People’s War in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau

One inevitable result of successful insurgencies is the myth of their uniformity Certainly, contemporary guerillas have drawn upon the pioneering Chinese model of a people’s war and the widely-publicised military thought of Mao Tse-tung. This application has led some observers to conclude that there is imitation rather than selection by guerilla cadres. Nowhere is the potential stronger for such cursory analysis than in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. China’s impact on revolution has been significant and cannot be minimised; but its lessons and those of other guerilla wars required redefining in an African environment. Another temptation is to lump the three simultaneous wars in the former Portuguese colonies into a common guerilla knapsack because they have similar nationalistic roots. The inclination is not wholly wrong, but the distinctions are worth noting. An even greater fallacy is to see no sophisticated employment of a people’s war, but only armed ‘bandits’ scouring the countryside. Purpose is to examine comparatively these issues, albeit not Angola’s immediate post-independence conflict which resembled conventional warfare. Ref.