Terror & Reform

Around the entire perimeter of Angola's breezy seaport capital of Luanda ran an illuminated wire fence. Portuguese patrols checked every car entering and leaving the city. To the north, near the Congolese border, Portuguese army units beat through the 12-ft.-high elephant grass, warily on the watch for ambush; overhead, planes from Portugal's antiquated air force rolled lazily, occasionally dropping firebombs into the impenetrable forests to smoke out the enemies they knew were there.

The enemies are the 5,000 black terrorists, organized and led from Leopoldville in the neighboring Congo by expatriate Angolan Nationalist Leader Holden Roberto, who has kept the revolt against Portugal's harsh colonial rule simmering for 17 months. Convinced by their witch doctors that Portuguese bullets would turn to water, and smeared with white paste that they thought would make them invisible, the rebels last year began an orgy of terror. Armed with machetes and crude rifles made from pipe, old cans and rubber bands, they mutilated their victims because of the native belief that mutilation prevents a body from going to heaven; men's penises were chopped off and nailed to trees, women were impaled on sticks. One coffee plantation owner was forced to watch while his dead wife and children were fed into a buzz saw.

The Portuguese retaliated with a vengeance, killed ten blacks for every white man murdered; since the rebellion began, some 1,300 whites and 13,000 blacks have died violently. Portugal poured troops into the colony until it had quintupled its garrisons (to 40,000). Slowly they restored a semblance of order; now the war has settled into a sporadic series of guerrilla ambushes and sniping skirmishes.

Badly scared by the savagery of the rebellion, Portugal has begun to ease some of the more repressive practices that provoked it. But after a swing through the troubled land, TIME Correspondent Lee Griggs reports that Angola is still virtually a feudal Portuguese fief -and a tinderbox for further revolt.

Diluted Apartheid. Tentatively, the Portuguese have begun a resettlement program in the north aimed to entice Angola's black masses into new government villages offering schools, churches, and medical facilities previously unavailable to them. Though the program is showing results, it involves a slow, laborious and wary process. Usually the maneuver begins with a Portuguese army patrol finding a message in pidgin Portuguese tacked to a tree by some natives asking food or a bag of salt. The provisions are left as requested, plus a note offering safe-conduct to a resettlement village. In this way, some 250,000 Africans have so far been moved into such centers.

On the face of it, there is no apartheid in Angola. Under paternalistic Portuguese rule, the races have mixed so freely that Angola has a proportionately high mulatto population. Some natives with ability have been allowed to earn good money, and today in Luanda's Continental Hotel it is common to see whites waiting on blacks. But the vast majority of Africans have been kept down by almost total lack of education and by labor laws which kept them in near bondage. These laws are now being overhauled.

Specter of Violence. Grudgingly, Portugal has allowed an infusion of foreign capital; hydroelectric plants and factories are going up, while foreign consortiums are preparing to tap Angola's oil and mineral resources. But the Portuguese keep such tight control over the use of foreign funds that many investors are scared off. New hospitals are being built in the bush, and bulldozers are plowing through Luanda's disgraceful slums, preparing new housing projects. A crash program to build new schools should double Angola's school population by 1963. Fortnight ago, the Portuguese government agreed to the opening of Angola's first university next October.

Despite such important but belated measures, there still hangs over the country the specter of future violence. Portugal's victory over the rebels was greatly aided by the bitter hostility between Holden Roberto's U.P.A. (Union of the Angolan Peoples) and the Communist-backed M.P.L.A. (Movement for the Liberation of Angola) led by Mario de Andrade, a Sorbonne-educated, Red-lining mulatto. The rival groups often seemed to hate each other worse than they hated the Portuguese; both Roberto and Andrade were the targets of assassination attempts by the other faction. Should the two organizations ever reach a truce, Angola could once more be drenched in blood. The rebels now have automatic weapons and land mines; plastiqueurs trained by Algeria's F.L.N. have begun to infiltrate into Angola, ready to continue the terror with their plastic bombs.

Portugal is determined not to be forced out of Angola, and is racing against time to regain the confidence of the politically indifferent African masses. Itself one of Europe's most backward countries, politically and economically, Portugal has not made enough headway in coping with the violent forces of the African present.

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