The Red Flag: A History of Communism (72 page)

Divisions within the Communist world also played a part in the failure of the
foco
. At first, the Soviets tolerated the Cubans in Latin America, but they soon decided that they were becoming too expensive, their plans were unrealistic, and they were spoiling relations with the United States at a time when Moscow sought détente. Local Communist parties in other Latin American countries also resented what they saw as
Havana’s unrealistic ambitions. Most followed Moscow’s gradualist line: Communists and workers had to unite with peasants and the bourgeoisie, rejecting a sudden Cuban-style leap from ‘feudalism’ to ‘socialism’. Nor did the Chinese help the insurgencies, despite their guerrilla origins. Their relations with Cuba were poor, and whilst Maoist groups did spring up – usually made up of extreme hard-liners – they secured little practical support from Beijing.
⁵⁸

By the mid-1960s, it was clear that rural guerrilla revolution on the continent was failing, and the Cubans realized they had to retreat. They had, however, already found another outlet for their revolutionary energies – Africa. The Cubans felt a strong link with Africa: about a third of its own population could trace connections through ancestors brought to the island as slaves. The revolutionaries had formally abolished all racial discrimination in Cuba, and believed they had a mission to do the same abroad. But to the Cubans, Africa was also a continent where the United States seemed vulnerable, a power on the wrong side of history as the continent threw off European imperialism.

In December 1964, Che Guevara embarked on a three-month tour of the radical nationalist states of Africa, and in January 1965 he reached Brazzaville, the capital of the formerly French Congo. In 1963 the first self-proclaimed Marxist regime in Africa had taken power in an insurrection there, and the new government of Alphonse Massemba-Debat was happy to host the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (
Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola
, known as the MPLA), which was struggling against Portuguese rule in its south-west African colony. The meeting was a tense one. The MPLA wanted Cuban help, but Che was determined to pour all of his resources into the war in the neighbouring Congo-Léopoldville, where the Simbas (‘Lions’) – leftist followers of the assassinated Patrice Lumumba – were staging a remarkably successful rebellion against the American- and Belgian-backed regime. Che proposed that the MPLA send their fighters to Congo-Léopoldville and learn from Cuban trainers on the ground, in the course of the fighting. Naturally the MPLA, and its leader, the doctor and poet Agostinho Neto, were unenthusiastic about fighting somebody else’s
war, but despite their differences, the prevailing atmosphere was a good one as the MPLA were a Marxist group, and they had much in common with Che.
⁵⁹
As one of the MPLA leaders at the meeting remembered:

Che was not only impressed by the Angolans’ Marxism, but also by their apparent strength. He sent one of his associates to their training camp, where he saw an impressive guerrilla force, little realizing that what was being paraded before him was a continuous loop of the same men. He should have spotted the ruse, for the Cubans had done exactly the same thing when parading before journalists from the
New York Times
in the Sierra Maestra.
⁶¹
But the Cubans were fooled, and Che relented, agreeing to send instructors to the MPLA in Congo-Brazzaville.

The following month, Che had a much less successful encounter with African guerrilla fighters in Dar-es-Salaam, the capital of Tanzania, which under the African socialist Julius Nyerere had become the main centre for exiled fighters in the anti-imperialist struggle. The Cuban embassy gathered a meeting of about fifty people from a number of liberation movements, all seeking Che’s support. Che’s proposal that they all send their guerrillas to Congo-Léopoldville was received in an atmosphere that was ‘worse than cool’, as he remembered. His audience objected that their duty was to defend their own people, not help other liberation movements. But although Che insisted that they had a common enemy – imperialism – and a blow against it in Congo-Léopoldville would help everybody, he was forced to concede that ‘no one saw it like that’. Eduardo Mondlane, former United Nations diplomat and leader of FRELIMO (
Frente de Libertação de Moçambique
) – the guerrilla movement fighting the Portuguese in Mozambique – was especially angry. At the end of the meeting, ‘the farewells were cool and polite’, and Che concluded: ‘we were left with the clear sense that Africa has a long way to go before it reaches real revolutionary maturity. But we also had the joy of meeting people prepared to carry the struggle through to the end.’
⁶²

Che’s efforts to persuade his audience to contribute to the Congo-Léopoldville war were a failure, as was the expedition of black Cubans he led to help the Simbas. The insurgency was defeated in 1965, and the Cubans were driven out. But his encounters in Brazzaville and Dar-es-Salaam had given him a good idea of the state of the left in Africa, from the ‘Marxist’ government of Brazzaville to the African socialist state of Tanzania, from the Marxist insurgents in Angola to the non-Marxist guerrillas of Mozambique. His judgement – that nationalism in Africa was radically anti-imperialist but not ‘mature’ (by which he meant fully ‘Marxist’) – was broadly accurate.

Nyerere was the most common type of nationalist leader in the independent parts of Africa of the early 1960s: a non-Marxist, indigenous socialist of the Bandung generation. African socialists had much in common with the Russian agrarian socialists of the nineteenth century. Just as the latter had seen Russian peasant society as a communitarian idyll, so Nyerere and his fellow socialists believed that African society was naturally collectivist. Nyerere claimed that ‘the idea of “class” and “caste” was non-existent in African society’, and Africa’s unique concept of ‘familyhood’ (
ujamaa
) would help the continent develop a special form of socialism.
⁶³
Such philosophies were inevitably attractive to leaders who had inherited states riven by ethnic divisions from the European empires. For them, Marxism, with its love of class struggle, was much too aggressive a creed for their fragile new states, whilst the small vanguard party seemed to be unsuited to countries that were so divided along ethnic lines. The all-inclusive ‘mass party’ was, for a time, much more attractive.

Some African leaders did move towards a more Marxist politics, believing that only a more ambitious state would promote economic development and prevent continuing neo-colonial subjection. European and American interventions also pushed African socialists to the left, and the Lumumba assassination played an equivalent role in Africa to the toppling of Arbenz in Latin America. Guinea’s Sékou Touré, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella, and Mali’s Modibo Kéïta all, therefore, moved towards a more radical, quasi-Marxist politics. Africa’s weaknesses, they were convinced, would have to be resolved by a more determined, centralized state. As Nkrumah explained, ‘socialism is not spontaneous. It does not arise by itself.’
⁶⁴
By 1961, he had established an ‘ideological institute’ to indoctrinate ruling party officials,
and in 1964 he had launched a Seven-Year Plan for industrialization.

However, Ghana retained a mixed economy and foreign capital was welcomed. And whilst questioning their old optimistic African socialism, and welcoming Soviet, Chinese and Cuban aid, these leaders were not ready to embrace a full-blown internationalist Marxism. Marxist influence was still weak in Africa, and it flourished only in particular conditions. The Marxist Congo-Brazzaville had an unusually large urban and literate population of civil servants and students, and they were receptive to Western ideas and responsive to the highly charged events in neighbouring Congo-Léopoldville. Political forces also reflected a French prototype, and as in France the Communists had a great deal of power over the trade unions. To these urban dwellers, a French-style Marxism promised modernity and independence. President Massemba-Debat was relatively moderate, but more radical Marxists, connected with the party’s youth group, soon became influential as the regime tried to consolidate its power. By the middle of 1964 Congo had a single Marxist-Leninist-style party and an ideologically trained ‘Popular Army’. Moreover, on the failure of Che’s mission to Congo-Léopoldville in 1965, some of the Cubans crossed the border to Congo-Brazzaville, and had a further radicalizing effect on the regime.
⁶⁵

The influence of Marxism is perhaps least surprising in the guerrilla groups that confronted the Portuguese empire in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea (renamed Guinea-Bissau on independence). The Portuguese, under the authoritarian dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, were determined to hold on to their empire and the long struggle inevitably radicalized politics. But there were other reasons why Marxism should have appealed in the specific conditions of Portuguese Africa.

Thus began the novel
Mayombe
, written in the early 1970s by a white Angolan fighter in the Marxist MPLA forces, Artur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos Santos, better known by his
nom de guerres,
‘Pepetela’. As the dedication makes clear, the novel is about Promethean modernity and war, for Ogun is an African warrior god. It is the story of a group of guerrillas fighting the Portuguese in the dense forest of Mayombe, and much of it is taken up with everyday life. But it also includes interior monologues by the characters that reveal the continuing tensions within the guerrilla band. One of the novel’s main themes is the effort to forge a modern Angolan people and end the divisions of tribe and the racist colonial past. The novel shows how, eventually, the guerrillas succeed in overcoming these differences, but the continuing tribalism and racial prejudice of the fighters are made very clear to the reader. As Theory – the half-Portuguese, half-African former teacher with a highly ideological
nom de guerre
– explains at the beginning of the novel:

But despite Theory’s complaints about Marxism as practised by MPLA guerrillas, Marxism in theory became enormously attractive to the
mestiços
(mixed race) and
assimilados
– the small group of Africans and Indians educated in Portugal to help administer the colonial state – because it gave class pre-eminence over race.
⁶⁸
For people who had been placed in a rigid racial hierarchy between Portuguese
civilizados
and African
indígenas
, Marxism provided an opportunity to forge bonds with black African workers and peasants. It also promised to create a modern integrated state, capable of standing tall in the world. Moreover, after the war the
mestiços
and
assimilados
had particular reason to be angry, for they faced competition for jobs from new immigrants from Portugal.

At first, these nationalists’ main interests were largely cultural: ‘de-Portugalizing’ and ‘re-Africanizing’ Angolan culture. But they were always self-conscious modernizers, seeking to create large, European-style states out of numerous tribal groups. It is therefore no surprise that they moved towards Modernist, Soviet-influenced Marxism,
especially as one of the few forces to oppose the Salazar regime was the underground Portuguese Communist Party, which established an Angolan party in 1954. And even though – like the French Communists – the party did not wholly condemn the empire or defend national liberation until 1960, many modernizing nationalists came into its orbit.
⁶⁹

Marxism had a particular influence on the Portuguese Africans who studied in Lisbon, and especially on a group of friends who met regularly to discuss African affairs and included Agostinho Neto, the future leader of the MPLA, and the Cape Verdean agronomy student Amílcar Cabral, the future leader of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (
Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde
– PAIGC). However, their commitments to Marxism varied. Neto became a member of the Portuguese Communist Party and remained an orthodox, pro-Soviet Marxist throughout his life, whilst Cabral’s Marxism was much more flexible.
⁷⁰

On their return to Africa, it became increasingly clear that the Portuguese were not going to give up their colonies without a fight. In 1961 political activists and local youths in Angola’s capital tried to release political prisoners from Luanda’s Bastille – the São Paolo gaol; they failed and the police stood by whilst the Portuguese settlers exacted an extremely bloody revenge. Nationalists now became convinced that they had little choice but to retreat to the countryside and resort to the gun.