The central account in this book, which remains unchanged from the original, was almost entirely based on interviews with soldiers who fought in the War for Africa. Since nearly all of the material came from ‘rockface’ interviews, no extensive source notes were provided. However, a wide range of books, publications and newspaper articles were read as background research, and much more has been written, and read, in the intervening years. Of the publications that have appeared since the original book appeared, I found Chester Crocker’s High Noon in Southern Africa: Making Peace in a Rough Neighbourhood (W W Norton & Company, New York, 1992) particularly fascinating and especially enlightening. The following is a partial but not exhaustive list of references:
James Adams, Israel and South Africa: The Unnatural Alliance (Quartet Books, London, 1984).
Sue Armstrong, In search of freedom: the Andreas Shipana Story (Ashanti Publishing, Gibraltor, 1989). This book is unfortunately mistitled because it is the most authentic and rigorous inside story of SWAPO in exile yet to be published.
Amnesty International, Political Imprisonment in the People’s Republic of Angola (Amnesty International, London, 1984).
Gerald Bender, Angola under the Portuguese: The Myth and The Reality (London, Heinemann, 1978).
Fred Bridgland, Jonas Savimbi:A Key to Africa (Coronet, London, 1986).
Chester Crocker, with Mario Greznes and Robert Henderson, Southern Africa – A US Policy for the 80s (Africa Report, Washington DC, February 1981).
Francis Deng and William Zartman, Conflict Resolution in Africa (Brookings Institution, Washington DC, 1991).
Jannie Geldenhuys, At the Front: A General’s Account of South Africa’s Border War (Jonathan Ball, Cape Town, 2008).
Edward George, The Cuban Intervention in Angola, 1965–1991, from Che Guevara to Cuito Cuanavale (Routledge, London, 2005).
Richard Gibson, African Liberation Movements: Contemporary Struggles Against White Minority Rule (Oxford University Press, 1972).
Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991 (University of North Carolina Press, 2013). A comprehensive analysis of the Cuban role in Angola and the War for Africa from the Cuban viewpoint by a pro-Castro academic. Gleijeses is Professor of US foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He is the only foreign scholar to have been allowed access to Cuba’s Castro-era government archives. Gleijeses refused to condemn the Cuban intervention in Ethiopia on behalf of the Marxist dictator President Mariam Mengistu who between 1974 and 1991 ran a ‘Red Terror’ campaign in which an estimated half a million to 1.5 million of his fellow countrymen died. Mengistu is now in his 80s. He fled Ethiopia and lives under high security in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. In absentia, he was found guilty of genocide by Ethiopia’s High Court and sentenced to death. President Mugabe has refused to extradite Mengistu.
Helmoed-Römer Heitman, South African Arms and Armour (Struik, Cape Town, 1988).
Helmoed-Römer Heitman, War in Angola: The Final South African Phase (Ashanti Publishing, Gibraltar, 1990). This book, based on official SADF records, was an excellent guide to the thinking of the top brass.
Lawrence W Henderson, Angola: Five Centuries of Conflict (Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1980).
Tony Hodges, ‘How the MPLA Won in Angola,’ in Colin Legum and Tony Hodges, eds., After Angola: The War Over Southern Africa, (London, Rex Collings, 1976).
Jane’s Armour and Artillery, Jane’s Infantry Weapons, and Jane’s Weapons Systems (Jane’s Information Group, Coulsdon, UK).
Colin Legum, The Western Crisis Over Southern Africa (African Publishing Company, New York and London, 1979).
Mao Tse-tung [Zedong], Guerrilla Warfare, translated by Brigadier General Samuel B Griffith (Anchor Press/Doubleday, New York, 1978).
David Mannall, Battle on the Lomba 1987: A Crew Commander’s Account (Helion Books, Solihull, UK, 2015).
John Marcum, The Angolan Revolution, Volume 1: The Anatomy of an Explosion, 1950–1962 (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969).
John Marcum, The Angolan Revolution, Volume 2: Exile Politics and Guerrilla Warfare, 1962–76 (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1978).
Gabriel García Márquez’s Cuban account of the ‘internationalist military mission’ to Angola, in the Havana magazine Proceso in January 1977. It was also serialised in three issues of the Washington Post, 10–12 January 1977, under the title ‘Cuba in Africa: Seed Che (Guevara) Planted’. The account by Marquez, the Colombian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and close friend of Fidel Castro, is an extraordinarily entertaining, boastful and sensationalistic piece of work, patronising and racist in tone. In one passage Marquez laments the ‘cultural backwardness’ of the MPLA Africans the Cubans found themselves working with, and goes on: ‘Old African supersititions not only complicated daily life but also hindered the war effort. The Angolans had been convinced that the bullets would not penetrate white skin. They feared the magic of airplanes and refused to go into trenches because tombs were only for the dead ... It was a dirty war in which Cubans had to watch out as much for snakes as for mercenaries, as much for cannibals as cannonballs. A Cuban commander, in the midst of battle, fell into an elephant trap. Many times Cuban scouts felt betrayed by the primitive telegraph of the talking drums, whose thumping could be heard for as much as 20 miles.’ This cliché-ridden nonsense is unrecognisable to anyone who has spent any length of time in the tragic territory known as Angola. It reflected the general inaccuracy of the Marques account. But such was his reputation that the Cuban ‘truths’ he asserted became incontrovertible ones in many minds far beyond Cuba.
Gabriel García Márquez, ‘Operation Carlota,’ New Left Review (January–April 1977). The official account of Cuba’s initial involvement in the Angola conflict.
Lara Pawson, In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre (I.B. Tauris, London, 2014). An outstandingly brave account by a former BBC correspondent of atrocities perpetrated by Angola’s ruling MPLA.
Leopold Scholtz, The Battle of Cuito Cuanavale (Helion and Company, Solihull, UK, 2016).
Vladimir Shubin, The Hot ‘Cold War’ (Pluto Press, London, 2008).
Willem Steenkamp, South Africa’s Border War 1969–1989 (Ashanti Publishing, Gibraltar, 1989).
John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story (Andre Deutsch, London, 1984). This is an account by the former head of the CIA Task Force in Angola of how the Americans first got deeply involved in the Angolan civil war in 1974 and then withdrew at the end of 1975. When the American effort failed, Stockwell resigned from the agency and threw his support behind the MPLA.
Hugh Thomas, The Cuban Revolution (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1986).
Paul Trewhela, Inside Quatro: Uncovering the exile history of the ANC and SWAPO (Jacana Media, Johannesburg, 2010), an account of the African National Congress’ activities in exile in Angola, a history the ANC would probably prefer to forget, by an author and journalist who was imprisoned for three years in South Africa in the 1960s for his anti-apartheid activism.
Jiri Valenta and Frank Cibulka, eds., Gorbachev’s New Thinking and Third World Conflicts (Transaction Books, New Brunswick, New Jersey, US, 1990).
Al J Venter, Challenge: South Africa Within the African Revolutionary Context (Ashanti Publishing, Gibraltar, 1989).
Michael Wolfers and Jane Bergerol, Angola in the Front Line (Zed Books, London, 1983). This is a book on the Angolan war written from the MPLA perspective by two British sympathisers who worked for the movement in Luanda.
Magazine and newspaper articles from newspapers in Europe, Africa and North America are too numerous to list. But I found the following particularly valuable:
The Johannesburg Sunday Star’s eight-page supplement, entitled ‘Mission Impossible: The Long Search for a Namibian Settlement’ (9 April 1990). This is an excellent account, full of human insights, into the Chester Crocker-brokered negotiations on Namibia and Angola between Cuba, the MPLA and South Africa through 1987 and 1988 right up to the signing of the New York Accords in December 1988.
Military Technology, a high-quality monthly magazine on weapons innovation published by the Monch Group, Bonn, West Germany.
Africa Confidential, an excellent monthly newsletter published in London on African politics rich in facts and informed speculation. The editor in the 1980s and 1990s, the late Stephen Ellis, managed to upset all sides in every country, so Africa Confidential must have been getting a lot right.
International Defence Review, probably the best of the multinational monthly journals on weapons, military developments worldwide and conflict; part of the Jane’s Information Group and carried outstanding coverage of the Angolan war.