Angola Emergence of UNITA
Agostinho Neto, Angola's first president, delivers a speech
on independence day.
Courtesy United Nations (J.P. Laffont)
The MPLA and FNLA faced a third competitor beginning in
1966
with the emergence of UNITA. UNITA first came to
international
attention when, in December 1966, a group of its
guerrillas
attacked the town of Teixeira de Sousa (renamed Luau),
succeeding
in interrupting the Benguela Railway and stopping Zambian
and
Zairian copper shipments for a week. The new organization
was
formed by Jonas Savimbi, the former foreign minister and
main
representative of the Ovimbundu within the FNLA/GRAE,
whose
disagreements with Roberto over policy issues led to
Savimbi's
resignation in July 1964. Savimbi had traveled to China in
1965,
where he and several of his followers received four months
of
military training and became disciples of Maoism. Perhaps
the
strongest impact of Maoism on UNITA has been Savimbi's
insistence
on self-sufficiency and maintenance of the organization's
leadership within Angolan borders. Upon his return to
Angola in
1966, Savimbi turned down an invitation from the MPLA to
join its
organization as a rank-and-file member and moved UNITA
into the
bush, where the organization began its guerrilla war with
a small
amount of Chinese military aid transported via Tanzania
and Zambia.
Although UNITA lacked educated cadres and arms, it
attracted
the largest following of the three movements from the
Ovimbundu,
who comprised 31 percent of the population. And, unlike
the MPLA
and FNLA, UNITA enjoyed the benefits of a unified and
unchallenged
leadership directed by Savimbi. Moreover, in contrast to
the
mestiço-dominated, urban-based MPLA, Savimbi
presented UNITA
as the representative of black peasants. UNITA's
constitution
proclaimed that the movement would strive for a government
proportionally representative of all ethnic groups, clans,
and
classes. His Maoist-oriented philosophy led Savimbi to
concentrate
on raising the political consciousness of the peasants,
most of
whom were illiterate and widely dispersed. Savimbi
preached selfreliance and founded cooperatives for food production and
village
self-defense units. He set up a pyramidal structure of
elected
councils grouping up to sixteen villages that--at least in
theory--
articulated demands through a political commissar to a
central
committee, whose thirty-five members were to be chosen
every four
years at a congress.
In the early 1970s, UNITA began infiltrating the major
population centers, slowly expanding its area of influence
westward
beyond Bié. There, however, it collided with the eastward
thrust of
the MPLA, which was sending Soviet-trained political
cadres to work
among the Ovimbundu and specifically with the Chokwe,
Lwena,
Luchazi, and Lunda, exploiting potential ethnic
antagonisms
(see Ethnic Groups and Languages
, ch. 2).
On the eve of independence, UNITA controlled many of
the rich,
food-producing central and southern provinces and was
therefore
able to regulate the flow of food to the rest of the
country. At
the time, it claimed the allegiance of about 40 percent of
the
population.
Data as of February 1989
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