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1994-02-27
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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>
<p> [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.]
</p>
<p>(May 26, 1975)
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p>(December 1, 1975)
</p>
<p> "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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p>(February 23, 1976)
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> [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.]
</p>
<p>(March 11, 1974)
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p>(August 22, 1977)
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> [For sixteen years, South Africa had been quiescent, ever
since the Sharpeville massacre of 1960. Then the black townships
exploded again.]
</p>
<p>(June 28, 1976)
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> [The death of Black Activist Stephen Biko while in police
custody caused outrage around the world.
</p>
<p> Lawyer: "What right did you have to keep a man in chains for
48 hours?...I am asking for the statute."
</p>
<p> Witness: "We don't work under statutes."
</p>
<p> Lawyer: "Thank you very much, Colonel. That is what we always
suspected."]
</p>
<p>(November 28, 1977)
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> [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.]
</p>
<p>(December 31, 1979)
</p>
<p> "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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>