Angola Amid Apartheid's Last Stand

With the South Africans gone, there was a brief respite for the new government in Luanda, but it couldn’t begin to put its house in order without foreign help. The Cubans were already looking forward to the day when they could pull out, but Neto was adamant that they should stay. Having held the military line, Havana now began providing doctors, teachers and low-level managers to build the rudiments of a public administration. Angola’s colonial masters had kept the population in a state of helplessness; poorer Portuguese in this settler colony had done the jobs performed by Africans in other European possessions. Eighty-five per cent of Angolans were illiterate at independence; there was almost nothing in the way of a managerial class. And the Portuguese had left en masse. ‘This was not just a matter of engineers or doctors,’ an MPLA elder told Soares de Oliveira. ‘In 1975 everyone who knew how to turn a screw disappeared overnight … You must understand, in this place no one knew how to do anything.’