Episode 4 - Cold War race-paranoia and how the Portuguese faced an Angolan knife-edge in 1961

We’re going to focus on the first two years - 1961 and 1962 in this episode which was about the same time as the South West African People’s Organisation took off. South Africa was supported by America until it became clear that the threat of a nuclear war reduced the possibility of a conventional war between the U.S. and Russia. For those who did not live through this period, it is quite difficult to understand the visceral fear conjured up by the idea that communist inspired revolutionaries and the global instability the two Superpowers were causing. In Latin America indigenous struggles had also accelerated. Che Guevara was an almost mythical Capitalist fighting Casanova who helped Cuban revolutionaries overthrow the US-backed government and Eastern Europe, Russia and China began exporting massive volumes of low cost firearms to any group that bought into the Marxist playbook. That was the book full of chapters – the Armed struggle, peasant classes seizes power, the state takes over all business, the proletariat defeats the bourgeoisie. Communist versus capitalist. The Americans, British, French and other NATO countries were as busy as the Communist nations trying to woo developing post-colonial nations into their ambit. Every kind of cloak and dagger could be found. Pretoria and Windhoek monitored with alarm the growing signs of revolution in Africa – where political commissars trained in Russia emerged back home, traveling from village to village speaking against a local leadership system that had been hijacked by the colonial administration. The French in Indo-China had faced exactly the same process, so too the political administrations in places like Peru which faced Maoist guerrillas called Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path which was to explode into public view by the 1970s.