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Author Douglas Reed describes in this Book, in Chapter 3, how Angola was liberated from the Portuguese, in the name of self-government of course. But the real powers behind the rebels were Wall Street Power Elite.
They used mrs. Roosevelt as an asset.
Here is the story of Angola, through Reed's eyes:
Chapter Three
Luanda is one of the least known capital cities and its hinterland, Angola, one of the least known
countries in the world. Luanda, with its ancient fort brooding over the southern tip of its
magnificent bay, would be the big-game hunter's and fisherman's paradise, were it better known
and more accessible: in the respective seasons you may see the landrovers returning to town with
buck and buffalo strapped across the bonnets, or the boats coming in laden with barracuda and
marlin.
When I first saw Luanda, it was abustle with building activity, like all the other cities I have seen in
this decade, and the streets were thronged with people of every shade of complexion between black
and white, all getting on alongside each other very well. Yet twelve years before this hardly a being
in the place would have given Portugal more than two years in Angola. That was after the terrible
initial shock of the attack of drugged and drunken assassins from across the Congolese border.
Angola has been a Portuguese possession for five hundred years. One of the great Portuguese
navigators, Diege Cam, first landed there in 1482 and left his mark in the traditional Portuguese
shape of the Cross. That was centuries before the emergence of the British Empire which in its brief
day occupied a quarter of the globe and ruled over a quarter of the earth's inhabitants, before
dissolving to leave as its only memorial a gibbering wraith called the British Commonwealth,
wherein the erstwhile “lion cubs” turned into yelping jackals snarling at the other members.
All that time Portuguese Angola was there. For a few years the Dutch appeared on the scene and
the Portuguese Governor withdrew upriver, but in seven years he was back again in the ancient fort.
During this time the Portuguese in Angola even hived off a colony in South America which today
has become the greatest state in that half-continent, wealthy, with a population of fifty million and a
glowing future: Brazil.
Among the great “ifs” of history is why the Portuguese Government did not make of Angola a
second Brazil. All the conditions were present: enormous space, and boundless mineral wealth.
Diego Cam's discovery was neither exploited nor developed, although he planted his cross on the
coast of Angola years before Columbus discovered America. These Portuguese navigators, who set
out in cockleshells and knew not if they would end by falling off the edge of the earth, were the
spacemen of five hundred years ago.
While all the great events of the next five hundred years racked the world around it, Angola
continued its placid way of life, undisturbed by the demon “progress”. Differences of race were not
felt or known as such. The difference between relatively schooled and skilled White people from
overseas and undeveloped Black ones set the pattern of life; colour as such played no part in it.
In this enormous territory (it is almost as large as Europe and it has a thousand miles of coastline
stretching from north to south along the Atlantic) the Portuguese until the beginning of this century
effectively occupied only the coastal strip, and that in small numbers.
The huge Black population of the interior, had they wished, could have just nudged the Portuguese
into the sea: hardly any troops were garrisoned there. But they never did this. The Portuguese,
alone among the colonizing powers, seem to have understood and come to grips with Africa. While
others came, stayed a hundred years or so, and then scuttled away, Portuguese Angola, unknown or
forgotten, stayed on. It saw all the others come and it saw them go, and now that its five hundredth
anniversary approaches it is still there.
forgotten, stayed on. It saw all the others come and it saw them go, and now that its five hundredth
anniversary approaches it is still there.
Who were these creatures? Mr. Robert Ruark, an expert on terrorism and torture from his
experience of the Mau Mau in Kenya, identifies them: “... hired strangers, strangers drunk on the
local pombe, strangers fired by hashish, strangers recruited and semi-trained across the northern
Angolese border in the Congo, strangers with no real axe to grind except against an innocent neck,
strangers armed by the terrorists of Algeria, strangers motivated by Russia and China and other
Communist affiliates.”[4]
Mr. Ruark did not add what I will append here: these hideous miscreants were the protegés of those
ravening wolves, the Liberals of New York, as well as the hirelings of Communism. Their leader,
an abominable creature of many aliases, is best known as Holden Roberto. Just eighteen months
before the massacre he went to the United States where he was made warmly welcome by the
American Committee on Africa, the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and Mrs.
Eleanor Roosevelt.
These influential acquaintanceships bore fruit. Holden Roberto received both financial and political
support from United States sources. Then about a year later came the massacre, of which Holden
Roberto boasted to a correspondent of the Paris journal, Le Monde. He was asked, “There is proof
of tortures perpetrated upon Portuguese men, women and children. Do you deny these horrors?” He
answered, “No, all that is true ... they massacred everything.” “Women and children included?” he
was asked, and he replied, “Yes, why deny it?”
Mr. James Burnham (see above and footnote [5]), speaking of the propagandist successes in the
world press and at the United Nations of such revolting gangs of murderers as that of Holden
Roberto, said, “Not the least of these propaganda victories has been the concealment of the events
of 15 March 1961. And even today some readers of this book will wonder: can these horrors that
Bernardo Teixeira recounts really be true? Can they possibly be true? Is it conceivable that human
beings actually ran other humans through rotary saws?[5]
“Alas for mankind, not only are these things true, but these things are not the worst, of what Holden
Roberto's squads did and have done: of some things it is simply not possible to write.”
I studied the story of 15 March 1961 for years before I was able to go to the scene of the massacre
and recreate what happened for myself. In probing the background, especially the background of
foreign support for these sub-human massacrists, my eye was immediately caught by the name of
Mrs. Roosevelt as their patroness. This woman, who posed as the mother of all good works and
good causes, first attracted my student's attention in 1949, when I was in America. At that time the
Soviet agent in the American Government, Alger Hiss, the man who at Yalta, at the dying President
Roosevelt's side turned the Allied victory into a Communist victory and an Allied defeat, had been
exposed and the Liberal Establishment was waging a tremendous campaign to snatch its favourite
son from the jaws of justice.
I observed with a shock of surprise that Mrs. Roosevelt identified herself with it, and went to the
length of publicly attacking the man who had denounced Hiss. From that time on I was prepared for
anything that Mrs. Roosevelt might do in her role as patroness of liberalism, and I was no longer
surprised when she entertained such as Holden Roberto to tea.
I observed with a shock of surprise that Mrs. Roosevelt identified herself with it, and went to the
length of publicly attacking the man who had denounced Hiss. From that time on I was prepared for
anything that Mrs. Roosevelt might do in her role as patroness of liberalism, and I was no longer
surprised when she entertained such as Holden Roberto to tea.
I came to think of Mrs. Roosevelt as the reincarnation of Madame Defarge. She knitted by the
guillotine as heads fell into the basket. Mrs. Roosevelt entertained murderers to tea and wrote her
unreadable “My Day” column, while women and children, Black, Brown and White, were being
hacked to pieces by her visitors' gangs in Angola.
Thus, by way of the Yalta Conference, the “hidden hand behind the scenes”, and the rise of all-
destroying “Liberalism”, we come to the massacre of 15 March 1961 in Northern Angola: the
continuing thread from Mrs. Roosevelt's patronage of Alger Hiss to her tea-party with Holden
Roberto twenty years later and his welcome by the Communist-infested departments of the
American administration is clear to see.
The initial shock in Angola was almost lethal. In the whole vast territory there were but a few
platoons of soldiers, Black and White, and police. Few then believed that Angola could survive.
But the unexpected, the almost incredible happened.
The civilian population of the massacre-area resisted fiercely and drove the murder squads back
into the Congo. The Black population never gave the invaders that support without which
(according to Che Guevare) no guerilla attack can succeed. Within a few days troop reinforcements
began to arrive from Portugal and soon the situation came under control. The mass of Black
peasants and farmers who had fled into the bush, either from fear of the murderers or of being
mistaken for them, began to trickle back, and in less than a year 140,000 of them had officially
presented themselves to the Portuguese authorities who fed, clothed, and housed them and provided
medical assistance.
No questions were asked, although terrorists may have been among this returning throng. The
Portuguese from the start, both in Angola and Mozambique, always practised this policy of
receiving-back and reincorporating into the Portuguese community. They are wise people in their
dealings with the Black population and have thus succeeded in Africa where others failed.
The atrocious event of 15 March 1961 went unnoticed by the outside world. As Mr. Burnham said,
its concealment was one of the greatest successes of the terrorist leaders and of “Liberalism”, and it
was achieved by the complicity of that vast network of “liberals” which in our generations has
come to control all means of public information: press, radio, television.
One American publisher produced the authentic story, with all the pictorial and other evidence, but
in Britain and other “enlightened” lands no one would touch it. The international campaign of
propaganda against Portugal continued unabated and was taken up by persons who had come to
political office in such places as Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
The resistance of the Angolan population, Black, White and Mulatto, and the arrival of military
reinforcements, put an end to the immediate threat to Angola, and from that point the epic of
Angola began. The atrocious event led to the rebirth of Angola, which began to look like becoming
“a second Brazil”. Its development in the decade after 15 March 1961 was so great, and in such
contrast to its former lethargic condition, that when I arrived there in 1973 the current jest was that
a statue ought to be erected to Holden Roberto because he had shocked and shaken the country out
of its colonial slumber.
A sudden revival of confidence followed the defeat and flight of the Bakongo murderers, the return
of the great plantation owners and the continuance on their land of the small ones, the repossession
and resumption of work in hundreds of plantations which had been attacked or destroyed. The
discovery of offshore oil in 1966 and the participation of several great foreign concerns in its
exploitation and in further prospecting helped. In places where thought had never been given to
Angola as a place for investment, the awareness began to spread that it probably has the greatest
unexploited mineral wealth in Central Africa.
A sudden revival of confidence followed the defeat and flight of the Bakongo murderers, the return
of the great plantation owners and the continuance on their land of the small ones, the repossession
and resumption of work in hundreds of plantations which had been attacked or destroyed. The
discovery of offshore oil in 1966 and the participation of several great foreign concerns in its
exploitation and in further prospecting helped. In places where thought had never been given to
Angola as a place for investment, the awareness began to spread that it probably has the greatest
unexploited mineral wealth in Central Africa.
The effect of the 1961 atrocity was to cause the Lisbon government to put Angola at the top of its
agenda paper. The support of the primitive Black population, which had been crucial in turning the
tide of invasion, must be maintained and established. One immediate result was the abolition of the
old colonial system of the indigenas, who were not recognized as full Portuguese citizens and were
subject to compulsory labour. For thirteen years now all Blacks have had the right, by simple
application, to become Portuguese citizens, and about a million have taken advantage of this.
A second effect was the emphasis laid on education, which for a backward population represents
the great road to improvement: in 1960 only 100,000 Black children were at school: in 1971 there
were 511,000 children and students in the schools and universities, and at least 400,000 of these
were Blacks (all places of education, like the hospitals, are integrated and Black and White scholars
or patients occupy adjoining desks or beds).
The other great effect of the 1961 attack was the vast growth of the system of roads in Angola,
partly due to military necessity (with an army of 100,000 men, Black and White, suddenly
appearing in the country), and partly to the great economic expansion which occurred in the
following decade. Formerly, during the rainy season, roads in the interior became unusable; the
plantations in the Coffee Belt and the diamond mines in the Lunda [ed: Luanda?] district, as well as
the pleasant small towns which have grown up in the interior during this century, were almost cut
off from their needs. By 1971 there were over five thousand kilometres of tarmac roads serving
north-south traffic and branching eastward.
On the morning of 16 March 1961 (that is, the morning after the massacre), it seemed impossible
that Angola's Coffee Belt, its main source of income, could ever live again. But in the next ten
years the coffee output was doubled. Much of the coffee-forest land is worked by Black growers
who get a guaranteed minimum price through the Coffee Institute at Carmona.[7] This marketing
system has achieved the result (near-miraculous in Africa) of weaning the Black smallholder away
from his immemorial method of hand-to-mouth, daily-bread farming, and making him a man of
substance with a rising standard of living.
For twelve years after the massacre of 1961 the picture of that day never left my mind. Not Stalin
or Hitler had ever invented such horrors as these. Now that I was in Angola I made it my first
purpose to go to the scene where those things happened which (as Mr. James Burnham said) were
“simply impossible to describe”, to talk to survivors and generally clear my mind about something
which it still found difficult to believe.
So I set out for the Coffee Belt one day with a most helpful guide in a military convoy (the road
was by this time pretty well clear of the Chinese land-mines planted by night, although a wrecked
truck or two still lay about, but was not secure from the odd shots fired from safe ambush in the
shade forests, where some of Roberto Holden's miserable hirelings still lurked).
truck or two still lay about, but was not secure from the odd shots fired from safe ambush in the
shade forests, where some of Roberto Holden's miserable hirelings still lurked).
One was the regrouping of the tribespeople in protected villages, and I saw many of them along this
road and later in the east and southeast, where other Chinese-motivated and Soviet-motivated
groups of terrorists still made desultory forays across the border. The aldeamentos, or protected
villages, were a good answer to the menace in one way: they did guard the people from the
arsonists and abductors who plagued them when they lived in isolated groups. A disadvantage is
that the Black tribesman clings tenaciously to the soil he knows, however perilous, and dislikes to
be separated by distance from his land.
However, safety comes first and the Ovambos and others accepted this enforced regrouping, albeit
with inward reservations on which the terrorists will undoubtedly play. As we went along we
passed groups of coffee-picking women going to and from the shade forests, escorted by an armed
militiaman (he is usually a returned fugitive living in the protected village). Another idea born of
this emergency was the mobile gendarmerie, Black soldiers or policemen grouped in a cantonment,
equipped with transport and arms, and in contact by radio with all isolated plantations or
aldeamentos of the district.
The Portuguese have built heavily on their policy of reincorporation and regeneration, and some of
their most efficient and effective Black troops are the Flechas, returned fugitives (or returned
terrorists: as I said, no questions are asked). These are highly-trained and very tough warriors who
go out on their own to pick up a terrorist or two or detect arms-caches. The array of Russian,
Chinese, Algerian, Cuban, Iron Curtain and other automatic weapons, grenades, landmines, mortars
and the rest collected by them, which I saw at one place, was proof of their devotion to their job.
The most fascinating of all the new ideas born of these problems was, for me, the regiment of Black
Dragoons whose officers welcomed me with great good cheer when I visited them. Their discipline
was exemplary, the condition of their lines, horses and barracks would have gladdened the
nostalgic eye of any ex-cavalryman from overseas. Ninety per cent of the troopers are Blacks and
their commander told me that none of them had ever seen a horse before they began their gruelling
training as Portuguese Dragoons in Angola. This rebirth of cavalry is one of the strangest and yet
most logical results of the need to seek out and stampede and rout creatures who never fight, whose
weapons and methods are the darkness of night, the buried landmine, the ambush and the arsonist's
torch. The Black Dragoons go out for weeks at a time, under their own officers, and usually come
back with a prisoner or two and more Chinese or Russian weapons to add to the collection in the
armoury.
Everywhere I went, in the north-west, the north, the east and the southeast, the Portuguese way of
handling their problem seemed to be producing results. In several places I saw tribespeople who
had been driven out from their homes by fear or levelled weapon, presenting themselves to the
Portuguese authorities for readmission. They told their tale of capture and abduction and were
taken in and given one of the adobe houses which Portuguese soldiers, Black and White, were
building all around.
On this first journey we came to Quitexe, a place I particularly wanted to see because at Quitexe
there were two survivors who were able to tell an exact story of what happened on that day of
horror. There were a few survivors in other places, but they were usually too demented from the
things they had seen to give a lucid account. At Quitexe was a butcher whose name has become
famous.
things they had seen to give a lucid account. At Quitexe was a butcher whose name has become
famous.
From Quitexe our convoy went on to Carmona, the capital town of the coffee region, where another
fantastic fight for survival was fought and won. At the beginning of the day the people of Carmona,
like those in the twelve villages, were completely unaware that the day was to be different from any
other. When the doctor, having gone the twenty odd miles to Quitexe on his professional round and
turned back when he saw what was happening there, drove into Carmona with the alarm, the townspeople,
sitting at the pavement cafés, at first could not understand what he meant, so unprepared
were they for anything of the kind. Yet by the evening the townspeople (there were only five
soldiers in Carmona) under the doctor's leadership and that of his son (killed during the battle) had
improvised some sort of defence against the Congolese attack which obviously was to follow.
It came in the dusk, when the drums began in the elephant grass and in Carmona the church bells
all began to toll. The noise of the drums came nearer and nearer, and louder, and then thousands of
voices, shouting kill, kill!, joined in the demoniac pandemonium. At last the murderers burst from
the elephant grass and the townspeople with their few weapons fought back, killed the frontal few,
and then drove in Landrovers and old motor cars, headlights full on, into the mass.
At last the murderers fell back into the high grass and departed: the staccato chorus of kill, kill
continued, but it grew fainter and then died away. And that was the end of the Congolese incursion
for the time being. The basic idea was to take Carmona and then claim that “the liberation
movement” was in control of northern Angola; at that point their accomplices at the United Nations
would without doubt have “recognized the new republic”. The Angolan population, Black, White
and Brown, had shown that they wanted no truck with the “liberators” and of their own strength
had beaten them back.
After that, troops began to arrive from Portugal and the immediate danger was over. Today as I
write, thirteen years later, the troops are still there, 100,000 of them, mainly Black but also many
Portuguese from Portugal itself, mostly peasants' sons whose devoutly Catholic mothers at home
cross themselves as they hear that “the World Council of Churches” is giving aid to the murderers.
What, they ask themselves, are their sons fighting for so far away, if even the churches want them
butchered.
I have in my mind's album many vivid pictures of that journey around Angola, by convoy and by
air. At one place in the eastern sector, where soldiers were building a protected village for the
returning fugitives and other soldiers were planting vegetables for them, I looked toward a distant
hill and saw a building which had the shape of a typical South African trading store. This surprised
me, because the trading store, so familiar a sight in South Africa and Lesotho, for some reason is
not found in Angola, so I asked what the odd-looking, lonely place could be. The Portuguese
colonel said it was “a shop” and added that it belonged to an eighty-year-old man who had been
there for fifty years and had survived three attempts by murderers (this time from Zambia) to kill
him.
there for fifty years and had survived three attempts by murderers (this time from Zambia) to kill
him.
Even the “freedom fighters”, stupid hirelings as most of them are, might be expected not to foray
across a frontier in order to kill one old man. But they came one night and fired through the door of
his room next to the store, where he was wont (as they evidently knew) to sit at his table. The
bullets went through the door and into the wall behind the table and would have perforated him but
by chance he was, for once, not there. They came again later with a machine gun and from a safe
distance sprayed the house with machine gun fire, the bullet holes leaving a dotted line across the
front of it. Once more they came and he went out with a shotgun and blazed away at the sound of
their firing. After that they left him alone, and he told me that if I came again ten years later he
would be there.
Another memory is that of a commanding general in one sector, on whose desk I saw a heavily
scored and annotated book. It was Sir Robert Taylor's Defeating Communist Insurgency in Malaya
and Vietnam. This general told me that he had read the book in the aeroplane on his way from
Lisbon to take up his command. When he arrived he gave his troops the order, “Don't press the
trigger unless you see something pointed at you.” The order was at first unpopular with the younger
officers, but they accepted it and behaved accordingly. This order, of course, was in line with the
Portuguese policy of retaining and encouraging the allegiance and support of the Black Portuguese
and it has produced results. Neither in Angola nor Mozambique have the murderers had much
success with the Black Portuguese population, who know all too well the sort of thing their
“liberators” do.
Another memory, a surprising one, is that of two Irish ladies whom I found in a remote place in the
eastern sector where for twenty years they had selflessly tended the sick and the poor. They paid
the highest tribute to the Portuguese as a nation and particularly to the Portuguese army, which,
they told me, was always ready to fly an urgent case to distant Luanda and to provide them with
transport to fetch a patient or stores. A German nursing sister at a mission not very far from the two
Irish ladies spoke of the Portuguese troops, and their ready helpfulness, in the same way.
This is an apt place to say that all the foreigners I met in Angola have admiration and respect for
the Portuguese and their troops, feelings which I soon came to share. People who had lived in other
parts of Africa and in many parts of the world all shared this regard.
A British Ambassador's lady once wrote of Portugal that she could not quite put her finger on what
makes the Portuguese such lovable people. In my case I can put my finger on exactly what qualities
gained my high respect for the Portuguese as I saw them in Angola. They are brave, steadfast in
adversity, tenacious, and proud. In this decadent couldn't-care-less generation they remain proud of
their nationality and of their unique historical achievement in opening up the world.
In Angola they are engaged, as they well know, in a war which they cannot militarily win because
it is not a war at all, in any sense in which the word was ever used in history. It is an international
conspiracy in which half the governments of the world join, wearing the mocking mask of moral
indignation: Russian and Chinese Communists, American Quakers, British Socialists, Norwegian,
Swedish and German Socialists. It can go on as long as hireling murderers can be enlisted by the
promise of loot, women, private vengeance and political appointments. It can go on as long as
America, Russia, China, “the satellite States”, Cuba and Algeria flood Africa with arms for these
hirelings, and as long as the Socialist party in England and the Roosevelt school in America lavish
money on them.
promise of loot, women, private vengeance and political appointments. It can go on as long as
America, Russia, China, “the satellite States”, Cuba and Algeria flood Africa with arms for these
hirelings, and as long as the Socialist party in England and the Roosevelt school in America lavish
money on them.
The best military brains realize that the Portuguese wars in Africa cannot be won by military means
because, as I have said, they are not wars. They are forays out of bush, jungle and forest land, into
which the murderers vanish, again at will, of gangs paid and armed from abroad. At any other time
in history they would have been chased back routed and destroyed, and peace would return. Today,
the noxious liberal cohorts all over the world would clamour “Portuguese aggression” and call for
“a bloodbath” (their favourite prescription for others).
What, then, can be done? A Portuguese general, Antonio de Spinola, deputy Chief-of-Staff of the
armed forces, in early 1974 suggested a solution in a book called Portugal and the Future. Starting
from the generally accepted theorem that the African “wars” cannot be won by military means
alone, he proposed the creation of a Federal Republic of Portugal in which each of the Portuguese
overseas territories would become independent states with a federal assembly in Lisbon and a
common head of state.
This plan would undoubtedly commend itself to the overseas Portuguese. territories, which have
often felt that government from metropolitan Portugal was too remote from their especial interests
and needs, and would strengthen their attachment to the Portuguese language, culture and heritage.
I do not myself see how it would prevent the international liberal conspiracy from continuing to pay
and arm the murderous marauders in the Congo (now Zaire), Zambia and Tanzania, or discourage
the Chinese and Soviet Russians from their obvious design of taking over Africa.
However, General de Spinola may see more clearly into the future than this wandering scribe. He
was dismissed immediately after the appearance of his book.
I left Angola one day with a sense of high respect for the Portuguese, whom I seldom encountered
in my earlier travels, and a conviction that, whatever the future, they had certainly brought the
revolt begun by the Roberto incursion of 15 March 1961 under control in Angola. At the start it
seemed that so small a country as Portugal could not long sustain the cost and strain of maintaining
a great army in Angola, but for thirteen years it had done just that and Angola itself, by its own
exertions and also by a few strokes of good fortune, such as the discovery of oil, was more
prosperous than ever before.
I said goodbye with regret and as I looked down on this enormous country, with its hundreds of
thousands of miles of empty ranchland and hundreds of miles of unused beaches, hoped one day I
might return and find that the grass had grown over the frightful memory of 15 March 1961.
Then I turned my face to the next stage on my long journey: Rhodesia.
