ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that Angola's civil war and the ongoing crisis of governance can be attributed primarily to the unwillingness and/or inability of the governing Movimento Popular de Libertacao de Angola (MPLA) and the rebel Uniao Nacional para Independencia Total de Angola (UNITA). It also suggests that contemporary analyses of the Angolan conflict which emphasize the ideological differences among the major politico-military forces, developed within the Cold War ideological confrontation, must be reassessed. The chapter sheds some light on how the major politico-military forces, MPLA and UNITA, have used ethnic politics for different, yet equally destructive, purposes. It reviews the practical and theoretical connections between and among ethnicity, nationalism and statehood. The chapter analyzes the impact of colonialism on ethnicity and highlights some of the negative consequences for Africa of the colonial imposition of artificial boundaries that ignored pre-colonial social and political formations that had developed along ethnic lines.
