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<text> <title> (1970s) Africa </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1970s Highlights </history> <link 07507> <link 07299> <link 06352> <link 01996> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Africa: 1970s </hdr> <body> [With the end of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974 came the end of the last European colonial empire in Africa. Portuguese Guinea (now Guinea-Bissau), Sao Tome and Principe and the Cape Verde Islands made the transition to independence, if not to democracy. But for Portugal's largest, richest colonies, Mozambique and especially Angola, the road to freedom was marked by violence and by superpower meddling.] (May 26, 1975) In Lourenco Marques' city hall square, workmen last week began chipping away at the great stone statue of Mouzinho de Albuquerque, a 19th century Portuguese governor who led a bloody campaign against rebellious blacks in 1895. After 300 years under Portuguese rule, Mozambique is finally becoming independent on June 25, and officials are anxious to remove the more obvious reminders of the country's colonial past before then. In many ways, the past may be easier to deal with then the future. Since the 1974 Portuguese revolution, when Lisbon decided to free its African territories, hundreds have died in racial clashes. As many as 50,000 whites (out of 220,000) have fled the Indian Ocean country, and planes and boats are fully booked until independence day. Not all of them have left for racial reasons; some fear that the all-black administration that will replace the joint Portuguese-Mozambique transition government will become a left-wing dictatorship. The flight of the whites has left Mozambique with a severe shortage of technicians, teachers, civil servants and other professionals. One estimate is that only 100 doctors are left to serve a population of 8 million blacks, 170,000 whites and 60,000 Asians. In Angola, three black liberation movements are fighting over who will hold power after the vast West African territory becomes independent of Portugal on Nov. 11. In three weeks of violence, mainly in the capital city of Luanda, at least 500 people, mostly blacks, have been killed and thousands of others wounded. The casualties resulted from a murderous vendetta among the liberation groups that fought a 13-year guerrilla war against the Portuguese. The biggest and best-financed of the groups is the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (F.N.L.A.), headed by the mercurial, missionary-educated Holden Roberto. It has its headquarters in Kinshasa and is backed by Roberto's brother-in-law, Zaire President Mobuto Sese Seko. Its chief rival is the Moscow-oriented Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (M.P.L.A.), backed principally by students and intellectuals in Luanda and strongly supported by the Portuguese Communist Party. The third group is the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (U.N.I.T.A.), headed by Jonas Savimbi, a onetime disciple of Che Guevara turned moderate, who controls much of rural Angola and is said to have the backing of Portuguese businesses with interests in the country. (December 1, 1975) "If only outsiders had stayed out," observed a Portuguese businessman in the Angolan capital of Luanda, "this might have remained a low-level civil war in the bush. But now everybody's in, and the thing is beyond solution." That seemed to be an accurate appraisal last week, as Angola was engulfed in civil war. Largely because of Angola's huge oil and mineral wealth, foreign interests have long been active behind the scenes in support of one or another of the country's three rival liberation movements. But since independence day, these nations no longer pretend to conceal their activities. Arms, advisers and mercenaries from at least a dozen countries have been pouring into Angola. Both sides seem desperately eager for outside help from their friends. The M.P.L.A. now admits that Cubans (an estimated 3,000, half of them combat soldiers) have joined its side. There are also some 4,000 refugees from the 1960-63 Katanga rebellion, most of them diehard opponents of Mobutu, who are fighting for the M.P.L.A. Moscow reportedly has dispatched 400 technicians to train Angolans to use Russian equipment, including light artillery and antiaircraft guns being disgorged daily at Luanda's Craveiro Lopes Airport. (February 23, 1976) After a decisive five-day military blitz, the Soviet-backed Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola last week triumphantly announced that it had won the seven-month-old Angolan civil war. In a Luanda interview with the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug, President Agostinho Neto held out an olive branch to former members of the two Western-backed opposition forces, the National Union for the Total Liberation of Angola and the National Front for the Liberation of Angola. They would have "no problem" under his government, he insisted. But he offered virtually no hope for a conciliatory settlement with UNITA Leader Jonas Savimbi or the F.N.L.A.'s Holden Roberto. Said Neto: "We regret being forced by the treason perpetrated by (these) leaders to take steps in order to prevent new cases of slaughter, murder and unreasonable destruction of human life." Neither Savimbi nor Roberto had any response to Neto's victory claims. But barring a direct confrontation of the M.P.L.A. and its battle-hardened Cubans with some 5,000 South African regulars dug in around the Cunene River hydroelectric complex just inside Angola, large-scale fighting appeared to be over. At week's end the M.P.L.A. was in control of all but a sparsely populated desert area in the south and a single pocket in the north. [The Soviets and the U.S. also warred through surrogates in another cockpit of conflict, the Horn of Africa. After Ethiopia's ancient U.S.-supported monarchy was overthrown by a military coup, the new rulers quickly turned to ruthless repression to solidify their power and quell domestic dissent, and to the Soviet Union for arms and mercenaries to put down two major secessionist movements. In the process the superpowers switched sides.] (March 11, 1974) Clearly shaken, the Emperor of Ethiopia, Lion of Judah, Elect of God and King of Kings mounted the balcony of his lion-guarded Jubilee Palace in Addis Ababa. Speaking to 600 members of the armed forces, Haile Selassie declared in a faltering and cracking voice: "This is a poor land. Your country cannot afford to give you more. I appeal to your loyalty!" From the palace courtyard, the Emperor received the expected cheers of support. But in Ethiopia's key garrison towns, where thousands of his soldiers were mutinying, the appeal fell on deaf ears. There, junior officers and enlisted men continued their rebellion, demanding higher wages to offset an inflation that since January has doubled the price of flour, rice and bread. The aging (81) monarch--who survived Mussolini's invasion in the 1930s as well as an abortive coup 13 years ago--really had no choice. He gave in to the rebels' demands, and last week virtually turned over the reins of authority to the military. What was surprising was not that the mutiny took place, but that it was so long in coming. Well-trained by American, British and Israeli experts, the 42,000-man army is a modern outfit with--at least for Ethiopia--modern views. Its educated officers have long been unhappy about the appalling gap between rich and poor and the inefficiencies and inequities of a feudal agricultural system. Last year drought, landlord indifference and government mismanagement combined to produce a famine that left at least 50,000 dead. (August 22, 1977) Somalia's Radio Mogadishu reported that guerrillas of an organization known as the Western Somali Liberation Front had captured as much as 90% of Ethiopia's Ogaden--all, in fact, except the strongholds of Dire Dawa, Harar and Jijiga, where fighting was raging. By the end of August, vowed the Somali guerrillas, the entire region would be "liberated" and merged with the Somali Republic. A hollow boast, perhaps, but the fact is that the Ethiopian empire of the late Haile Selassie is today threatened with disintegration. In the northern province of Eritrea, Addis Ababa's Marxist military government of Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam has lost everything but the provincial capital of Asmara and the port cities of Massawa and Assab to the secessionist rebels. If Ethiopia should be defeated in both of its desert wars, it would lose more than 40% of its territory, 6 million of its 28 million people, and its access to the sea. The Horn of Africa, lying beside the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the oil routes between the Persian Gulf and Europe, is of enormous strategic importance to the superpowers. For about 15 years, the Soviet Union trained and armed the 22,000-man Somali army and helped make it one of the best fighting forces in Africa; it also built a missile and naval base at the Somali port of Berbera, strategically located near the approaches to the Red Sea. But three years ago, following the overthrow of Haile Selassie, the Soviets began to concentrate on improving their relations with the new junta in Ethiopia--and began to alienate the Somalis. The Cubans, who used to back the Eritreans, followed the Russians to Addis Ababa, and today are helping to train Colonel Mengistu's "peasant army." During the same period, the U.S. has lost out in Ethiopia--the junta expelled the remaining American diplomats and military advisers last April--but has been working hard to improve its relations with Somalia. Along with France, the U.S. has been offering "defensive" arms to Somalia in an effort to wrest the Somalis from the Soviet grip. An irony of the current fighting in the Ogaden is that the Somalis are equipped with Soviet-made T-54 tanks and the Ethiopians with American-made M-60 tanks--yet the superpowers, in the years since they provided the armor, have changed sides. [For sixteen years, South Africa had been quiescent, ever since the Sharpeville massacre of 1960. Then the black townships exploded again.] (June 28, 1976) Some events make the very realities of repression stand out in particularly bold relief. One was Sharpeville: in 1960, police broke up a rioting mob of blacks in this Johannesburg suburb by firing pointblank into the crowd, killing 69 and wounding 186. Last week South Africa suffered a second Sharpeville. Its name was Soweto. The racial tensions that seethe just beneath the surface of South African life exploded in Soweto, a ramshackle, overcrowded satellite town for blacks on the outskirts of Johannesburg. In three bitter days and nights of wild rioting and skirmishes between club-wielding, stone-throwing blacks and heavily armed police, at least 100 people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured; only a handful of the victims were white. The turmoil spread to at least seven other segregated black townships surrounding South Africa's largest industrial city. At week's end the violence subsided, although police remained on guard in Soweto and other neighboring townships. Exactly how and why a student protest became a killer riot may not be known until the conclusion of an elaborate inquiry that will be carried out by Justice Petrus Cillie, Judge President of the Transvaal. But already last week, South Africans--white and black alike--were seeking to interpret the soul-cry of rage that came from Soweto. Some whites saw in the violence a nightmarish vision of South Africa's future if the government ever eases its rigid rule over the blacks. Far more whites, though, saw Soweto as a warning that the artificial and unfair structure of South African society cannot be long endured. [The death of Black Activist Stephen Biko while in police custody caused outrage around the world. Lawyer: "What right did you have to keep a man in chains for 48 hours?...I am asking for the statute." Witness: "We don't work under statutes." Lawyer: "Thank you very much, Colonel. That is what we always suspected."] (November 28, 1977) The lawyer was Sydney Woolf Kentridge, one of South Africa's most able trial attorneys; the witness was Colonel Pieter Johannes Goosen, the officer in charge of security police at Port Elizabeth. Their angry exchange in Pretoria last week provided the dramatic high point of an extraordinary public inquest into the death of Black Consciousness Leader Stephen Biko. Biko, 30, leader of a new generation of black political activists, had been arrested on Aug. 18 near Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape district and, under the country's tough Terrorism Act, detained in Port Elizabeth without trial. On Sept. 11, he was transferred to Pretoria's Central Prison, 750 miles to the north; the next night he was found dead in his cell. From the beginning it was clear that there was a lot in the case to be curious about. The security police maintained that Biko was a dangerous revolutionary who had attacked his interrogators and had been "subdued." In the scuffle, they alleged, he had hit his head against a wall and thereafter became incoherent and comatose. Under Kentridge's cross-examination, police witnesses revealed that Biko had been kept naked and chained in his cell for most of the 26 days he spent in detention--as well as during two full nights of interrogation. During the last 24 hours of his life, he had been driven, still unclothed but covered by a blanket, in the back of a police Land-Rover all the way to Pretoria, where he died of the head injuries 14 hours later. [After twelve years of unilateral independence as a white-supremacist outlaw nation, Rhodesia capitulated in 1976 to pressure from Britain and the U.S. and agreed to a transfer of power from the country's 275,000 whites to its 6,000,000 blacks. But the transitional regime that finally took office in 1978 did not include the Patriotic Front, the guerrilla army fighting in black majority rule, and its leaders, Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo. The guerrilla war continued with increasing casualties until late 1979, when the Patriotic Front leaders were finally persuaded to lay down their arms.] (December 31, 1979) "This is an important day for Rhodesia," declared a jubilant Sir Ian Gilmour, Britain's Deputy Foreign Secretary. "It means the end of the war." So it seemed. Moments earlier, Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe, co-leaders of the Patriotic Front guerrilla alliance, had entered a gilded room in London's Foreign Office to add their signatures to a twelve-page protocol that had already been initialed by representatives of Britain and the now defunct Salisbury government of Prime Minister Abel Muzorewa. The document: a three-sided agreement for a complete cease-fire in Zimbabwe Rhodesia's increasingly bloody seven-year civil war. The Patriotic Front's acceptance of the cease-fire terms came at the eleventh hour. Two days earlier, in fact, the Lancaster House conference had formally ended with no comprehensive settlement. In the face of a stern ultimatum from British Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, who had conducted the talks, Nkomo and Mugabe had flatly rejected a British scheme by which the guerrillas would assemble at 15 widely dispersed camps, which they felt would be too isolated and vulnerable. The so-called frontline states (Mozambique, Zambia, Angola, Tanzania and Botswana), whose support is crucial to the guerrillas, were given much of the credit for breaking the deadlock. Anxious for an end to the costly struggle, their leaders had been instrumental ever since they helped bring the Front to the conference table last September. With strong diplomatic encouragement from Whitehall and Washington, the frontline Presidents had sent a senior representative to London to tell the guerrilla leaders--particularly the recalcitrant Mugabe--that they must settle with the British. That arm twisting, and the additional assembly points, did the trick. The settlement was a long awaited triumph for British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as well as for Carrington. The U.S. had also played a role in winning the final agreement, most of all by following Britain's lead last week and promptly lifting its own economic sanctions against Rhodesia. Within days similar action had been taken by a number of countries, including Canada, Australia, West Germany, New Zealand, Switzerland, France and Mauritius. </body> </article> </text>