On the morning of 10 November 1975, Oleg Ignatyev walked from the Hotel Tivoli in Luanda to the former governor's palace to collect his invitation to the ceremony at which Angola would proclaim its independence. He was a Pravda correspondent, and he had been coming to these colonies for a decade — eight trips to guerrilla-held territory, the book's own jacket claims, "more than any other Soviet journalist." Secret Weapon in Africa is the record of what he saw in those 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 around a map in a two-storey house on the edge of the capital, the katyusha rockets at Kifangondo, the mercenary trial the following summer. It is not a philosophical tract and does not pretend to be one. 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 the first duty of an honest introduction is to say so before it says anything else.
The date of the book. The spine and the copyright page both read 1977 — "First printing 1977," "© Progress Publishers 1977" for the English, translated from the Russian by David Fidlon. But the argument is a 1976 argument. The latest event the book narrates is the verdict of the Luanda mercenary trial, delivered on 28 June 1976; its press citations run out in the spring and early summer of that year (the Christian Science Monitor of May 1976, Granma of March 1976, the Italian L'Europeo of February–April 1976). Ignatyev is writing in the immediate afterglow of the MPLA's victory: South Africa's columns had been driven back across the Namibian border in March 1976, the mercenaries had been captured and sentenced, and the People's Republic had won recognition. This matters for what follows, because the book's horizon closes in mid-1976 — a full year before the event that would test everything it says about the MPLA, the crushing of the Nito Alves faction on 27 May 1977. The silence on that event is chronology, not evasion; it had not happened. What the book could have said about the MPLA's character on the evidence already before it is a separate question, and the answer to that one is less flattering.
Historicise the moment. 1976 was the high-water mark of Soviet and Cuban engagement in Africa. The Portuguese empire had collapsed in the Lisbon coup of April 1974; Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau came to independence within eighteen months of each other; Soweto rose in June 1976. For Moscow, the Angolan war was the first case since the 1960s in which Soviet arms and a Cuban expeditionary force had turned back a Western-and-South-African intervention and installed an allied government. A book celebrating that victory, written by the Pravda man who had been on the spot, was exactly the export the moment called for. It is worth registering one striking feature of its vocabulary at the outset: in more than seventy thousand words the word "Marxist" does not appear once. The MPLA is presented as a national-liberation movement fighting colonialism, apartheid and mercenaries — not as a party of socialist construction. This is reportage in the register of the anti-colonial front, and the omission is itself a fact about the book's purpose.
Begin the credit where the book is strongest, because the criticism that follows is worthless if the reader thinks the book is a fabrication. It is not. The covert war it describes was real. The United States did run a secret operation in Angola through the CIA, channelling money and arms to Holden Roberto's FNLA and Jonas Savimbi's UNITA; the officer who directed that operation from Langley, John Stockwell, resigned and confirmed its existence and its scale in In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story (New York: Norton, 1978), published a year after Ignatyev's book and independently of it. The apartheid South African invasion was real: Pretoria sent regular armoured columns hundreds of kilometres into a newly independent country in the last months of 1975, and Ignatyev's account of the defence of Benguela and Kifangondo, however coloured, describes an actual war against an actual aggressor. The white mercenaries were real, and so were their crimes. The book's closing chapter reproduces the sentences handed down at Luanda on 28 June 1976 — Callan, McKenzie, Gearheart and Barker to death, the others to sixteen, twenty-four and thirty years — and the man it calls Callan, the Cypriot-British ex-paratrooper Costas Georgiou, really did murder prisoners and, notoriously, order the shooting of thirteen of his own men. And the Cuban intervention really did defeat a racist invasion. None of this was an imperialist invention, and the Cold-War literature that treated African decolonisation as a Soviet plot was frequently an apology for the colonial power and for Pretoria.
The book's method deserves a specific word of credit, because it is the method the reference volumes in this series so often lack. Ignatyev cites. He quotes the actual actors and, repeatedly, the Western press against itself — the Sunday Telegraph on the twenty million dollars the CIA planned to spend on British mercenaries, the Christian Science Monitor on the recruits trained at Fort Benning, The Guardian and Newsweek and The New York Times. Most tellingly, he turns to the American scholar John Marcum, the leading Western academic historian of the Angolan revolution, and quotes Marcum's judgement that "'high officials' in Pretoria have announced that South Africa's entry into Angola was made on the basis of an 'understanding' with American officials," and Marcum's conclusion that "at the very least the United States connived at the South African intervention and sought to cooperate with it." A propagandist who can convict Washington out of the mouth of an American professor of African studies has done real reporting. Where this book records Western and South African violence, believe it.
The trouble is not with what the book documents but with the shape it forces the documentation into. Ignatyev sets the war up, in his first chapter, as two lines of men at a single barricade: "On one side of the barricades were those who fought for an independent Angola and those who helped them in this struggle. On the other were their adversaries and those who helped them." Everything then sorts cleanly into those two files. On one side: the MPLA, the Cubans, the USSR, the socialist countries doing their "internationalist duty." On the other: the CIA, the mercenaries, apartheid South Africa, Mobutu's Zaire, Chinese arms, and the "splitter puppet organisations" FNLA and UNITA. The mercenary trial becomes, in his phrase, not a trial of thirteen men but a trial of an institution — "It was a trial over the US Central Intelligence Agency." As a description of the external war this is not far wrong. As a description of the Angolan revolution it erases almost everything that made that revolution difficult, and in particular it erases the internal life of the movement the book exists to praise.
Here the corrective is not a hostile one. The Fourth International — the anti-Stalinist Marxist tradition from which these introductions are written — supported the same side Ignatyev did, and said so at the time, in the same months he was writing. Its American weekly, Intercontinental Press, whose regular writer on Angola was Ernest Harsch, drew the exact distinction the Soviet account blurs; reviewing the war on 8 March 1976 it insisted that "It is one thing to use the weapons of the imperialists. It is quite another thing to permit the actual armed forces of the imperialists to intervene." The first was the MPLA's right — the paper defended its access to Soviet arms without qualification — and the second was the crime of the FNLA and UNITA in opening Angola's door to Pretoria. The starting point of these analyses was to "combine our support to the MPLA, FRELIMO, and the PAIGC with an analysis of the direction of their political development." On the decisive question the two traditions agree; writing in June 1978, once the Cuban brigades had moved on to a very different war in the Horn of Africa, the Trotskyist review Africa in Struggle still judged that in Angola "the Cuban role was progressive to the extent that it represented a defence against the South African army." Against Pretoria and the CIA, the Fourth International was on the MPLA's side of the barricade. What it would not do — and what Ignatyev cannot do — is pretend that the barricade had only two sides.
Because the MPLA had a third front, an internal one, and the book touches it exactly once. In 1973 the movement's vice-chairman, Daniel Chipenda, led a serious split; Ignatyev names it, but only to dispose of it. Chipenda, he writes, "caused a split in the organisation by his tribalistic, adventuristic manoeuvres," went over to the enemy, plundered occupied towns, and finally "bolted, with a vast sum of stolen dollars." That Chipenda did end up an instrument of South Africa is true. But notice the form of the explanation: a dissident is not a political current with a position that can be stated and answered, he is a traitor whose treachery is his whole biography. The contemporaneous FI analysis of the same split, published in Inprecor, made precisely the objection an honest reader should make of Ignatyev's page: "He was denounced as a traitor, but certainly a political explanation of why should have been offered. Not only was this never done" — and the writers noted, uncomfortably for the official story, that "it also seems that a compromise may have been reached between the 'traitor' and the rest of the leadership." A movement that explains its opponents by their venality rather than their politics has told you something about how it intends to govern.
There was, moreover, more than one internal opposition, and the book mentions none of the others. Alongside Chipenda's "Eastern Revolt" there was the Revolta Activa, the "Active Revolt" led by the Andrade brothers and Gentile Viana, which drew its support from the movement's intellectuals and which — in the words of the Portuguese Trotskyists who chronicled it — "criticized the lack of internal democracy and the rule of an 'all powerful president.'" Of this Ignatyev says nothing. Mário de Andrade, who had led the MPLA during Agostinho Neto's imprisonment and whom the book mentions warmly in its early chapters as a founder, has by the 1970s become, in the book's silence, a non-person. The pattern is the one this series meets again and again: the movement has a living authority and no dissenters, because the dissenters have been written out.
And there is one act of suppression the book cannot excuse by chronology, because it happened in the very weeks Ignatyev was in Luanda. In October 1975, as the MPLA prepared to declare independence, it arrested the militants of the comités de acção and the "people's power" (poder popular) committees — the neighbourhood and factory organs the movement's own left had thrown up in the capital — and, in Harsch's contemporaneous account, "the arrests of members of the CAC and 'people's power' groups in Luanda in October 1975 were accompanied by a typical Stalinist slander campaign, which portrayed the dissidents as 'partisans of Trotsky and Bakunin.'" That phrase should stop any reader of this series short. It is the identical anti-Trotskyist amalgam the Progress textbooks manufacture at their desks in Moscow — the imaginary "Trotskyite" as the hidden hand behind every deviation — now deployed by an African liberation movement against its own rank-and-file, in the same city and the very weeks in which Ignatyev was gathering the material for this book. By July 1976, with Secret Weapon in Africa already at the printers, Harsch could write flatly in Intercontinental Press that "the MPLA's 'socialism' is limited to its rhetoric." None of this is retrospective wisdom. It was in print, in English, from writers who wanted the MPLA to win, while Ignatyev's manuscript was still warm.
All of this the book could have weighed in 1976. What it could not have known — and here the chronology must be respected exactly — is what the movement's intolerance of its own left would produce on 27 May 1977, when a faction associated with Nito Alves, a member of the MPLA Political Bureau, attempted a coup against Neto's leadership and was crushed. The reprisal was not confined to the plotters. In the months that followed the MPLA killed thousands of real and suspected nitistas; the toll has never been established and estimates range from the low thousands into the tens of thousands, but that it was a massacre is not in dispute. Ignatyev's manuscript had closed a year before it happened, and it would be a cheap trick to charge him with a silence about the future. The point is a fairer one: the Fourth International, which had backed the MPLA against imperialism exactly as Ignatyev did, reported the massacre as it unfolded — the tradition Ignatyev wrote for did not, then or ever.
Harsch covered it week by week in Intercontinental Press through the summer of 1977, and caught at once the terrible symmetry the official silence was built to hide: Nito Alves had himself been "the central figure" in the earlier purge of the poder popular left, "employing the same charges that were later to be used against himself." Now Neto denounced Alves's followers as a "black racist faction" — "resorting," Harsch noted, "to some of the MPLA's standard slanders" — and made no secret of what awaited them. "We don't want to waste time on trials," Neto said; "we want to get this over with as quickly as possible." By September Intercontinental Press could report that "Neto has announced that some of the MPLA dissidents have been executed." And in July 1977, under the headline "We Have Set Up a Dictatorship," the paper printed the words in which Neto answered his own left — words that need no gloss and dissolve the book's entire framing in a sentence: "We are the MPLA and we have set up a dictatorship under which we live.… It is the MPLA which lays down the path to be followed."
The Portuguese section of the Fourth International drew the fuller balance sheet. Writing in November 1977, and translated in Intercontinental Press/Inprecor, José Maia named the dead: the guerrilla commanders of the First Military Region — "Van Troi, Sihanouk, Bakaloff, Nito Alves, Monstro Imortal, and Ho Chi-Minh, along with others. All were arrested and shot following May 27" — and the militants of the old Luanda underground, "Nado, Juca Valentim, and Zé Van Dúnem, who were later shot on the orders of the MPLA leadership." Four of the executed had sat on the MPLA's own Central Committee; two, Nito Alves and Monstro Imortal, on its Political Bureau. "May 27," Maia wrote, "was the point at which the revolutionary process began to be reversed"; the leadership had always "preferred to settle the differences by expeditious administrative methods," and now the method reached its conclusion. This is the same movement, the same leadership, that Ignatyev's book presents as a barricade with only enemies on the far side. The white mercenaries at Luanda were tried in open court and some were shot; a year later the movement shot its own commanders — men with noms de guerre like Ho Chi-Minh and Van Troi, who had fought the Portuguese in the bush — and no book from Moscow would record it.
The house test for these volumes is a test of reflexivity: can a category the book applies to its enemies ever be turned on the book's own side? Here it must be applied with more care than usual, because the book's central category is largely sound and its own side was, in the main, in the right. Mercenaries and covert intervention genuinely were imperialism's weapon in Angola; the Cuban intervention genuinely was anti-imperialist; this is not the neat self-indictment that a philosophy textbook's ritual use of "opportunism" invites. The reflexive failure is narrower and it is real. The book's operative category is not "mercenary" but the barricade itself — the claim that "those who fought for an independent Angola" form a single bloc without internal antagonism. That category the author will not let bend. Political killing, the settling of disputes by the gun, the suppression of a current for its ideas: these belong, in the book's grammar, exclusively to the far side of the barricade, to the CIA and to Callan. When the MPLA did the same things — to Chipenda's people, to Andrade's, to the poder popular militants it was jailing in Luanda even as the book was being reported, and, the year after it closed, to Nito Alves's — the grammar had no words for it, and so it recorded nothing. The "secret weapon" turns out to name only the enemy's violence. The book has no name for the violence of the side it loves.
Behind this stands the deeper argument the whole tradition was formed to have, and it is the same argument the companion volume in this series, USSR and Countries of Africa (Progress, 1980), stages on the terrain of the Horn. Moscow's category for movements like the MPLA was "socialist orientation," the "non-capitalist road": the claim that a national-liberation front, led by radicalised petty-bourgeois and military cadre and guided by the Soviet Union, could carry a backward country over into socialism without a workers' revolution. Against exactly this, Trotsky's second thesis in The Permanent Revolution (1930) states the counter-case: "With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses." What was at stake between Ignatyev's tradition and the one that answered him was never sympathy for Angola's liberation, which both sides shared, but whether a front that suppressed its own proletarian and intellectual wings and settled its arguments by firing squad was building socialism — or a one-party state whose "socialism" was, in José Maia's flat verdict, a party that "will not be a party of the workers and peasants, as is claimed; nor will it be Marxist-Leninist, despite the invocation of this term."
Read Secret Weapon in Africa for its reportage, which is genuine and in places irreplaceable — an eyewitness account, by a competent and well-connected journalist, of the CIA's mercenary apparatus, of Pretoria's invasion, and of the fortnight in Luanda when a small movement with two salvoes of rocket ammunition waited for the Cubans to arrive. On the machinery of the imperialist intervention the book is a real source, and it has the honesty to convict the West from Western documents. But read its account of the MPLA itself against the Fourth International's contemporaneous Angola coverage — Ernest Harsch's despatches in Intercontinental Press through 1976 and 1977, and José Maia's balance sheet of November 1977 — because these came from people who stood with the MPLA against South Africa and the CIA and still refused to look away from what the movement did to its own. Their priorities were the mirror of Ignatyev's, and the contrast is itself instructive: he built a book around the Luanda mercenary trial, which the Trotskyist press barely noticed; they spent their Angola columns on the movement's internal life, which he could not see at all. The book asks to be trusted as the record of a just war. It was a just war; that is why the parts the book leaves out matter. A movement is not honoured by the suppression of its history, and the men the MPLA shot in the winter of 1977 were, most of them, revolutionaries who had fought the same enemy Ignatyev came to Luanda to watch defeated.