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Portugal Angola
The first uprising against Portuguese rule in Africa
occurred
in Angola in March 1961, when primitively armed Bakongo
tribal
nationalists in the extreme north of the province attacked
several coffee plantations, massacring white Portuguese
owners
and their families, as well as black African workers who
refused
to cooperate. Bloody retribution followed at the hands of
local
whites and blacks who had suffered at the hands of the
insurgents. The revenge killings abated only in May 1961,
when
10,000 troops arrived to reinforce the 6,000 white
soldiers and a
similar number of locally conscripted Africans already in
Angola.
Under the leadership of Holden Roberto, the insurgents
found
sanctuary across Angola's northern and northeastern
borders in
the Democratic Republic of the Congo (present-day Zaire).
Roberto's group eventually became the National Front for
the
Liberation of Angola (Frente Nacional de Libertação de
Angola--
FNLA), one of the three major anti-Portuguese guerrilla
forces.
Portuguese units, relying heavily on aerial bombardment
and
strafing attacks, managed to stabilize the military
situation in
the north. They brought large segments of the population
into
aldeamentos (controlled villages), similar to the
strategic hamlets used during the Vietnam conflict.
While the intermittent warfare dragged on into the
mid-1960s,
as many as 70,000 troops (40,000 of them European) were
involved
in the Angolan conflict. By 1966, two rival insurgent
groups
gradually superseded the FNLA. One was the Popular
Movement for
the Liberation of Angola (Movimento Popular de Libertação
de
Angola--MPLA), a communist-oriented group supported
militarily by
the Soviet Union and other communist countries. The other
was the
National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (União
Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola--UNITA),
based
among the Ovimbundu in the south.
From the mid-1960s until the April 1974 coup,
Portuguese
government forces were generally in control. Insurgency
continued, however, as long as the guerrilla movements
could
obtain sanctuary in neighboring states. The long years of
conflict increasingly damaged the morale of both the
military and
a large segment of the Portuguese people. A few months
after the
revolutionary government came to power in Lisbon in 1974,
it
began negotiations with the Angolan factions. Full
independence
was granted on November 11, 1975. Portugal officially
announced
its losses in Angola as 1,526 killed in action and 1,465
noncombat deaths. Other sources estimated a much higher
mortality
figure.
Data as of January 1993
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