‘It took courage to die in Angola’: Umkhonto we Sizwe’s War versus UNITA, 1975–89

Abstract

Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress, is reputed to have been a largely ineffective guerrilla army which hardly challenged the apartheid war machine. Instead, this army in exile was mostly confined to its bases in post-independence Angola, thousands of kilometres from the land they sought to liberate. While in Angola, MK forces were largely kept on the defensive as they were compelled to join the Angolan government in its war against the armed group UNITA, which received extensive support from the South African apartheid regime and the United States. Yet within this context, on the periphery of the Cold War and the anti-apartheid struggle, MK managed a degree of battlefield success against UNITA, thus helping to pave the way for negotiations with South Africa. Although constrained by structural factors, MK nevertheless managed to assert an agency that has largely gone untold in the history of southern Africa’s national liberation movements. This article reinterprets MK’s military history by putting its Angolan battles at its heart. Relying on oral testimonies and memoirs of former MK combatants as well as scholarly sources, I argue that MK’s containment of UNITA offensives in northern and eastern Angola has been overlooked as an important battlefield contribution that helped Angola’s MPLA government to endure the apartheid regime’s onslaught and shaped the Cold War endgame in southern Africa. Moreover, combat narratives from Angola have proved pivotal in shaping the memories and identities of former MK personnel, even as contemporary South African elites have deployed these narratives for their own political ends.