In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

IN SEARCH OF ENEMIES
a taste for wealth and entrepreneurship as the Portuguese subjugated
them by playing tribal factions against each other. In 1902 the Bailundu
king, Mutu wa Kwelu, led a general uprising that held out for
two years against a Portuguese expeditionary force. Simultaneously
the Cuanhama people further south sustained a resistance for four
years before they too were suppressed. In the mid 1950s the Ovimbundu
trailed the Mbundu and Bakongo in prenationalist development,
not because they were less resentful of Portuguese domination,
but because of their isolation in central Angola. Fewer managed to
obtain European educations, and it was not until 1966 that they
mounted an active resistance to the Portuguese.
Jonas Malheiro Savimbi was born August 3, 1934, to a prominent
family of the Ovimbundu people at Munhango on the railroad near
Luso. His father, Lot Malheiro Savimbi, was a railroad station master
who had been converted to Christianity by an American evangelical
mission. Lot Savimbi started and ran a grade school and church
at his first small rail station, until protests by the Portuguese Catholic
clergy resulted in his being transferred to another post. The local
population continued nevertheless to support the little church, and
Savimbi started another at his next post. Again he was transferred.
And again. The end result was a string of schools and churches along
the railroad in central Angola.
Jonas Savimbi inherited his father's respect for education. He
attended Protestant mission schools, including the secondary high
school at Silva Porto, and eventually graduated from the Liceu at Sa
da Bandeira, Angola, at the top of his class.
In 1958 Jonas Savimbi was one of a pioneer group sent by the
United Church of Christ to study medicine in Portugal. Badgered by
the Portuguese police, he left Portugal in 1960 and continued his
education in Switzerland, switching from medicine to political science.
In 1961 Savimbi committed himself to revolutionary activities,
joining the FNLA as the GRAE foreign minister, and accompanying
Roberto on one visit to the United Nations. However, in 1963-1964
diverging interests of the central Angolan people led him to split with
the FNLA and begin organizing an Ovimbundu movement.* In 1967
•CIA biographic publications reflect Holden Roberto's prejudices by claiming that
in 1966 Roberto sent Savimbi to Cairo to hand-carry a s50,ooo donation from the