by Guy Arnold
The government vetoed all criticisms of its African policies during the October 1973 elections with the result that the opposition candidates withdrew before election day. The number of deputies was raised from 140 to 150 with Angola and Mozambique being allotted 12 instead of 10 deputies each. The Angolan Legislative Assembly had 32 elected to 21 nominated members while in Mozambique there were 20 elected and 30 nominated members. Neither assembly had a majority of black members. In order to qualify for the vote Africans had to be over 21, literate in Portuguese and pay a minimal sum in taxes; the fact that so many blacks remained disenfranchised demonstrated how little Portugal had done to bring about the assimilado policy that it boasted was its unique gift to Africa. By this time the financial drain on the Portuguese economy of the long drawn out wars in Africa was creating a massive annual trade deficit of £400 million. Following the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East (1973) the Arab states imposed an oil boycott on Portugal as a reprisal because Lisbon had allowed the US to use the Azores as a staging post for military supplies being sent to Israel. The boycott cut Portugal’s oil supplies by 60 per cent.
After a desperate year in which all the signs pointed to the coming collapse of Portugal’s African policies, Gen. Antonio de Spinola, the Deputy Chief of Staff, published his book Portugal and the Future in February 1974. In it he said: ‘Today Portugal is living through one of its gravest hours, perhaps the gravest hour of its history. An exclusive military victory was no longer viable in the African wars… We must smash the myth… that we are defending the West and Western civilization… We must also smash the myth… that the essence of the Portuguese nation is the civilizing mission…’ Portugal’s African policy was unlikely for long to survive the publication of this book.21 Spinola also said that Portugal had to give frank recognition to the principle of self-determination in the framework of a united but outward-looking and reformed Portugal. Spinola favoured some form of federation but as he was to discover it was too late. An attempt to overthrow Caetano on 9 March resulted in the dismissal of Spinola and Gen. Francisco da Costa Gomes but the attempt was a forerunner of the April Revolution.
The coup of 25 April 1974 was staged at dawn. The Caetano government was arrested and President Americo Thomaz and Premier Marcello Caetano were flown to Madeira and later exiled to Brazil. The news of the coup was received with enthusiasm and few mourned the downfall of Caetano. The Movimento das Forças Armadas (MFA) (Movement of Armed Forces), which had staged the coup, handed over the government to a Junta of National Salvation and Gen. Spinola became the acting President. He promised elections within a year, the release of political prisoners, freedom of expression and the press, while exiles such as the socialist Dr Mario Soares and the communist Alvaro Cunhal were allowed home, the latter to head the Communist Party, which was allowed to operate freely. Cunhal became a minister without portfolio while Soares became Foreign Minister. Soares warned that the white settlers in Angola (500,000) and Mozambique (220,000) might try to carry out unilateral declarations of independence. Some of the whites in Africa dissociated themselves from the Junta and its newly appointed territorial administrators. South Africa, on the other hand, was quick to recognize the Spinola government. Gen. da Costa Gomes became immediately responsible for Portuguese Africa and within two weeks of the coup the Portuguese holding key posts in Angola and Mozambique had been replaced. He made it clear in Luanda that any attempt by the white minority to seize power would not be tolerated. Thus, the longest dictatorship in modern history, which had begun in 1926, and the oldest colonial empire in the world came to an end on 25 April 1974 when nameless army officers calling themselves the MFA seized power and 800 men took control of Portugal over 24 hours.
On 19 May Spinola announced the suspension of military operations in Africa. The PAIGC, represented by Aristides Pereira, entered into talks with the new government, represented by Dr Soares, in London on 25 May. In Mozambique, however, FRELIMO continued its military operations. A period of uncertainty now followed as divisions appeared between the middle-of-the- road politicians and the more radical MFA, which opposed Spinola’s centrist policies. This division led to the resignation of Premier Palma Carlos and four other ministers and the MFA then chose Col. Vasco Goncalves as Premier on 14 July. Criticism of Spinola increased and he was accused of adopting a personality cult. He was accused of only wanting self-determination for the colonies rather than full independence. The left was firmly committed to total decolonization. The government repealed the first Article of the 1933 Constitution, which defined Portugal as a single state made up of home and overseas provinces. On 27 July Spinola gave a broadcast in which he said the time had come to recognize the right of people to take their destiny in their own hands and he announced ‘the immediate initiation of the process of decolonization of overseas Portugal’.22 Despite this speech Spinola was rapidly losing favour with the young officers of the MFA; he was seen as too conservative and too loyal to friends of the old regime. He sealed his fate when he released several right-wing figures from detention because of ‘lack of evidence against them’.23 On 10 September 1974, following his recognition of independence for Guinea-Bissau, Gen. Spinola gave a speech in which he used the fateful words the ‘silent majority’ and spoke of a slide towards chaos. The effect of this speech was to bring the right back into action and it started to regroup. The crisis came on 28 September when Gen. Spinola was prepared to sanction a rally in his support mounted by a regrouped right wing, which had adopted the phrase ‘silent majority’ as its catchword. Clashes between right and left followed and rumours spread of a counter-coup. Spinola bowed to left-wing pressure and called off the rally. Some 200 arrests were made by COPCON (Continental Operations Command), which supported the MFA; those arrested included Gen. Kaulza de Arriaga. Gen. Spinola, who was not implicated in the plotting, resigned on 30 September and was replaced by Gen. da Costa Gomes while Vasco Goncalves took over Defence. By the end of the year the MFA had effective control of the country.
The PAIGC and the struggle in Portuguese Guinea was the most decisive event leading to the 25 April Revolution in Portugal. MFA analyses of Portugal’s situation focused first upon developments in Guinea where the influence on the young officers of Amilcar Cabral had been profound. ‘The year [1974] began with the fiercest fighting the colonial army had known. Heavy artillery bombardments by the PAIGC and their capture of the Copa camp heralded what could have become certain military victory by the end of 1974 had the April coup not intervened and prompted an immediate though unofficial ceasefire.’24 In the south of the continent, after five centuries of colonial rule, Mozambique won its struggle for independence under FRELIMO whose tenacious struggle under Mondlane and then Machel had forced the pace and the revolution in Portugal that overthrew Caetano. The date for independence was set for 25 June 1975. The FRELIMO victory signalled a major change in the balance of power in Southern Africa. Angola, the largest and richest of the Portuguese African possessions, also won the right to independence in 1974 although in this case the changeover was far less straightforward than in either Guinea-Bissau or Mozambique and the agreement signed on 15 January 1975 by representatives of the Portuguese government and the three liberation movements – MPLA, FNLA and UNITA – that promised independence for 11 November that year owed more to events in Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau that had precipitated the April Revolution than to liberation pressures in Angola itself.
Few had foreseen the sudden collapse of Portuguese colonialism. The Portuguese government had long disguised from the Portuguese people the true position in Mozambique after FRELIMO launched its decisive southward offensive in January 1974. Lisbon’s propaganda had also fooled most Western political and military commentators. In March 1975 Portugal produced its own figures of the human and economic costs to Portugal of its three African wars. From May 1961 to 30 April 1974, 4,788 Portuguese servicemen had been killed in action and of these 1,523 had been recruited in the colonies (not all black); the figures for the three
territories were: Angola 1,526, Mozambique 1,606, Guinea-Bissau 1,654. A further 2,341 were killed in accidents and 545 died of disease. The total cost of the wars was estimated at 120,000 million escudos (US$5,000 million).25 The Portuguese did not produce any figures for African casualties. The liberation movements over the years had claimed a higher rate of Portuguese casualties than these figures suggest.
Portugal’s exit from Africa in 1975 was undignified and disorderly. It left behind a developing civil war in Angola while a mass exodus of whites was taking place from both Angola and Mozambique, to give the lie to Portugal’s claims to non-racialism and integration. Portugal’s new ‘radical’ rulers showed little more understanding of Africa than had their hard-line predecessors. At the end of 1975 Portugal had little continuing contact with its former colonies and no influence over events either immediately preceding or following independence. The last Governor-General of Angola left without handing over to a recognized successor government. Furthermore, as the Portuguese quit Angola they opened the way for major interventions by the Cold War superpowers, the US and USSR, and had done nothing to prevent this development. Thus, not only did the departing Portuguese fail to make a reasonable handover of power but appeared to welcome the big power interventions as a defeat for the liberation movements that had defeated and humiliated metropolitan Portugal.
Although Maj. Melo Antunes, the architect of decolonization, repeatedly warned of the dangers of Vietnamization (in Angola) this did not occur for three reasons: the pressures of the US anti-involvement lobby in the wake of the American withdrawal from Vietnam; the failure of South Africa to assess correctly the scale of military intervention required for it to achieve its 1975 invasion objective of overthrowing the MPLA government in Luanda; and the inability of the FNLA and UNITA to unite in opposition to the MPLA.26 ‘In reality, Portugal left Angola with its tail between its legs. More shaming than the war itself, which could with justification be blamed partly on foreign powers, was the behaviour of its white Mozambicans and white Angolans who had been held out for generations as examples of integrated settlers and who were supposed to consider themselves more as African than Portuguese. Only a handful stayed in either country, or were prepared to make any sacrifices for “their” new, independent nations.’27
As a consequence of the Portuguese withdrawal from Southern Africa and the emergence of two Marxist-oriented governments in Angola and Mozambique, South Africa lost the ‘cordon’ of white-controlled territories that had separated it from black Africa to the north. Pretoria, therefore, had to rethink its strategies in relation to its neighbours and the first casualty of this rethink was Smith’s Rhodesia whose usefulness to South Africa came abruptly to an end. The result was to bring the end of white minority rule in Rhodesia appreciably closer while, for the first time, South Africa was brought into direct contact, along its 500 kilometre border with Mozambique, with the possibility of black liberation movements having direct access to its territory. The Soweto uprising of 1976 was, in part at least, inspired by events in Angola and Mozambique. At last the winds of change were blowing directly across South Africa’s borders.
CHAPTER TWENTY - TWO
Namibia
From the viewpoint of an increasingly embattled South Africa, Namibia occupied a strategically vital position as a buffer between the Republic and Angola and Zambia to its north. Covering 318,000 square miles of territory Namibia was half as large again as France with a population of just on one million people. Its thousand-mile northern border stretched from the Atlantic along the whole of southern Angola and then western Zambia for the 300 miles of the Caprivi Strip to the Kazungula ferry crossing from Zambia to Botswana at the point where the four countries – Namibia, Zambia, Rhodesia and Botswana – meet. The Caprivi Strip is a geographical anomaly, carved out of northern Bechuanaland in 1890 by the British and ceded to Germany so as to give German South West Africa access to the Zambezi; by the 1970s, when confrontation between South Africa and its northern neighbours was steadily escalating, the Strip enabled South Africa and Rhodesia jointly to encircle Botswana while the huge military base that South Africa established at Katima Mulilo on the Strip acted as a direct threat to Zambia. The Namibian economy could be conveniently divided into two sectors: the south, which was the area of white settlement (including segregated reserve areas for Africans), was the principal area of economic activity and included the territory’s huge mining wealth; and the north, where the majority of the African population lived, which was almost entirely dependent upon subsistence agriculture.
In Namibia South Africa behaved like any other colonial power and was to hold on to its colony for as long as it was able to do so, in the process denying all demands for majority rule. In addition, the colonial grip that Pretoria exercised over Namibia was reinforced by the apartheid policies that South Africa imposed at a time when these policies were coming under increasing pressure from the rest of the world community, led by the United Nations. As long as South Africa defied world opinion and refused to leave Namibia it was, in a sense, asserting its determination to remain outside the world community. If it was right to apply apartheid inside South Africa then Pretoria could not do less than apply it to Namibia. As a result, by the 1970s South Africa was in defiance of world opinion as represented by the United Nations by holding on illegally to its ‘mandate’ from the former League of Nations while refusing to move the territory towards independence as all the other former mandatory powers had agreed to do. Namibia’s rejection of South African occupation was expressed in 1968 by Andimba Toivo ja Toivo, SWAPO’s co-founder and the regional secretary for Ovamboland, in a statement he made from the dock on being sentenced to 20 years prison by a South African court under the retroactively applied Terrorism Act:
My lord, we find ourselves here in a foreign country, convicted under laws made by people whom we have always considered as foreigners… It is the deep feeling of all of us that we should not be tried here in Pretoria… We are Namibians and not South Africans. We do not now, and will not in the future recognize your right to govern us, to make laws for us in which we had no say; to treat our country as if it were your property and us as if you were our masters. We have always regarded South Africa as an intruder in our country… Only when we are granted our independence will the struggle stop. Only when our human dignity is restored to us, as equals of the whites, will there be peace between us.1
When, eventually, South Africa slowly conceded first that Namibia was a UN responsibility and that South Africa had no permanent rights in the territory and, second, that it was prepared to withdraw from the territory, did South Africa also signal its desire to rejoin the world community.
A BRIEF HISTORY
South West Africa had been colonized by imperial Germany in the course of the Scramble for Africa. The colony was overrun early in World War I when South African imperial forces, led by Generals Botha and Smuts, entered the territory in January 1915 through the ports of Walvis Bay and Lüderitz. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles Germany surrendered its colonies to the allies and in December 1920 German South West Africa was designated a C Mandate and entrusted to South Africa to administer on behalf of the newly formed League of Nations. In fact, the Mandate was granted to Britain (George V) to be administered through the Union of South Africa with the obligation ‘to promote to the utmost the material and moral well-being of the inhabitants of the territory’ so that, in terms of international law, Britain always had a responsibility for Namibia until it eventually achieved independence in 1990. South Africa administered the territory as though it were an integral part of the Union (much as the main imperial powers, Britain and France, treated their African mandates). During the 1920s and 1930s South African policy was to convert the mandate into a fifth province. In 1922 Walvis Bay, which South Africa had held throughout the German colonial period, was transferred to the South West Africa administration. In 1924 the South West Africa Naturalization of Aliens Act allowed all German adul
t males to become naturalized. In 1926 a Legislative Assembly was created with 12 elected (white) and six nominated members and an executive committee with authority over roads, bridges, taxation and agriculture. From its inception this assembly lobbied for accession to the Union. This persistent lobbying led the permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations in 1933 to object to the suggestion that South West Africa should be joined to South Africa, forcing South Africa to announce in 1937 that it had no such plans.
Following World War II, the mandates of the defunct League of Nations were made Trust Territories of the newly formed United Nations, and in 1946 the UN invited its members to place their mandates under the Trusteeship system. All did so except for South Africa, which, instead, organized a referendum among the chiefs of South West Africa and on the strength of the result demanded that the territory should be incorporated in the Union. Only Britain supported this South African move. Subsequently, Pretoria refused to place South West Africa under the UN or to recognize UN jurisdiction, claiming instead that the Mandate of the League of Nations was at an end. From 1946 onwards South African control of the territory was to be challenged every year in the UN General Assembly. In 1949 South Africa virtually incorporated South West Africa in the Union and the government stopped providing the UN with annual reports of its administration, a move that was tantamount to annexation. Economic integration followed and most of Namibia’s wealth, derived from its vast mineral resources, was diverted to South Africa. On 10 December 1959 mass protests against apartheid were held in the capital, Windhoek, and the police fired on the demonstrators, killing or wounding 60 people, an event that signalled a major growth of nationalist opposition. Prior to this event the Ovamboland People’s Congress (OPC) had been formed in 1957 in Cape Town, by Namibians working in South Africa, under the leadership of Andimba Toivo ja Toivo. The Congress changed its name to the Ovamboland People’s Organization in June 1960 when it extended its activities outside Windhoek. In 1964 it changed its name again to become the South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO) and though other movements such as the South West Africa National Union (SWANU) were also formed SWAPO became the main focus of opposition to South African rule. In its early years – to 1966 – SWAPO sought change by peaceful means but in that year, following the failure of the International Court at The Hague to find against South African occupation of Namibia, SWAPO launched its armed struggle. In 1964 the South African-appointed Odendaal Commission reported and recommended the division of Namibia into 10 self-governing homelands or Bantustans covering 40 per cent of the territory, a recommendation that spelt the break-up of Namibia as a single entity.