Cuito Canavale: 12 Months of War that Transformed a Continent

Cuito Cuanavale: 12 Months of War that Transformed a Continent

By Fred Bridgland

Jonathan Ball. R200

It's been 30 years since Cuito Cuanavale became a landmark in the Angolan civil war. South African and Angolan troops, some of them just boys, died there. So did many Cubans. The full casualty toll in a war that was fought mainly in secret is still unknown. Along with the mysteries are the myths, one of them being that a decisive battle was fought around the little town between 1987 and 1988. There certainly was some fighting, but the big battle was fought 170km to the south-east on the Lomba River and it ended decisively in favour of South Africa and its ally Unita. An entire brigade of the Angolan army was wiped out at the Lomba, forcing a retreat by the Angolans and Cubans back across the confluence of the Cuito and Cuanavale rivers. There, in 1988, the fighting ended in either a stalemate, if you accept the military facts, or in a victory for the MPLA and Cubans, if you believe Fidel Castro’s propaganda. Bridgland’s book remains one of the best accounts of the war. As a Reuters correspondent assigned to Lusaka, he arrived as a young idealist filled with notions of 'liberating the whole of southern Africa by the power of my pen'.