than with Marx's Manifesto. It is a country with a long history and unresolved differences that existed before the Soviets, Cubans, South Africans, Britons, Americans and others arrived and would persist after they all left. There were clear divisions between the coast and the interior, between town and country, between north and south, between the capital and the hinterland. ...

"The critical divide is between the Kimbundu and the Ovimbundu .... The Kimbundu, concentrated around Luanda on the coast in the north, comprise about 25 per cent of the population and they were the core ethnic supporters of the MPLA. Their language is Kimbundu. The Ovimbundu mainly live high on the great African plateau in the centre and south of the country and make up about 35 per cent of the overall population. Their language is Umbundu.

"The Kimbundu had been in close contact for five centuries with the Portuguese [Angola's colonial master before April 1975], whose live-and-let-live attitude towards the races created a big mestiço (mixed race) population in the Luanda region. The Portuguese scarcely bothered to settle the interior until the early 20th century. Ovimbundu society, with its networks of royal kings and chiefs, had therefore, to some extent, been left undisturbed. It also meant there had been far less miscegenation, and the Ovimbundu derided the heavy mestiço influence on Kimbundu culture and politics. The Ovimbundu took pride in ancient tradition, encapsulated by the proverb Etu tua tunga vovipembe viovopakula - 'We have roots in the fields of our ancestors'." (pp.47-8)

The Journalist in the title of the book is Bridgland. The Guerrilla, and its hero, is Tito Chingunji, UNITA's former foreign secretary, who was murdered by Savimbi, in addition to the whole of his  extended family, bar one. In the last sentence of the final chapter, Bridgland writes: "I am honoured to say that Tito was, and remains, my brother." (p.257) 

Tito's execution in July 1991 followed years of terror for him in the Ovimbundu heartland. The book is dedicated "For the Chingunjis especially, but also for all the people of Angola."

The index of the book has the names of 20 members of the Chingunji family, all of whom except one - Tito's nephew, Ernesto - were murdered on the orders of UNITA's Stalin-type, psychopath dictator during the decades-long Ovimbundu war against, first, the Portuguese and then the MPLA, the Soviet Union and the Cubans. Bridgland's narrative extends to the execution of Savimbi in Ovimbundu territory in February 2002 by MPLA government troops under the command of one of the psychopath's former leading guerrillas, Brigadier Geraldo Sachipengo Nunda, now Angola's ambassador to the UK, who Bridgland interviewed for the book. He had "yomped" through thick bush on foot with Nunda and his UNITA battalion in a succesful guerrilla operation against the forces of MPLA in November 1983.

Marking a crucial difference with urban South Africe over the same historical period, Bridgland cites Tito Chingunji as telling him: "In UNITA we often talk about how good it might have been to have the Soviet Uion as our ally. Moscow gives staunch  backing to its chosen friends. However, ninety per cent of our people are illiterate or barely literate peasant farmers ....". (p.192) Angola's peasant people were the social basis of Savimbi's military strategy.

Following two very lengthy journeys on foot with UNITA's guerrillas in their war against the MPLA's army, Bridgland is one of only two foreign journalists to have been a first-hand observer and reporter of its outstanding quality as a guerrilla army. The military grade of the ANC's army, Umkhonto we Sizwe, on the Eastern Front against UNITA in 1983-84 - as reported by Luthando Dyasop in his memoir, Out of Quatro: From Exile to Exoneration (Kwela Books, 2021) - was minimal compared with UNITA's army.

So far as I am aware, the first half of the book carries by far the best first-hand account of guerrilla warfare in Africa. As the commander and theorist of a guerrilla army, Jonas Savimbi was top rate. A Maoist who had received a BA degree in Switzerland, Savimbi later received training at the military academy in Nanjing in China in 1965. This was three years after the first six members of Umkhonto we Sizwe to receive military training abroad had been taught in Nanjing, which included two meetings and discussions with Mao Zedong, before the Sino-Soviet split between the Chinese and Russian Communist parties ended the ANC's military connection with China in 1963.

Already well versed in Mao's collected works - above all his military philosophy - Savimbi later met Mao for the first time in Kunming in south-west China in April 1967, having already had personal discussions with the Cuban guerrila commander Che Guevara in Dar es Salaam in 1964. Bridgland's account of how Savimbi guided UNITA's military strategy - operating initially in heavily wooded areas of southern Angola before moving into northern Angola across the Benguela Railway, which straddles the country - provides first hand detail of the quality of Mao's guidance. The UNITA forces walked at great speed, disguised their tracks, kept even babies as quiet as posible, camouflaged themselves with leaves and twigs, observed tight discipline.and lived off nourishment from the wild. As a military commander, Savimbi prided himself, justifiably, with living among the people throughout the whole period in which he fought this war, in a way no MPLA leader ever did (still less, the Russians, the Cubans and Umkhonto we Sizwe).

As Tito Chingunji explained to Bridgland, the social basis of UNITA's bush war was the Ovimbundu peasantry, described by Bridgland as "90 percent of the population that survived on subsistence farming, hunting and trapping" (p.76)

Though supplied by the mid-1980s with funding and high quality military equipment by the US, China and the apartheid regime, UNITA could not compete on a country-wide scale with the high quality equipment provided to the MPLA by the Soviet Union and Cuba - a massive drain on the Soviet economy, contributing to the regime's collapse in 1991 - or Cuba's "400,000 fighters ... rotated through Angola." (p.167)

Yet the very qualities which made UNITA such a formidable force sustained its failure. This is the horrific, unforgettable saga of the book's second half. Eduardo Chingunji, Tito's nephew -  who survived Savimbi's purge having been sent to university in the US, and then the UK, and stayed there - explained this to Bridgland, giving enormous help to the writing of this book.

"Let me teach you how to deal with Western nations," Savimbi instructed Ernesto. "First, you have to play their game. You have to pretend that you stand for everything they believe in - religion, democracy, feedom of speech, free movement of people, freedom of property and a free market economy. Once you claim these to be your fundamental values, all the doors of the Western powers will open to you. ...

"We do not believe in any Western system, but to get their money we have to lie ....

"We will only use them until we seize power. Our contract with them will have finished and we shall turn our back on them. As for the MPLA, if they ever accept a peace deal and the forming of a transitional government, I, Savimbi will overthrow that government and take over. ... We shall be in power whatever." (pp.264-65)

This cynical deceit sums up the moraL character of the man, whose father, a "devout Christian", was the first black stationmaster on the Benguela Railway and had "established small [Protestant] churches everywhere he was posted." (p.15) Savimbi's psychological mania was even worse than this deceit. Bridgland got a sense of this at first hand.

Just before midnight on 21 December 1988, he found himself subjected to a very frightening interrogation by Savimbi at UNITA's base at Jamba, deep in the forest in Angola's south-east corner near its border with Zambia and Botswana. Backed by a semi-circle of armed and uniformed members of UNITA's Politburo and facing Savimbi, Bridgland knowingly took the risk of asking why Tito Chingunji - who was sitting in the middle, "his face drawn and haunted" - had not returned to his high-profile post in Washington. "Savimbi exploded. His face contorted. His prominent eyes blazed", accusing Bridgland of being an agent of imperialism and white supremacy, so close that Bridgland "could feel the physical force of his anger, like a succession of blast waves". After more than an hour, in which Savimbi ordered him "just go, get out of here", Bridgland was able to fly early the next morning to Pretoria on the same tiny plane which had brought him to Jamba. (pp. 199-200)

After helping to make a half-hour documentary on British television about the murder of Tito's parents and the threat to Tito, screened in March 1989, then back in London he was subjected to death threats night after night in telephone calls from Savimbi's agents in Europe and West Africa, and later threats to rape his partner, Sue Armstrong, when they were based in Johannesburg.

Bridgland cites the first-hand experience of Bela Malaquias, a woman who'd been a captain in Savimbi's army and survived his purges, whose book, Heroinas Das Dignidade (Dignified Heroines, published in Luanda in 2020), gives her account of Savimbi's love of killing his supporters, especially women. She describes him as a "master psychopath" with "an incomparable degree of mastery." (Bridgland, p.271)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florbela_Malaquias

She relates how in September 1983 at UNITA's base at Jamba, the monster's cult of witchcraft took the form of a public bonfire of UNITA women and their children whom he accused of being "witches". It was as integral to him as Mao's philosophy of guerrilla warfare. Quoted by Bridgland, Malaquias writes:

"The military had been convinced by Savimbi that front-line deaths were the result of interventions by women witches. Once they had been manipulated, they worked hard to prepare for the burning alive of the women. They shouted in unison, 'Death to the witches!' ... All this was being done by a man who hyped himself as the people's saviour." (p.190)

One by one, women members of UNITA were called out from the crowd and thrown onto the flames, in some cases with their young children. So too a man - a qualified nurse who had cared for Savimbi's mother - together with his wife, a kindergarten teacher, their four children and a 12-year-old nephew.

In his Epilogue, Bridgland writes that Malaquias records "an extraordinary number of killings and abuses of human rights perpetrated by Savimbi." He writes that her book could  be a "start document" for war crimes trials either in Angola or internationally. In her own words, Savimbi was "psychosocially toxic. ... People were very afraid and knew if they moved a single blade of grass (without permission) they could be shot."

Now an MP and a former candidate for the presidency of Angola, Malaquias continues: "People were so frightened that they were not even willing to be shot in defence of their mother, wife, brother or child. ... Savimbi was solely motivated by power and by absolute control." (pp, 271-72)

In these concluding chapters, Bridgland's book makes for horrible but necessary reading. I would make the point, however, that in my view this devastating report on the lethal madness of UNITA's tribalist self-destruction should have been balanced, even briefly, by mention of the MPLA's mass murder of its own supporters beginning on 27 May 1977. After three decades of cover-up by British fellow-travellers in the media, this was adequately reported for the first time in English in the brave and well-researched book In the Name of the People: Angola's Forgotten Massacre by the former BBC journalist in Angola, Lara Pawson, published by IB Tauris in London in 2014.

As I wrote in my review, "The Angolan massacre of May 27 1977: A grim portent for South Africa", published on Politicsweb on 24 August 2014,

"Question: When is a massacre not a massacre?

"Answer: When truthful reporting of it is suppressed for nearly 40 years, as with the Nitista massacre in and around Luanda in Angola on 27 May 1977, when as many as 25,000 urban people - mainly, but not exclusively, poor black township dwellers - are reported to have been murdered en masse by the ruling MPLA party, assisted by Cuban military and security forces".

/documents/the-angolan-massacre-of-may-27-1977-a-grim-portent

In this tribally divided society, the great bulk of these township victims would have been Kimbundu workers, killed for ideological reasons by the Soviet-supported MPLA regime when it feared they were being infected by the Black Consciousness political thinking of its former MPLA leader, Nito Alves. The ANC's young recruits in Umkhonto we Sizwe, who had fled from South Africa into exile after the school students' uprising in Soweto on June 16 the previous year, were already in Angola, being trained at Nova Catengue, near the coast south of Benguela. They were kept strictly ignorant and systemically misinformed.

Then, as Bridgland reports, came a massacre in 1992 of UNITA supporters in Luanda between 30 October and 1 November, following Savimbi's rejection of the result of the general election held in the previous September, following a peace agreement between the two main parties, followed by Savimbi's resumption of war.

In a report "Halloween massacre (Angola)", Wikipedia states that "Many of the targeted were of the Ovimbundu and Bakongo ethnic groups, which were the main supporters of UNITA and considered to be politically disloyal. Other opposition parties that supported UNITA's claim that the 1992 election results were illegitimate were also targeted. ...

"The total number of casualties ranges, with some sources saying the deaths numbered as high as 30,000."

Bridgland quotes Reuters correspondent Judith Matloff, who was a witness to the events: "Thousands of its (UNITA's) members were hunted down in the musseques (squatter camps) - chopped, shot, clubbed or sliced. People armed with kitchen knives, pistols, clubs, machetes went from door to door massacring anyone they suspected of belonging to UNITA." (p.248)

These are the ferocious extremes in Angola.

No democracy was learned by ANC in that country, and no accountability of leaders to voters.

Fred Bridgland's life experience of that fiercely conflicted society makes salutory reading for a South African. Let readers be brave, and read.