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Angola Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola-Youth Movement
The JMPLA was founded in 1962 and converted into a
training
ground for MPLA-PT activists in 1977. It claimed a
membership of
72,000, mostly teenagers and students, in 1988. The JMPLA
conducted
military exercises and political study groups, measuring
success
within the group primarily by an individual's commitment
to the
socialist revolution. The Second Congress of the JMPLA was
held on
April 14, 1987, a date that was also celebrated as
National Youth
Day.
Despite the symbolic and practical importance of the
political
role of the nation's youth, MPLA-PT officials generally
had a
derisive attitude toward JMPLA leaders during the 1980s.
At the
MPLA-PT congresses of 1980 and 1985, party officials
criticized
youth leaders for their failure to encourage political
activism.
They also remonstrated against youth group officials for
the
bourgeois attitudes, materialism, and political apathy
they
detected among children and teenagers. One measure of
these
problems was the continued urban influx among young
people, which
impeded MPLA-PT efforts at rural mobilization.
MPLA-PT leaders assigned the JMPLA the task of guiding
the
national children's organization, the Agostinho Neto
Organization
of Pioneers (Organização dos Pioneiros Agostinho
Neto--OPA). The
goal of the OPA was to educate all children in patriotic
values,
socialism, and the importance of study, work, and
scientific
knowledge. Founded as the Pioneers in 1975, the group took
the name
of the nation's first president at its second conference
in
November 1979, following Neto's death. JMPLA leaders
generally
viewed the OPA as a recruiting ground for potential
political
activists.
Data as of February 1989
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