Angolan War of Independence

From 1961 to 1974 Angolan nationalist movements fought a guerrilla war against Portuguese rule in what Lisbon called its overseas province of Angola. Part of the wider Portuguese Colonial War, which also engulfed Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique, it was never won on the battlefield: it ended when a military coup in Lisbon in April 1974 brought down the dictatorship and the new government agreed to leave Africa. The three rival nationalist movements then turned on each other, and the struggle for independence passed straight into civil war.

Portuguese ships reached the Kongo kingdom in 1482 and Luanda was founded in 1575, but the conquest of the interior was completed only in the 1920s. Portugal treated Angola as an integral part of the nation rather than a colony. In 1960 it had about five million people, among them roughly 180,000 white settlers. Three nationalist movements emerged, each with a different base: the MPLA, led by Agostinho Neto, drew on Luanda's urban intellectuals and the Ambundu; the UPA, later the FNLA, under Holden Roberto, was rooted among the Bakongo of the north; and UNITA, founded by Jonas Savimbi in 1966, among the Ovimbundu of the central highlands. A separate movement, FLEC, sought independence for the enclave of Cabinda.

The year opened with a revolt by cotton workers in the Baixa de Cassanje region, crushed by the army in February; the death toll is disputed, with Portuguese military figures far lower than those given by their opponents. On 4 February militants attacked prisons and police posts in Luanda, an action the MPLA later claimed, and the riots that followed killed many more people, though accounts of how many differ sharply. On 15 March UPA fighters crossing from the Congo attacked farms and posts across northern Angola, killing, by one widely cited count, about 1,000 white and 6,000 black civilians. Portugal's leader António de Oliveira Salazar called for a response "rapidly and in force", and troops poured in. By October the army had retaken the north. In the first year, some 20,000 to 30,000 Angolans died and hundreds of thousands fled, many to the Congo.

The conflict settled into a low-intensity insurgency in thinly populated countryside. The movements fought each other almost as much as the Portuguese. The FNLA operated from bases in Congo-Léopoldville (later Zaire), backed by the United States; the MPLA received Soviet weapons, largely by way of Zambia, and Cuban support, and opened an eastern front in 1966; UNITA, short of arms, eventually reached arrangements with the Portuguese against the MPLA. South Africa supplied helicopters and some troops to the colonial forces. Portuguese offensives in the east in the late 1960s and early 1970s badly weakened the MPLA. Atrocities were committed by all sides.

The decisive blow came from Portugal itself. On 25 April 1974 junior officers of the Armed Forces Movement overthrew the Estado Novo regime in the Carnation Revolution, partly in protest at the colonial wars. The new government halted military operations and committed itself to rapid decolonisation, bringing the Portuguese Empire in Africa to an end.

On 15 January 1975, at Alvor in Portugal, the MPLA, FNLA and UNITA signed an agreement with the Portuguese setting independence for 11 November and creating a joint transitional government. It quickly collapsed. Fighting spread through Luanda, foreign arms poured in, and Portugal airlifted more than 200,000 settlers to Lisbon. South African troops invaded in October, while Cuban forces backed the MPLA. On 11 November 1975 the MPLA proclaimed the People's Republic of Angola in Luanda, and the Angolan Civil War began in earnest. Estimates of deaths in the independence war range from 10,000 to 25,000 nationalist fighters and 30,000 to 50,000 civilians, with about 2,700 Portuguese soldiers killed.

Our 1960 map shows Angola as Portuguese territory at the start of the war, and our 1985 map shows the independent republic in the midst of its civil war.