ABSTRACT
Modern images of the European military contact with the non-Western world after the fifteenth century have been dominated by two striking images. The first of these is the conquest of the large and powerful empires of Mexico and Peru by tiny groups of intrepid Spaniards, and the second is the spectacular victories of European or European trained and equipped armies over vastly more numerous non-Western opponents in the late nineteenth century. This chapter provides the foundations of the art of war in central Africa before the Europeans arrived. It explores the development of the new art of war in Angola. The chapter reviews more briefly the development of war in Europe and the way in which Europeans fit into and altered the Angolan system of fighting. European observers generally considered this semi dispersed order of fighting as disorder, and often spoke scornfully of the disorganization of African armies.
