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WiSe 18/19: Colonial War, Civil War, Cold War. Angola, 1961-2002

Christoph Kalter

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On November 11, 1975, the independence of Angola from Portugal ended centuries of imperial domination and thirteen years of an embittered colonial war or war for national liberation from Portuguese rule (1961-74). However, independence did not bring peace. In the capital Luanda, Agostinho Neto, the leader of the national liberation movement MPLA and Angola’s first president, addressed huge crowds that cheered as the new country’s flag was raised at midnight. At the same time, the competing national liberation movements FNLA and UNITA set up a rival government some 500 kilometers further south in the city of Huambo. The Angolan civil war had begun. In what was one of the most infamous cases of the Cold War turning hot, all belligerent parties in Angola in their bid for power received massive support from foreign governments. When the war ended twenty-seven years later in 2002, around 500,000 people had died and approximately one million had been forcibly displaced. At the crossroads of the new historiography on the Cold War, African history, and Portuguese history, this seminar looks into how Angola crystallized the entangled dynamics of violent decolonization, the global Cold War, as well as local and regional politics in Southern Africa from the 1960s through the early 2000s. The colonial war with Portugal, itself a conflict fought also on the international front and shaped by transnational entanglements, fed directly into the Angolan civil war, which in turn quickly became a proxy war with the direct involvement of South Africa, the USA, the Soviet Union, and Cuba, all in the midst of a what was considered a détente period of Cold War politics. But even after the end of the Cold War the civil war in Angola lingered on. Focusing on the political, social, cultural, and economic aspects of Portugal’s late colonial rule and the civil war’s history up to the death of UNITA-leader Jonas Savimbi in 2002, the event that paved way for a lasting peace settlement, this seminar aims to provide students with an exciting insight into the connective and disruptive power of postcolonial war and conflict. Course requirements: A. Regular and active participation; B. preparation and introduction of the discussion for one of our classes; C. seminar paper (optional, depending on your module). Introductory reading: Birmingham, David, Short History of Modern Angola, Oxford: OUP 2016. close