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JEAN-MICHEL MABEKO-TALI, Dissidencias e poder de estado: o MPLA perante si proprio (1962-1977): ensaio de historia politica. Luanda: Nzila, 2001, two volumes, 471 pp. and 374 pp., paperback (orders from [email protected]).
Jean-Michel Mabeko-Tali has written a major contribution to the understanding of late twentieth-century Angola in the form of a study of the MPLA covering the outbreak of the anti-colonial war to the internal purge and subsequent creation of a vanguard party that followed the 1977 failed coup. The two-volume work is based on the author's doctoral thesis, submitted to the University of Paris VII in 1996. Tali, who hails from Congo-Brazzaville, has been mostly based in Angola since the time of Independence, and received no financial support for the duration of his Ph.D. research. This should be commended, as should the forthrightness unusual in a scholar not in exile. Perhaps things are finally changing in Luanda.
The Movimento Popular de Libertacao de Angola was founded in 1960 by a motley group of exiles with a multi-racial, left-leaning agenda of national liberation. Most of the leading cadres were mestico (Lucio Lara, Iko Carreira, Mario de Andrade, Viriato da Cruz), white or Mbundu (the second largest ethnic group of Angola, based on the Luandan hinterland and with long experience of contact with the Portuguese). The president of the party after 1962 was Agostinho Neto, a medical doctor of Mbundu origin. Despite the pan-Angolan rhetoric, the movement was initially hampered by its limited geographical provenance, separation from its natural urban milieu, and the concurrent incapacity to develop a rural insurrection in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of the anti-colonial war (not a problem for the ethnically based rival FNLA and, later, UNITA).
In the first volume the author articulates his close examination of the internal politics of the movement around three internal crises (1962, 1972 and 1974) through which the very identity of the party was at stake. Though emanating from very different quarters, the themes picked up in each moment of radical requestioning uncannily mirror each other. This mainly consisted of the strains introduced in the structure of the movement by perceived (interchangeable) class and racial asymmetries in the enjoyment of privileges and access to positions of power. The complaints referred to the class...