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Guimaraes, Fernando Andersen. THE ORIGINS OF THE ANGOLAN CIVIL WAR: FOREIGN INTERVENTION AND DOMESTIC POLITICAL CONFLICT. London: Macmillan, 2001. xvi + 250 pp. List of Tables. Abbreviations. Notes. Bibliography.
The book is easy to read. The structure of the text is well laid out. The narrative of each chapter is prefaced with a set of provocative nuggets to chew on as the text gallops from topic to topic with an eye to keeping it supremely simple. The objective of the book is twofold: strip the literature of bias to reveal the real roots of the Angolan conflict and then augment them with new gems on the "hidden" history of the Movimento Popular de Libertacao de Angola (MPLA) using new materials, presumably collected by the author. The book does neither.
The literature used in the book is selective. Contained in the seventeen-page bibliography, it constitutes more than one hundred and seventy-one sources. Most of these sources are secondary, inclusive of eleven journals and periodicals. No evidence is provided that the sources used in the secondary works utilized in the book were checked and examined for their individual subjectivity. Some evidence exists of oral interviews, five or six on record, in support of the text. The provenance, context, and methodology used to garner oral information for the discourse are omitted.
Further, there is little evidence on record that the text mined several archival and nonarchival sources crucial for a discourse of this kind. Clear and overt evidence of consultation of documents from U.S. archives for the period under review...