The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) has consolidated its position as Angola’s principal opposition party despite being defeated militarily in 2002 and forced to accept a post-war settlement on terms dictated by the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) government. To the growing literature on rebel movement transitions to political parties, UNITA offers a case of a rebel movement that has made the transition without the prospect of state power. Steady growth in vote share suggests UNITA has defied predictions that former armed movements enter peacetime with structures and aptitudes unsuitable for adaptation to a civilian role. UNITA has also broken a vicious cycle attributed to opposition parties in dominant party regimes, in which marginalization from power denies the resources necessary to cultivate a base. The case of UNITA demands therefore that we consider continuities in the practices that constitute organization and in the ideas that legitimize authority.
This article examines UNITA’s post-war mobilization in Huambo province in the Central Highlands, a region whose people constituted UNITA’s main social base throughout the war. Central to UNITA’s strategy in the region has been the implementation of social service and educational projects. Drawing upon interviews with UNITA supporters and officials and observation of UNITA public events during fieldwork in 2008 and 2013, I examine supporters’ expectations of UNITA and how officials and supporters understand the terms of their party’s engagement with society. I argue that adherence to UNITA is constituted in a discourse on UNITA’s organizational abilities and efficacy associated with superior moral values. UNITA claims ownership of these properties both through invoking a version of its past and through practices of service provision that lie outside the usual repertoire of an opposition party, but which define a role for UNITA that is continuous with its earlier roles as an anti-colonial and anti-government movement. However, UNITA’s role is shaped not only by its own history but also by a post-war present in which a triumphalist discourse by the MPLA and the close identification of the state with the MPLA constrain the possibilities for opposition mobilization.
Opposition parties and former rebel movements
The case of UNITA adds to two distinct bodies of scholarship: an underdeveloped literature on opposition in Africa, and a developing literature on rebel-to-party transformation. Political parties, particularly opposition parties, have received relatively little attention from scholars of African politics. The neo-patrimonial paradigm that once dominated the study of African politics leaves ‘no place in the political system for an opposition with no means of delivering resources to its constituents’ (Chabal and Daloz Reference Chabal and Daloz1999: 55), a view that disregards the reality of sustainable opposition parties in many African countries, including Angola. The literature on institutional democratization, where it considers parties at all, concentrates on party systems rather than parties per se (Cooper Reference Cooper2018; Randall and Svåsand Reference Randall and Svåsand2002), while in emerging democracies parties themselves are the ‘weakest link’ in the system (Carothers Reference Carothers2008). The scarce research that exists on opposition parties emphasizes their lack of success. Scholars have variously attributed this to a lack of ambition (Cooper Reference Cooper2014), to the absence of constitutional protection for party activity outside election time (Burnell Reference Burnell2001; Olukoshi Reference Olukoshi1998), and to the failure of a fragmented civil society to piece together political platforms from diverse interest groups (Widner Reference Widner1997). Particularly in Southern Africa, dominant party-states guard ‘an exclusive post-colonial legitimacy’ that leaves scant space for opposition (Melber Reference Melber2002: 163), even if in Angola the MPLA has had to remain vigilant to UNITA’s rival nationalist claims. Ricardo Soares de Oliveira (Reference Soares de Oliveira2011: 292) suggests the MPLA, having won the war, ‘wanted to remain the hegemonic political force in Angola’, something it accomplished through ‘the political neutering of UNITA’.
UNITA in 2002 thus appeared to have little potential to cultivate a support base without already having access to the benefits of power. In analysing UNITA’s viability as an institution, and in particular the way in which it has overcome obstacles and consolidated a support base, I therefore consider factors other than its effectiveness in parliamentary politics. UNITA has recently benefited from a system that allocates state funding to parties proportionate to their parliamentary vote share, and it has invested this into the projects described below.Footnote 1 Nevertheless, UNITA party branches also rely on the service of members who receive no material reward, suggesting we need to look beyond patronage in explaining UNITA’s endurance. My approach is to examine the practices implemented by UNITA in mobilizing people in the Central Highlands since the war, and the ideas that give meaning to these practices in the context of UNITA’s decades-long relationship with people in the region. Here I follow Adrienne LeBas (Reference LeBas2013: 43), who rejects a model of mobilization based on patronage and observes that ‘[s]hared identities and affective loyalties facilitate collective action, and they can also maintain mobilization over time, even if participation delivers little in the way of concrete benefits’. LeBas also makes an analytical distinction between strength and effectiveness: important to bear in mind in Angola, where MPLA dominance of the media and a questionable electoral process mean that opposition parties’ electoral results may not reflect their effectiveness in mobilizing people.
In examining how UNITA maintains affective ties, this article also builds upon the literature on rebel-to-party transformations. A central question in this literature is the relationship between parties’ former role as rebel movements and their political effectiveness in the present (Curtis and De Zeeuw Reference Curtis and De Zeeuw2009). Here again, it is useful in the Angolan case to distinguish between strength and effectiveness. Michael Allison (Reference Allison2006) argues that post-war ‘success’ depends on organizational factors during wartime, including number of combatants and popular support. While David Garibay (Reference Garibay2005: 291) observes that the values of secrecy, loyalty and honour that unite a rebel movement may be ill suited to the transparent and democratic norms of a political party, more recent work shows how the authoritarian character of rebel movements and the defined networks that surround them can be useful resources, even if they predispose the post-war party towards authoritarianism (Aalen and Muiraas Reference Aalen and Muiraas2017; Lyons Reference Lyons2016; Sindre Reference Sindre2014). UNITA’s legacy, I argue here, reflects its past not only as an army but also as a political organization that exercised de facto sovereign power and bureaucratic control in areas it governed in wartime.
Renamo in Mozambique offers a particularly relevant comparison, given that UNITA, like Renamo, previously fought against a single-party state, and is now the principal opposition in a nominally multiparty system. Carrie Manning’s finding (2007: 260) that Renamo enjoyed ‘unconditional legitimacy’ thanks partly to the paucity of alternative opposition parties in a political arena dominated by wartime cleavages (Manning Reference Manning2007: 264) is true at least in part for UNITA too. UNITA, like Renamo, has faced the challenge of what to do with the soldiers and cadres who need to be reskilled for a peacetime role (Manning Reference Manning2007: 261). Manning notes continuity in Renamo’s self-presentation as what Michel Cahen (Reference Cahen1998) termed a ‘coalition of outsiders’; in this respect I will argue that while UNITA fostered a more exclusive political belonging during and immediately after the war, it has more recently sought to ally its own organizational concerns with broader social needs.
UNITA: from anti-colonial war to civil war to defeat
The analysis of UNITA that I offer here recognizes the need to take account both of UNITA’s engagement with society during wartime and of the environment in which it operates today. My aim is to examine UNITA’s practices and the creation of meanings that connect these practices to a discourse on UNITA’s historical and present role, and in so doing create and sustain affective bonds between people and the party. This section of the article offers an overview of the emergence of UNITA as an anti-colonial movement in Angola, and how its engagement with civilians developed during its war against the MPLA-controlled state. I then go on to examine UNITA’s post-war engagement with people in the Central Highlands.
Anti-colonial activity came late to Angola. Three strands of nationalism developed around three regional elites whose differing experience of colonial rule ensured that they had divergent aspirations (Messiant Reference Messiant2006). The União de Populações de Angola (UPA), later the Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola (FNLA), mobilized among Bakongo exiles in the then Zaire, and entered northern Angola in the 1960s. The MPLA emerged from a creole elite of the coast and the Luanda hinterland. Most accounts associate UNITA with the Ovimbundu people of the Central Highlands, a region that became a focus of late colonial development in the mid-20th century. FNLA mobilization had extended to Ovimbundu migrant labourers on the northern coffee plantations, and it was perceived Bakongo domination of the FNLA that led Jonas Savimbi to break from the FNLA in 1964, taking with him supporters alienated by the FNLA’s ethnic chauvinism. In March 1966 UNITA was formally launched at its first congress at Muangai in Moxico province. This gathering approved the party statutes, known as the Muangai Declaration, which set out UNITA’s principles as:
Freedom and total independence for men and women and for the motherland.
Democracy assured through popular vote by means of various political parties.
Sovereignty expressed and embedded in the will of the people to have friends and allies who always put Angolans’ interests first.
Equality of all Angolans in the land of their birth.
When seeking economic solutions, putting the countryside first so as to benefit the city. (Chiwale Reference Chiwale2008: 93)
This document continues to be important to UNITA’s self-image today and is evoked to claim legitimacy not only by recalling the party’s past as an anti-colonial force, but also in articulating a set of principles for a future Angola that can be put forward as an alternative to what UNITA sees as the shortcomings of the MPLA regime.
Until 1974 the liberation movements had scant opportunity for popular mobilization, other than in ‘liberated zones’ in the north and east. It was only after the change of regime in Lisbon in 1974 that the liberation movements could start mobilizing throughout Angola. UNITA moved quickly to sign a ceasefire with the Portuguese, giving it a head start over its rivals as it mobilized in the Central Highlands and elsewhere. Mutual distrust provoked conflict among the rival movements for control of the independent state amid the precipitate departure of the Portuguese administration and security forces between June and November 1975. This conflict was sustained by the availability of assistance by South Africa and the US to UNITA, and by Cuba and the Soviet Union to the MPLA. Upon independence in 1975, the MPLA controlled little more than the capital, Luanda. UNITA proclaimed independence in Huambo before the MPLA, with Cuban assistance, forced UNITA out of the interior cities in early 1976. In the years that followed, the MPLA established a state that comprised urban enclaves, isolated in countryside that was either controlled by UNITA or remained beyond the control of either movement.
The political relationships established during the first years of independence are central to understanding UNITA’s social relationships since the end of the war. After 1976, the core of UNITA’s presence in rural Angola comprised bases that housed soldiers as well as civilians who implemented UNITA’s strategy of providing services to nearby villages. Farmers were useful to UNITA as providers of food or intelligence, but they were separate from UNITA. UNITA strategists knew it was necessary to convince people that it was in their own interests to render part of their harvest. Political education was necessary if people were to be convinced of the justice of UNITA’s cause. The message it disseminated was that UNITA was defending the people and defending the peace against a predatory MPLA. To underpin its political education, UNITA provided or attempted to provide basic health and education services as the basis of the political relationship that it sought with the people. UNITA also sometimes supplied essential manufactured items such as salt, soap and clothes.
Crucial to the argument of this article is that UNITA in wartime saw itself as state-like. I have argued elsewhere that the relationships that UNITA established with farming communities in the areas that it dominated possessed characteristics of state building (Pearce Reference Pearce2012, Reference Pearce2015). Although the social contract that it sought to establish in rural villages could only ever be rudimentary, UNITA’s capacity for state building was enhanced from the early 1980s, when with South African assistance it established a ‘bush capital’ at Jamba in far south-eastern Angola. Although established for strategic reasons, Jamba acquired political importance as a laboratory in which UNITA could realize its ambitions to state building in all but name. The process of creating the physical, organizational and coercive apparatus that resembled a state was linked to the dissemination of an ideology of the state that linked the exercise of a monopoly of violence to a historical discourse about UNITA’s role as an anti-colonial liberator and to a duty of care towards the population. During this period UNITA officials consistently spoke of the MPLA as the organization of a creole elite and the puppet of Cuban and Soviet masters that did not have Angolan interests at heart.
The vision of UNITA that Savimbi, in particular, presented to the outside world was eclectic in its approach to ideology. Savimbi called upon Maoist ideas as readily as he presented himself to Western backers as a free marketeer, while studies of UNITA have also emphasized its appeals to Angolans on the basis of cultural authenticity (Heywood Reference Heywood1989, Reference Heywood1998). To its adherents within Angola, however, UNITA was consistent in presenting itself as a modern state-like organization, whose role was defined both in terms of national liberation and of development (Pearce Reference Pearce2017). Such an understanding of UNITA, which draws a connection between its ability to provide for and protect people, and its political legitimacy, provides a framework for understanding how UNITA’s military losses in later years had a deleterious effect on people’s identification with it, and how UNITA’s reaction to its military defeat has been to try in peacetime to recreate relationships with its constituents defined by provision and protection.
The first moves to end the Angolan conflict, as the Cold War drew to a close, led to an internationally brokered peace deal in which UNITA and the MPLA were reluctant participants, and elections that were conducted amid mutual mistrust in September 1992. As violence resumed after the elections, UNITA took control of towns in the Central Highlands and imposed rule by force that cost it the sympathy of many urban people. From 1998 to 2002, counter-insurgency by the Angolan Armed Forces (FAA) fatally weakened UNITA. When FAA soldiers shot Savimbi dead on 22 February 2002, UNITA’s surviving leaders accepted a settlement on the government’s terms. The demobilization plan called for soldiers and civilians living under UNITA control – later found to number over 300,000 – to assemble in designated quartering areas from where most were later transported to their areas of origin (Reliefweb 2002). The Angolan state, and therefore the MPLA, was in control of the national territory for the first time. UNITA had been humiliated, its founder dead and its followers at the mercy of the government: an inauspicious place from which to build an exclusively civilian party.
Nevertheless, since 2002 UNITA’s share of the national vote has grown over the course of three elections: from 10.39% of the national parliamentary votes in 2008 to 26.70% in 2017. This growth has been concentrated in three regions of Angola, each offering different opportunities to UNITA: the capital, Luanda, the oil-producing exclave province of Cabinda, and the Central Highlands (Pearce et al. Reference Pearce, Péclard and Soares de Oliveira2018). Within the Central Highlands, UNITA’s best 2017 election results were in districts where UNITA governed territory until the last years of the war.Footnote 2 Whereas in Luanda and Cabinda UNITA has expanded its support by tapping into existing political grievance, the party’s recovery in the Central Highlands depends on the use of networks and common narratives dating from the war. UNITA became the dominant political movement in the Central Highlands following the Portuguese revolution of April 1974. UNITA maintained bases in rural areas of the province throughout the ensuing civil war, and although UNITA’s headquarters of Jamba was some thousand kilometres away, many members of the UNITA elite who worked at Jamba originated from Huambo and returned there after the war.
UNITA since the war
In considering how UNITA positions itself in Huambo today, I will first examine briefly the political system in which UNITA operates and the constraints that this system imposes. I will then consider how UNITA conceives of its own role and how its practices are shaped by a political habitus (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1977) inherited from earlier phases of its existence. After the war the MPLA used its control of Angolan territory and the revenues from soaring global oil prices to consolidate its hegemony. Notwithstanding a formally multiparty constitution, the state remains identified with the MPLA, so that benefit from the state is contingent on loyalty to the party (Messiant Reference Messiant2007; Schubert Reference Schubert2010, Reference Schubert2015; Soares de Oliveria Reference Soares de Oliveira2014). The MPLA’s dominance imposes limits on what a parliamentary opposition party can achieve. This external constraint not only limits UNITA’s possibilities of participation but also shapes UNITA’s choice of targets: as we will see, an important element of UNITA’s challenge to power involves confronting the MPLA’s domination of the state. It does so, however, in terms that are themselves conditioned by UNITA’s past as an anti-colonial and anti-government rebel movement with state-like aspirations of its own.
To consider now UNITA’s internal discourses and habitus: The contradictions posed by its past both as an anti-colonial movement and as an anti-government movement and its present as a political party have presented a challenge to UNITA ever since Savimbi’s death presaged the end of the war. These tensions were evident in a radio debate shortly after Savimbi died. The UNITA parliamentarian Jaka Jamba explained he favoured UNITA’s participation in a multiparty system, but the terms in which he expressed this revealed that he saw UNITA as not just another political party among many: he argued for a need to ‘assess [UNITA’s] historical destiny’, pointing out that UNITA had been founded ‘to make its contribution to the liberation of Angola, together with other political forces’ (Rádio LAC Reference Rádio2002: 121–137). UNITA speakers in the debate referred to the Muangai Declaration as a blueprint for future action, prompting a caller’s concern that the Muangai project was a plan for UNITA to take power. In response, the UNITA member of parliament Domingos Maluka insisted that while UNITA indeed possessed ambitions to power, it would pursue these by democratic means. Participants in the debate who were not UNITA members also discussed the difficulties posed by UNITA’s close identification with the then recently dead Jonas Savimbi, which they said had stifled the development of ideas by others inside UNITA.
These early suggestions about UNITA’s post-war role acknowledge the heritage of its days as a liberation movement and recognize that this would have to be renegotiated as UNITA moved into the role of political party. Since then, UNITA has contested three parliamentary elections, in 2008, 2012 and 2017. Yet even as UNITA plays the part of Angola’s principal parliamentary opposition party, officials continue to assert the party’s historic uniqueness. UNITA’s eleventh congress in 2011 reaffirmed its commitment to the Muangai principles.Footnote 3 Two years later, party leader Isaías Samakuva published Reflection on 38 Years of Independence in which he asserted UNITA’s historical role and revived an old UNITA discourse: that the MPLA served foreign interests and its own elite to the detriment of the majority of Angolans, and that UNITA’s existence is necessary as a corrective to this.
In adopting the name National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, UNITA brought to the attention of the political community two fundamental values for the construction of the Angolan nation: independence and national unity. Since its foundation in 1966, UNITA has identified that the MPLA was against the independence of Angola and against the unity of Angolans. Today, even children understand that the MPLA puts a foreigner first and an Angolan last. They already understand that the MPLA discriminates against the ‘langa’ [Bakongo people from northern Angola], humiliates the ‘sulanos’ [southerners], divides the money among its own and does not allow people from other parties to prosper economically or to attain political power legitimately. (Samakuva Reference Samakuva2013)
Samakuva claims that the racism of Portuguese colonialism has been replaced by discrimination on the basis of party membership, and he frames the contemporary political situation in Angola as the subjugation of a nation by an alien power. This places UNITA in a role in which political opposition merges with national liberation. These ideas about how UNITA views its present role in terms of a particular interpretation of its history allow us to understand the practices that I now describe and discuss.
Social services in the Central Highlands
This section considers how UNITA represented its role in relation to its followers in the aftermath of war, the expectations that adherents had of UNITA, and how UNITA subsequently began to implement activities that embodied its own self-image and its followers’ expectations. As UNITA re-established itself as a party in Huambo after 2002, its dilapidated provincial headquarters served as a gathering place for people who had spent all or much of their lives with UNITA. These UNITA loyalists believed they were discriminated against because of their continued adherence to UNITA, but they looked to UNITA for support since they had no confidence in the state. One woman said she had been with UNITA since she was a child, when her parents joined the movement at the time of independence. Although trained as a teacher in Jamba, she said her qualifications had not helped her to find work: ‘I don’t have a job. I’ve tried often, but it’s not possible. If you’re with UNITA it’s not possible to get a job in a government area.’Footnote 4
Some of those who frequented the office were former UNITA soldiers, while others were civilians who had supported UNITA secretly during the days of one-party government, or served in civilian roles in Jamba. ‘They seek from the party moral support, in search of employment … and in terms of social reintegration’, the official said. Others came for help in times of illness. ‘As you know, our hospitals don’t have medicines – a sick person goes to hospital and after the consultation they give him a receipt to go and buy medicines because the hospital doesn’t have them.’
One interviewee said she had joined UNITA as a teenager in 1974 and ‘went to take part in the revolution in the bush’. She said she had joined UNITA ‘out of my own convictions’, because ‘UNITA was the only patriotic party: its leader is from Angola and can resolve Angola’s destiny’. This woman had also been trained in Jamba, as a laboratory technician; she too complained that she was unable to find work. These interviews made clear that in 2008, six years after the end of the war, members still viewed UNITA as a state-like provider. UNITA officials acknowledged the validity of these claims, but at the time, the reality of a cash economy, far removed from the communitarian ethos of societies ruled by UNITA in wartime, made it difficult to meet the material demands of its members.
In the years following 2008, UNITA began to establish projects in the areas of education, training and famine relief. Fieldwork I conducted in various locations in Huambo province in 2013 examined some of these projects and revealed that, compared with 2008, UNITA officials were now more confident in their ability to re-engage with the people of the region, but also that this engagement owed much to norms established during the war years. Here I consider three distinct projects: a school established by the local UNITA branch in the town of Bailundo, UNITA’s ‘cadre training’ initiatives in several districts of Huambo province, and a programme of humanitarian aid for drought-stricken parts of southern Angola.
Bailundo is a municipal centre 100 kilometres from Huambo, which in the late 1990s served as UNITA’s headquarters and was one of the last towns to remain under UNITA occupation before the war ended. In 2013 the local branch of UNITA set up a school in an abandoned building. The school offers high-school-level classes in law, geography, history, mathematics, Portuguese and English languages, and computer skills. Students range in age from their teens to their sixties. Teachers offer their services voluntarily, including some who earn a salary in the state system but also teach for a few hours at the UNITA school before going to their regular jobs. As a UNITA official in Bailundo put it: ‘Teachers are incorporated into the government system. In the morning they present themselves [at the UNITA school] because of their patriotism.’Footnote 5
While the school in Bailundo offers a general education and professes to be open to all, UNITA also runs a training programme for ‘cadres’ in various districts of the province.Footnote 6 These comprise a daily programme of lectures on ‘party history’, ‘the people’s status’, ‘organization’ and ‘mobilization’. Each cohort of new trainees numbered around 30 people, ranging in age from 18 to over 60. Women comprised between one quarter and one third of each group. Of those who had been adults during the war, most had worked for UNITA in a civilian capacity while a few had been soldiers. The younger trainees, who had been children during the war, invariably had parents who had worked for UNITA. I attended three ceremonies where the trainees were awarded certificates for having completed the course, in the towns of Kahala, Katchiungo and Catabola.Footnote 7
In addition to these educational initiatives, a project to organize humanitarian aid also provides insight into how the party sees its social role. Since 2012 the southern Angolan province of Cunene has suffered several years in which rains failed. Churches and civil society groups have criticized the government for paying insufficient attention to a growing humanitarian crisis. In August 2013, UNITA’s provincial structures around the country solicited donations of grain and other foodstuffs from party supporters, which they trucked in a convoy to the drought-affected area, and distributed it through local traditional authorities. In Huambo province alone, UNITA supporters collected more than 10 tons of food. UNITA officials have spoken of repeating the food distribution initiative when necessary.Footnote 8
Interviews with UNITA officials and with participants in all of these programmes, as well as officials’ speeches, revealed a consistent set of meanings about the programmes and about UNITA’s responsibilities towards its own membership and towards Angolan society more broadly. They expressed the conviction that not only are government state services inadequate, but adherents of UNITA are excluded from access to them. Regarding the school in Bailundo, a provincial UNITA official said: ‘There were difficulties in bringing everyone into the educational system. As UNITA we decided to organize another alternative system.’Footnote 9 At the graduation ceremony in Katchiungo, a speaker said that the houses that the government claimed to be building were ‘only for their own pessoal’.Footnote 10 UNITA members were insistent on the notion of a united Angolan people: ‘The people are not of the MPLA or of UNITA; there is only one people’, declared a speaker at the cadre award ceremony in Catabola. But this invocation of a united Angolan people serves to highlight that divisions within society are the result of unequal treatment by the MPLA-led state.
The accusations of exclusion and division made against the MPLA are sometimes presented as being to the disadvantage specifically of rural people. UNITA members therefore speak of a mission to redress inequality in the distribution of social goods between town and countryside. A UNITA official in Bailundo set out UNITA’s position as follows: ‘The government never met its promises. Their party never struggled for Angola. UNITA defends the interests of peasants and excluded people. … There are some students who are not studying – young people spend their days hunting or fishing, even though we have UNITA teachers. When UNITA takes power all Angolans will have the right to be included’.Footnote 11 A speech in Catabola took up a similar theme: ‘The land is rich, the people poor. … The wealth of the Angolan people has to be well distributed. … If there are good schools in Huambo there also should be [schools] here to benefit the peasants.’Footnote 12
If, for UNITA, the MPLA state lacks legitimacy owing to its failure to fulfil its responsibility to welfare, then the social projects affirm UNITA’s suitability as an alternative. A party official explained the rationale for the humanitarian food convoy as follows:
The state has shown itself to be an exclusive state. UNITA cannot desist from its historical responsibilities. UNITA has always been a big part of the Angolan people. UNITA has to make up for great deficiencies in the way Angola has been treated. Food has always been distributed on the basis of t-shirts [i.e. a perception that the government gives out assistance along with MPLA t-shirts]. In the liberated zones during the war, UNITA made sure that all the people would have a normal life. [Now] the state is putting obstacles in the way, and UNITA cannot hold back.Footnote 13
The reference to ‘historical responsibilities’ is consistent with UNITA members’ frequent allusions to UNITA’s past and the state-like role that it assumed in relation to the people under its control. This recourse to the past makes UNITA more than simply another opposition party that might, hypothetically, replace the MPLA. First, it evokes UNITA’s previous ambitions as an anti-colonial movement that would take control of the state upon independence. Second, it recalls UNITA’s governance activities during its years as a rebel movement, at its rural bases but above all at Jamba.
Central to UNITA’s imagining of its social role is the idea of the cadre, a state-mandated professional. The term has an ambiguous reference.Footnote 14 In some parts of Southern Africa it means simply a party member. In South Africa it has acquired connotations of cronyism being put ahead of professionalism (see e.g. Hoffman Reference Hoffman2016). In Angola and Mozambique the definition of the term also links political fidelity to professional service, but the connoted meaning is more positive, emphasizing the professional skills that an individual brings in service of a political cause.Footnote 15 This merging in the term ‘cadre’ of the professional and the political speaks of a history of single-party state-led economic development. The notion of the cadre links the capability of the state to its capacity to improve individual lives both by providing training and by creating employment.
This harks back to a UNITA past in which everyone was either a soldier or a cadre in the employ of UNITA, at a time when the movement regarded itself as the eventual heir to the control of the Angolan state. UNITA’s supposed efficacy in providing full employment at Jamba is contrasted with the lack of access to job opportunities in today’s Angola. A speaker in Catabola complained: ‘Angolans don’t have jobs. The current government isn’t managing to organize jobs.’ A student in Bailundo expressed the wish ‘to be a cadre capable of serving tomorrow’.
Officials and trainees alike spoke of the programme in a way that conflated being an effective political activist with being someone capable of serving in the state. The remark by the director of the training programme in Catabola was typical: ‘Cadres are being prepared for UNITA’s own government – to implement the Muangai project. We have to overcome asymmetries, to find a solution for economic problems. Put the countryside first in order to benefit the city.’
UNITA officials’ frequent references to Muangai serve to situate today’s projects in continuity with the aims set out by Savimbi and with UNITA’s entire history of mobilization against the MPLA regime, first at war and latterly in the realm of politics. Equally frequent are references to Savimbi as an individual. On two separate occasions, speakers recalled that ‘Dr Savimbi said, “the political cadre in the revolution is the blood in the human body. It can only live when the blood is circulating.”’
At the ceremony in Kahala, the opening speech explicitly drew the connection between UNITA’s practices of political education in the bush, and the new training courses: ‘In the 1980s Savimbi created political education to support UNITA’s struggle. People from that course went on to become diplomats and officers. [Current UNITA leader Isaias] Samakuva has taken the initiative to revive the cadres’ school. No organization in the world has ever grown without cadres.’Footnote 16
In addition to these idealized claims linking past to future, UNITA officials and trainees saw a more immediate need for skilled cadres as a safeguard against future electoral fraud: a function that would not have been considered during wartime cadre training, though people speak of it as part of UNITA’s supposed long-term commitment to democracy. A UNITA local official in Bailundo claimed that: ‘UNITA has gathered strength in this municipality [Bailundo] since 2012. If the elections hadn’t been fraudulent, we would have won [here]. This motivated us to raise the academic, political and professional level.’ Similarly, a speech in Katchiungo emphasized the need to ‘strengthen our cadres on the ground’ ahead of promised municipal elections.Footnote 17
The government’s shortcomings did not only deprive people of their rights as citizens, UNITA members suggested, but were also responsible for increased crime since the end of the war. A woman aged 23 studying at the Bailundo school said government policy had caused unemployment and this had led to ‘delinquency’ among her peers. A soba (chief) in Catabola complained that: ‘We have people who are running wild – we have to enlighten them. Social harmony doesn’t exist in Angola.’ This attribution of a moral dimension to UNITA’s efforts at educating society echoes UNITA members’ recollection of the past in Jamba, where crime was unknown and ‘nobody told lies’ (Pearce Reference Pearce2015: 110). UNITA’s promise of a more egalitarian society and the promotion of a moral order combine in an idea of ‘social peace’ or ‘social harmony’. A student at the school in Bailundo said that ‘people talk today of peace because the war has ended, but peace in the heart doesn’t make sense if no one eradicates poverty’. A speaker in Katchiungo declared that ‘Angola has peace because UNITA is contributing to peace’. In claiming ‘peace’ as its own initiative, UNITA challenges a powerful MPLA discourse that positions the ruling party and President dos Santos as peacemakers (Messiant Reference Messiant2007; Pearce Reference Pearce2015; Schubert Reference Schubert2010). From these interviews there emerges an internally consistent set of meanings about UNITA’s past and present role in relation to Angolan politics and society. These meanings include a normative belief in a non-partisan state, alongside a reality in which the MPLA state is partisan and limits access to education or to jobs.
The complaint of discrimination is not unfounded. The overvalued currency and cheap imports that characterized Angola’s post-war oil economy left no room for Huambo’s recovery as a centre of light industry and commercial agriculture. Oil revenue accrues to the central state and is disbursed to the provinces in the form of government salaries. Civil service jobs require MPLA membership. UNITA politicizes the issue of economic discrimination by defining various groups as the losers from MPLA policy. Interviews conducted in 2008 revealed a perception that UNITA members themselves were the main victims of discrimination. By 2013, however, the accusation had broadened to include discrimination against rural people, against people whose ethnic identity associates them with regions other than Luanda, or against anyone not in the MPLA. In invoking the needs of a constituency, and not only of UNITA members themselves, this more recent discourse recalls how during the war UNITA bolstered its own nationalist claim by characterizing the MPLA as representing parochial interests: those of an urban, creole, Luanda-centred, Portuguese-speaking elite.
It therefore falls upon UNITA to provide these social goods: a responsibility that is the fulfilment of a historical destiny that can be traced to UNITA’s original role as an anti-colonial movement. Alongside this argument about UNITA’s historical responsibilities towards its own followers and towards marginalized groups within Angolan society is a belief in UNITA’s superior moral values, a belief founded in historical narratives about internal solidarity during armed struggle, and about continuity in opposition to the colonial regime and to an MPLA state that is portrayed as always having been illegitimate, sectarian and corrupt. Details of UNITA’s history that are at odds with this narrative, such as the ‘Operation Timber’ pact with Portugal in the early 1970s (Minter Reference Minter1988), are never mentioned. Likewise, the detention and totalitarian control of people at Jamba (Bridgland Reference Bridgland1995), where ‘cadre training’ was imposed rather than embraced voluntarily as it is today, are erased in UNITA recollections that emphasize continuity with the past. Through narratives that link a critique of MPLA-ruled Angola to an idealized view of UNITA’s past, UNITA officials and members present their role as being simultaneously one of building UNITA now as an opposition party and investing in an imagined future in which UNITA rules Angola.
Conclusion
Explaining UNITA’s revival in the Central Highlands requires acknowledging the potency of ideas and practices gestated during a history that spans UNITA’s origins as an anti-colonial movement and the decades during which its guerrillas fought against the MPLA. Although the party has received some funds from participation in parliamentary politics, Angola’s party funding model means that this is the consequence and not the cause of its growth in vote share. UNITA’s revival rests on its access to resources outside of the structures of formal politics. Only this fact can explain how UNITA has begun to escape the double bind faced by parties in new democracies, in which the possibilities for building support depend on already having a foothold in power. Central among these resources have been the networks, affective loyalties, ideas and habits of organization acquired during the war. Previous scholarship on rebel-to-party transformation has seen the military heritage both as a hindrance and as an asset to the post-war party, and noted that the values and structures of an armed movement may predispose such movements to authoritarian behaviour when in power (Allison Reference Allison2006; Curtis and De Zeeuw Reference Curtis and De Zeeuw2009; Garibay Reference Garibay2005; Manning Reference Manning2007). Insofar as UNITA has turned its heritage to its advantage, we need to consider the particularities of UNITA and its circumstances that have made this possible.
UNITA in wartime was not only a military movement, and military organization is only one part of its organizational heritage. The principles declared at Muangai were drawn up in a context of anti-colonial struggle as a manifesto for nation building. While the political context and UNITA’s role have changed, adherence to the ideas of the Muangai declaration has remained a constitutive part of UNITA identity. UNITA speaks of its role in relation to Angolan society today using a language of nation building derived from Muangai, which links political legitimacy to a duty of social service and an ethic of collective responsibility. When UNITA, like most other opposition parties, campaigns on issues of poverty and inequality, it defines social cleavage along lines established during the independence struggle and war. This serves as a reminder that further studies of rebel-to-party transitions should consider the civilian as well as military aspects of a party’s heritage, in particular the enduring power of ideas and norms.
Moreover, attention to ideas has explanatory power that a simple material reading of UNITA’s strategy lacks. Even if UNITA’s activities may appear to involve providing material and social goods in exchange for political allegiance, to read this in terms of a logic of patrimonialism is unsatisfactory. If support depended on material largesse, then the MPLA would be able to outbid UNITA. Both patrimonialism as theorized by Weber and its neopatrimonial variant assume a separation in the roles and identities of patron and client. But in the case of UNITA today, adherence to the movement is constituted in a political subjectivity that is as much about service and collective contribution as it is about receiving benefit. Insofar as the party does offer material goods, this transaction is inseparable from a discourse about the movement’s historic role as an anti-colonial movement and as the opponent of a corrupt and sectarian state. The meaning of the transaction, in evincing UNITA’s historical antecedence and the legitimacy that history confers, is at least as important as any material benefit that it might bring.
The fact that UNITA remains in opposition means that its case does not offer any meaningful contribution to the debate on whether a rebel past predisposes a party to authoritarianism. UNITA’s social programmes in Huambo certainly display centralized organization that recall UNITA’s wartime practices. However, since adherence to UNITA is voluntary and the party does not enjoy political power, any predictions that UNITA’s past might dispose it towards authoritarianism can only be speculative. Bringing non-governing former rebel parties into debates on rebel-to-party transformations points to a need to compare parties along dimensions other than that of authoritarian versus non-authoritarian.
Finally, UNITA serves as a reminder that a party’s adaptation to civilian politics is best not measured by its conformance to the ideal type of a parliamentary political party whose primary function is to ‘represent citizens’ interests before the state …, engage and involve citizens in democratic participation, structure the political choices that citizens have in elections, and form the governments’ (Carothers Reference Carothers2008: 9). In reality, UNITA’s choices since the end of the war have been shaped not only by its own history, but also by the political space in which it operates. If UNITA had chosen to reinvent itself simply as a political party competing for the control of the state it would have found itself constrained by a space in which the state is indistinguishable from the MPLA. In Cabinda and Luanda, where UNITA has established itself since the war without historical roots, UNITA has found common cause with nascent civil society groups and protest movements. But in the Central Highlands, where civic mobilization is all but absent, UNITA’s wartime networks and discourses that evince its own aspirations to statehood have been its best assets in nurturing a support base that has eventually allowed its vote share to grow.
Acknowledgements
This article is based on research that was begun during my doctoral studies at the University of Oxford, supported by grants from the ORISHA fund, the Norman Chester fund, and St Antony’s College. Later research was funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, grant number 74978, at the University of Cambridge and supported by a research associateship at St John’s College Cambridge. I am particularly indebted to Father Daniel Chimbulungunjo, Carlos Figueiredo, Fern Teodoro and Rafael Marques for their hospitality during research, and to all those who agreed to be interviewed and facilitated my presence at events.
