Angola, the Alves Coup and Massacre - a Rejoinder to Paul Trewhela

It is never a good way to start one's week reading an attempted character assassination, especially when yours is the character someone is trying to assassinate. That is my situation today having read Paul Trewhela's very personal attack on me in a piece that starts off discussing the upcoming Mandela conference that I have co-organized with Martin Plaut at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies on the legacy of Nelson Mandela. Paul has been invited to attend the event and we are looking forward to his observations on the array of papers being presented.

But it is easier to weather sniping and attacks on one's integrity when they are inaccurate, highly selective and in that selectivity totally ignore aspects of one's work that would be inconvenient for the focus of the criticism. That is the case with the rather bitter, strange attack he has embarked upon - I say strange as I have never met Paul or done other than exchange a few e-mails with him.

The focus was on the links between South Africa and Angola in the context of Mandela's membership of the South African Communist Party. Paul seems to think it a problem that I am organising the conference having written a book 28 years ago on Angola's attempts to develop a Marxist-Leninist system.

I'm not quite sure I see the problem, but Paul's view is that I write the book from a Marxist perspective and without mentioning the Alves massacre of May 1977. It is true that I do not report that appalling and very widespread killing of real or imagined supporters of the former Angolan Interior Minister Nito Alves. But I do mention the events surrounding them, the violence of the coup attempt, its repression and the purging of Alves supporters from the MPLA.

Why did I not cover the massacre? That is quite simple. Because it was hidden - not by me as Trewhela states, though certainly by other journalists closely connected with the MPLA government and uncritically sympathetic towards it. When I was approached to write the book in 1984, I tried to get a visa to carry out research in Angola.

I was told someone in the party, government or popular organisations in Angola would have to invite me for me to get a visa. I approached pro-Angolan groups like MAGIC (Mozambioque, Angola, Guine Information Centre) and also the official Angolan news agency, ANGOP, both of which had offices in London.

No invitation was forthcoming and so no visa. This made research difficult, especially as other than reports from the MPLA itself, from South Africa (then fighting the Angolan government), from UNITA, from American government information and journalistic reportage there were no other sources if you couldn't get to Angola.

Even Angolan journalists at the BBC World Service, couldn't help much with firm information about the coup, the massacres and executions. These were hidden by the Angolan government. Those British journalists who were close to the government and able to visit the country saw it as vital to maintain solidarity given the destabilization of frontline states by South Africa and clearly felt honest reporting would undermine that MPLA government.

I was sympathetic to the MPLA but critical - a level of criticism that Paul has chosen not to select in the very carefully chosen and truncated passages from my book that he quotes. He misses out the context I provide and the criticism - criticism that ensured that it wasn't until 1995 that I was able to get a visa to visit Angola through the Red Cross.

If he has read the whole book, he has chosen to ignore my conclusions that MPLA policies would "create a small urban elite remote from the overwhelming mass of the peasantry and operating in a vacuum" or that it was deploying "a misplaced insistence on dogmatic Marxist-Leninist principles that are not applicable to Angola" and pointing out that the Angolans were trying to make a Soviet model fit Angola despite the evident contradictions in that. Not exactly the words of a true believer.

But returning to my supposed hiding of the Alves massacres. Trewhela cites a review by Richard Dowden of Lara Pawson's excellent book digging into the real story and the extent of killing and repression - a book only published last year and detailing the massive obstacles to finding out anything concrete about the massacres.

He was aware that on the same Royal African Society website, I wrote a review of the book praising it and pointing out why writers like me had been unable, rather than unwilling, to uncover the truth about the purges and killings (see here). And here it is best to quote what I wrote about the difficulties in researching these events:

"Any willingness to probe internal activities of the movement and ask awkward questions was held back by the wish to express solidarity with those fighting apartheid. Consequently, too much of what the Angolan government and the MPLA said was taken at face value. It was also the reason why challenges to the MPLA leadership from within the movement were viewed with suspicion and even hostility by many Angola watchers. This partly explains the reaction Lara Pawson got from a number of British journalists and writers on Angola like Michael Wolfers, Victoria Britain and Basil Davidson, when she was trying to find out what they knew and thought about the movement led by Nito Alves and Zé Van Dunem that sought to challenge the hegemony of Agostinho Neto, Lucio Lara and Iko Carreira..."

In the review, I go on to point out that, "I, too, was sympathetic to the MPLA, but critically so. It made me no friends among some Angola-philes when my writings on the MPLA's commitment to Marxism-Leninism questioned whether its unimaginative, mechanistic and a-historical interpretation was really appropriate to Angolan realities. This meant that when I tried to get to Angola to do research I was rebuffed...when I tried to find out more about what the Alves ‘coup' was about I didn't get very far .."

This review was published alongside Dowden's but was curiously overlooked in the clumsy hatchet job on my work. I make no pretence about my sympathies but nor do I about my thwarted attempts to dig beneath the surface and criticize on the basis of fact rather than supposition, something Paul failed to do in his very narrow and ill-informed approach to my writings.

I'm still grappling what point Trewhela was trying to make when after reproducing parts of my CV from my Kent University page, he says: "It is a weird and wonderful fact in the world of the BBC and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, that non-reporting of a massacre of between 20,000 and 30,000 people becomes in the course of time a matter of "Humanitarian Communications"."

There is clumsy innuendo there but to what effect? I was unable to find out more about the Angolan massacres in 1986, I did not hide anything as he suggests because to hide something you have to have it or know about it. And that is relevant how, when it comes to my current work and teaching? I leave it to readers to judge.

Keith Somerville is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London, teaches at the Centre for Journalism at the University of Kent, and is the author of a number of books on Angola, the Soviet Union and Southern Africa and conflict in Africa. His latest book Africa's Long Road Since Independence is being published by Hurst and Co in May 2015.

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