The people of Angola are wonderful. Their ability to survive the vicissitudes of the twentieth century has been wholly remarkable. Their humanity shines through the rich literature that has been devoted to their country over the last hundred years. And yet the people of Angola have been the victims of some of the worst governments that the modern world has seen. Popular humanity has been met with institutional inhumanity at every turn of the road. But while the suffering goes on, Angolans still welcome visitors with patience and a smile. In the depths of war a sympathetic journalist, or a dedicated diplomat, will be invited to share with a long-suffering host the last roadside doughnut or the last can of local beer.

The catalogue of misgovernment that has been inflicted on Angola's people is almost too grievous to be credible. In 1904, when Henry Nevinson travelled through Angola, the country was still in the grip of slavery. Some slaves escaped from the shackled columns being marched to the Atlantic and gained refuge in mission compounds set up to protect them. Many other escapees were returned to captivity or, if seen to be lame and sick, were slaughtered. Life was cheap in the eyes of the merchants of blood. The world of 1904 was not prepared, however, to tolerate such horror and the bloodshed led to an international outcry. Six years later the colonial administration was swept away in the fall of the Portuguese monarchy.

The historic abuse of Angola did not end with the fall of the old monarchy. On the contrary, the new republican regime set up in Portugal in 1910 was also regressive in its colonial policies. The future grandmaster of Portugal's free-masons was sent to Angola to build a new colonial society. He conscripted tens of thousands of forced workers to build roads and railways, showing little regard for the human rights or economic needs of black peoples. He also brought from Portugal thousands of unemployed white carpet-baggers who drove the Angolan middle classes out of their jobs in both the public and the private sector. With loud cries of self-justification the new expatriates robbed the farmers of their cattle and the townsmen of their women. Death continued to stalk the land: death from hunger, from disease, and most harrowing of all from the daily brutality of beatings and whippings that stood in the stead of wage incentives for conscripted workers.

In the 1930s Angola fell under the sway of a fascist-type government with brutal manners. The great dictator, Salazar, was an early disciple of Mussolini and he would brook no opposition to his determination to extract wealth from Angola in order to compensate the tiny bourgeois class of Portugal for the financial losses it had suffered during the world depression. Angola's farmers were compelled to plant cotton for export rather than food of their children. When famine ensued in 1945 the dictator advised his colonial commissioners that `famine is but a figment of the Bantu imagination'....