Paper short abstract:

This paper compares visions of politics in the South African liberation army Umkhonto weSizwe & the Angolan state army FAPLA that hosted it in the 1970s-80s, revealing ideas and relationships more contingent & contradictory than the official position of solidarity based on a common political cause.

Paper long abstract:

Camps in Angola were crucial training grounds for the South African liberation army Umkhonto weSizwe from the late 1970s , a period when the Angolan state army FAPLA was itself engaged in a civil war. Based on interviews and published memoirs, this paper examines visions of politics within the two allied armies, and the mutual regard of the two forces.

In the MK accounts, politics becomes a way of rationalising the frustration that recruits felt as they waited in camps for years. Politics, specifically socialist politics, was invoked in unifying soldiers from different racial and class backgrounds. But some saw the ideas that inspired them abused by the leadership to suppress dissent.

FAPLA officers' accounts demonstrate they were animated by political ideas but distrusted politicians, while conscripted men had little regard for the politics of the war. FAPLA was united by a belief in a superior military way of doing things that was contrasted with the moral equivocation and ineffectual behaviour of politicians. FAPLA’s self-regard as a liberation army belies the reality that few Angolan anti-colonial fighters ended up in the independent state army, which relied heavily on the expertise of Angolans trained in the colonial army.

Comparing these accounts shows that soldiers were acutely aware of the political ideas that underlay the Angolan war and the South African liberation struggle. But it also reveals ideas and relationships more contingent and perhaps contradictory than the offical ANC’s and Angolan government’s position of solidarity based on a common political cause.