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Angola Effects of Socialist Policies
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Homeless children on a street in Luanda
Courtesy UNICEF (Maggie Murray-Lee)
Beginning in late 1977 with the First Party Congress of
the
MPLA, at which the conversion of the MPLA to a vanguard
party was
announced, party leaders attempted to define the kind of
society
and economy they wished to develop. The process of
definition was
by no means systematic and often simply drew on
Marxist-Leninist
clichés borrowed from the Soviet model. Nevertheless, from
time to
time statements of either purpose or criticism focused on
specific
features and problems of Angolan society as these leaders
saw them.
Sometimes, the solutions offered appeared to have
conflicting
implications.
Running through the statements of leaders and
editorials in
Angola's largest newspaper, Jornal de Angola, and
other
party and state publications were frequent and strong
references to
the need to eliminate all signs of ethnicity, regionalism,
and
racism. On several occasions, the statements and
editorials
asserted that ethnicity and regionalism were not the same,
but
their differences were not spelled out. Because there is a
link
between ethnolinguistic category and location, the
differential
effects on behavior of ethnicity and regionalism are often
difficult to determine.
At the same time that the party cautioned against
racism (the
reference is to mestiços and to those Portuguese
who
remained in Angola after independence), it also
discouraged
attitudes of superiority. Presumably, this was an allusion
not only
to the preindependence attitudes of Portuguese and
mestiços
but also to those of urban, educated Africans, who would
in former
times have been called assimilados. In fact, it is
unlikely
that the Portuguese in the party would act in the style of
the
Portuguese colonial official or settler, but some
mestiços,
uncommitted ideologically, might act in such a way;
educated
Africans, secure in their racial situation, were even more
likely
to exhibit a sense of superiority to ordinary Africans.
The
sensitivity of the party to popular perceptions about
racism and
attitudes of superiority were partly responsible for
attempts in
the 1980s by the dos Santos regime to remove from the top
party
echelons a number of mestiços, who dominated the
party
structure, and replace them with a more ethnically diverse
group
(see Political Environment
, ch. 4).
In the 1980s, there was a significant shift of attitude
on the
part of government and party officials toward private
enterprise
and what the party had previously labeled "petite
bourgeoisie." In
the 1970s, the term was widely and pejoratively used to
discourage
individuals from activities in which they could accumulate
personal
wealth. Although self-aggrandizement was still
discouraged, the
party recognized that economic and agricultural
centralization had
failed as development strategies and that movement toward
private
enterprise would be necessary to boost domestic
production,
increase the supply of goods available to the Angolan
population,
and generally improve the economic picture.
The implications of these policy changes for the
structure of
society, including economic support for individual peasant
farmers
and an increase in the role of private traders, were
extensive.
Where the party once discouraged the existence of an
entrepreneurial bourgeoisie both in urban and in rural
Angola, some
observers believed that efforts to develop the country and
come to
grips with its economic and technical problems might
generate not
only a bureaucratic middle class and elite but also a
business
middle class less amenable to control than a salaried
state
bourgeoisie.
Data as of February 1989
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