Lúcio Lara, who has died aged 86, was one of the leading figures in the Angolan war of independence against Portugal and a key member of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) which took power in 1975. He remained prominent during the ensuing period of undeclared war across the region waged by South Africa in the 1970s and 80s, when much of southern Angola was occupied.
Alongside his colleague Agostinho Neto, who became the first president of Angola, and with Amílcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Samora Machel of Mozambique, and Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Lara played a vital part in the liberation movements of southern Africa during the cold war years. After Cabral’s assassination in 1973, Lara and Neto embodied the idealism and moral tone of the Portuguese-speaking African colonies’ fight. Even when he was ousted from political power in the late 80s, Lara remained an honoured reference for many.
He was the son of a Portuguese father, Lúcio Gouveia Barreto de Lara, who worked as a farm manager and then shopkeeper, and an Angolan mother, Clementina. He was brought up and went to school in the central highlands town of Huambo and then went to university in Coimbra, in central Portugal. He started his political life there in the late 40s, and, as a member of the African Studies Centre in Lisbon, soon met some of the other men who would become historic names in the African wars of independence from Portugal – Cabral, Mário de Andrade and Marcelino dos Santos.
By 1957, Lara was active in underground independence politics and represented the Anti-Colonial Movement (MAC) – which included all the Portuguese colonies, including Goa – at the fifth congress of the Portuguese Communist party (PCP), in Lisbon. He was smuggled into the meeting lying on the floor of a large wedding taxi, which was driven into a garage, and from there he was taken in through a tunnel that had been dug to the house. At that gathering, the PCP took a position, for the first time, in favour of independence for the colonies. However, the party’s attempts to get the Angolan nationalists to work for it were never accepted, mainly because of Lara and Neto’s vision that the independence struggle belonged to its own people.
Two years later, Lara’s presence at the PCP congress was betrayed to the Portuguese secret police, and he fled just before any arrest could be made. He spent some time in Germany and then returned with his family to Africa and to overt liberation politics, via Tunis, Rabat, a period working in Conakry in Guinea and then Leopoldville (now Kinshasa), before finally settling in Congo-Brazzaville. His wife, Ruth Pflüger, was also a veteran of underground politics in Portugal, and she worked as a maths teacher in Conakry and Brazzaville. Lara also worked as a teacher, of maths and physics, in parallel with his political activities.
In 1960 he became a founder member of the first external direction committee of the MPLA, and from 1962 organising secretary of the movement. He was linked with the key African revolutionaries of the time, including Mehdi Ben Barka, Sékou Touré, Kwame Nkrumah, Félix Moumié and Frantz Fanon, the psychiatrist from Martinique who worked in Algeria. The anti-colonial movement had allies in Britain as well. In 1961, in a meeting in the House of Commons organised by the Labour MP Fenner Brockway and the historian Basil Davidson, the Portuguese colonies, still presenting themselves in a group as MAC, announced the beginning of “direct action” – having been warned by their hosts not to say the words “armed struggle” in London. In fact, by then, the various independence movements had formed their own distinct organisations, and in Angola the armed struggle had begun.
But the shadow of racial politics, which was to be so damaging to Angola over the years, surfaced in 1963 with challenges to Lara’s position, and that of others in the leadership, because they were “mestiços” (of mixed race). One of the founder members of the MPLA, Viriato da Cruz, himself a mestiço, left the organisation and joined the rival, black-led party the FNLA. A simplistic interpretation of Fanon’s work brought him and others to believe that mestiço intellectuals were too far from the people, and should accept black African leadership. But Neto stood firm against the pressures to oust mestiços from the movement’s senior ranks.
By 1964 the MPLA’s operational headquarters was based in Dolisie, in southern Congo-Brazzavile. Brazzaville and Dolisie became the heart of the MPLA, and a sophisticated education programme, with support from Scandinavia, was built up by Lara to prepare for independence. Dolisie, and after 1966 Lusaka in Zambia, became the bases for the armed struggle inside Angola that would last until independence in 1975.
In 1965, Che Guevara made the first high-level Cuban contact with the Angolans, meeting Lara and Neto in Brazzaville. The MPLA leaders asked him for Cuban military instructors, and nine arrived within four months. The guerrilla war moved up the scale in professionalism and daring with attacks in northern Angola’s Cabinda province. Lara, the consummate intellectual, had become a fighter before the Cubans arrived, and he forged personal bonds that lasted all his life with that handful of men.
The 10 years of guerrilla war against the power of Portugal’s Nato-supplied army were extremely testing times, and Lara carried heavy political responsibilities in the forging of the MPLA’s policies within a political bureau often divided by power struggles. Besides the fighting, the young movement had to deal with betrayals of ambitious men, including Jonas Savimbi, who had pretended to join the MPLA in 1961, but then joined the rival FNLA before forming his own movement, Unita.
External players, including the Chinese and the CIA, all had large roles in the power struggle against the MPLA. Angola became the focus of cold war politics for western governments that still hoped to hold off majority rule in South Africa. But on 8 November 1974, with Portugal ready to give up its colonies, Lara led the first official delegation of the MPLA to the capital city of Luanda. It was the last phase of the independence struggle after a ceasefire was signed in June 1974.
In 1975, apartheid South Africa invaded Angola from the south, and some months later Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), aided by British and American mercenaries, invaded from the north. On the brink of independence, it could have been the breaking point for the MPLA. The arrival of Cuban troops, however, stopped the South African invasion and prevented forces reaching Luanda. On 11 November 1975, Neto was declared president, and Lara, as organising secretary of the MPLA, was to be the key figure in the shaping of the new political order.
The early years of independence were marked by a violent ultra-left coup attempt against Neto, and a harsh military response to it, which left deep divisions, and then by the death of Neto in 1979. Lara’s history and authority made him a natural successor, but he did not want to play the role of leader, even for a steadying transition, and José Eduardo dos Santos came to power.
Political in-fighting continued in the subsequent period while the country was under extreme pressure from the apartheid regime in South Africa and the US. There were direct invasions of the south, massive sabotage of infrastructure, and the buildup of Savimbi’s Unita by Pretoria and the CIA. Angola was broken, and meanwhile a campaign of US political destabilisation targeted Lara, among others, as a man whose political influence had to be neutralised. His politics and analysis were too clear, “this is a war of imperialism ... they want us to work with their yes men ...” he used to tell popular meetings.
He was dropped from the political bureau in 1985, but left the central committee only some years later, for health reasons.
By then Angola’s socialism belonged to the past, broken by the war launched by the apartheid regime and supported by the Americans, and by the lack of social forces capable of building what Lara, Neto and so many of their generation had dreamed of.
Lara valued and loved history, and he made an incredible effort to preserve the historical archive of the Angolan struggle that had been his life’s work. Ruth organised and published three volumes of MPLA history, and their daughter, Wanda, continues their work.
But Lara was much more than a brilliant analyst and dedicated political leader for Angola. Behind the austerity was a man who loved life and beauty. I have seen him laugh and talk to his pet monkeys as he fed them; waltz beautifully with a fiery Cuban schoolteacher in a provincial town under siege by Unita for months; appreciate classical and modern ballet; walk for miles in parks in London, or on beaches in Angola with his dog; sit peacefully for hours over a coffee, reading Le Monde from cover to cover on a rare break in Europe.
At the centre of his life was his family, and his connection of trust to Angola’s powerless. At home, there were always humble people waiting to see him with their troubles. In rural areas, peasants would not hesitate to tell him everything on their minds. I have seen policemen at a roadblock, look into the car, recognise him, and shake his hand with reverence, or airport officials wave a friend through without a check, because Lara was there.
The great political disappointments in the region saddened him deeply, but he never became a cynic. He wrote a careful letter to South Africa’s post-apartheid leaders, reminding them of the sacrifice Angolans had made for them, and warning them of what he feared for the future of the region, but he did not expect his ideals to be upheld in the new world.
Ruth predeceased him. He is survived by his children, Paulo, Bruno and Wanda, his adopted son Jean-Michel Mabeko Tali, and many grandchildren.
• Lúcio Lara (Lúcio Rodrigo Leite Barreto), teacher and political activist, born 9 April 1929; died 27 February 2016
