ABSTRACT
From January to March 1961, a spontaneous, bloody, largely racially motivated rebellion broke out in northern Angola, then a Portuguese colony. By 1962, renewed opposition to Portuguese rule had become apparent as the first two major Angolan black organizations, the Unaio das Populacoes de Angola, later in the year to become the Frente Nacional de Libertacao de Angola (FNLA), and the Movimento Popular de Libertacao de Angola (MPLA), became active as politico-military organizations. The Angolan regime's precarious survival is ensured by a miscellaneous combination of regular and semi-irregular forces of different national origins, levels of training, motivation, and discipline. Angola experts have consistently maintained that UNITA is a tribal, Ovimbundu-based organization, that the MPLA is Mbundu, and that FNLA is Kikongo; not surprisingly, the repetition of ideas over more than a decade has almost obscured the far more complicated truth and has failed to take dramatic changes into account.
