Preparing the People

After 500 years of colonialism, the future has never looked brighter, at least in some respects, for Angola. The guerrilla war that raged sporadically for 13 years in Portugal's biggest (480,000 sq. mi.) and richest African colony has virtually ended. The territory's exports (principally oil, coffee, diamonds and iron ore) amounted to $764 million last year and will exceed $1 billion in 1974. Within a year there will be a referendum that will probably lead to full independence. Yet in the two months since the military coup in Lisbon, Angola's nearly 6 million citizens have grown increasingly uneasy about their country's future.

Outside Angola's borders, leaders of self-styled liberation armies based in neighboring Zaire, Zambia and the Congo Republic still claim to be the "sole representatives" of Angola's black majority. The claims remain to be proved, however, and within the country's inarticulate and largely nonpolitical black community of 5 million, a leadership vacuum has developed. No fewer than 40 political factions have sprouted inside Angola since the coup, but there is no noticeable groundswell for any single party or personality.

Three separate and mutually antagonistic guerrilla groups have been responsible for carrying on the civil war:

> The one with the most in-country support is the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (M.P.L.A.), but it is split into three factions.

> The one with the most fighting men (an estimated 10,000) is the Zaire-headquartered National Front for the Liberation of Angola (F.N.L.A.). Its support within the country, however, is largely confined to the Bakongo tribe in the north. It is also strongly opposed to the M.P.L.A. and is holding a number of M.P.L.A. guerrillas prisoner in Zaire.

> The third and smallest group is the Maoist-minded National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (U.N.I.T.A.), which has about 500 fighters and, unlike the other organizations, is actually based inside the territory.

The Portuguese are committed to holding a referendum to determine whether Angolans prefer full independence or a loose federation with Lisbon, and they are determined to proceed with their plan despite the factional quarrels of the main guerrilla groups. "We will listen to anybody and everybody," says General Silvino Silverio Marques, 53, the newly arrived Governor General, "and that includes those who have fought or are fighting against us."

Marques, a no-nonsense administrator whose older brother is a member of the junta back in Lisbon, has made the guerrillas a remarkable offer: complete amnesty and an immediate place in his government at high level if they will lay down their arms. "I would welcome the assistance of the emancipation movements in preparing the people for future elections," he told TIME Correspondent Lee Griggs. "I have less than a year in which to prepare the population for self-determination, and that is hardly enough." U.N.I.T.A. has already accepted a ceasefire, and Marques' offer will put pressure on the other groups to do the same. But the guerrillas are in a dilemma: they reject the referendum because each group knows that it alone cannot win power that way. The Popular Movement is simply not popular enough, and the National Liberation Front is not national enough.

No Sellout. So far, most of Angola's 500,000 whites and 250,000 people of mixed blood seem willing to stay on and take their chances. President Antonio de Spinola's assurances that there will be an orderly transfer of power have helped, and so has the moderate tone of most black political pronouncements within Angola. "Money is basically cowardly," observes a Portuguese banker in Luanda, the Angolan capital. "At present it is staying here, but unless confidence continues, it will flee." In the central plateau city of Nova Lisboa, an insurance executive told Griggs: "I am Angolan, born here. My skin is white, but I am not Portuguese in my heart. There are good people in this country, many of them mulatto or black. If they get control here after independence, all will be well. But if the wild ones get in and turn the masses against the rest of us, then I will have to go."

Having fought in Angola against F.N.L.A. guerrillas in the early '60s, General Spinola is well known and respected there. "When he makes his long-awaited visit, probably this week," reports Correspondent Griggs, "he will be expected to provide a sort of wholesale reassurance to the entire population: to the black poor, that economic racism is finished and a better life awaits them; to the black politicians, that the power will be theirs as promised; and to the whites, that there will be no sellout to extremism when, after 500 years, the Portuguese go home at last."

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