Secret Weapon in Africa

On the morning of 10 November 1975, Oleg Ignatyev walked from his hotel in Luanda to the former governor's palace to collect his invitation to the ceremony at which Angola would proclaim independence. He was a Pravda correspondent who had been visiting the Portuguese colonies for a decade, with eight trips into guerrilla-held territory behind him.

This is the record of what he saw in the last weeks of Portuguese Angola and the first months of the People's Republic: the torchlight procession of the veterans of 1961, the Cuban instructors gathered round a map in a two-storey house on the edge of the capital, the katyusha rockets at Kifangondo, and the mercenary trial the following summer.

It is war reportage with a thesis, and the thesis is in the title. The secret weapon is the mercenary - the hired white soldier as the instrument through which imperialism, denied its old colonial armies, tried to strangle a newly independent African state. Much of what the book reports under that heading is true, and it is reported first-hand.

Its horizon closes in mid-1976, in the immediate afterglow of victory: South Africa's columns had been driven back across the Namibian border that March, the mercenaries had been captured and sentenced in June, and the People's Republic had won recognition.

One feature of its vocabulary is worth noting in advance. In more than seventy thousand words the word Marxist never appears; the MPLA is presented throughout as a national-liberation movement.

Translated by David Fidlon. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.