The Protracted Conflict

Cuanza, Angola. After extensive inquiry in southern Africa, Nicolas Ashford—a British journalist with long African experience—concludes: “There are many signs that the Angolan civil war is still far from over.” In a dispatch published by the London Times, Ashford, basing himself on first-hand reports reaching neighboring black African countries, writes that “the Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita) still controls huge areas in the center and south and is reorganizing for a guerrilla offensive against the MPLA.”

Ashford has interviewed Unita officers on visits to “a black African country” (the anonymity is deliberate), some of them recuperating from combat injuries. They insist that in the center and south “the MPLA controls the towns but we have the countryside.” One officer named areas in which Unita forces were operating, ranging as far north as Müssende, to the vicinities of Silva Porto in the center, and the port of Moçamedes in the south.

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James Burnham

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Cuanza, Angola. After extensive inquiry in southern Africa, Nicolas Ashford—a British journalist with long African experience—concludes: “There are many signs that the Angolan civil war is still far from over.” In a dispatch published by the London Times, Ashford, basing himself on first-hand reports reaching neighboring black African countries, writes that “the Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita) still controls huge areas in the center and south and is reorganizing for a guerrilla offensive against the MPLA.”

Ashford has interviewed Unita officers on visits to “a black African country” (the anonymity is deliberate), some of them recuperating from combat injuries. They insist that in the center and south “the MPLA controls the towns but we have the countryside.” One officer named areas in which Unita forces were operating, ranging as far north as Müssende, to the vicinities of Silva Porto in the center, and the port of Moçamedes in the south.