Revolution in Angola

...Officialdom in Angola believes the present risings are aimed more at toppling Salazar in Portugal than Portugal in Angola...

...The Portuguese are determined, tough, and ruthless...

...The Bakongo worked iron and copper, made pottery, and had become a pastoral community—in times when the rest of the Coast was still .in the more primitive hunting-fishing-rootsandberries stage...

...Its dollar surplus pays for Portugal's dollar deficit, for the United States, its best customer, buys three times as much as it sells in the country...

...He named the other prisons...

...In those fever-ridden, communicationless days of Africa's historical infancy, the Portuguese alone settled on the African coast and intermarried...

...From the moment you step off the antiquated Portuguese DC3, go through the modern but austere little terminal building and step into the white-driven minibus, you are conscious that this is an oddity in Black Africa.' The streets, the post office desks, the road gangs, the cheap cafes which serve the malodorous bacalhau (salted cod) and boiled potatoes, are full of tough, educationally underprivileged white faces...

...It will come, like the little emigrant chambermaid, at the push of a bell, from the heart of the Angolan darkness...

...None is anywhere near as big as the UPA...

...Finally came the law of the gun—colonization...

...Roberto, who physically resembles Lumumba but appears to have more depth, has been three times to the United Nations, spending eight months in the United States on the first visit...

...Let them fill Sao Tome and Sao Paulo," a nationalist militant who recently escaped to Leopoldville chuckled bitterly...

...Where else in Africa do white people go as emigrants for the right to scrub floors...

...He studied the Portuguese legal code and revised Kongo tribal law...

...They introduced a number of processes for handling metals and for building and, when no one else in Europe was educating Africans—and when more than ninetynine per cent of the Portuguese themselves were illiterate—the hardy captains from Portugal were bringing the princes of the Kongo or the sons of the Olu of Warri to the Lisbon court for education...

...I n the Sixteenth Century, an Itshekiri prince returned to Warri from Lisbon with a Portuguese noblewoman bride...

...In Leopoldville, UPA leader Roberto (a thirty-six-year-old former Belgian Congo civil servant who has spent only about four years in Angola since his birth in Sao Salvador in 1925) coordinates the rising, and plans other moves, such as strikes and sabotage to keep Angola in the world's eye...

...The king's elderly sister had opened a girls' school...

...executions (the clothes, Catholic medallions, and other personal possessions are returned to the families so that they and their neighbors will be impressed...

...But Portugal does not possess the force to subdue a general uprising by Angolans if the insurgents have sufficient firearms...

...Portugal is an ally and must be handled as delicately as circumstances permit...

...Until recently, white home-rulers were Portugal's only political problem in Angola...

...After independence, he will probably, if in charge, tend to err on the side of ruthlessness, of emotional anti-Portugalism...

...Angola is not like anything else in modern Africa...

...But Africa is uncommitted, a circumstance that permits of no ambiguity, on our part, in matters such as the revolution in Angola...

...The older Portuguese colonists were conquerors, not whitesupremacists— there is a difference...

...He is 700 years old, you know—politically," said one angry local exporter...

...He makes a good impression, but is ideologically left of center, thus leaving the U.S...

...In another hundred years, a daring young senior official in GovernorGeneral Silva Tavares' office told this correspondent recently, Angola will be a second Brazil—though not independent, of course...

...African casualties include the victims of firing squads and populations immolated in burned villages...

...The pace of democratic reform would be geared to the increased pace of education they wish to see—democracy requires an understanding of democracy...

...Portugal does not admit that there is an African political problem in Angola...

...But Kongo remained an unusually westernized African kingdom, enjoying friendly relations with its trading partner, Portugal...

...Then came the slave trade, .for which Portugal was only one of many nations—African, European, and American—responsible...

...Dropped," in the past tense, would be more accurate: the Monsignor was saying mass one morning last March when the PIDE showed up at Luanda Cathedral and bustled the little divine off to headquarters...

...Although the press is held on a short leash and muzzled to the bone, drama still barks out from the flowery headlines...

...In the current six-year development plan, only three per cent of funds are devoted to education and health, taken together...

...Dom Affonso, in the meantime, had made himself literate...

...There is no solution to Angola's problems under our present medieval system," said a leading local lawyer...

...No love is lost, on either side...

...Black nationalism is something new...

...The king appointed his elders to the ranks of duke, marquis, and count and borrowed other Portuguese customs...

...The party is strong enough to have received a delegation from exiled Portuguese opposition leader General Humbert Delgado, to whom it is cool (Delgado's supporters in Angola do not want African home rule...

...The demonstrations were typically government-organized —police dutifully stood by and watched the depredations to property, but intervened when there was any risk to life...

...Great difficulties were encountered in recruiting replacements in the European community's ranks...

...more accurately, these mulattoes are Portuguese, not African, and nobody who meets them could doubt it...

...The machete was used more than guns, in those early days...

...Terror, more than destruction, is their major aim...

...But Lisbon has clamped down on unrestricted transfers— the provincial escudo is not worth as much as that of the homeland...

...The entire Portuguese forces in the world cannot surpass 100,000 men...

...Even in Roberto's hands—which are steadier than were Lumumba's—Angola will probably do a Congo...

...Perhaps the whole concept of independence is too big for a small power like Portugal to think about...

...The leaven of Angolan resistance lives in the Congo, where 60,000 emigrants from Angola earned, until recent times, a much better living than Luanda offers...

...By African standards, casualty statistics are monstrously high...

...The enormous death toll from tropical diseases discouraged the Portuguese settlers...

...Even without a telephone, you are sure to meet the PIDE, whether you know it or not...

...With Tunisian aid, Holden Roberto, the party leader, is setting up a New York office...

...inferno lines (a narrowing circle of brush fire around a conglomeration of villages...

...To increase forces in Angola, Portugal is relying on a white militia...

...Angola is fourteen times Portugal in size...

...In Luanda, the capital port, to which foreign journalists are confined, you hear little shooting...

...Portugal, says Portuguese officialdom, cannot even envisage giving up Angola and Mozambique because Portugal is too poor to do without them...

...The second best customer is the United Kingdom, then Portugal, which sells three times as much as it buys...

...The U.S...

...Racial discrimination here is not codified...

...Thirty per cent of civilized children are getting an education...

...The United Nations inquiry commission on Angola cannot enter the country...

...We are not afraid...

...but Delgado would be a better prospect than Salazar...

...Today, the revolution uses modern automatic weapons, and permanent resistance guerrilla forces are entrenched in the forested mountain near Damba, Nuambuancongo, and other northern market centers...

...They are what accounts for the intricate security service...

...His governorgeneral, a Cape Verde islander (who now cedes final authority to the military commander), has an appointed advisory council...

...In the twenty-four hours that followed, there were twenty-one plantation uprisings...

...Even as it loyally boasts of how Portuguese forces are riding roughshod over the "foreign-inspired rebellion," it reveals the extent of the disaster...

...Angola's commercial-world Jacobins, though less liberal than most European liberals in Africa, have perhaps the most realistic view of the situation...

...it proves a spurious point of theirs: that they themselves, the Portuguese, are Angolans, not settlers...

...Andrade, a mulatto, is the brother of Monsignor Joaquim Pinto Andrade, chancellor of Luanda Diocese, who was deported to Lisbon last year as a subversive influence...

...Fortunately—for Angola needs ten years to prepare for independence—no one yet has pushed the bell, but well before ten years is up, it will ring...

...The Portuguese found the people hungry for sophistication: in no time at all, they had put aside their pantheon of greedy gods and malevolent ancestor-spirits and embraced Christianity...

...Angola can hardly do better: it is much less developed than the Congo, has an infinitesimal elite, and speaks a language almost as dead as Latin, which makes it difficult to recruit technical assistance...

...Where Angola does look like South Africa is in the faces and activities of the police, the army, and especially the security police, the PIDE...

...The Portuguese official reply to the absence of education is that the country can do without a discontented, jobless elite...

...They say their crime is a Christian outlook on African rights...

...Roberto speaks .French, English, Portuguese, and two Angolan languages...

...But Portugal was managing to resist the passage of time, until the revolution, with Affonso's old kingdom as the most affected area, broke out...

...They accept with thanks a tip less than half what a less energetic Congolese would get in Leopoldville, only a hundred miles away...

...Therefore, it is an internal problem...

...Portugal's forces in the field are pretty small—perhaps 20,000 European soldiers, including a battalion of parachutists, and 15,000 now-disarmed Angolan levies...

...This intense and astonishing westernization process over a little stretch of central Africa's primeval rain forest slackened off after Affonso died...

...In Kongo, as the little kingdom there was called, the Portuguese found a nation-clan with a fairly well-regulated system of government...

...He advised on the design of a cathedral and had churches built throughout his kingdom, including several in Mbanza—which his people nicknamed "ekongo dia ngungo," the town of bells...

...State Department in doubt as to whether he is the man to back...

...There are more than a dozen different nationalist movements...

...Possibly still at PIDE headquarters...

...The Portuguese say they used their priestly office as a shield from arrest and organized the risings which are now tearing Angola apart...

...Of 200,000 whites, more than half are recent immigrants...

...One distinguished mulatto, who comes from a long line of mulattoes, is Monsignor Manuel J. Mendes das Neves, Vicar-General of Angola, hierapparent to the archbishopric, and a favorite for elevation to membership in the College of Cardinals...

...Portuguese force and the secret police are not the only barriers to the revolution...

...In 1952, 470 years after the Portuguese arrived in the Ngola-Kongo area, the territory became a Portuguese province instead of a colony— the first reform introduced for centuries...

...In the frontier area of the Congo, more than 60,000 refugees from Portuguese army onslaughts are getting Red Cross assistance...

...The great majority of the "civilized" are whites...

...A local consul says: "I know no one here of whom I could say with certainty that he does not work for the 'gestapo.'" Out in the streets, you hail a taxi with a white driver—there are no others—and you go to an apparently all-white restaurant...

...Consul William Gibson's car was rolled into Luanda harbor...

...But anyone of any color, who can afford to, can go there, and the Portuguese like to see a few dark faces...

...the main terrorist commandos are farther north and east...

...The Portuguese brought in traders, blacksmiths, masons, cabinetmakers, priests, friars, and even master printers...

...missions and mission clinics, have been attacked...

...You raise your eyebrows...

...RUSSEIL WARREN HOWE, who writes from Africa for a number of American and European publications, is the author of two books on that continent, "Theirs the Darkness," and "Black Star Rising...

...And still nothing will have been done to make independence work...

...It has five million people...

...and that the indigenous population are Portuguese provincials, not Africans...

...The controlled local press talks fairly frankly of fear, panic, mayhem...

...They want an end to forced labor...

...Yet to say that Angola is an underdeveloped South Africa is not strictly true...

...Said one courageous liberal on the PIDE blacklist: "We are staying here, either above the ground or below it...

...and Portugal is too poor to be indispensable to either after independence...

...Forty per cent of its export economy is coffee, twenty per cent diamonds...

...The Portuguese presence spread south from Kongo into Ngola until the whole territory known today as Angola—twice the size of Texas—was the trade preserve of the Lisbon flag...

...There are 40,000 in Leopoldvillt} mostly Bakongo and therefore quite at home in this predominently Mukongo city...

...four per cent of non-civilized progeny have a privileged place on the benches of mission primary schools...

...It has startled the mother country but has not destroyed its blind, superb optimism...

...Other priests have been rounded up in recent months...

...But how long can Europe's second poorest nation resist Africa's galloping gale of change...

...But the white home-rulers, Delgadoists, Galvaoists, and liberals do not want an African independent state that will drive them into the Atlantic...

...Mendes das Neves is five feet tall and about seventy years of age, a slightly Orientallyfeatured prince of the Catholic Church who occasionally drops his clerical demeanor to flay from the pulpit Portugal's African policy and her contempt for human rights...

...There is nothing about an African political view in the gospel according to Oliveiro Salazar...

...A small legislative council, chosen by restricted suffrage, deals with minor aspects of legislation...

...More than a thousand Europeans—soldiers, civilians, women, children— have been shot or hacked to death...

...the colonization period in Africa will have been only a brief moment in history...

...But their chances of putting these ideas across in Lisbon are small, and time is running out...

...But the revolution is spreading...

...The Mbundu, the Ambundu, and the Kwamyana, on the whole do not...

...In 1506, when the king of the Bakongo died, his son mounted the royal stool with the eminently Portuguese and Catholic name of Dom Affonso I. His sons went to the Santo Eloi college in Lisbon, and one of them was part of a group of early African seminarists...

...Of its five million population, 250,000 are civilisados—whites who may or may not be literate, blacks and browns who can read and write, are Catholic, and live as Europeans do...

...European emigrants, invented as a policy to make Portugal's stake in Angola even stronger than during the past five centuries, are undermining it by the enmity they create and by their racism...

...consulate, and especially U.S...

...Thirty thousand voters send two deputies to Lisbon's yes-man assembly...

...But enough of the revolt ravaging the northern third of the country has spread to the center and the south and sporadically bubbles up in the major towns to be evident in the local press...

...seventy-five more are missing—either dead, deported, or imprisoned...

...But economic expansion in recent years has not created the jobs for Africans which would have justified more education, under this philosophy...

...This son, Dom Henrique, returned to Mbanza from the Vatican in 1521 with the title of bishop...

...The country, being essentially illiterate, is still tribally divided...

...You cannot protest so much about African atrocities, or boast so well of Portuguese feats of arms, without showing Angola to be at war...

...and the pro-Communist one based in Guinea, the Revolutionary Front for Angolan Independence, led by former Sorbonne professor Mario Andrade, has recently merged with the UPA...

...Enough of these 40,000 pay fifty cents a month to the UPA 4 0 enable the party to put out a twice-monthly, sixteen-page paper without advertising, and to send delegates abroad...

...Today the great white mass has abandoned the opposition cause and is clasping for protection at the coat-tails of the Lisbon dictator, Antonio Salazar...

...They favor close cooperation with the Latin-American nations...

...But the white businessmen of Luanda still have a mixture of hatred and contempt for the durable old Portuguese premier...

...for the new jobs have gone to Portugal's ever-increasing, government-encouraged flow of emigrants, not all of whom are needed for the new agricultural projects...

...He has also had seven months in Accra, and this summer visited Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tunisia, and Switzerland, lobbying for moral help...

...The Baptist mission in Leopoldville has received reports of eight African pastors executed by the Portuguese in Southern Angola...

...A Lisbon paper says 50,000...

...But at the airport you can watch the charter aircraft, loaded with women and children, panicking off to Lisbon...

...To speak to someone from the PIDE is easy: be a correspondent, pick up your hotel telephone, and the PIDE monitor will click in on your line at once...

...What it would have then would be "decentralized, representative, local government," legislation subject only to confirmation in Lisbon (presumably by a 172-year-old Salazar...

...In 1497, when British and French ships were still content to nibble at the northwest edge of the continent, Vasco da Gama turned the Cape and found the road to the Indian Ocean...

...Officialdom even denies underdevelopment—but admits the need for more international investment...

...From their brush mountain fastnesses, they venture out on commando raids...

...Officially, this should pose no problem, for Angola is a province, not an overseas territory...

...The Portuguese trading castles—including the magnificent one that stands in the sea at Elmina, Ghana (built in 1492 and still in excellent repair)—are landmarks all down the coast for the seamen of today...

...They prefer tyranny to the tomb...

...A year ago, consuls in Luanda were reporting that Angola was sixty per cent behind the moderate opposition of exiled Humbert Delgado...

...For more than a hundred years," wrote Gervase Mathew, the East African historian, "they [the Portuguese] treated the Indian Ocean as if it were a Portuguese lake...

...If he is lucky he will be deported to Portugal—if luckier still (on Vatican insistence) to the Gregorian University, Rome...

...Of course, under the circumstances, it is wiser not to speak to him then...

...But a nationalist victory is not for tomorrow...

...Revolution in Angola by RUSSELL WARREN HOWE Leopoldville IF WE accept the historical evidence that Africa was propelled into the mainstream of modern life by its contact with Europe, we have to admit that Africa owes a great deal to Portugal...

...And how long can we in the West appear less enthusiastic than the Eastern bloc for the revolution...

...Possibly on his way to Sao Tome slavelabor island...

...We shall build a great nation and cement it together with Portuguese bones and blood...

...At the hotel two white boys of thirteen battle laughingly for the right to carry your luggage and open the elevator...

...Let them fill Porto Alexandre, Silva Porto, Damba, Baia dos Tigres...

...almost inevitably, the Kongo became a place to send convicts, drunken priests, and other jetsam...

...A white chambermaid curtsies and says that you can ring for her, any time of the night...

...Time has passed, and passed quickly...

...Outside the two local banks, long files of people wait all day to transfer savings to Portugal...

...But their strongest and most definitive settlement was on the southern banks of the Zaire, now called the Congo, which has been a Portuguese sphere of influence since 1482...

...In Cabinda, the Portuguese enclave between the former French and Belgian Congos, fifty chiefs have been arrested...

...The first contacts between the Portuguese and the kings of Mbanza Kongo (now called Sao Salvador, and the birthplace of Holden Roberto, the leader of the present Angolan revolution) were friendly and promising...

...The bitter-sweet smell of independence, chaotic and mysterious, is in the air...

...Since Adlai Stevenson raised his hand for discussion of Angola in the United Nations Security Council (leftwing Ecuador abstained, as did America's usual voting partner, Taiwan, thus reducing an anticipated seven votes, the minimum, to an ineffective five), the United States, in Portuguese eyes, has been more or less responsible for all the mayhem in Angola...

...In the morning, a gray-headed old woman who might be her grandmother is scrubbing the marble terrace...

...The revolt began on the Primavera plantation, near the Matadi border, in February...

...It is Mississippi again, with a Portuguese accent...

...wholesale shootings...

...The territory's 1961 defense budget has been raised from $3 million to $8 million to arm and indemnify these local volunteers, and to issue grenades, machine guns, flares, and ammunition to isolated white plantations...

...yet there are 100,000 mulattoes, many of whom stand in high esteem...

...They want democratic reforms, but not too fast—just fast enough to stave off political disaster...

...Nobody knows the true figures, and the Portuguese soldiery are certainly not counting the charred heads...

...she curtsies again, grins, and goes...

...Perhaps in Sao Paulo jail...

...Where is he now...

...This improved Portugal's standing with the stronger tribes—who captured and sold weaker tribesmen—but made the others their enemies and exacerbated the country's natural tendency to tribal conflicts...

...They want an escudo zone, to protect the local currency, now suffering from a grave lack of confidence...

...bombings...

...From the Americas, the Portuguese brought nearly everything which Africans grow and eat today— cassava, corn, bananas, a score of citrus and other fruits...

...has been the slogan...

...Portuguese navigators mapped and explored the west and east coasts of the continent, not only opening the channels of trade between Africa and Europe but expanding those that already existed between East Africa and Asia...

...What is the stake in this three-way struggle among the regime, the white liberals, and the nationalists...

...The enmity has spread over into attacks on Protestant missions (nationalist leader Holden Roberto is a Protestant...

...The new colonists are emotional racists, as are all threatened poorwhites in black places...

...The Bakongo in the north support the Angolan Peoples' Union (UPA), which gave the signal for the troubles...

...At present, Salazar is all the government Angola has...

...Portugal's chief weapon is intimidation...

...Economic expansion first...