Three Movements, One Colony

When Portugal's 1974 revolution ended five centuries of empire and sent the colonisers rushing for the exits, Angola was left with no agreed successor. Three rival liberation movements — the Marxist MPLA, based in Luanda and among the Mbundu; the FNLA of Holden Roberto in the north, backed by Zaire and the CIA; and Jonas Savimbi's UNITA among the Ovimbundu of the central highlands — turned at once from fighting the Portuguese to fighting each other for control of the new state.

The Cold War powers poured in at once. The Soviet Union and Cuba backed the MPLA; the United States, Zaire, and — fatefully — apartheid South Africa backed the FNLA and UNITA. In October 1975 South Africa launched a secret armoured invasion, Operation Savannah, driving hundreds of miles north to stop an MPLA victory before independence day. From the north, Roberto's FNLA and its Zairean allies advanced on Luanda.

The crisis came in the first days of November. As South Africa's column neared the capital from the south, Fidel Castro launched Operation Carlota, a stunning airlift of Cuban troops across the Atlantic. On November 10, at Quifangondo just outside Luanda, Cuban-manned rockets annihilated the FNLA's attacking column on the 'Road of Death,' and the next day the MPLA proclaimed the independent People's Republic of Angola. The Cubans then helped halt and reverse the South African advance. The MPLA held the state — but UNITA melted into the bush, and a civil war that would last twenty-seven years had begun.