In the cockpit of Angola’s ideological struggle – Fred Bridgland’s ‘The Guerrilla and the Journalist’

Revolving around the volatile decades after Angola’s independence, the new book by Fred Bridgland, The Guerrilla and the Journalist: Exploring the Murderous Legacy of Jonas Savimbi (Jonathan Ball), draws the reader into the political turbulence that engulfed most southern African countries.

The real instigators and propellers of Angola’s civil war, steeped in ideological and political rivalry, were foreign powers vying for world domination during the Cold War: the imperial West and the socialist Soviet Union. Angola had natural resources like oil, gold and diamonds in abundance, and a good climate to fend for its people, but these turned out to be the main reasons that led to the untenable derailing of democracy and a tortuous and brutal decline of humane values and great loss of life.

What could have been a peaceful transition to multiparty democracy following the 15 January 1975 Alvor Agreement between the liberation movements the MPLA, Unita and the FNLA, which stipulated 11 November 1975 as the date of independence after holding elections a month before, turned out to be the beginning of the bloodshed as the MPLA, backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba, drove Unita and the FNLA from Luanda into the wilderness so as to proclaim itself the sole victor of the liberation struggle.

What drew me to the book is a strong longing to learn more about Unita’s story from someone who has had first-hand experience since 1975 while living from time to time with Unita’s leader, Jonas Savimbi. Bridgland writes: “As I talked with Savimbi, I had only the thinnest grasp that Angola was becoming a hot adjunct to the Cold war – of all unlikely places, it had become a cockpit of the wider ideological struggle.”

Savimbi co-founded Unita with an elderly Jonatão Chingunji in 1965. The book is an intriguing discourse of Savimbi’s egomania and greed for absolute power versus all the Chingunji family who stood for the ideals of Unita to liberate Angola from five centuries of Portuguese colonialism and bring progress and peace to its people.

A man with exceptional credentials of leading the struggle from the bush since October 1966, Savimbi had rubbed shoulders with the world-renowned Che Guevara, had military training in Mao Zedong’s China, and adopted Maoist philosophy in the process. His execution of the military tactics learnt from the East helped resuscitate Unita when Western countries were less sanguine about its survival.

Read in Daily Maverick: “Unita shakes foundations of MPLA, slashing ruling party’s majority by 27% in Angola”

“The refusal of the West to respond to the Soviet-Cuban build-up was at the heart of Unita’s dilemma. Savimbi felt he had been left with no choice other than to sup from the West’s gift of a poisoned chalice and accept help from black Africa’s sworn enemy, apartheid South Africa,” writes Bridgland.

Enter the young son of Unita’s co-founder, the ever-dedicated and hardworking Tito Chingunji. His diplomatic prowess catapulted Unita’s standing to international recognition... and more financial and military support.

The author has quite flattering memories of his lasting friendship with Tito and dedicates the book to the whole Chingunji family and extended family – all slaughtered by Savimbi, except for one survivor.