could bring, early Angolan publicly flogged, and imprisoned.
When the map. The followed, Neto's release, evens of the movement In 1962, from his Portuguese leading position of Angolan nationalism, workers and peasants. AGOSTINHO NETO, president of Angola, died in Moscow last week at the age of 56 One of the first leaders of the struggle to oust Portuguese colonialism from its dominions, Neto was among the tiny handful of young Africans able to overcome the hurdies erected by the colonial system and receive higher education. However, rather than sit back and enjoy the privileges membership of such an elite For take the easy route of emigration to Europe, Neto was stirred by the oppression of his people into political action.
After years of study in Portugal, , where he made contact with the Communist Party and nationalist circles, Neto qualified as a doctor and returned to practise medicine in his home village. Two years later he was arrested for alleged political offences, inhabitants of this and the adjoining village demonstrated peacefully in the Portuguese army opened fire on them, killing 30 and wounding 200. A further retaliatory raid wiped these two villages off the wave of indignation that and the continuing campaign for the CHOLY Angolan anti-imperialist assisted by the CP., Neto escaped prison and took up a MPLA, the nationalist group to which he had been closest.
Neto and the MPLA represented that current led by a tiny but influential group of intellectuals, which saw that the struggle to free the Angolan people from the Portuguese yoke required the forging of a new Angolan nation out of the wide range of tribal and ethnic groups in the country. They also grasped the need to take up the social questions which affected the daily lives of the It was these two strengths which gave the MPLA its central role in the modern history of Angola. However Neto remained encased in the trapped Stalinism and a limited nationalism that failed the struggle emancipation is doomed to frustration unless it is based upon the revolutionary mobilisation of the oppressed masses for a total break with the Às a result, the Angola which Neto leayes as his legacy is marked by deep uncertainties. It between political and military dependence on Cuba and the Sovie economic dependence Methods of repression and bureaucratic dic tate have increasingly come to supplant those of revolutionary mobilisation. Political power in Angola is monopolised by the ruling party, had becoming increasingly dominated by the personal influence of its Neto's death thus poses big problems for Regrettably Angolan masses, for whose sake Neto originally took up the banner of struggle, have no means by which much less decide • the outcome. That is the tragedy of the Angolan revolution, and the tragedy of Agostinho Neto