FAPLA memoir

Memoirs by FAPLA officers about the post-independence war in Angola are rare. Publishing in the security-conscious climate during the war, or even in the aftermath when the official narrative was one of denial and forgetting, would have been impossible. Since President José Eduardo dos Santos retired, the silence has been broken by two books: a memoir by Higino Carneiro, and a biography of Kundi Paihama which although not strictly speaking a memoir, reads as though it was written with the general’s express approval, perhaps even dictated.

Both men served in government after their military careers, close allies of President dos Santos who lost their positions of influence when João Lourenço assumed the presidency. Carneiro has since been investigated for corruption. Consequently, both books have a strong tone of self-justification. Carneiro repeatedly refers to himself in the third person as ‘soldado da pátria’, solider of the fatherland. The book about Paihama includes phrases such as ‘being a man of uncommon wisdom…’ referring, of course, to the general himself. The two books continue almost to the present day, including the war in the 1990s and its conclusion with the death of Jonas Savimbi in 2002.

Born in 1955, Carneiro was of a generation that reached adulthood just as the Portuguese Revolution allowed the anticolonial movements to compete for support in Angola, and he joined the MPLA aged 19. He recalls the military assistance that Angola received from Portugal between 1981 and 1984, a little known episode that illuminates the contradictions between the politics of the Cold War and the circumstances of Angolan independence in the wake of the Portuguese revolution. The futile colonial wars in Africa had engendered some sympathy for the MPLA among Portuguese army officers, who were supportive of the coup that toppled the dictatorship on 25 April 1974. In the early 1980s some of these men were hired by the MPLA government, their intimate knowledge of counterinsurgency in the Angolan terrain now an asset in the fight against UNITA.

Carneiro’s account also usefully sheds light on the distinct methods of warfare used by the FAPLA  and how it perceived its enemies. In the late 1970s he was in Bié, where a large part of what the FAPLA did was ‘luta contra bandidos’ (fight against bandits): in other words, counterinsurgency against UNITA conducted by what he calls ‘light’ / ‘irregular’ units. Carneiro was appointed FAPLA head of operations in 1981, a time when Ronald Reagan in Washington and PW Botha in Pretoria renewed their respective governments’ commitments to UNITA following the retreats of 1976. Carneiro recounts how, with the assistance of a Soviet and a Cuban advisor, he worked on restructuring FAPLA operations in a more ‘uniform’ manner, with both ‘light’ and ‘regular’ units.

He describes a relationship with MK and SWAPO at the highest level of the FAPLA, emphasising the FAPLA’s senior role in the relationship. He also mentions ‘very discreet’ relationships with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and the Polisario Front.

In 1985 he was sent to Moscow for training on the ‘Vystrel’ officers’ course. He emphasises that before then he had no ‘scientific’ military training, and was particularly impressed by the way the course allowed him to integrate theory and practice in contrast to the more spontaneous approach of earlier years:  ‘Previously we made war because it was necessary and acted in whatever way seemed best.’ Moscow provided an opportunity to live at home with his family, after a life on the battle front back in Angola.

But his training course in Moscow was not yet complete when Carneiro, along with other senior officers, were recalled to Angola in 1988, because of the escalation in conflict that would eventually lead to the battle of Cuito Cuanavale. He left his the family in USSR, as his children were studying in Soviet schools, and also writes about his regret that he didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to Col. Bukatin, his supervisor for his doctorate in military science. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that the training in USSR prepared him for the violence of conventional warfare which was nothing like he had seen with the operations against UNITA prior to 1985. His happy memories of Soviet life may explain one of the photos in the book: the general was snapped at Madame Tussaud’s waxwork museum in London, standing between effigies of Lenin and Gorbachev.

Paihama was born in 1944 and  like many of his generation he became aware of the MPLA in the 1960s through Rádio Angola Combatente which was broadcast from Brazzaville, but was conscripted against his will into the colonial army. He rebelled and deserted, and was detained by the Portuguese security police (PIDE) for some years. He joined the MPLA after 25 April 1974. Unusually for a senior FAPLA officer, Paihama makes no mention of any training abroad, and does not discuss the role of Soviet or Cuban advisors in Angola.

Instead, the slim volume makes much of his leadership of a unit called ‘As Onças da Montanha’ (the mountain leopards), an irregular unit that was involved mostly in defending supply lines from the coast to the interior. The book suggests that Paihama had a personal role in recruiting the men for this unit, and brushes away accusations of tribalism, since most of the men were from Paihama’s Kwanhama ethnic group, from the extreme south. Paihama sees his role in organising this unit as the continuation of his work in the ODP (Popular Defence Organisation), the civilian militia that defended the MPLA first of all in the confrontations with the FNLA in Luanda before the start of the civil war.

Paihama’s emphasis on the role of the ‘Onças’ stands in interesting contrast to Carneiro’s account, which describes a process in which the disorderly units of the anticolonial struggle are shaped into a professional fighting force thanks to Soviet and Cuban assistance. It’s almost as if for Paihama this process never happened and he still believes he was fighting the ‘luta contra bandidos’ until the end.

Justin Pearce

References

Carneiro, Higino. Memórias: Soldado Da Pátria. Luanda: Edições Keve, n.d.

Chivinga, António Ngula. General Kundi Paihama: Uma História de Batalhas e Conquistas. Luanda: Rubricart, 2015.