Author: Ricardo Soares de Oliveira
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190251417
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235
Get Book Here
Book Description
Magnificent and Beggar Land is a powerful account of fast-changing dynamics in Angola, an important African state that is a key exporter of oil and diamonds and a growing power on the continent. Based on three years of research and extensive first-hand knowledge of Angola, it documents the rise of a major economy and its insertion in the international system since it emerged in 2002 from one of Africa's longest and deadliest civil wars. The government, backed by a strategic alliance with China and working hand in glove with hundreds of thousands of expatriates, many from the former colonial power, Portugal, has pursued an ambitious agenda of state-led national reconstruction. This has resulted in double-digit growth in Sub-Saharan Africa's third largest economy and a state budget in excess of total western aid to the entire continent. Scarred by a history of slave trading, colonial plunder and war, Angolans now aspire to the building of a decent society. How has the regime, led by President José Eduardo dos Santos since 1979, dealt with these challenges, and can it deliver on popular expectations? Soares de Oliveira's book charts the remarkable course the country has taken in recent years.
Author: Paulo C. J. Faria
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443866717
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335
Get Book Here
Book Description
The quest for a broader reform of the current political regime and for equitable redistribution of Angola's wealth constitutes the most surmountable challenge this country faces since the end of civil war in 2002. State power has become a personalized affair to the extent of perpetuating an entrenched, centralised and overly bureaucratic structure of governance. To understand these dynamics, this book explores the role of the 'public' in post-war Angolan politics. The reality mimics the acti ...
Author: Al J. Venter
Publisher: Helion and Company
ISBN: 191311810X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 564
Get Book Here
Book Description
Following the publication of Al Venter’s successful Portugal’s Guerrilla Wars in Africa - shortlisted by the New York Military Affairs Symposium’s 'Arthur Goodzeit Book Award for 2013' - his Battle for Angola delves still further into the troubled history of this former Portuguese African colony. This is a completely fresh work running to almost 600 pages including 32 pages of color photos, with the main thrust on events before and after the civil war that followed Lisbon’s over-hasty departure back to the metrópole. There are also several sections that detail the role of South African mercenaries in defeating the rebel leader Dr Jonas Savimbi (considered by some as the most accomplished guerrilla leader to emerge in Africa in the past century). There are many chapters that deal with Pretoria’s reaction to the deteriorating political and military situation in Angola, the role of the Soviets and mercenaries in the political transition, as well as the civil war that followed. With the assistance of several notable military authorities he elaborates in considerable detail on South Africa’s 23-year Border War, from the first guerrilla incursions to the last. In this regard he received solid help from the former the head of 4 Reconnaissance Regiment, Colonel Douw Steyn, who details several cross-border Recce strikes, including the sinking by frogmen of two Soviet ships and a Cuban freighter in an Angolan deepwater port. Throughout, the author was helped by a variety of notable authorities, including the French historian Dr René Pélissier and the American academic and former naval aviator Dr John (Jack) Cann. With their assistance, he covers several ancillary uprisings and invasions, including the Herero revolt of the early 20th century; the equally troubled Ovambo insurrection, as well as the invasion of Angola by the Imperial German Army in the First World War. Former deputy head of the South African Army Major General Roland de Vries played a seminal role. It was he - dubbed ‘South Africa’s Rommel’ by his fellow commanders - who successfully nurtured the concept of ‘mobile warfare’ where, in a succession of armored onslaughts ‘thin-skinned’ Ratel Infantry Fighting Vehicles tackled Soviet main battle tanks and thrashed them. There is a major section on South African Airborne – the ‘Parabats’ –by Brigadier-General McGill Alexander, one of the architects of that kind of warfare under Third World conditions. Finally, the role of Cuban Revolutionary Army receives the attention it deserves: officially there were almost 50,000 Cuban troops deployed in the Angolan war, though subsequent disclosures in Havana suggest that the final total was much higher.
Author: Lanie Millar
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438475926
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Get Book Here
Book Description
Analyzes parallel developments in post–Cold War literature and film from Cuba and Angola to trace a shared history of revolutionary enthusiasm, disappointment, and solidarity. In Forms of Disappointment, Lanie Millar traces the legacies of anti-imperial solidarity in Cuban and Angolan novels and films after 1989. Cuba’s intervention in Angola’s post-independence civil war from 1976 to 1991 was its longest and most engaged internationalist project and left a profound mark on the culture of both nations. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Millar argues, Cuban and Angolan writers and filmmakers responded to this collective history and adapted to new postsocialist realities in analogous ways, developing what she characterizes as works of disappointment. Revamping and riffing on earlier texts and forms of revolutionary enthusiasm, works of disappointment lay bare the aesthetic and political fragmentation of the public sphere while continuing to register the promise of leftist political projects. Pushing past the binaries that tend to dominate histories of the Cold War and its aftermath, Millar gives priority to the perspectives of artists in the Global South, illuminating networks of anticolonial and racial solidarity and showing how their works not only reflect shared feelings of disappointment but also call for ethical gestures of empathy and reconciliation. Lanie Millar is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Oregon.
Author: Inge Tvedten
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429970803
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177
Get Book Here
Book Description
After more than twenty years of devastating civil war, Angola is slowly moving toward peace and reconciliation. In this accessible introduction to one of the most resource-rich countries in Africa, Inge Tvedten traces Angola’s turbulent past with a particular focus on the effects of political and economic upheaval on the Angolan people. First, Tvedten reviews five centuries of Portuguese colonial rule, which drained Angola’s resources through slavery and exploitation. Next, he turns to the postindependence period, during which the country became a Cold War staging ground and its attempts to democratize collapsed when the rebel movement UNITA (until then supported by the United States) took the country back to war after electoral defeat. Tvedten shows how the colonial legacy and decades of war turned Angola into one of the ten poorest countries in the world in terms of socioeconomic indicators, despite its possessing considerable oil resources, huge hydroelectric potential, vast and fertile agricultural lands, and some of Africa’s most productive fishing waters. Finally, Tvedten argues that peace and prosperity for Angola are possible, but constructive international support will be crucial to its achievement.
Author: Assis Malaquias
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274
Get Book Here
Book Description
Rebels and Robbers is about the political economy of violence in post-colonial Angola. This book provides the first comprehensive attempt at analyzing how the military and non-military dynamics of more than four decades of conflict created the structural violence that stubbornly defines Angolan society even in the absence of war. The book clearly demonstrates that the end of the civil war has not ushered in positive peace. The focus on structural violence enables the author to explore the continuities since colonial times, especially in the ways race, class, ethnicity, and power have been used by governing elites as mechanisms to oppress the powerless. Thus, although corruption as structural violence manifesting itself so ubiquitously in Angola today may have been taken to new levels after independence, its origin is unmistakably colonial. Similarly, the zero-sum character of political interactions that defined colonial Angola is yet to be fully exorcized. But there are also important discontinuities. The unabashed propensity to capture public resources for personal aggrandizement is purely post-colonial. So is the tendency toward personal, unaccountable rule. Given its rich endowments, the end of the civil war provides Angola with an opportunity to finally realize its developmental potential. This will depend on whether the wealth resulting from the exploration of natural resources is directed toward creating the conditions for the citizens " realization of their aspirations for the good life thus ensuring sustainable peace. This book will be valuable to academics, practitioners, and the general public interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the political economy of violence in Africa and, more specifically, the interplay between violence, wealth and power in Angola.
Author: Justin Pearce
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107079640
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 205
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book examines the internal politics of the war that divided Angola for more than a quarter-century after independence. In contrast to earlier studies, its emphasis is on Angolan people's relationship to the rival political forces that prevented the development of a united nation. Pearce's argument is based on original interviews with farmers and town dwellers, soldiers and politicians in Central Angola. He uses these to examine the ideologies about nation and state that elites deployed in pursuit of hegemony, and traces how people responded to these efforts at politicisation. The material presented here demonstrates the power of the ideas of state and nation in shaping perceptions of self-interest and determining political loyalty. Yet the book also shows how political allegiances could and did change in response to the experience of military force. In so doing, it brings the Angolan case to the centre of debates on conflict in post-colonial Africa.
Author: Natalia Telepneva
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469665875
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Get Book Here
Book Description
Cold War Liberation examines the African revolutionaries who led armed struggles in three Portuguese colonies—Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau—and their liaisons in Moscow, Prague, East Berlin, and Sofia. By reconstructing a multidimensional story that focuses on both the impact of the Soviet Union on the end of the Portuguese Empire in Africa and the effect of the anticolonial struggles on the Soviet Union, Natalia Telepneva bridges the gap between the narratives of individual anticolonial movements and those of superpower rivalry in sub-Saharan Africa during the Cold War. Drawing on newly available archival sources from Russia and Eastern Europe and interviews with key participants, Telepneva emphasizes the agency of African liberation leaders who enlisted the superpower into their movements via their relationships with middle-ranking members of the Soviet bureaucracy. These administrators had considerable scope to shape policies in the Portuguese colonies which in turn increased the Soviet commitment to decolonization in the wider region. An innovative reinterpretation of the relationships forged between African revolutionaries and the countries of the Warsaw Pact, Cold War Liberation is a bold addition to debates about policy-making in the Global South during the Cold War. We are proud to offer this book in our usual print and ebook formats, plus as an open-access edition available through the Sustainable History Monograph Project.
Author: Paula Cristina Roque
Publisher: Hurst Publishers
ISBN: 1787387356
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book traces three decades of securitisation in Angola. As a governing strategy during war and peacetime, it muted the aspirations of those on opposing sides, distorted the state, emboldened elites and redefined the identity of Angolans. Through this lens, Paula Cristina Roque provides an original account of Angola’s post-conflict state-building. Securitisation protected the interests of President dos Santos, the ruling MPLA party and the elites supporting the regime. Angola’s array of security forces and infrastructure provided an alternative to a fully functioning executive, at national, provincial and local levels. The intrusive way in which any form of dissent or activism was crushed allowed the presidency to control the direction and narrative of the post-war years. But the façade of democracy, development and stability hid a very different reality for the majority of Angolans, who remained poor, disenfranchised and marginalised. Roque explores the inner workings of the intelligence services, army and presidential guard, explaining the trajectory of a survivalist and fearful regime presiding over scarcities and injustices. She shows that the survival of national security and governing elites was the highest priority. The ‘shadows’ held far more power than institutions, and weakened them–widening the gap between government and governed.
Author: Francisco Kapalo Ngongo
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781618975218
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204
Get Book Here
Book Description
Angola has experienced 41 years of violent conflict, including 14 years in its struggle for independence and 27 years of political fighting between national belligerents largely supported by the Cold War geopolitical elephants of the United States and the Soviet Union. The end of violent armed conflict in 2002 gave hope that the government would finally achieve peace and that the majority of the population would benefit. Instead, we are witnessing an era of economic growth and modernization of some urban infrastructures, but not the uplifting of human development that benefits the welfare of the people. An incredible amount of research and preparation went into this book. The findings show that the fight against poverty in post-conflict Angola requires tackling the political problem of the dominant ruling party as well as undemocratic state leadership that would inspire true democracy. What is at stake in Angola is also at stake elsewhere in Africa. Francisco Ngongo is an Angolan who has lived abroad in Africa and Europe, first as a refugee, and then as a student and on international staff.He hold a PhD from the peace studies department of the School of Social and International Studies, University of Bradford, UK. His work experience is in the field of peace building, development and policy influencing. His vision is to contribute to the building of institutions for sustainable development, peace and good governance in Africa. Publisher's Website: http: //sbpra.com/FranciscoNgong
