Angola Quotes

I often meet people in the West who insist that the Holocaust was the worst atrocity in human history, without question. Yes, it was horrific. But I often wonder, with African atrocities like in the Congo, how horrific were they? The thing Africans don’t have that Jewish people do have is documentation. The Nazis kept meticulous records, took pictures, made films. And that’s really what it comes down to. Holocaust victims count because Hitler counted them. Six million people killed. We can all look at that number and rightly be horrified. But when you read through the history of atrocities against Africans, there are no numbers, only guesses. It’s harder to be horrified by a guess. When Portugal and Belgium were plundering Angola and the Congo, they weren’t counting the black people they slaughtered. How many black people died harvesting rubber in the Congo? In the gold and diamond mines of the Transvaal? So in Europe and America, yes, Hitler is the Greatest

In pursuit of counterrevolution and in the name of freedom, U.S. forces or U.S.-supported surrogate forces slaughtered 2,000,000 North Koreans in a three-year war; 3,000,000 Vietnamese; over 500,000 in aerial wars over Laos and Cambodia; over 1,500,000 in Angola; over 1,000,000 in Mozambique; over 500,000 in Afghanistan; 500,000 to 1,000,000 in Indonesia; 200,000 in East Timor; 100,000 in Nicaragua (combining the Somoza and Reagan eras); over 100,000 in Guatemala (plus an additional 40,000 disappeared); over 700,000 in Iraq;3 over 60,000 in El Salvador; 30,000 in the “dirty war” of Argentina (though the government admits to only 9,000); 35,000 in Taiwan, when the Kuomintang military arrived from China; 20,000 in Chile; and many thousands in Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Brazil, South Africa, Western Sahara, Zaire, Turkey, and dozens of other countries, in what amounts to a free-market world holocaust.

I thank God today she found the courage in her heart to love me enough so that someday I could tell you that even a black ex-con from Angola that stabbed a man could maybe someday do some good in the world if he gets a chance.

The evening sky was streaked with purple, the color of torn plums, and a light rain had started to fall when I came to the end of the blacktop road that cut through twenty miles of thick, almost impenetrable scrub oak and pine and stopped at the front gate of Angola penitentiary.

Why are some countries able, despite their very real and serious problems, to press ahead along the road to reconciliation, recovery, and redevelopment while others cannot? These are critical questions for Africa, and their answers are complex and not always clear. Leadership is crucial, of course. Kagame was a strong leader–decisive, focused, disciplined, and honest–and he remains so today. I believe that sometimes people's characters are molded by their environment. Angola, like Liberia, like Sierra Leone, is resource-rich, a natural blessing that sometimes has the sad effect of diminishing the human drive for self-sufficiency, the ability and determination to maximize that which one has. Kagame had nothing. He grew up in a refugee camp, equipped with only his own strength of will and determination to create a better life for himself and his countrymen.

By the time the clock had moved past midnight on Christmas 1993, they finally clicked the last piece into place: Angola, nestled between Zaire and Namibia and bordering the vast lapping Atlantic. Then, having succeeded in putting the world back together, they went to bed.

If in Germany today there were a prison built on top of a former concentration camp, and that prison disproportionately incarcerated Jewish people, it would rightly provoke outrage throughout the world. [...] And yet in the United States such collective outrage at this plantation-turned-prison [Angola] is relatively muted.

It is a pervasive condition of empires that they affect great swathes of the planet without the empire's populace being aware of that impact - indeed without being aware that many of the affected places even exist. How many Americans are aware of the continuing socio environmental fallout from U.S. militarism and foreign policy decisions made three or four decades ago in, say, Angola or Laos? How many could even place those nation-states on a map?

My life seems to be an increasing revelation of the intimate face of universal struggle. You begin with your family and the kids on the block, and next you open your eyes to what you call your people and that leads you into land reform into Black English into Angola leads you back into your own bed where you lie by yourself, wondering if you deserve to be peaceful, or trusted or desired or left to the freedom of your own unfaltering heart. And the scale shrinks to the size of a skull: your own interior cage.

[Angola Prison] 'This place really is just like the plantation was. Just to utilize all the free labor they can get,' Norris continued. 'They lost all that free labor to emancipation, and now how are we going to get that free labor back? You've got all these folks wandering around with no real skills, don't know what to do, well, we can create laws to put them back in servitude, and that's what they've done. Where do they work? They go right back to working convict leasing, working these same plantations they were freed from.

Reading was my salvation. Libraries and universities and schools from all over Louisiana donated books to Angola and for once, the willful ignorance of the prison administration paid off for us, because there were a lot of radical books in the prison library: Books we wouldn’t have been allowed to get through the mail. Books we never could have afforded to buy. Books we had never heard of. Herman, King, and I first gravitated to books and authors that dealt with politics and race—George Jackson, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Steve Biko, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, J. A. Rogers’s From “Superman” to Man. We read anything we could find on slavery, communism, socialism, Marxism, anti-imperialism, the African independence movements, and independence movements from around the world. I would check off these books on the library order form and never expect to get them until they came. Leaning against my wall in the cell, sitting on the floor, on my bed, or at my table, I read.

That until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned: That until there are no longer first-class and second class citizens of any nation; That until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes; That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; That until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained; And until the ignoble and unhappy regimes that hold our brothers in Angola, in Mozambique and in South Africa in subhuman bondage have been toppled and destroyed; Until bigotry and prejudice and malicious and inhuman self-interest have been replaced by understanding and tolerance and good-will; Until all Africans stand and speak as free beings, equal in the eyes of all men, as they are in the eyes of Heaven; Until that day, the African continent will not know peace. We Africans will fight, if necessary, and we know that we shall win, as we are confident in the victory of good over evil.

(...) não custa atribuir a obstinada melancolia dos portugueses ao uso desregrado da palavra saudade, no fado, na poesia, no discurso dos filósofos e dos políticos. Seria interessante estudar o quanto o culto à saudade contrariou, vem contrariando, o esforço para desenvolver Portugal. Já a famosa arrogância e optimismo dos angolanos poderia dever-se à insistência em termos como bué («Angola kuia bué!»), futuro, esperança ou vitória. No que respeita à alegria dos brasileiros, poderíamos talvez imputá-la a duas ou três palavras fortes que acompanham desde há muito a construção e o crescimento do país: mulato/mulata, bunda, carnaval.

When people say 'Angola is a prison built on a former plantation' it is often made as an unsettling observation not as a moral indictment. Is it because our collective understanding of slavery and its inherent violence is so limited? Or is it that violence experienced by Black people is thought less worthy of mourning? White supremacy enacts violence against Black people, but also numbs a whole country, black and white, so what would, in any other context, provoke our moral indignation.

The security guards and all of the ranking officers at Angola were white, and we called them “freemen.” Freemen came from generations of white families born and raised in Angola prison.

We could recite passages from Shakespeare and legends about African kingdoms going back thousands of years. We could share facts about the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the largest forced migration of a people in the history of humankind, and about the great military strategist Queen Nzingah, who defended the nation of Angola against Portuguese invaders in a powerful effort to destroy the slave trade entirely.

You ever met anyone who’s served time in Parchman prison?” “Yes sir. Met a guy in Angola who served time there.” “I’m sure he was happy to be out of there.” “Yes sir. Said it’s the worst place in the country.

In pursuit of counterrevolution and in the name of freedom, U.S. forces or U.S.-supported surrogate forces slaughtered 2,000,000 North Koreans in a three-year war; 3,000,000 Vietnamese; over 500,000 in aerial wars over Laos and Cambodia; over 1,500,000 in Angola; over 1,000,000 in Mozambique; over 500,000 in Afghanistan; 500,000 to 1,000,000 in Indonesia; 200,000 in East Timor; 100,000 in Nicaragua (combining the Somoza and. Reagan eras); over 100,000 in Guatemala (plus an additional 40,000 disappeared); over 700,000 in Iraq;3 over 60,000 in El Salvador; 30,000 in the "dirty war" of Argentina (though the government admits to only 9,000); 35,000 in Taiwan, when the Kuomintang military arrived from China; 20,000 in Chile; and many thousands in Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Brazil, South Africa, Western Sahara, Zaire, Turkey, and dozens of other countries, in what amounts to a free-market world holocaust.

Without anything being said, there were no women at our lunches. Not that we were talking pussy. Or not much. But it was a chaps thing. Seasoned observers all, we set the world, such as it was, to rights, offsetting our intellectual know-how with truly wondrous flights of fancy. It was at the time of the ruinous yet avoidable civil war in Angola, in which far too many people died, or, in our immortal parlance, became 'deadified.' It might have been anyone—actually, I [Christopher Hitchens] am sure it was our poet friend Craig Raine—who came up with the appalling yet unforgettable idea that there is a design flaw in the female form, and that the breasts and the buttocks really ought to be on the same side. For myself, I have oft been perplexed as to why our heads are where, in a truly just world, our penises really ought to be, and my arse is not located between my chin and my nose, allowing me mellifluously to talk out of it.

Juntei-me um dia à flor da mocidade partindo para Angola no Niassa a defender eu já não sei se a raça se as roças de café da cristandade a minha geração tinha a idade das grandes ilusões sempre fatais que não chegam aos anos principais por defeito da própria ingenuidade a guerra era uma coisa mais a Norte de onde ela voltaria havendo sorte à mesma e ancestral tranquilidade azar de uns quantos se pagaram porte esses a que atirou a dura morte diz-se que estão na terra da verdade Lisboa 28-IV-94

One of those characters who in Angola are often called 'lost frontiers', because by daylight they look white, and at twilight they are discovered in fact to be half mulatto - from which it might be concluded that sometimes you can understand people better further away form the light.

Then I saw the consuming nature of her fear, her willingness to believe that exploitative charlatans could change her fate or really cared what happened to her, the dread and angst that congealed like a cold vapor around her heart when she awoke each morning, one day closer to the injection table at Angola.

I think that's the biggest challenge more than anything else. Not the work but just the mindset of being there [Angola] and knowing you're kind of reliving history, in a sense. I'm going through the very same thing that folks fought and died for, so I wouldn't have to go through it, and here it is all over again.

Willing to fight for freedom alongside her warriors, Nzinga demonstrated bravery, intelligence, and a relentless drive to bring peace to her people. A true anti-terrorism strategist and an original freedom fighter. Queen Nzinga reflects the dignity of the Ndongos and Angola in particular, but of Africa and all women in general.

How do you bury a man? Put him in the ground or stomp out his fire? They give the Singer an honour on his deathbed, the Order of Merit. The black revolutionary joins the order of British Squires and Knights, Babylon in excelsis deo. A fire that lights up Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique and South Africa doused out by two letters, O and M.

According to a UN report from 2014 surveying 185 countries and territories, only two did not guarantee any paid maternity leave; Papua New Guinea and the United States. The United States is also one of only a handful of countries that don’t guarantee their workers any paid time off for illness—others include Angola, India, and Liberia.

There was no more reasonable sequitur between “provocation” and “reaction” in the case of the French Revolution than in the case of the Jews and the Nazis, the Armenians and the young Turks, the old Russian regime, the Kerensky interlude and bolshevism, Portuguese colonial rule in Angola and the horrors perpetrated by savage monsters of Holden Roberto’s “Liberation Front,” the Belgian administration in the Congo and the delirious atrocities of Gbenye and Mulele, British colonialism in Kenya and the Mau-Mau. We have to face the fact that man is not “good”—only the extraordinary man is, only the heroic saint or the saintly hero, while the noble savage belongs to the world of fairy tales.

A incerteza, afinal é o que me faz escrever. (...) escrevo porque estou perdido. Escrevo porque não sei ler mapas. Acredito, finalmente, que a ficção histórica me ajuda a compreender o presente. O que mais me surpreende é descobrir a actualidade de muitas das questões com que as pessoas se debatiam em Angola no século XVII. (...) o poeta (...) usa a palavra para iluminar a solidão.

Holocaust victims count because Hitler counted them. Six million people killed. We can all look at that number and rightly be horrified. But when you read through the history of atrocities against Africans, there are no numbers, only guesses. It’s harder to be horrified by a guess. When Portugal and Belgium were plundering Angola and the Congo, they weren’t counting the black people they slaughtered.

A diamond may be forever, but terrorism, promiscuously funded, will be too. Let's make the connection clearly by tracing the path of the diamond. Diamonds start out in the earth, and eventually that earth is part of a country, like Sierra Leone, Angola, or the Democratic Republic of Congo. In those countries, desperate battles for control have been going on for decades, and the armies that fight the battles finance their ambitions with diamonds. Villagers are forced to mine the diamonds by ruthless rebels who maintain order through terror: by raping women and hacking off the limbs of the children, something, by the way, you never see in the De Beers ads. The rebels then smuggle the diamonds into neighboring dictatorships in exchange for guns and cash. There the diamonds are sold to the highest bidder--whether they be terrorists or "legitimate" dealers--and finally they're laundered in Europe, shipped to America, and end up in jewelry stores where they're purchased by men and given to women in exchange for oral sex. In the feminized world we live in, it's practically national policy that women are more evolved that men--but if that's so, how come they're still so impressed by shiny objects?

Quanto a Horácio Capitão, o Eu-Não-Vos-Disse, passa as tardes num bar decrépito, na Ilha, bebendo cerveja, e discutindo política, na companhia do poeta Vitorino Gavião, de Artur Quevedo e de mais duas ou três velhas carcaças dos tempos do caprandanda. Ainda hoje não reconhece a Independência de Angola. Acha que assim como o comunismo acabou, um dia a Independência também acabará. Continua a criar pombos.

Wadigimbi has told me on several occasions that journalists are a waste of time, which is certainly an arguable point of view, but surely not one that the director of the foreign press centre should hold.

She couldn’t stand the picture at first. She saw in it a distillation of everything she hated about Angola: savages celebrating something – some cause of joy, some glad omen – that was quite alien to her. Then, bit by bit, over the long months of silence and solitude, she began to feel some affection towards those figures that moved, circling around a fire, as though life really deserved such elegance. She

By all accounts the Angolan people, the great majority of them poor, illiterate and living in isolated villages or urban slums, carry out their civic responsibilities with great dignity and patience. The two voting days in Angola are another confirmation that anyone who mouths the cliché that Africans are not ready for democracy is simply ignorant of the facts. African politicians, however, are a different matter.

Marxism-Leninism as a theory of hierarchical organization and engineered change can be applied to countries like Angola or Mozambique with a low degree of social conflict and class consciousness without much difficulty. The dictatorship of the proletariat may make little sense in any African country, but a vanguard party is an admirable instrument of rule in new nation-states in need of a centralizing institution.

The next prisoner looks twelve. He says he's sixteen. He knows it is shameful to fight for the FNLA, but they told him that if he went to the front they would send him to school afterward. He wants to finish school because he wants to paint. if he could get paper and a pencil he could draw something right now. He could do a portrait. He also knows how to sculpt and would like to show his sculptures, which he left in Carmona. he has put his whole life into it and would like to study, and they told him that he will, if he goes to the front first. He knows how it works - in order to paint you must first kill people, but he hasn't killed anyone.

They have suffered and risked death for their country while their commanding officers are becoming rich. ‘Look at that lieutenant, how fat he is. How come the officers are all fat? None of us are fat, because we have no food.

[...] se a gente segue assim, para trás ou para a frente, vê que não pode se partir o fio da vida, mesmo que está podre nalgum lado, ele sempre se emenda noutro sítio, cresce, desvia, foge, avança, curva, pára, esconde, aparece...

When many people say “Angola is a prison built on a former plantation,” it is often made as an unsettling observation, not as a moral indictment. Is it because our collective understanding of slavery, and its inherent violence, is so limited? Or is it that violence experienced by Black people is thought less worthy of mourning? White supremacy enacts violence against Black people, but also numbs a whole country—Black and white—to what would in any other context provoke our moral indignation.

From the window, we saw a group of two dozen men in white-and-blue sweatshirts with garden hoes methodically rising in their hands and then falling to the earth. Their bodies were set against a backdrop of trees that had tumbled into autumn, draping them in a volcanic sea of red and orange. It had been one thing to see Black men laboring in the fields of Angola in photographs but it was quite different to see it in person. The parallel with chattel slavery made it feel as if time was bending in on itself. There was no need for metaphor; the land made it literal.

Violence is itself a form of political mobilisation. It is mainly directed against civilians and not at another army. The aim is to capture territory through political control rather than through military success. And political control is maintained through terror, through expulsion or elimination of those who challenge political control, especially those with a different label. Population displacement, massacres, widespread atrocities are not just side effects of war; they are a deliberate strategy for political control. The tactic is to sow the fear and hate on which exclusive identity claims rest.

later, twenty Africans arrived in Virginia, the first slaves in British America, Kimbundu speakers from the kingdom of Ndongo. Captured in raids ordered by the governor of Angola, they had been marched to the coast and boarded the São João Bautista, a Portuguese slave ship headed for New Spain. At sea, an English privateer, the White Lion, sailing from New Netherlands, attacked the São João Bautista, seized all twenty, and brought them to Virginia to be sold.22 Twenty Englishmen were elected to the House of Burgesses. Twenty Africans were condemned to the house of bondage. Another chapter opened in the American book of genesis: liberty and slavery became the American Abel and Cain. II.

Support of sexist oppression in much political writing concerned with revolutionary struggle as well as in the actions of men who advocate revolutionary politics undermines all liberation struggle. In many countries wherein people are engaged in liberation struggle, subordination of women by men is abandoned as the crisis situation compels men to accept and acknowledge women as comrades in struggle, e.g., Cuba, Angola, and Nicaragua. Often when the crisis period has passed, old sexist patterns emerge, antagonism develops, and political solidarity is weakened. It would strengthen and affirm the praxis of any liberation struggle if a commitment to eradicating sexist oppression were a foundation principle shaping all political work.

The much-criticised rubber regime of Leopold II had only a brief heyday and disappeared from the tables of Congolese resources shortly after 1900 in favour of palm oil and palm nuts. The production tables also show that the population increased from 1890 onwards and was not exterminated. In 1888, And revenue from the 'red' rubber largely went to the Free State for public expenditure, including road construction and the army. These budgets, too, are never cited by the narrators, ever. Ditto for the rubber tables, which show that far more rubber arrived in Antwerp from French Congo and Angola than from the Free State in the early period. Rubber from Congo Free State accounted for barely 10 per cent of world production. The big supplier was the Amazon with 70%.

The month before I had found a cockroach in a bowl of onion soup and, when I complained, the waiter dutifully removed it and returned with another bowl from the same pot. Sheepishly, I explained that I no longer had an appetite for onion soup. A few days later, when I told the hotel manager how disappointed I was to find that onion soup was no longer on the menu, he said, ‘Oh, we ran out of cockroaches.

failed to mention that the land upon which Angola is built had once been the plantation of Isaac Franklin, a man whose business, Franklin and Armfield, became one of the largest slave-trading firms in the United States. The plantation produced 3,100 bales of cotton a year, a yield higher than most other plantations in the South. He failed to mention that Samuel Lawrence James, who purchased the plantation from Franklin’s widow, was a former major in the Confederate Army. James agreed to a twenty-one-year lease with the state to purchase access to all of the state’s prisoners as long as he was able to keep all of the profits. James subsequently subcontracted the prisoners to labor camps, where—as Roger had told us—they worked on levees and railroads in horrific conditions. A prisoner under James’s lease had a greater chance of dying than an enslaved person did.

Demanding yet denying the human condition makes for an explosive contradiction. And explode it does, as you and I know. And we live in an age of conflagration: it only needs the rising birth rate to worsen the food shortage, it only needs the newly born to fear living a little more than dying, and for the torrent of violence to sweep away all the barriers. In Algeria and Angola, Europeans are massacred on sight. This is the age of the boomerang, the third stage of violence: it flies right back at us, it strikes us and, once again, we have no idea what hit us. The "liberals" remain stunned: they admit we had not been polite enough to the "natives," that it would have been wiser and fairer to grant them certain rights, wherever possible; they would have been only too happy to admit them in batches without a sponsor to that exclusive club -- the human species; and now this barbaric explosion of madness is putting them in the same boat as the wretched colonists. The metropolitan Left is in a quandary: it is well aware of the true fate of the "natives," the pitiless oppression they are subjected to, and does not condemn their revolt, knowing that we did everything to provoke it. But even so, it thinks, there are limits: these guerrillas should make every effort to show some chivalry; this would be the best way of proving they are men. Sometimes the Left berates them: "You're going too far; we cannot support you any longer." They don't care a shit for its support; it can shove it up its ass for what it's worth. As soon as the war began, they realized the harsh truth: we are all equally as good as each other. We have all taken advantage of them, they have nothing to prove, they won't give anyone preferential treatment. A single duty, a single objective: drive out colonialism by every means. And the most liberal among us would be prepared to accept this, at a pinch, but they cannot help seeing in this trial of strength a perfectly inhuman method used by subhumans to claim for themselves a charter for humanity: let them acquire it as quickly as possible, but in order to merit it, let them use nonviolent methods. Our noble souls are racist.

E queria estar a treze mil quilómetros dali, a vigiar o sono da minha filha nos panos do seu berço, queria não ter nascido para assistir àquilo, à idiota e colossal inutilidade daquilo, queria achar-me em Paris a fazer revoluções no café, ou a doutorar-me em Londres e a falar do meu país com a ironia horrivelmente provinciana do Eça, falar na choldra do meu país para amigos ingleses, franceses, suíços, portugueses, que não tinham experimentado no sangue o vivo e pungente medo de morrer, que nunca viram cadáveres destroçados por minas ou balas. O capitão de óculos moles repetia na minha cabeça A revolução faz-se por dentro, e eu olhava o soldado sem cara a reprimir os vómitos que me cresciam na barriga, e apetecia-me estudar Economia, ou Sociologia, ou a puta que o pariu em Vincennes, aguardar tranquilamente, desdenhando a minha terra, que os assassinados a libertassem, que os chacinados de Angola expulsassem a escória cobarde que escravizava a minha terra, e regressar, então, competente, grave, sábio, social-democrata, sardónico, transportando na mala dos livros a esperteza fácil da última verdade de papel.

The story of European imperialism is dramatic and traumatic, etched deep into the psyches of both victors and victims, and it has tended to dominate discussion of European expansion. Yet, in much of Asia and Africa substantive European empire arrived very late and did not last very long. The British did not comprehensively dominate India until the suppression of the 'Mutiny' in 1859, and they were gone ninety years later. Outside Java, the Dutch East Indies was largely a myth on a map until about 1900 - an understanding that, if any power was to have a real empire in this region, it would be the Dutch. European empire in most of Africa was not even a myth on a map until the 'Scramble' of the 1880s, and often not substantive before 1900. 'Before 1890 the Portuguese controlled less than ten per cent of the area of Angola and scarcely one per cent of Mozambique.' 'Even in South Africa . . . a real white supremacy was delayed until the 1880s.' For many Asians and Africans, real European empire lasted about fifty years. A recent study notes that 125 of the world's 188 present states were once European colonies. But empire lasted less than a century in over half of these. With all due respect to the rich scholarship on European imperialism, in the very long view most of these European empires in Asia and Africa were a flash in the pan. Settlement, the third form of European expansion, emphasized the creation of new societies, not the control of old ones. It had no moral superiority over empire. Indeed, it tended to displace, marginalize, and occasionally even exterminate indigenous peoples rather than simply exploit them. But it did reach further and last longer than empire. It left Asia largely untouched, with the substantial exception of Siberia, and affected only the northern and southern ends of Africa. It specialized, instead, in the Americas and Australasia. European empire dominated one and a half continents for a century or so. European settlement came to dominate three-and-a-third continents, including Siberia. It still does. It was settlement, not empire, that had the spread and staying power in the history of European expansion, and it is time that historians of that expansion turned their attention to it.

Like most young people, I thought I understood so much, when in fact I understood so little. My father knew exactly what he was doing when he raised that flag. He knew that our people’s contributions to building the richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United States simply would not exist without us. In August 1619, just twelve years after the English settled Jamestown, Virginia, one year before the Puritans landed at Plymouth, and some 157 years before English colonists here decided they wanted to form their own country, the Jamestown colonists bought twenty to thirty enslaved Africans from English pirates.4 The pirates had stolen them from a Portuguese slave ship whose crew had forcibly taken them from what is now the country of Angola. Those men and women who came ashore on that August day mark the beginning of slavery in the thirteen colonies that would become the United States of America. They were among the more than 12.5 million Africans who would be kidnapped from their homes and brought in chains across the Atlantic Ocean in the largest forced migration in human history until the Second World War.5

Outside the rooms, Sam pointed to a small opening in a wall beneath a set of stairs with CELLULE DES RECALCITRANTS written over the top of it. This is where they kept the slaves who resisted, Momar translated for me. It was too dark to tell what it looked like. I turned on my phone's flashlight, bent down, and scooted inside. The stone seemed to almost absorb the light, so it still felt dark inside the shallow cavern. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. They did not. I hugged my knees close to my chest as I sat inside. The joints in my knees and ankles cracked. Dirt fell from the wall where I touched it. It was impossible to feel as if the walls weren't closing in on me. I thought of people being held here, how they might barely have been able to see their hands in front of their faces. How they would have been able to taste the salt water that hung in the air without seeing any of the ocean. I thought of all the times I had heard, 'But why didn't they fight back?' when slavery was discussed in my classes. I thought of the bell at plantations like the Whitney, which had been rung to tell the enslaved people to gather round and watch one of their loved ones being lashed until the bled. I thought of the rooms at Angola's Red Hat cell block, how the smallness of those spaces had closed in on me. The cramped cavern might have been where the lessons on first resistance had taken place in a person's earliest days of enslavement. Where spirits and bodies had been broken.

(Note: The following was written in 2003, before the full implication of US military commitment in Afghanistan and Iraq could be fully appreciated. The passage also predates US drone attacks against targets in Pakistan and Yemen - to say nothing of Israeli affairs since 2003. It is unknown if and how the author's comments would change if he were writing the same today.) The value of Israel to the United States as a strategic asset has been much disputed. There have been some in the United States who view Israel as a major strategic ally in the region and the one sure bastion against both external and regional enemies. Others have argued that Israel, far from being a strategic asset, has been a strategic liability, by embittering U.S. relations with the Arab world and causing the failure of U.S. policies in the region. But if one compares the record of American policy in the Middle East with that of other regions, one is struck not by its failure but by its success. There is, after all, no Vietnam in the Middle East, no Cuba or Nicaragua or El Salvador, not even an Angola. On the contrary, throughout the successive crises that have shaken the region, there has always been an imposing political, economic, and cultural American presence, usually in several countries - and this, until the Gulf War of 1991, without the need for any significant military intervention. And even then, their presence was needed to rescue the victims of an inter-Arab aggression, unrelated to either Israelis or Palestinians. (99)

That’s right, whine,” said Katharine. “Children,” said their mother. “I,” said Mr. Smith, “suggest we stop and have lunch.” So they did, and it was a town called Angola, which interested Mark because it was named after one of the countries in his stamp album, but it turned out not to be very romantic, just red brick buildings and a drugstore that specialized in hairnets and rubber bathing caps and Allen’s Wild Cherry Extract. Half an hour later, replete with sandwiches and tasting of wild cherry, the four children were on the open road again. Only now it was a different road, one that kept changing as it went along. First it was loose crushed stone that slithered and banged pleasingly underwheel. Then it gave up all pretense of paving and became just red clay that got narrower and narrower and went up and down hill. There was no room to pass, and they had to back down most of the fourth hill and nearly into a ditch to let a car go by that was heading the other way. This was interestingly perilous, and Katharine and Martha shrieked in delighted terror. The people in the other car had luggage with them, and the four children felt sorry for them, going back to cities and sameness when their own vacation was just beginning. But they forgot the people as they faced the fifth hill. The fifth hill was higher and steeper than any of the others; as they came toward it the road seemed to go straight up in the air. And halfway up it the car balked, even though Mr. Smith used his lowest gear, and hung straining and groaning and motionless like a live and complaining thing. “Children, get out,” said their mother. So they did. And relieved of their cloying weight, the car leaped forward and mounted to the brow of the hill, and the four children had to run up the hill after it. That is, Jane and Mark and Katharine did.

In attempting to learn the Umbundu language, I often look back with a shiver and a blush at the atrocious mistakes I made. The African has a highly developed sense of humor, but he listened to these blunders politely with a deadpan expression on his face. Some f the young girls giggle, but the men control their emotions until later, when, in the absence of the missionary, the blunders are repeated around the campfire to the accompaniment of howls of laughter.

As had been the case with 2 Rajput and 1/9 GR earlier in the month, each man was in Angola shirts and inappropriate footwear, and had just a couple of blankets.

She compares up, to the First World, where privileges are treated as rights. I compare down, to the apocalyptic Africa that presses in around us, where rights are only for the privileged. After covering wars in Mozambique, Angola, Uganda, Somalia, and Sudan, Zimbabwe feels to me like Switzerland.

It has been my contention, for many years, that the KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn was generally correct in his analysis of the liberalization that led to the collapse of the USSR. Golitsyn predicted the liberalization before it occurred, and he accurately predicted where it would lead. He said that the communist party would appear to lose its monopoly of power. This would allow Russia access to capital and technology it could not have acquired during the Cold War. This capital and technology would enable Russia, further down the road, to build a military machine second to none. Golitsyn argued that Soviet liberalization was devised with this end in mind. It was also devised to eliminate anti-communism and destroy the West's vigilance so that communism could make gains across the globe without anyone noticing. If we look at what has happened, from Venezuela and Nicaragua to Brazil and Nepal, South Africa, Congo and Angola, communism did not disappear. It has been victorious in country after country.

One key to African growth is what happens to commodity prices. Many African countries have long been and are still dependent on exports of “primary” commodities, mostly unprocessed minerals or agricultural crops. Botswana exports diamonds; South Africa, gold and diamonds; Nigeria and Angola, oil; Niger, uranium; Kenya, coffee; Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, cocoa; Senegal, groundnuts; and so on. The world prices of primary commodities are notoriously volatile, with huge price increases in response to crop failures or increases in world demand and equally dramatic price collapses, none of which are easily predictable.

Malmesbury, was an example, a market town in an old farming district, surrounded by wheat fields, on Hansie’s route to Springbok. This town, too, had grown.

Most people come to Africa to see large or outlandish animals in the wild, while some others — “the new gang — the gang of virtue” — make the visit to tell Africans how to improve their lives. And many people do both — animal watching in the early morning, busybodying in the afternoon.

The idea for elephant-back safaris was initially that of the photographer, socialite, and Africa hand Peter Beard, who suggested to Moore in the 1980s that riding elephants through the bush was unprecedented and would be an incomparable safari.

Who has the moral high ground? Fifteen blocks from the whitehouse on small corners in northwest, d.c. boys disguised as me rip each other’s hearts out with weapons made in china. they fight for territory. across the planet in a land where civilization was born the boys of d.c. know nothing about their distant relatives in Rwanda. they have never heard of the hutu or tutsi people. their eyes draw blanks at the mention of kigali, byumba or butare. all they know are the streets of d.c., and do not cry at funerals anymore. numbers and frequency have a way of making murder commonplace and not news unless it spreads outside of our house, block, territory. modern massacres are intraethnic. bosnia, sri lanka, burundi, nagorno-karabakh, iraq, laos, angola, liberia, and rwanda are small foreign names on a map made in europe. when bodies by the tens of thousands float down a river turning the water the color of blood, as a quarter of a million people flee barefoot into tanzania and zaire, somehow we notice. we do not smile, we have no more tears. we hold our thoughts. In deeply muted silence looking south and thinking that today nelson mandela seems much larger than he is.

The sight of bribery on the back road of any country is a clear indication that the whole place is corrupt and the regime a thieving tyranny,

Africa had been deliverance for me, a liberating embrace and an opportunity.

I have a hatred of the taming of animals, especially large ones that are so contented in the wild. I abominate circus acts that involve big befooled beasts — cowed tigers or helplessly roaring lions pawing the air and teetering on small stools. I deplore zoos and anything to do with animal confinement or restraint.

The ‘Buffaloes’ were becoming a legend. The Colonel had forged them into a superb fighting machine […] Enough for a young hothead like me to want to be one of them [...] Sam pauses and looks for a moment into the sparkling fire. The scar on his jaw glistens against the dark skin like broken glass [...] You slowly fall prey to a sick frenzy. You develop a lust for blood. You even begin to enjoy killing.

The GIF butts in her House, smell like Angola.

What thus emerged from the Russian Revolution was a new model of state capitalism which, in turn, would become attractive to the bourgeoisie of “backward” countries and colonies of the Western colonial powers (like Cuba, Vietnam, Mozambique, Angola, etc.). They could use the State to keep Western multinationals from bleeding the country dry, and try to “develop” independently through state mobilisation of the population. Devoid of real proletarian initiative, this was a flawed model, and even the Communist Party of the Chinese People’s Republic abandoned Stalinism after the death of Mao by setting up Special Economic Zones to attract international capital and build a new Chinese capitalist class (so-called “socialism with Chinese characteristics”). What they have in fact returned to is the type of state capitalism that Lenin advocated in 1918, opposed by the Left Communists of that time. Across the world many workers in the former Eastern European bloc still think it was better than what they have now. But neither “state capitalism” nor “state socialism” are socialism as understood by Marx. Both depend on the exploitation of workers whose surplus value is the basis for capitalist profit and who have no actual political say in the system.

The average sentence at Angola is eighty-seven years.

Is Spain task-based or relationship-based? If you are like most people, you would answer that Spain is relationship-based. But this answer is subtly, yet crucially, wrong. The correct answer is that, if you come from France, the United Kingdom, Sweden, the United States, or any other culture that falls to the left of Spain on the scale, then Spain is relationship-based in comparison to your own culture. However, if you come from India, Saudi Arabia, Angola, or China, then Spain is very task-based indeed—again, in comparison to your own culture.

The Angola 3: targeted, framed, isolated.

The Angola 3. Another prisoner confessed to the killing, and when Robert and his fellow detainee were questioned and told to shut up. The judge then ordered them to be gagged with duck tape and bound. All this happened in front of a jury who sat there aghast.

The Angola 3. Held in Solitary confinement for 40+ years each. The Closed Cell Restriction (CCR) block, where Herman and Albert were imprisioned, housed solitary cases on two tiers, with around 13 cells per tier. The cells were no more than nine by six feet, and prisoners were confined 23 hours a day, only getting out for a shower or solo exercise in the yard. Imagine, for a minute, being forced to live in your bathroom for the rest of your life.

Frame it up fact by fact. Build it up to show the injustice.

Solitary confinement is torture.

The Angola 3 had an invincible spirit.

Justice for the Angola 3.

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The formal ceasefire was connected to the withdrawal of the Cubans and South Africans from Angola as well as the implimentation of U.N. Resolution 435.

The real winners of the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale were the Angolan people who were able to say goodby to their Soviet and Cuban patrons so that the earnest business of peace and prosperity could begin while dodging the deadly inheritance of a countryside despoiled by mines.

King João II did not wait long before retaliating against Jews who overstayed or failed to pay the required tax. In his most shocking action, he enslaved Jewish children, had them converted to Christianity, and then shipped them to a new experimental colony in São Tomé, an uninhabited island near the equator, about 120 miles off the African coast. By the mid-fifteenth century, the Portuguese had already established profitable sugar plantations on the island of Madeira, and the king hoped to emulate this success in São Tomé, using Jews, criminals, and African slaves from northern Angola as laborers. Several later Jewish commentators bewailed the mistreatment of these children, whose suffering on the island reportedly included being eaten by crocodiles. As recorded by Samuel Usque in the mid-sixteenth century: “They were thrown ashore and mercilessly left there. Almost all were swallowed up by the huge lizards on the island, and the remainder, who escaped these reptiles, wasted away from hunger and abandonment. Only a few were miraculously spared that dreadful misfortune.8

For all who take the sword will perish by the sword.”—Matthew 26:52

This book is dedicated to the thousands of unknown young Africans of all colors who gave their lives in a meaningless outrage for whom family and friends silently mourn for an unrequited return.

At Freedom Park, outside South Africa’s capital city of Pretoria, is the Sikhumbuto Wall monument that includes the 2,106 names of Cuban soldiers who fell in Angola between 1975 and 1988.

All Cubans between the ages of seventeen and twenty-eight, men and women alike, are required to perform two years of military service with provisions to work in other areas other relating to the national security of the country in place of uniformed service.

There can be no doubt that significant change will occur in Cuba in the near future. How those changes reflect the history of Cuba during its “internationalist proletariat” era that began with Che Gueverra and ended rather ignominiously in Africa remains to be seen.

A great irony of this conflict was that that much of the funding for the war came from the sale of Angolan oil to the American Gulf Oil Company.

With only a few exceptions, rarely were sons of the rich and powerful sent to fight the sons of the poor and powerless in the Angolan bush.

The Cuban expeditionary forces carried on a code of conduct established since their first incursion to Algeria where astutely Raul Castro required the Cuban soldiers act with humility, to be modest and not act like experts.

The first thing that hit arriving soldiers when they landed at Rundu was heat that felt like a massive outdoor oven.

In 2005 Transparency International, the Berlin-based corruption watchdog, ranked Angola as one of the ten most corrupt countries in the world.

Angola’s vast reserves of oil and diamonds should make it one of Africa’s richest countries, but the politicians—Deofina calls them the donos, or owners—spend everything either on the war or themselves.

There are ample signs that the two sides are simply using the lull in the fighting to re-arm and re-equip their forces to have another go at a war neither can ever win.

Only God can intervene, Deofina believes, to save a people condemned to damnation by their leaders. She is a deeply religious woman, a member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, and she is hoping God will do away with the politicians and self-appointed messiahs—the donos - who have dragged the country, her family, to ruin. ‘The problem is that the donos never die.

Her age was one of the reasons she always got away with it. In Africa elderly people still command respect.

The 140 children at the Cuando mission represent a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of Angolan kids who have no one to look after them. Most wander aimlessly around the countryside or live by their wits on the streets of Luanda and other major cities, begging for money, washing or even just watching cars. In what should be one of Africa’s richest countries, guarding vehicles has become a major form of employment.

There were 675 people in his village, he says, but one-tenth of them have perished in the past three months. ‘It began in November and the children were the first to begin dying.’ We are eating some leaves, but the people don’t have the strength to look for food any more.

One wiry little man sees from the form that I am living in South Africa and begins to question me about the situation in the run-up to the country’s first all-race elections. ‘Mandela will never win there, will he? Our