ABSTRACT
Kinyama was a thirty-six-year-old farmer who lived in a valley in southern Angola, on the northern slopes of the Benguela Highlands. By 1956 he was not rich for a man of his age, but he was comfortably off. He had three cows, and this made him one of the more prosperous middle peasants in the valley. The first way in which Kinyama had begun to feel the authority of the 'New State', which Salazar had founded twenty years earlier, was in the more systematic levying of taxes. Kinyama did not feel that the cotton war had anything to do with him. In February 1961, a few days after the cotton war began, news began to reach the valley of a second uprising in Angola. In the middle of March 1961 a third phase of the Angolan revolution touched the people of the highlands more closely.
