Staging Society: Sources of Loyalty in the Angolan UNITA

Abstract

This article explores the importance of the social environment for the stability of armed groups as organizations. A case study of the Angolan UNITA explores how this armed group engaged and transformed existing social structures to recruit members and create a stable and loyal following. Contrary to the image of UNITA as a tribal organization, it is shown that UNITA's most loyal followership was created in a far-reaching project of social engineering, designed to control the combatants' entire lifeworld. UNITA created a state within a state, a society within society. To policymakers in the post-war context, this situation poses a major challenge. To facilitate a rapprochement of UNITA people to the majority society and the institutions of the state will take time and effort. The latter will have to be as intensive as UNITA's original social project had been.

Notes

Interview by the author, Huambo, 19 January 2006. According to the interviewee, radio communication between pilots was sometimes received by household radios. In this way, the refusal of pilots to obey their orders had become known.

In a seminal study, Robert Knapp defined rumour as ‘a proposition for belief of topical reference disseminated without official verification’. Robert H. Knapp, ‘A Psychology of Rumor’, Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1944), p. 22. As such, rumours represent a particular form of information. Knapp also points out that war conditions foster the emergence of rumours, because official information on important events (e.g. the preparation of attacks) is scarce while at the same time the ‘emotional life of the public’ is intensified (p. 23).

If merely rumour, the function of the story would be to spread division. In Knapp's classification it would be a ‘wedge-driving or aggression rumour’ designed to divide groups or undermine loyalties. See Knapp, ‘A Psychology of Rumor’ (note 2), p. 24.

The research was part of a PhD project about the transformation of societies in civil wars, realized in the context of the research group ‘Micropolitics of Armed Groups’ at Humboldt University Berlin, Germany. During the seven months of field research in Angola data was collected chiefly through interviews, complemented by the study of archival material accessible in Huambo.

The works of Carolyn Nordstrom are the most prominent examples in this regard (see especially Carolyn Nordstrom, A Different Kind of War Story (Philidelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Carolyn Nordstrom, Shadows of War. Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century (Berkley: University of California Press, 2007). In the eye of the political scientist, the anthropologist's advantage in gathering information is often outweighed by a certain conceptual weakness. Yet, works such Stephen Lubkemann's study on Mozambique show that anthropological research might very well indicate strong conceptual propositions. See Stephen C. Lubkemann, Culture in Chaos: An Anthropology of the Social Condition in War (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

or Ivana Maček's works on Sarajevo that shows that this is not necessarily the case. See Ivana Maček, ‘Predicament of war: Sarajevo experiences and ethics of war’, in Bettina E. Schmidt and Ingo W. Schröder (eds), Anthropology of Violence and Conflict (London, New York: Routledge, 2001); Ivana Maček, 2007. ‘Imitation of Life_. Negotiating Normality in Sarajevo under siege’, In: Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms, and Ger Duijzings (eds.), The new Bosnian mosaic. Identities, memories and moral claims in a post-war society (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970).

Stathis Kalyvas, ‘The Ontology of Political Violence’ Action and Identity in Civil Wars', Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 1, No. 3 (2003), pp. 475–94.

Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Charles Tilly, The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).

Joel S. Migdal, State In Society. Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute Each Other (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

For detailed overview on the period of anti-colonial struggle until the end of the post-colonial transition John Marcum's two-volume oeuvre The Angolan Revolution remains unmatched. John A. Marcum, The Angolan Revolution, Vol. I: The Anatomy of an explosion 1950–1962 (London: MIT Press, 1969); John A. Marcum, The Angolan Revolution, Vol. II: Exile Politics and Guerrilla Warfare 1962–1976 (London: MIT Press, 1978), pp. 318–20. A recent contribution focussing on combatant-civilian relations during this period is Inge Brinkman's study of Southern Angola: A War for People. Civilians, Mobility, and Legitimacy in South-east Angola during the MPLA's War for Independence (Köln: Rüdiger Köppe, 2005).

Academic writing on the Angolan civil war mirrors the state of world politics as well as conceptual developments in the field of conflict studies sciences. During the Cold War, the conflict was described either in terms of collective deprivation. See for example: W. Martin James, A Political History of the Civil War In Angola 1974–1990 (New Brunswick, NJ: The East-South Relations Series, Transaction Publishers, 1992). It has also been denounced as a proxy war launched and maintained by imperialistic powers; see for example George Wright, The Destruction of a Nation. United State's Policy Towards Angola since 1945 (London and Chicago, IL: Pluto Press, 1997).

From the late 1990s onwards, attention moved to the economic dimension of the conflict. See for example: Tony Hodges, Angola. From Afro-Stalinism to Petro-Diamond Capitalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Assis Malaquias, Rebels and Robbers. Violence in Post-colonial Angola (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2007). For a detailed (yet not impartial) reconstruction of the military events until 1991 see Edward George, The Cuban Intervention in Angola, 1965–1991. From Che Guevara to Cuito Cuanavale (London and New York: Frank Cass, 2005). For the denunciation of the conflict as a proxy war launched and maintained by imperialistic powers, see: for example Wright, The Destruction of a Nation (note 13). From the late 1990s onwards, attention moved to the economic dimension of the conflict. See for example Hodges, Angola. From Afro-Stalinism to Petro-Diamond Capitalism and Malaquias, Rebels and Robbers (above). For a detailed (yet not impartial) reconstruction of the military events until 1991, see George, The Cuban Intervention in Angola (above).

The date, 1956, refers to the foundation of the FNLA's principal predecessor, the UPNA (União das Populaç[otilde]es do Norte de Angola – Union of the Northern People of Angola), renamed UPA (União das Populaç[otilde]es de Angola – Union of the People of Angola) in 1958.

From the outset, the broader Angolan liberation movement had been fragmented into panoply of organizations. FNLA and MPLA were but the tip of an iceberg. In what he calls ‘a partial list of Angolan nationalist movements’, John Marcum names 86 organizations for the period 1962–1976 alone. See Marcum, The Angolan Revolution, Vol. II (note 12), pp. 318–20.

GRAE – Govêrno revolucionário de Angola no exílio.

Marcum, The Angolan Revolution (note 12), pp. 161–7.

Linda M. Heywood, Contested Power in Angola, 1840s to the Present (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2000), pp. 154–5.

Interview by the author, Huambo, 30 December 2005.

George, The Cuban Intervention in Angola (note 13), p. 193.

Ibid.

The Minorities At Risk Project, for example, listed UNITA as a ‘communal contender’. See Ted Robert Gurr, and James R. Scarritt, ‘Minorities Rights at Risk: A Global Survey’, Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 3 (1989). For a more differentiated discussion of the issue see Linda M. Heywood, ‘UNITA and Ethnic Nationalism in Angola’, The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (1989).

Klaus Schlichte, In the Shadow of Violence. The Micropolitics of Armed Groups (Frankfurt/M: Campus, 2009).

Interview by the author, Huambo, 30 December 2005.

Inge Brinkman, ‘War and Identity in Angola. Two Case Studies’, Lusotopie (2003), pp. 195–222.

Interview by the author, Huambo, 30 January 2006.

For more on the relationship between ‘physical’ space and social order see: Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Physischer, sozialer und angeeigneter physischer Raum’, in Martin Wenz (ed.), Stadt-Räume (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 1991). For a modified version in English, see Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Site effects’, in Pierre Bourdieu (ed.), The Weight of the World. Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (Oxford and Stanford, CA: Polity Press and Oxford University Press, 1999).

Interview by the author, Bailundo 24 March 2006. The interviewee had joined UNITA in 1979 and was demobilized in 2002.

See for example Médecins sans frontières (MSF) (ed.), Voices from the Silence. Testimonies from Angola (Toronto: MSF, 2004).

Interview by the author, village km25, 1 December 2005.

Fred Bridgland, ‘Savimbi et l'exercice du pouvoir. Un témoignage’, Politique Africaine, No. 57 (1995), pp. 94–102.

Interview by author, Huambo, 30 December 2005.

Teresa Koloma Beck and Klaus Schlichte, ‘Nature and Civilization in the Habitus of the Warrior’, Working Papers Micropolitics 1. Working Paper series of the research group The Micropolitics of Armed Groups, Humboldt University Berlin, 2007.

Note that the vast majority of those considered as ‘combatants’ who could thus register for demobilization (95 per cent in the cited survey) were men, in spite of the fact that most of UNITA's women have been combatants in the broader sense, providing rear support as porters, cooks, etc. See: João Gomes Porto, Imogen Parsons, and Chris Alden. From Soldiers to Citizens. The Social, Economic and Political Reintegration of UNITA Ex-Combatants. ISS Monograph Series No. 130, Institute for Security Studies, Tshwane, 2007, pp. 40–1.

Ibid., chapter 2.

See also Jutta Bakonyi and Kirsti Stuv⊘y, ‘Violence & Social Order beyond the State: Somalia & Angola’, Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 32, No. 104/105 (2005).

Interviews by the author, Bailundo, 24 March 2006.

Porto et al., From Soldiers to Citizens (note 34), p. 41.