Angola Is Not Portugal's Happiest Colony

This is the first of a two-part series of first hand accounts of the situation within Angola today Part one deals with Angola its relationship with Portugal, and the progress of the guerrilla war there. The conclusion, which will appear September 26, will discuss the position of the Gulf Oil Corporation in Angola, its contribution to Portugal's war effort, and the options available to the company!

LUANDA. Angola--There is no atmosphere of war in this African city, the capital of Portugal's largest and richest colony. There is none of the tension that a visitor would expect to find in a country which has now seen continual guerrilla warfare for nearly 12 years. No soldiers march through the streets by day or haunt the city's bars by night.

Instead, there is a feeling of confidence. The Portuguese feel increasingly sure that they have stopped the advance of the independence fighters. They are convinced that they can indefinitely continue ruling Angola as they have for the past 500 years. And they believe that the black African population is on their side.

This tranquil atmosphere of confidence extends far beyond the capital Only a few troop carriers are seen today on the streets of Carmona, the center of the thriving North Angolan coffee industry and a prime locus of guerrilla activity since 1961 when the rebellion broke out only a few miles away.

In the tiny enclave of Cabinda, the site of Angola's newly-discovered oil reserves and the rebel groups' second front, no one speaks of the war, except perhaps twice a year, when the explosion of a land mine is reported, an often as not killing civilians rather than military personnel.

Whites and wealthy blacks travel freely, moving throughout any part of the cities day and night, and driving around the countryside unarmed.

The message a visitor to Angola is given by all is the same: There is no war going on here.

Yet there is a war going on. It is an unfamiliar kind of anticolonial war, bearing little resemblance at this point to Vietnam, Algeria of the 1960s, or China of the 1940s. It is a war of few casualties, a war fought in the countryside in a contest to win the allegiance of the people rather than the control of tracts of land.

On one side are the guerrillas fighting for independence, wracked by internal dissension which often erupts into fratricidal war. On the other side are the Portuguese--a strange, stubborn foreign force which firmly believes itself not to be what international opinion nearly everywhere has deemed it: the last European colonial power in Africa.

The Portuguese say they have no colonies, Instead, they say that their three African territories--Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea--are integral parts of Portugal, forming one unitary, multiracial state.

Starting in 1951, the Portuguese began playing an international wordgame, changing the names of everything associated with their African possessions. The lands that were formerly called Colonies became Overseas Provinces. The Ministry of Colonies was renamed the Overseas Ministry. The Colonial Governor became the Provincial Governor General. Just his summer, the name Overseas Province was discontinued, yielding now to the term State.

DESPITE THESE CHANGES of name, the power structures have remained virtually the same. Any important decision's made within the totalitarian government in Lisbon. Representatives from Angola do sit in Portugal's National Assembly, but these representatives are either white Portuguese settlers or blacks approved by the Portuguese authorities. For a man to run for office in any part of Portugal or its possessions, he must have the backing of the nation's one political party, the party of Portuguese dictator Marcello Caetano.

But the Portuguese argue that the situation is the same in mainland Portugal. The argument essentially is that no self-government in the colonies is all right, because there are no free elections at home.

Talking to a national television audience earlier this summer. Premier Caetano presented the position that has now become ingrained in Portuguese traditions. "Angola, Mozambique and Guinea are provinces of Portugal," he sternly intoned. "Their inhabitants, white or black, are Portuguese. The disturbances of internal order, the acts of violence that have taken place there. The aggressions of guerrillas coming from foreign countries, must be put down and fought back by the Portuguese. It is at once our duty and responsibility."

A corollary of the belief that Angola is part of a unitary Portuguese state is the profound sentiment that the people of Angola feel themselves to be Portuguese. Therefore, in the Portuguese mind, the fighting that has gone on for the past decade must come form the outside. Independent black African nations and the forces of international communism are blamed for the fighting. And the critics of Portugal's colonial policies in the West are thought of the ignorant dupes or communist agents.

There is little evidence to indicate that the African population that makes up 90 per cent of the people in Angola supports the ruling Portuguese 10 per cent. The fact that the Portuguese cite most as evidence of their support is their ability to stay in Africa. "We are not a very mighty county," explained Vasco Vieira Garin, the former Portuguese ambassador to the United Nations. "If the people did not support us, how could we remain in Africa for the past 11 years fighting wars in three territories?"

"As Mao Tse-Tung said, the guerrillas must be like fish in the sea," he said, quoting as uneasy ally. "If the sea is inhospitable, the fish cannot swim."

IT IS DIFFICULT to gauge who the Angolan people support, Angola, like all of Portugal and its possessions, has a tightly controlled press and strictly limited freedom of assembly. Without free public expression, an accurate measure of public sentiment is impossible.

Private expression is equally limited, not by law but by fear. They Portuguese secret police, known as the DGS or General Directorate of Security, has an omnipresent influence. The very fact that the DGS is so active and widespread is to some extent a measure of anti-Portuguese sentiment. In the cities, roundups of dissident intellectuals and political organizers occur every few months. The DGS works through a network of agents and informers, as often as not black African, induced to volunteer through financial psychological pressure.

There are other facts that belie the Portuguese assertion that the Angolan people are on their side. First, there is the number of troops--this year about 60,000--that Portugal feels are necessary to keep in Angola.

Another indication that the Portuguese do not have a large is given by the policies they feel compelled to follow in the countryside. The government has concentrated small rural villages into larger hamlets, called aldeamentos, and thus made contact and cooperation with independence movements more observable and more easily disrupted. In each aldeamento, the government appoints a regedor, who serves as a liason with the authorities and sets up a hamlet-militia.

The Portuguese explain that the aldeamentos are intended to help the villagers defend themselves against the guerrillas, whom they refer to as "terrorists." At the same time, however, the aldeamentos help the Portuguese keep a close watch on the countryside.

The drain on Portugal is enormous. The wars in Africa consume nearly half of the country's budget and require a standing army of 140,000. Portugal's total population is about 7 million. If proportionately sized army were drawn from the United States, it would be like having four million American soldiers in Vietnam.

Even with so much spent on keeping its overseas empire, Portugal does not look on the colonies as a heavy millstone around its neck. "With its African colonies, Portugal is a world power," one diplomat commented. "Without them it is only the poor man of Europe."

Portugal is one of the poorest nations in the West, with an average annual per capita income of only $460. Forty per cent of the population is functionally illiterate. Emigration out of the country--both to find better paying jobs and to escape the four years' compulsory military service--has reached alarming proportions. In the last ten years, 1.5 million people--a third of the total labor force--has left, causing a shortage of manpower and a rise in production costs.

The only source of pride, and one of the few sources of stability for Premier Caetano's regime, is the African empire.

Angola has been in the hands of the Portuguese since Prince Henry the Navigator commanded the empire's fleets from Lisbon in the fifteenth century. In 1482, Diogo Cao became the first Westerner to set eyes on the land now called Angola.

From these days comes the contention that the African territories are Portuguese because Portugal created them. "The Guinean, Angolan and Mozambican people lack national traditions," Premier Caetano says, "since it is only the Portuguese language and Portuguese sovereignty that confer personality and unity on them."

The time of Prince Henry, the days of empire building, were the height of Portugal's national splendor. It is no surprise that the Portuguese cling to their African possessions as a last vestige of former grandeur.

A less psychological motive for continued presence in Africa is the markets the colonies provide. The African territories absorb about a quarter of Portugal's exports.

Very often these exports could go nowhere else. Portuguese law requires Angola and Mozambique to buy out many Portuguese products before purchasing any competing products from other countries.

If there is an excess of textiles or fertilizers in Portugal, merchants in the colonies must buy them even if comparable foreign-made products are cheaper and better. This arrangement allows an inefficient factory in Portugal to function and even prospet. Without the captive colonial market, the products wouldn't be sold.

One incident which particularly piqued Angolan merchants stemmed from a shortage of powdered milk, important in Angola because there are no pasteurizing plants in the main cities. When the merchants found powdered milk hard to come by, they applied to the Overseas Ministry from permits to import foreign-made powdered milk.

The ministry denied the permits," because, it said, an oversupply of powered milk existed in Portugal. When the powdered milk finally arrived in Angola, the merchants discovered the oversupply in Portugal consisted of imports from Holland an Spain.

IN THESE ECONOMIC terms, the Portuguese approximate a classical colonial pattern. In other ways, they go directly against it.

The strongest example of this is the policy of multiracialism, a practice which the Portuguese are fond of correctly pointing out as unique in the history of European involvement in Africa.

The Portuguese are not racist in the way other European colonialists were in Africa. They follow nothing similar to the apartheid policies of South Africa and Rhodesia. No color bar exists in employment practices, property ownerhip, or social intermixture.

Black children and white children often attend the same schools. Blacks and whites live alongisde each other in rich districts and poor districts alike.

"In our laws, there are no differentiations." Rebocho Vaz, the Portuguese General of Angola, observed. "There are no blacks and no whites. We are all Portuguese."

Yet, even though there is no de jure racism in Angola, the situation remains one of de facto racism on nearly every level of life.

Over five million black people are ruled by a tiny group of white bureaucrats from Lisbon. Although many blacks hold lower echelon government posts, all of the decision-making power is in the hands of the whites.

The cause of this uneven distribution of power, most Portuguese explain, is the lack of education among the blacks. The black man who has acquired an education, they say, has nothing to prevent him from rising to the top.

Yet educated blacks, who have become completely assimilated into the Portuguese way of life, still face discrimination. A mulatto lawyer who works as legal counsel to a large foreign firm was turned away when he applied for an apartment in one of Luanda's high-class districts. Other educated blacks report their advancement frustrated by increasingly stiff barriers to promotion as they rise in the economic hierarchy.

The ruling Portuguese see a special, limited role for the blacks in the development of Angola. As Premier Caetano himself expressed it, "The African needs the aid of the men who created and practice the techniques without which collective life nowadays is unthinkable. But the African societies must be built up fraternally by white and black together, where some will provide their experience and their technology, others the valid elements of their culture."

The most pervasive racist practice, and the one the one that most blacks come in contact with and feel the most resentment about, is unequal pay scales for black and white workers. It is the exception, not the rule, to find a black man's pay equal to a white man's for doing the same work.

In a small furniture factory in Luanda, a black man and a white man sit beside each other doing identical labor making the legs of a chair. The black is paid 70 cents a day; the white gets $3.

The white man does not say he is more skilled. Instead, he explains the unequal pay by saying. "This is not my country. I am from Portugal These people were born here They don't deserve as much as I do".

Two waiters work side by side in a small restaurant in Melange a diamond mining area. One is black one white. The white says he is paid $50 a month the Nack $25. When asked why he gets less the black responds. You know why.

THE FEELING of powerlessness and economic discrimination reached a head in 1961 as a wave of nationalism swept across the African continent. A year before the Belgians had fled the neighboring Congo after only a brief uprising. Independence-minded Angolans now had a base in which they could safely plan their revolution.

At the same time, a number of peculiar circumstances combined to turn the early months of 1961 into the bloodbath that would inaugurate the Angolan revolution.

The most bizarre occurrence, one which forced the rebels to move before they had planned, took place some 7000 miles away in the Carribean. Henrique Malta Galvao, a former colonial High Inspector and a staunch opponent of the then dictator Antonio de Oliveria Salazar, seized the Portuguese luxury liner Santa Maria," the second largest ship in the nation's merchant navy. Along with 68 men armed with machine guns. Galvao hijacked the ship after leaving Curacao with 600 passengers and 300 crew members aboard.

The incident caused an international uproar. The boat disappeared on he high seas until three days later, when a joint U.S. English Portuguese search effort finally tracked it down in mid- Atlantic heading south towards Africa. Gaivao announced his intention of sailing to Angola, not to free it, but to set up a rebel Portuguese government there, opposed to the Salazar regime.

Galvao never made it. He had engine trouble and problems with the 900 captive traveling companions he had brought along. He was forced to land at Recife, Brazil, where the government gave him anylum, but returned the ship to the Portuguese.

Nonetheless, Galvao's announced plans brought dozens of journalists to Luanda for the first time. Eager to display their case before a watching foreign audience, a small group of mostly mulatoo intellectuals decided to launch an attack on Luanda main political prison.

In a predawn raid on Feb. 4, 1961, several hundred Africans and mulattos staged the attack. Armed with only knives and clubs the said was suicidal. Seven police were killed, and 40 Africans were machine gunned. The walls of the prison were scarcely scratched.

The following weeks saw wholesale rioting throughout the city. The whites, better armed, inflicted, the most casualties. One missionary personally counted 300 dead in the first three days. By the end of the month, the fighting subside, and Luanda lapsed into a state of anxious tension.

Many of the rebel leaders, coming from a group called the MPLA, or People's Movement for he Liberation of Angola, escaped the capital and went north to the coffee-growing regions of the Dembos, where trouble was brewing 100 miles away.

Already another rebel group had been working in the North. This group, the UPA or the Union of the Populations of Angola, had called for massive destruction of property and crops on the coffee plantations timed to coincide with the opening of U.N. debate on the Portuguese colonies in March 1961.

At the same time, an economic decline had resulted in white coffee planters not paying their African conscript laborers their normal $7 monthly wage. Beginning on March 15, the plantation workers, armed mostly withcatanas or African machettes, and garden tools, attacked the planters and their families, burned crops, pillaged houses and wrecked bridges. Accounts of the atrocities of the time have filled hundreds of Portuguese pamphlets and speeches. Hatcheting of farmers and disemboweling of their families no doubt occured. But the violence of the whites far outside that of the blacks.

Reliable estimates hold that in the first six months about 800 whites were killed. In the same period, 20,000 blacks died.

The Portuguese responded to the uprising with bombs and machine guns. They bombed and strafed much of the countryside, including areas unaffected by the rebellion. In the words of one Baptist missionary. "The savagery of the Portuguese reaction kicked and scattered the fire until the whole of the North was ablaze."

Underarmed and poorly organized, both rebel groups found the uprising out of their control. The Portuguese, however, were able to isolate it to a few areas of the North within six months.

Since that time the rebellion has simmered in the North. The Portuguese keep it laidden from public viewas much as possible; the roads through the affected areas can only be traveled on in a military convoy.

THE MOST CRIPPLING factor for the rebel groups is their disunity which has persisted to this day. The UPA still concentrates its efforts in the North, and is recognized by Zaire (formerly the Belgian Congo). The MPLA has shifted its principal efforts to the vast, underpopulated areas of the East of Angola. It is supported by neighboring Zambia.

Fratricidal was between the groups has been frequent. An alliance has been reported in the making, but nothing has yet come of it.

Military progress has been slow. The groups say they have been concentrating on political work in the countryside. They say they are not vet at the stage where they can attack towns or strategic targets.

A third rebel group UNHA, or the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, was formed in 1962. It has concentrated its efforts in the East and the South. Friction with the MPLA has been constant, and UNHA claims that MPLA guerrillas have repeatedly attempted to eradicate their rival to the south.

All of the groups recognize that unity is essential for victory, but they have yet to agree on a way to attain the necessary cohesion. And the Portuguese aren't about to help out. They play off one group against the others, much as they fomented tribal wars in the previous five centuries of their involvement in Angola.

Former dictator Salazar ruled Portugal and its empire by the glorification of nationalism and the country's imperial heritage. He had a stroke in 1968 after an unsound deckchair he was sitting on collapsed. But it took him two years to die.

Portugal's empire had a stroke in 1961. When the disease will finally claim its victim is yet to be seen