Fifty Years Ago, Angola Looked Forward to a False Dawn
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15.1.2025 by Klas Lundström - January 15 marks 50 years since the Alvor Agreement promised Angola’s independence from Portugal. Yet the new state was doomed to be a Cold War battleground, with Washington planners seeking to avenge their defeat in Vietnam.
Vitor Alves stops his four-wheeler along the road that leads to Cuito Cuanavale. The town in Angola’s southeastern corner has often been dubbed “Africa’s Stalingrad” due to its longtime besiegement (October 1987–June 1988) during the civil war that gripped the country throughout the final quarter of the last century. He points to abandoned and dilapidated tanks, adorned with graffiti and looted of technical gadgets, decorative items, and removable scrap metals.
“Be careful, there’re still landmines here,” Alves warns. Despite a massive nationwide cleanup effort, over a thousand minefields across Angola must still be cleared.
Alves was the son of Portuguese settlers who escaped dire poverty in their homeland under António Salazar’s fascist Estado Novo dictatorship. Born in a newly independent African nation that had suffered five hundred years of colonialism, he recalls a violent youth.
“Angola’s birth was more a Big Bang than a blank page,” he says while studying the dusty and desolate landscape that was center stage during the civil war. “The Alvor Agreement,” he sighs. “What a shit piece of work!”
The ten-page document, signed on January 15, 1975, by Portugal and Angola’s three liberation movements, promised the start of a bright future. Army captains disillusioned by the failures of Portugal’s brutal warfare in the African colonies — Mozambique, Portuguese Guinea, and Angola — had overthrown the dictatorship in Lisbon during the Carnation Revolution in late April 1974, thus ending four decades of fascist rule and five centuries of colonialism.
Even as Europe’s last colonial empire was being hastily dismantled, the US Army bombed with impunity in Vietnam and Cambodia amid an oil crisis that had erupted in the wake of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Western powers dug deep to secure accessible resource wells and Chevron-Gulf began extracting oil in the Angolan enclave Cabinda in 1972, along the mouth of the Congo River.
Lisbon’s new revolutionary leadership, the Armed Forces Movement (MFA), was keen to fulfill its promise of “not even one more soldier in the colonies,” and it wasted no time in pledging these lands full independence. In Angola, however, three liberation movements had waged war against Portuguese forces since the early 1960s. The Marxist-inspired Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angolan (MPLA), led by Agostinho Neto, was supported by Cuba and blessed by the Soviet Union; the United States and Zaire backed Holden Roberto’s Bakongo tribal National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA); meanwhile, South Africa’s apartheid regime, Communist China, and the United States all supported Jonas Savimbi’s black nationalist National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).
UN secretary-general Kurt Waldheim traveled to Portugal in August 1974 to launch constructive negotiations between the parties but failed. Yet Kenya’s president, Jomo Kenyatta, succeeded and had Neto, Roberto, and Savimbi gathered for productive talks in Mombasa from January 3 to 5, 1975.
The Mombasa gathering led to sincere talks in Alvor, southern Portugal, starting on January 10 under the guidance of Vice Admiral Rosa Coutinho, known as the “Red Admiral” for his Communist sympathies. Despite varying ideological backgrounds, political aims, and deep-rooted mutual suspicions, an agreement was reached and signed on January 15.
Under the deal, MPLA, FNLA, UNITA, and the Portuguese government would cooperate during a ten-month period leading up to Angola’s unconditional independence on November 11, 1975. A transitional government was formed including all parties, and a united national army, consisting of soldiers from all three movements, would replace the Portuguese after their gradual withdrawal from October 1975 to February 1976. General elections were to set up Angola’s first democratically elected parliament.
On paper — historian Douglas Wheeler noted — the Alvor Agreement seemed like “a masterful piece of diplomacy and compromise” that cleared the path to a well-planned and stable future for the Angolan people. Unfortunately, it was a poor reflection of reality. The agreement depended on the premise that the MPLA, FNLA, and UNITA would cooperate peacefully and strive for a common goal.
“The agreement offered a better chance than anyone had dared hope that Angola might complete the transition from colony to country without a civil war and major outside intervention,” Wayne Smith, then a Cuba expert at the US State Department, wrote in a 1976 essay.
Wheeler, however, also noted a looming power struggle that, “if the structure set up by the Alvor Agreement disintegrates,” ran the risk of resulting in a conflict that might “spread and affect a wider area of Central Africa.”
Angola’s transitional government assumed power on January 31, 1975, “in an atmosphere of deep mistrust,” writes US foreign policy expert Piero Gleijeses. Admiral Coutinho had been held captive by the FNLA in the early 1960s, during the outbreak of Angola’s colonial war, and was deemed pro-MPLA by the FNLA and UNITA. Coutinho allowed the MPLA to control the transitional government’s broadcaster, Rádio Luanda.
War
Angola was destined, however, not to be liberated but rather to be an obedient provider of resources, cheap labor, and geopolitical influence. In Washington, Henry Kissinger, President Gerald Ford’s secretary of state and national security adviser, haunted by the lost war in Vietnam, lobbied for increased American involvement in Angola’s internal affairs.
“A display of resolve in Angola would exorcize the ghost of Vietnam, and the installation of a client regime in Luanda would provide a cheap boost to American prestige and his own reputation,” writes Piero Gleijeses.
Thus, on January 22, 1975, a week after the agreement was signed, the US National Security Council’s “40 Committee” — which oversaw clandestine CIA operations — transferred $3.5 million in today’s worth to the FNLA. Shortly after, Roberto launched a large-scale attack on MPLA strongholds in Luanda and northern Angola, encouraged by the Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko and the US government. FNLA killed unarmed MPLA recruits, one among numerous other atrocities, and wrecked the Rádio Luanda station.
Then and there, writes John Stockwell, CIA agent and chief of the Angola Task Force in 1975, “the fate of Angola was sealed in blood.”
A shellshocked MPLA turned to the Soviet Union, which had cut off support in 1973, for help. Faced with a situation where Washington and Beijing had formed an unholy alliance in funding the FNLA, Moscow reopened its political, economic, and military ties to the MPLA, while Cuba deployed its first military advisers to Luanda.
“At one time or another almost two dozen countries, East and West, felt the urge to intervene in the conflict,” writes historian William Blum.
In March 1975, the transitional government broke down after the Zairian army joined the FNLA in its push for control over Luanda and became a de facto invading force. At the same time, Daniel Chipenda, an ousted MPLA leader-turned-FNLA-commander, traveled to South African–occupied Namibia to persuade the apartheid regime to assist the attempt to occupy Luanda before Independence Day, on November 11.
All actors made sure war was the only outcome for an independent Angola. MPLA recruited anti-Mobutu cadres, exiled allies of Patrice Lumumba within Zaire’s own military police, and secured large-scale Soviet arms shipments. FNLA strengthened its ties to Zaire, received $30 million in covert support from the 40 Committee, and had Roberto begging for war funding from Iran, Kuwait, and Abu Dhabi. There were, however, African nations that pleaded with Neto and Roberto to work things out before the conflict reached disastrous proportions. Once again they met in Kenya, this time in Nakuru, in mid-June 1975, along with Savimbi, to broker a revised agreement that renounced any use of force.
But once again, the written words changed little on the ground. Fighting between the MPLA and FNLA soon spread from northern Angola to grip the entire country, and from then on the United States funded Savimbi and UNITA at full tilt to make sure MPLA was defeated before November.
The Organization of African Unity (the predecessor to the African Union) pleaded with Portugal to act, but Lisbon instead annulled the Alvor Agreement in late August 1975. “Lisbon has neither the means nor the will to play cop,” Le Monde reported. Portugal’s new leadership just wanted to “get out,” as noted in a US National Security Council meeting. Lisbon’s lack of control and interest facilitated the South African Army’s border crossing into Angola on October 9. It teamed up with UNITA and FNLA and advanced toward Luanda, only to be halted by a swift intervention by Cuban forces. Thus, on November 11, 1975, it was MPLA leader Agostinho Neto who became Angola’s first president as he proclaimed the former colony’s independence.
South Africa’s invasion of Angola was the product of intense American lobbying. Domestically, with the 1976 presidential election looming, Ford could not openly admit Washington’s approval of the South African intervention, instead dismissing it as Pretoria’s own initiative. P. W. Botha, then South Africa’s defense minister and later its president, countered that there was an “understanding” and an “approval and knowledge of the Americans.” He bewailed, “We were ruthlessly left in the lurch.”
On the geopolitical scene, actors sniped at one another from all directions; for the Angolan people, there was nowhere to hide. War had come.
Had the Alvor Agreement failed without sabotage by external forces? The United States proved its blatant imperialistic ambitions by replacing napalm bombing in Vietnam with proxy warfare in Angola. Furthermore, Portugal’s domestic uncertainty in the wake of the Carnation Revolution, which led to the rapid demise of an entire empire, left the door ajar for external actors to stake their claims in Angola.
The Clark Amendment to the 1976 Arms Export Control Act prohibited any form of US funding to UNITA and FNLA. The CIA, however, continued to aid UNITA illegally, which replaced the FNLA as Angola’s primary anti-Communist movement, by delivering arms to South Africa, which in turn ferried the military aid into Angola. In the 1980s, the Reagan Doctrine sprang into action and hailed Savimbi’s child soldiers and mercenaries as “freedom fighters.” When Ronald Reagan invited Savimbi to the White House in 1986, the president stated that UNITA secured “a victory that electrifies the world and brings great sympathy and assistance from other nations to those struggling for freedom.”
Human Rights Watch holds that Washington funded UNITA with “$250 million between 1986 and 1991” in addition to defending Savimbi politically as a legitimate actor. Cuban and Soviet forces aided the MPLA government against UNITA and its Zairian and South African counterparts up until the early 1990s, when South Africa’s apartheid regime collapsed along with the Soviet Union.
A peace agreement and general elections in 1992 looked set to end Angola’s carnage, but Savimbi lost the presidential vote to MPLA’s José Eduardo dos Santos, cried foul play, and returned to the battlefield. Another decade of war followed, with lucrative deals for illegal arms, mercenaries, war crimes, and blood diamonds until Savimbi was killed in 2002.
“In a beautiful slip of irony, rumor has it that the CIA, and possibly Mossad, played a significant part in pinning him down,” writes journalist Lara Pawson.
False Dawn
This year marks fifty years of Angolan independence, and as many years since the disastrous Alvor Agreement spelled a false dawn of hope and stability. Twenty-odd years since the end of the civil war, minefields remain uncleared and the responsibility for human rights atrocities and war crimes has yet to be claimed for actors on all sides of the conflict.
At the heart of Cuito Cuanavale, a monument has been erected to commemorate the civil war. It’s the first time Vitor Alves, raised on truths, lies, and legends about the last military battle between East and West during the Cold War, has visited Africa’s Stalingrad. Here Cuban forces and Soviet advisers aided the MPLA-led army (FAPLA) against the US-funded UNITA and its South African troops.
It’s a form of closure. It’s a long journey from Alvor, southern Portugal, where the agreement set out to prevent any bloodshed in the wake of the fall of the Portuguese Empire and the looming independence of Angola.
“The Alvor Agreement was dead at birth,” sighs Alves, admiring the war monument. In hindsight — given the various liberation movements’ differing aims and political visions, the outside forces jumping at the chance to exploit Angola’s natural riches, and Portugal’s lack of willingness to take responsibility for its historic atrocities and put things right — he’s not sure how things could have turned out much differently, let alone less bloodily than it did. “The wounds of colonialism were still bleeding when Angola became independent, so imagining a peaceful country to pop up in an atmosphere of trauma, despair, and war was very naive. But sure, also beautiful in a way.”
He adds, “Let the Alvor Agreement be an example for future generations on how not to solve complex conflicts.”
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