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Nominated for the NYMAS Arthur Goodzeit Book Award 2013 Portugal's three wars in Africa in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea (Guiné-Bissau today) lasted almost 13 years - longer than the United States Army fought in Vietnam. Yet they are among the most underreported conflicts of the modern era. Commonly referred to as Lisbon's Overseas War (Guerra do Ultramar) or in the former colonies, the War of Liberation (Guerra de Libertação), these struggles played a seminal role in ending white rule in Southern Africa. Though hardly on the scale of hostilities being fought in South East Asia, the casualty count by the time a military coup d'état took place in Lisbon in April 1974 was significant. It was certainly enough to cause Portugal to call a halt to violence and pull all its troops back to the Metropolis. Ultimately, Lisbon was to move out of Africa altogether, when hundreds of thousands of Portuguese nationals returned to Europe, the majority having left everything they owned behind. Independence for all th Indeed, on a recent visit to Central Mozambique in 2013, a youthful member of the American Peace Corps told this author that despite have former colonies, including the Atlantic islands, followed soon afterwards. Lisbon ruled its African territories for more than five centuries, not always undisputed by its black and mestizo subjects, but effectively enough to create a lasting Lusitanian tradition. That imprint is indelible and remains engraved in language, social mores and cultural traditions that sometimes have more in common with Europe than with Africa. Today, most of the newspapers in Luanda, Maputo - formerly Lourenco Marques - and Bissau are in Portuguese, as is the language taught in their schools and used by their respective representatives in international bodies to which they all subscribe. ing been embroiled in conflict with the Portuguese for many years in the 1960s and 1970s, he found the local people with whom he came into contact inordinately fond of their erstwhile 'colonial overlords'. As a foreign correspondent, Al Venter covered all three wars over more than a decade, spending lengthy periods in the territories while going on operations with the Portuguese army, marines and air force. In the process, he wrote several books on these conflicts, including a report on the conflict in Portuguese Guinea for the Munger Africana Library of the California Institute of Technology. Portugal's Guerrilla Wars in Africa represents an amalgam of these efforts. At the same time, this book is not an official history, but rather a journalist's perspective of military events as viewed by somebody who has made a career of reporting on overseas wars, Africa's especially. Venter's camera was always at hand; most of the images used between these covers are his. His approach is both intrusive and personal and he would like to believe that he has managed to record for posterity a tiny but vital segment of African history.
This detailed combat history sheds light on the significant yet overlooked guerilla campaigns in what would become Angola and Guinea-Bissou. Portugal was the first European country to colonize Africa. It was also the last to leave, almost five centuries later. During what Lisbon called its “civilizing mission” the Portuguese weathered numerous insurrections, but none as severe as the guerrilla war first launched in Angola in 1961 and two years later in Portuguese Guinea. Both the Soviets and the Cubans believed that because the tiny colony of Guinea had no resources, Lisbon would soon capitulate. But the 11-year struggle became the empire’s most strenuous attempt to retain colonial power. Though it was overshadowed by the conflict in Vietnam, the Soviet-led guerrilla campaign in Portuguese Guinea set the scene for the wars that followed in Rhodesia and present-day Namibia.
A new account of how Portugal fought a bush war in Mozambique for over a decade. Portugal fought a bush war in Mozambique — one of the most beautiful countries in the world — for over a decade. The small European nation was ranged against formidable odds and in the end was unable to muster the resources required to effectively take on the might of the Soviet Union and its collaborators—every single communist country on the planet and almost all of Black Africa. Yet, Al Venter argues, Portugal did not actually lose the war, and indeed fought in difficult terrain with a good degree of success over an extended period. It was radical domestic politics that heralded the end. Mozambique is once again embroiled in a guerrilla war, this time against a large force of Islamic militants, many from Somalia and some Arab countries, and unequivocally backed by Islamic State and the lessons of Mozambique’s bush war are still relevant today.
Following the publication of Al Venter’s successful Portugal’s Guerrilla Wars in Africa - shortlisted by the New York Military Affairs Symposium’s 'Arthur Goodzeit Book Award for 2013' - his Battle for Angola delves still further into the troubled history of this former Portuguese African colony. This is a completely fresh work running to almost 600 pages including 32 pages of color photos, with the main thrust on events before and after the civil war that followed Lisbon’s over-hasty departure back to the metrópole. There are also several sections that detail the role of South African mercenaries in defeating the rebel leader Dr Jonas Savimbi (considered by some as the most accomplished guerrilla leader to emerge in Africa in the past century). There are many chapters that deal with Pretoria’s reaction to the deteriorating political and military situation in Angola, the role of the Soviets and mercenaries in the political transition, as well as the civil war that followed. With the assistance of several notable military authorities he elaborates in considerable detail on South Africa’s 23-year Border War, from the first guerrilla incursions to the last. In this regard he received solid help from the former the head of 4 Reconnaissance Regiment, Colonel Douw Steyn, who details several cross-border Recce strikes, including the sinking by frogmen of two Soviet ships and a Cuban freighter in an Angolan deepwater port. Throughout, the author was helped by a variety of notable authorities, including the French historian Dr René Pélissier and the American academic and former naval aviator Dr John (Jack) Cann. With their assistance, he covers several ancillary uprisings and invasions, including the Herero revolt of the early 20th century; the equally troubled Ovambo insurrection, as well as the invasion of Angola by the Imperial German Army in the First World War. Former deputy head of the South African Army Major General Roland de Vries played a seminal role. It was he - dubbed ‘South Africa’s Rommel’ by his fellow commanders - who successfully nurtured the concept of ‘mobile warfare’ where, in a succession of armored onslaughts ‘thin-skinned’ Ratel Infantry Fighting Vehicles tackled Soviet main battle tanks and thrashed them. There is a major section on South African Airborne – the ‘Parabats’ –by Brigadier-General McGill Alexander, one of the architects of that kind of warfare under Third World conditions. Finally, the role of Cuban Revolutionary Army receives the attention it deserves: officially there were almost 50,000 Cuban troops deployed in the Angolan war, though subsequent disclosures in Havana suggest that the final total was much higher.
“The fascinating story of arguably the greatest queen in sub-Saharan African history, who surely deserves a place in the pantheon of revolutionary world leaders.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Though largely unknown in the West, the seventeenth-century African queen Njinga was one of the most multifaceted rulers in history, a woman who rivaled Queen Elizabeth I in political cunning and military prowess. In this landmark book, based on nine years of research and drawing from missionary accounts, letters, and colonial records, Linda Heywood reveals how this legendary queen skillfully navigated—and ultimately transcended—the ruthless, male-dominated power struggles of her time. “Queen Njinga of Angola has long been among the many heroes whom black diasporians have used to construct a pantheon and a usable past. Linda Heywood gives us a different Njinga—one brimming with all the qualities that made her the stuff of legend but also full of all the interests and inclinations that made her human. A thorough, serious, and long overdue study of a fascinating ruler, Njinga of Angola is an essential addition to the study of the black Atlantic world.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates “This fine biography attempts to reconcile her political acumen with the human sacrifices, infanticide, and slave trading by which she consolidated and projected power.” —New Yorker “Queen Njinga was by far the most successful of African rulers in resisting Portuguese colonialism...Tactically pious and unhesitatingly murderous...a commanding figure in velvet slippers and elephant hair ripe for big-screen treatment; and surely, as our social media age puts it, one badass woman.” —Karen Shook, Times Higher Education
In 1975, Angola was tumbling into pandemonium; everyone who could was packing crates, desperate to abandon the beleaguered colony. With his trademark bravura, Ryszard Kapuscinski went the other way, begging his was from Lisbon and comfort to Luanda—once famed as Africa's Rio de Janeiro—and chaos.Angola, a slave colony later given over to mining and plantations, was a promised land for generations of poor Portuguese. It had belonged to Portugal since before there were English-speakers in North America. After the collapse of the fascist dictatorship in Portugal in 1974, Angola was brusquely cut loose, spurring the catastrophe of a still-ongoing civil war. Kapuscinski plunged right into the middle of the drama, driving past thousands of haphazardly placed check-points, where using the wrong shibboleth was a matter of life and death; recording his imporessions of the young soldiers—from Cuba, Angola, South Africa, Portugal—fighting a nebulous war with global repercussions; and examining the peculiar brutality of a country surprised and divided by its newfound freedom.Translated from the Polish by William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand.
A “gripping” story of the Angolan Civil War and how it evolved into a Cold War struggle between superpowers (New York Journal of Books). Lasting over a quarter of a century, from 1975 to 2002, the Angolan Civil War began as a power struggle between two former liberation movements, the MPLA and UNITA—but became a Cold War struggle with involvement from the Soviet Union, Cuba, South Africa, and the United States. This book examines the height of the Cuban-South African fighting in Angola in 1987–88, when three thousand South African soldiers and about eight thousand UNITA guerrilla fighters fought in alliance against the Cubans and the armed forces of the Marxist MPLA government, a force of over fifty thousand men. Fred Bridgland pieced together the course of the war, fought in one of the world’s most remote and wild terrains, by interviewing the South Africans who fought it, and many of their stories are woven into the narrative. This classic account of a Cold War struggle and its momentous consequences for the participants and the continent now includes a new preface and epilogue. “Highlights just how much political and social considerations dictate the outcome of war . . . A highly detailed work of military history, The War for Africa can tell us a lot about the nature of counter-insurgency warfare and how small states can become contested battlegrounds between superpowers.” —New York Journal of Books
The book focuses on an area called Maúa, not because I believe Maúa represents the whole of Mozambique as such, but because highlighting a specific area and people helps to understand the Mozambican history more deeply and comprehensively. In any case, it would be impossible to study the experience of all Mozambicans. I am not attempting to write a history textbook of Mozambique, or a glorious history of the liberation struggle, but rather trying to fill a gap in the descriptions of contemporary Mozambican history by delving into matters that have not been written about before.
Portugal is a small country, but for many years it possessed the world's third largest empire; and its armed forces deserve to be better known than they are in the English-speaking world. Fortunately, the British co-author was able to meet a Portuguese colleague who was not only an authority on Portuguese military history and uniforms, but who had also served in Mocambique himself. A collaborative venture seemed the best way of providing the kind of 'hard' information about Portuguese weapons, organisation, uniforms and insignia that has been lacking until now.