Paper short abstract:

The aim of this paper is to analyse how UNITA produced a narrative of suffering along its trajectory, especially by borrowing elements from the Chinese Communist Party’s Long March. This heroic narrative was explored as an instrument of imagining hope during the last years of the Angolan Civil War.

Paper long abstract:

In 1965 11 members of UNITA were sent to the People’s Republic of China for a military training at the Nanjing Military-Political Academy. Later in that year, they were among the first UNITA’s combatents to enter Angola in order to start the mobilization of the people. In his autobiography, Chiwale, one of the 11 men trained in China, characterizes this event as a "great odyssey". Two years later, UNITA’s operation from Zambia was banned by Kaunda’s government, raising an extensive disorganization in UNITA’s activities inside Angola. Miguel Puna states that for those making that "great march", it was a period of great difficulties. In 1970, UNITA’s information bulletin, Kwacha-Angola, began to display a narrative of suffering, which was gradually combined with an idea of resilience and revival, from which descends UNITA's own version of a Long March of overcoming obstacles. By integrating UNITA’s stock of cultural artifacts, this narrative was used in at least two other critical moments in UNITA's history to promote a sense of community, hope and stability. The first took place between 1976 and 1977, when UNITA was expelled from Huambo by the forces of the MPLA and Cuba, and the second, from 1999, when UNITA was expelled from its bases in the south of Angola, until the end of the Civil War, in 2002. This proposal will analyse this narrative through the biographical writings of UNITA’s former combatents Samuel Chiwale, Miguel Puna and Alcides Sakala, and documents from the Portuguese National Archives.