International African Institute

Dissidências e poder de estado: O MPLA perante si próprio (1962-1977): Ensaio de história

politica by Jean-Michel Mabeko-Tali
Review by: Ricardo M. S. Soares de Oliveira
Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 73, No. 2 (2003), pp. 326-329
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International African Institute
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3556903 .
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326 BOOK
REVIEWS

Beyondthat, the projectalso dealswith rightsas entitlementto socialgoods

such as land and housing,which are indeed pressingissues but which are
entirelypoliticalin thattheycannotbe addressedwithoutcallinginto question
the entirepoliticaland economic structuresof an inequitableelite-oriented
statesystem.
The volumeby turnsenlightensandfrustrates,in thata lightis shoneon an
extremelywidevarietyof issueswhicharenot oftenaffordedpublicdiscussion
or analysis,but sometimesall too briefly.The chapteron customarylaw, for
instance,highlightsthe potentiallyenormousissues of the legal statusof lost
childrenand remarriedcouplesin the aftermathof twentyyearsof displaced
personsandbrokenfamilies,onlyto passit by in a coupleof sentences.Alsoin
the samechapter,readersfromthe humanrightscommunitymayfindcauseto
disagreewiththe notionthatWesternmethodsof coercion,imprisonment and
execution have representedan improvementupon traditionalsystems of
community-based punishment.
These objectionsaside, the publishedengagementof a broadcoalitionof
nationalcivil societywith the core humanrightsproblemsof Sudanand its
successor(s)(unitary,federalor separateentities)is entirelyto be welcomed.
Ongoinghigh-levelpeaceprocessesarelargelyconductedby a narrowpolitical-
militaryelite on both sides, and allow little space for wider discussionof
problematicissueswhich,if left unsolved,could derailany hopes of a lasting
peace.Someof these,suchas the dangersof not resolvingthe statusof minority
groupsin northernSudan,andtherebyleavingscopeforthe re-ignitionof more
local conflicts,are givenmuch-neededattentionin thesepages.
Pre-emptivecivildiscussionof rightsissuesis essentialif the futureof Sudan
is to avoidthe tragediesof its present.This volumeis a valuableguideto those
issuesconsideredcrucialby Sudanesethemselves,andit is to be hopedthatits
availabilityin both Englishand Arabiceditionswill help to enabletheirwider
discussionby those who standto be most affected.
OLLY
OWEN
Centrefor Democracyand Development,London

Dissidincias e poder de estado: o MPLA perante si

JEAN-MICHELMABEKO-TALI,
proprio (1962-1977): ensaio de histdria politica. Luanda: Nzila, 2001, two
volumes, 471 pp. and 374 pp., paperback(orders from nzila@hotmail.com).

Jean-Michel Mabeko-Tali has written a major contribution to the under-

standing of late twentieth-centuryAngola in the form of a study of the MPLA
covering the outbreak of the anti-colonial war to the internal purge and
subsequent creation of a vanguardpartythat followed the 1977 failed coup.The
two-volume work is based on the author's doctoral thesis, submitted to the
University of Paris VII in 1996. Tali, who hails from Congo-Brazzaville,has
been mostly based in Angola since the time of Independence, and received no
financial support for the duration of his Ph.D. research. This should be
commended, as should the forthrightness unusual in a scholar not in exile.
Perhaps things are finally changing in Luanda.
The Movimento Popular de Liberta~giode Angola was founded in 1960 by a
motley group of exiles with a multi-racial, left-leaning agenda of national
liberation. Most of the leading cadres were mestifo(Liicio Lara, Iko Carreira,
Mario de Andrade, Viriato da Cruz), white or Mbundu (the second largest
ethnic group of Angola, based on the Luandan hinterland and with long
experience of contact with the Portuguese). The president of the party after
1962 was Agostinho Neto, a medical doctor of Mbundu origin. Despite the

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 BOOK REVIEWS 327

pan-Angolan rhetoric, the movement was initially hampered by its limited

geographical provenance, separation from its natural urban milieu, and the
concurrent incapacity to develop a rural insurrection in the immediate
aftermath of the outbreak of the anti-colonial war (not a problem for the
ethnically based rival FNLA and, later, UNITA).
In the first volume the author articulateshis close examination of the internal
politics of the movement around three internal crises (1962, 1972 and 1974)
through which the very identity of the party was at stake. Though emanating
from very different quarters, the themes picked up in each moment of radical
requestioninguncannily mirroreach other. This mainly consisted of the strains
introduced in the structure of the movement by perceived (interchangeable)
class and racial asymmetries in the enjoyment of privileges and access to
positions of power. The complaints referred to the class dominance of
'intellectuals' (i.e. those having experienced higher education, mostly in
Portugal) over the less educated, and the disproportionalrole of whites and
mestifosin the upper ranks of the movement. These recurrent conflicts, often
explicitly addressed but never properly resolved, were left to simmer until
eventually others raised them.
It is impossible to do justice to all the interesting facets explored here. I
found the insights into guerrilla governance in the liberated areas of eastern
Angola (and the widespread executions on the grounds of witchcraft,
something often attributed to jungle UNITA but never to the suave MPLA)
especially illuminating. Likewise the rather sordid exile politics in Congo-
Brazzaville, on which the author brings to bear a curiously detached local
perspective. Tali is also successful in conveying the difficulty of articulatinga
movement that was not only partitioned according to the aforementioned rifts
but was also dispersed into three mutually unintelligiblerealms: exile, guerrilla,
and the internal element then getting to grips with the rapidly mutating late
colonial society.
The study is particularly innovative in regard to the role of whites and
mestifosin the MPLA, which is but one of the factors that make it such a bibelot
rare, as Paul Veyne would put it, among other anti-colonial liberation
movements. Most seasoned observers of Angola have a few (sometimes
apocryphal) anecdotes on this, from the unsuspecting Chatham House public
recently faced with a white Angolan planning vice-minister to a Mozambican
audience surprisedat the unambiguous whiteness of the MPLA general invited
to speak on, of all subjects, negritude.The author fully realises their centralityto
the most important internal conflicts of the period under review, and is on
target when claiming that their embraceby Agostinho Neto (and, on the face of
it, exclusion by pivotal sectors of the MPLA itself, let alone the other liberation
movements) led to the formation of a particularlyloyalist and uncritical group
around the party leader and future President.
In the second volume Tali provides a refreshing analytical stance on the
MPLA victory of 1975-76. Without dislodging the pivotal role of the
Portuguese military left and, later on, that of Cuban/Eastern Bloc aid (and,
in the case of besieged Luanda, the high degree of luck in having met the
Independence Day deadline in possession of the city), the author takes
seriously the degree of popular support for a political message that then
spanned racial, class and ethnic boundaries. He argues that the latter (and not
simply mere logistics) crucially contributed to the movement's success. This
upsurge of support came in the wake of two cripplinginternal schisms that had
left the movement on the verge of dissolution in the eve of the April 1974
Lisbon coup. The analysis of the bewildering array of extreme left splinter

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328 BOOKREVIEWS

groups, neighbourhood associations, vigilante posses and labour unions that

resulted from this spontaneous support is one of the strongest points of Tali's
work. After bringing out their diversityand manifold contradictions, he charts
the systematic way by which Neto suffocated these uncontrollable offshoots
once they had become expendable, mostly by means of discrete co-optation,
but often enough through the repressiveapparatusquickly put in place by the
new MPLA government.
By early 1977 a number of those unwilling to return to the fold of the MPLA
family found themselves gravitating towards Nito Alves, a sometime Neto
protege now pursuing his own populist agenda. The Alves faction (ironically,
itself animated by a number of white Angolans) coupled the maturing of many
of the older racial and class complaints against the leadership with a new
emphasis on the 'conservatism'of the presidential clique, i.e. its unwillingness
to follow the radical (in Nito's case, pro-Soviet) path favoured alike by the
intellectual youth that had revamped the party in 1974-5 and the urban
lumpenproletariatthat had enabled the MPLA's Luanda stand at the time of
Independence. With hindsight, the gradual stiffening of positions could but
lead to a very bloody attempt at toppling the existing power structure.This bid
for state power (covertly supported by the Soviet Union) was averted only by
means of a massive Cuban deployment on the Neto side.
The outcome was catastrophic:in the wake of the failed coupthe repression
unleashed on the whole country left tens of thousands dead. (Tali, while
acknowledgingthe geographicaland human reach of the process, mostly shirks
the body-count polemic.) The MPLA went through a sweeping change that
resulted in the shedding of a mass movement ethos and its replacement by a
Marxist-Leninist vanguard structure of only a few thousand members. The
issue of why Neto accepted the path of ideological orthodoxy in the wake of an
aborted internal challenge seeking the same aim remains unclear. Tali is
deliberatelyvague on this, arguing for a mix of internal reasons coupled with
the obvious externalpressure of the Cuban and Soviet patrons. This is perhaps
the least satisfactory instance of the work, and it will certainly merit further
elaboration by Tali or others. With this severance, writes Tali, 'starts a new
period of social demobilisation' that stands in sharp contrast with the fertile
associational and ideological dynamics of post-1974 party politics.
The other noteworthy weakness pertains to the generally meek attitude
towards Agostinho Neto the man: In all fairness, Tali's portrait is hardly
flattering, but the few negative assessments that make it into the study are
either cryptic or subliminal. Tali's Neto doesn't seem like a particularlybad
guy, and at crucialinstances like the 1977 post-couprepressionTali puts him in
a reactive role as the inge'nuecaught unawares. Note that one of Tali's
interlocuteursprivilegiisduring his long research period has been Lficio Lara,
Neto's right-handman: perhaps this accounts for some understatement. Many
who were privy to Angolan politics of the period remember Neto as an
altogether more Machiavellian, fearsome character. On the other hand, while
never squarelylaying blame at the late President's feet, the author does a neat,
methodical job of exposing the historical truth of Neto's actions. So perhaps
this is just an instance of the extreme prudence and semantic care needed to
tread the path of academic research in Angola.
One hopes that the ensuing period finds as worthy a chronicler as the 1962-
77 one has merited (although a lot remains to be done even here). Regrettably,
as the recent experience of a French academic writing on the Jose Eduardo dos
Santos Foundation seems to show, the prospect of a truly authoritativestudy of
post-1977 MPLA politics may be a distant one at the present time. As it stands,

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 BOOKREVIEWS 329

Tali's impressivestudy deserves a place among the works of a select number of

scholars (such as Franz-Wilhelm Heimer, Christine Messiant, Rene Pelissier
and John Marcum) who have provided us with the most exciting research and
the most compelling interpretationsof Angola's late colonial and early post-
Independence social and political turmoil. Its publication at a moment when
the MPLA is bound to experience yet furthersubstantialchanges is particularly
timely.
RICARDO
M. S. SOARESDE OLIVEIRA
Universityof Cambridge

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