Insightful, thoughtful and often beautifully written analysis the internal and external forces that lead to the devasting, unending civil war in Angola. Addressing the geopolitical pressures informing the intervention into a local internal conflict of the Portuguese, South Africans, Soviets, Cubans, and Americans, author Andresen Guimaraes artfully reveals the international nature of the Angolan war and its devasting effect on the Angolan peoples. A fascinating study, which is so well written that it is definitely NOT for experts only.

This has got to be one of the most intriguing books I have ever read. If you are a World/Political History buff then this book is a must read. I would give it 10 stars out of five to this one!

This book is built as a memoir of the narrator of his life on the war of Angola, circa 1972/3. Thw colonial war against the portuguese army and the dictorship of the Portuguese goverment ended with the revolution in Portugal. Here the author tells in an almost biographic way the life on a camp on the south of Angola.

Superb. Memories flooded back to me as I was there, in the Caprivi in 1988. A lot of things that went on now become clear and things fall into place. I even knew a few people referred to in the book. Thank you Colonel Breytenbach.

Joseph Miller's Way of Death is an exhaustingly long volume for a non-academic reader, but a rich and rewarding one, if you like your history deeply rooted in archival sources. The title (and headings such as "Floating Tombs" and "Merchants of Death") make the book sound like popularization, though they actually are more a reflection of Miller's penchant for metaphor, which gives the book an almost Tolstoyan quality. Indeed, the division of the book into discrete sections that view the Angolan slaving economy as it affected those involved (native African individuals and polities, mixed-race "Luso-African" traders, Brazilian ship and plantation owners, Lisbon-based merchants, Portuguese governors) lets you see his subject with a depth and complexity reminiscent of good fiction. But it doesn't make Way of Death easy to read-the section most like a narrative account, which ties together a number of the previous threads, doesn't come till well after the 500th page. Miller feels no need to summarize political history, so I recommend as background an earlier short work such as David Birmingham's Trade and Conflict in Angola (though its economic history needs correction in the light of Miller's research).

Trained as an Africanist, Miller is particularly sensitive to the Central African sense of wealth as people rather than as goods or specie, and the different political economies leading from one kind of wealth to the other-a linkage that passes from the traditional elders and lineage systems, in which control of land and women's fertility was power, to the monarchs and warlords who used material goods to acquire dependents, to the merchant princes who stockpiled goods and slaves rather than dependents, to Luso-African traders who provided the link between textiles, muskets, and rum from Europe, Asia, and Brazil and the slaves given up by Africans. The boundaries were not stable, and the "slaving frontier" moved east from Luanda and the coast in jumps, partly in response to periodic war and drought. After three and a half centuries, this "catchment zone" for captives spread across a vast expanse of Central Africa from the Congo to the upper Zambezi and the edges of the Kalahari.

From the perspective of Atlantic economies, the financial basis of 18th-century Luso-Brazilian slaving was very rickety. Exchange of precious metals for slaves was rare. Those most immediately concerned on the African end took European goods to sell on credit and only saw reimbursement after the surviving slaves were sold-at more or less fixed prices-in Brazil. The chronic undercapitalization of Angolan slaving and the dependence of both the Angolan and Brazilian side on credit extended by Portuguese and (indirectly) British merchants is a major theme of the book. The appalling death rate among captives between point of capture and delivery in Brazil made slaves a highly perishable commodity and considerable financial risk. Those seeking to wrest a profit engaged in "tight-packing" on slave ships, which meant cheating on official capacity and reducing space for water and food in order to fit more slaves on board-which raised the death rate on ships even higher. Miller's title is no hyperbole-between the long trip from the hinterland, the dreadful conditions in Luanda barracoons, and the middle passage, a minority of those who began the "way of death" reached Brazil.

A must-read for anyone seriously interested in Central Africa or the Atlantic slave trade.

This is the fourth of Kapuscinski's books that I have read, and I was not disappointed. His trademark wit is once again on display, as he manages to impart jewels of wisdom while reporting from the deadliest and remotest corners of the world. For those unfamiliar with Kapuscinski, do not get this book if you are looking for a detailed political history of Angola. He gives a brief historical overview of the country in the final chapter, and it might help to start there first. Otherwise, a novice will quickly get confused by all the acronyms (MPLA, UNITA, etc.) and names; Kapuscinski does not really explain to the reader which group is fighting for what causes or what their ideological standpoints or political goals are. In a sense, however, this ambiguity is highly effective, since it conveys the actual situation in Angola in 1975. Kapuscinski's aim is not to offer a trenchant political analysis, but to simply convey to the reader what it is like to live in a desperately impoverished country in the midst of a brutal civil war. One could substitute any number of countries for Angola, and the themes would likely be the same; desperation, helplessness, ignorance, despair. Kapuscinski looks at the conflict from many points of view. He relates how the Portuguese colonialists desperately fled Angola in the months leading up to that country's independence, certain that all hell was about to break loose. He points out the general state of confusion among most Angolans, who were just as uncertain about the future as their former Portuguese rulers. He looks at the war from the point of view of the guerilla soldier, for whom death is almost inevitable, lurking unseen in the bush at every moment. He even tells how the dogs in Luanda followed the example of the Portuguese and bolted town; no dead dogs were to be seen, but they all seemingly disappeared. And, of course, Kapuscinski has lived through more near-death experiences than just about any reporter on the planet. He must look at movies like "Tears of the Sun" and simply laugh, for he himself has avoided certain death on a number of occasions. Kapuscinski's books are a blend of political commentary, narrative travelogue, abstract philosophy, and action adventure. The reason for only four stars is that because this book is so short (it can easily be read in one sitting), it falls shorts of some of his other works in terms of depth and scope. Also, this is one of his earlier works, and his style has been improved on since then. That doesn't stop me from highly recommending this one, though.

I read parts of the Emperor in college and expected a lot of this book. Well, it delivered. Kapuscinski shows more in this book about the civil war in Angola than one would expect. They say that a good journalist stays impartial and doesn't get involved with his story, but this proves the opposite. The author goes to Angola at the last minute and burrows into the country. He almost becomes a citizen, learning the local custom and showing how life actually is.

This book is full of insight into the human condition, the problems caused by colonialism, and how stupid war can be. This isn't a war of the front and trenches, its chaos. Chaos dictated by the rules of living in a harsh place like Angola. The weekends are days of rest, the heat prevents battle, children fight and lose interest.

Kapuscinski shows a side to this civil war, and in turn other wars, that you never get to see. This books is funny, touching, sad, and well written. It reads like a novel, it has character and place. The difference is its true. An excellent book for the history lover or the literary lover.

Kapuscinski's "Another Day of Life" was a complete impulse buy for me. Why is it that these are very often the most enjoyable and satifying reading experiences? This slim 144-page, novella-like volume taught me so much about Angola, it's Portugese colonial heritage, the factional fighting that developed in the 60s & came to a head during Kapuscinski's three-month stay in the country in 1975, and the eye-opening level of involvement of such players as Cuba and South Africa.

The amazing thing is *how little* things have changed since 1975. Since the fall of Portugal's dictatorship, there has been constant battle for almost 30 years. Jonas Savimbi - introduced here as a very young freedom fighter - was killed in battle only a short time ago.

Added bonus: There's a wonderfully sparse little map of the country & the borders of its neighbors at the front of the book. You'll thumb back to that page no less than 50 times while reading "Another Day of Life."

The title is apropos..when one of the characters utters the it two-thirds of the way into the book, I thought it was the perfect line at the perfect time. No wonder they culled it out of the book and had it serve as the title as well.

I plan on reading the rest of Kapuscinski's works now.

By the former Chief of the Angola Task Force at CIA, this book is a classic on the Keystone Kops aspects of paramilitary operations as run by the CIA"s Special Operations Group within the Directorate of Operations, as well as the lack of contextual judgment that accompanies the CIA's decisions to "get into" local conflicts that are none of our business. Ammunition from the warehouses that doesn't fit the weapons in the field is just the beginning.

Please read this book. It tells all, that you didn't know about the direction and practices of your own country. I attended a lecture by John Stockwell and he pleads for you to not purchase this book but pirate it from your local library. The US government sued him and won the rights to this book so all proceeds go to the CIA or the Federal government. Also read "The Grand Chessboard" This is the blue print for the United States foreign policy. You will be blown away.

For the Mbundu, a major ethnolinguistic group of Angola, traditional allegiance and identity did not center on kingdom, nation, race or ethnicity, but on the extended family. Joseph C. Miller convincingly reconstructs the Mbundu efforts to establish a broader sense of identity, and a wider basis for political power. Some traditional organizations established a basic framework for organization that transcended lineage affiliation. Hunting societies, for instance, initiated members from different lineages and even different ethnic groups. Mbundu leaders continually tried to legitimize even broader authority that would supersede allegiance to extended families and encompass members of many lineages. The Mbundu did establish many kingdoms. By the eve of extensive Portuguese colonization, however, authority and loyalty eventually reverted from kings to lineage elders. Miller offers great insight into political philosophy and practice in West Central Africa.

For studies of the same region, see works by John Thornton and Jan Vansina, as well as various works on the Ovimbundu (related to the Mbundu), and Miller's own The Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830

For the Mbundu people of Angola, identity and organization centered traditionally not on state, kingdom, race or ethnicity. Association was based on lineage membership; authority resided with elders of the extended family.

Some societies did exist which bound together people from various families. Hunting societies, for instance, initiated people from different families, even different ethno-linguistic groups. Political authority and association, however, did not transcend the limits of family allegiance. Several movements and leaders did aim at establishing authority that would encompass people from many families, and supersede the authority of lineage heads. Joseph Miller interprets the dreaded Imbangala invasions, who terrorized Angola, in light of this objective.

Many kingdoms were established among the Mbundu. On the eve of Portuguese colonization, however, authority reverted from kings to lineage elders.

Other works on Central Africa include histories by Phyllis Martin, David Birmingham and John Kelly Thornton, as well as Miller's Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830.

I spent almost all of my professional career concerned with the mapping of Africa. And in the course of mapping one scans and extracts a lot of information from various open sources. In the course of this study I became familiar with the social, economic, and military happenings in Southern Africa.
I can say that except for the works of Al J. Venter, a reporter from South Africa, there are very few books with detail on the bush wars conducted by black nationalists in opposition to the minority white rule resulting from colonialism. And often the insurgents had clashed among themselves for ethnic reasons and some blacks remained loyal to the minority governments.
In other cases, when the white rulers gave up and went home as did the Portuguese in Angola and Moçambique the remaining contenders began civil wars backed by the west and by the Communists respectively. In 1976, the Portuguese Army had revolted in protest to the endless bush wars in Africa and overthrew the government. The army had been especially disgusted with the conflict in defense of Portuguese Guinea-(now Guinea-Bissau) located on the shoulder of West Africa, a hot and worthless swamp land which had no economic value and a land where there were few white settlers.
In contrast, the Portuguese ruled lands in Southern Africa had a large settler class, intermarriage was common,for there was no color line there, as there was in English speaking colonies. But still the post independence unrest was such that most of the settlers migrated back to Portugal and some to Brazil. A civil war ensued which is still going on.
On the other hand, the struggle in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, was long and the white regime became an international pariah. The social structure was so unequal that half the land was owned by the whites who composed less than ten percent of the population. But the initial years of the peace settlement were so calm and benign that I feel that it was a positive influence on the South African settlement. Many whites who had fled to SA went back to Zimbabwe but in recent times unrest has broken out again. The socio-economic pie has yet to be fairly divvied up in Zimbabwe.

Excellent review for the independence wars of Portuguese african colonies of the 60's and 70's decades. Covers the conflict deeply and describes all forces involved with accuracy. I expected to see something about Cubans in Angola, even in the third book of this series (MAA-242), but there is nothing about them, but in general it's a great book.

Mr. Maier provides a basic education on the Angolan civil war of the 90's and the circumstances under which it came it be. He has done an admirable job of coupling historical fact and his own experiences into a easily readable memoir of less than 300 pages. However, it would be unfair to the author to compare his writing to that of Rysczard Kapuczinski who's writings about Africa are presented in a style which is closer to poetry than non-fiction.

I may have just got a bad copy, but it was all I could do to keep the book from disentigrating before I could finish reading it. Every time I opened it 2 or 3 pages would pop out of the binding.........

Finally, I would like to put a caution out to the potential reader. Please be aware that I do not have the book in front of me at this time and the following quote may not be exact but I promise it is real close. In the closing pages of the book Mr. Maier writes (for reasons that I cannot remember) " the US's failed attempts to impose their new world order on Mogadishu"..........and that was it....no mention of starving people...the UN...or warlords using food as tools of power. Clearly, Mr. Maier is entitled to his views and I would never condemn this well written book for a single misguided statement, but the reader is left wondering if the author may have left other vital pieces of info out of this book in order to further his political agenda.

While this is a better book than "This House Has Fallen" the author's most recent book about Nigeria, it suffers from the same problem of being a series of frequently random encounters with the country in question and the events in it over a period of several years. There is some attempt to give the readers a more structured understanding of the historical and political background, but at the end of the day it is a series of points on a timeline as experienced by the author. His experiences are very interesting, and he is a thoughtful and observant writer who feels an admirable degree of passion for those suffering from the ongoing conflict.

Reviewed by MARGARET ANSTEE in International Relations, Volume XIII, No 2, August 1996 -

Karl Maier describes the long-running Angolan conflict as 'the worst war in the world'. During my tenure there in 1992-3 as Special Representative of the Secretary-General and Head of the UN Angolan Verification Mission (UNAVEM II) I also dubbed it 'the forgotten tragedy'. Although the horrific armed struggle that engulfed the country once again after Savimbi refused to accept the results of the September 1992 elections claimed more lives than the fighting in Bosnia - 1000 people were dying every day - Angola got scant attention from the media.
The author was an exception and I respected him for his commitment and his objectivity. Even now it is difficult to lift the veil of silence. Both Karl Maier and I know how hard it is to persuade anyone to publish a book about Angola. The argument is that there is no public interest - and apparently no desire to awaken it either. This book is therefore all the more welcome, and Serif are to be congratulated for making it possible.
It makes a rivetting read and deserves to reach a wide public. With passionate eloquence Maier depicts the horrendous sufferings of ordinary Angolans, who have known nothing but war for over thirty years - enduring constant bombardments from one side or the other, families divided and uprooted, many thousands mutilated for life by anti-personnel mines, many thousands more, mainly women, children and old people, dying of hunger and malnutrition. The author's moving account of his encounters with individual Angolans of all ethnic and political persuasions brings out the indomitable tenacity and courage of ordinary Angolans, especially the women, as well as the senseless stupidity of the conflict. Maier describes it as 'a civil war fought primarily against innocent civilians, the povo (people), by armies of conscripted youngsters on behalf of power-mad politicians'.
The other great strength of this book is that Maier sets the war in its historic and cultural context. His episodic technique does, however, make it more difficult for those unfamiliar with it, to trace the evolution of the conflict and the reasons for the failure of the various attempts to resolve it. Yet this also serves to underscore the futility of it all. No attempt at rational analysis can justify this degree of suffering.
Understandably Maier is at his best when recounting his own experience. His attempt to recreate the sanguinary battle for Luanda during the last weekend of October 1992, when he was not in Angola, is less successful. There are errors of chronology and of fact, as well as some internal inconsistencies. This is not surprising since even for those of us who did live through those dreadful events, and were trying to negotiate a cease-fire, there are still mystifying aspects that may never be unravelled.
Maier has some stern things to say about the United Nations, though he does recognize that the mandate and resources handed out to UNAVEM II as a result of the Bicesse Accords were pathetically inadequate to the enormity of the task, and that the powers for whom Angola had been a desirable pawn during the Cold War, now wanted to get shot of the problem as quickly and cheaply as possible. I agree with many of his comments but regret that he does not always distinguish between the Security Council, UN Headquarters, and the peace-keeping mission on the ground - and thus sometimes mistakenly apportions blame or overestimates what could in practice be done. He contends, for instance, that demobilization delays in the pre-election period could have been solved by UNAVEM threatening to withdraw but such threats could have achieved nothing: if UNAVEM's bluff had been called, the fighting would simply have started earlier. While he shows understanding of the difficulties of my situation he claims that, when the peace process began to crumble after the elections, 'she did not use the power she possessed as the focal point of world opinion'. What power? What focal point, given the indifference of world opinion? He himself appears to deny his own thesis by admitting, in the next breath, that 'the Western countries, especially the United States, did little to back her up'.
There is a big difference between being an onlooker and being a player. Cautious public utterances by senior UN officials - and here I refer to his almost contemptuous dismissal of Marrack Goulding's statement, at the end of his visit to Angola in November 1992, that the peace process was 'seriously threatened' - should not too easily be dismissed as naive or complacent. According to Mr. Maier, the peace process was already dead, but he gives no clue as to how it might have been revived.
At that point, the United Nations, in contrast to the marginal role assigned to it in the pre-electoral period, was unceremoniously pushed to centre stage, and expected to resolve the crisis. There were three main options open: to mediate and try to persuade both sides to withdraw from the brink; to send in massive reinforcements - 'Blue Helmets' - to prevent the two sides from fighting; or to withdraw altogether. The last was unthinkable, the second impossible because the initial reluctance of the Security Council and the international community to commit any significant resources to resolve the Angolan issue had hardened even further as a result of the Bosnian experience and the growing crisis of peacekeeping in general. Neither the mandate nor the troops would have been forthcoming. Mediation was thus the only course. Even the possibility of bolstering the mediation efforts by sanctions was ruled out because the United States continued to cling to its mistaken belief that it still had influence over UNITA in Security Council resolutions. In any case, as Maier himself writes later, when partial sanctions were eventually applied against UNITA in September 1993, they proved ineffectual.
Some remarks specific to UNAVEM also require elucidation. Maier's encounter with an American UN electoral observer in Kuito leads him to 'wonder where the United Nations finds such people for so important an assignment'. A few observers may not have had the required experience, but his sweeping comment takes no account of the outstanding performance of the majority, many of whom had had valuable experience in Namibia, Nicaragua and Haiti. Moreover, the United Nations had little time in which to mobilize this group and was obliged, because of budgetary constraints imposed by member states, to recruit all but a few from within the existing Secretariat.
The author's description of myself as 'a United Nations diplomat' (whatever that is) and Under-Secretary-General gives the impression of someone who had been catapulted from a desk-bound Headquarters sinecure into this African maelstrom, rather than of someone who had worked in more than a dozen countries, including some of the most underdeveloped, in all regions of the world, among them Africa, had managed large-scale operations in all of them, and had had her (literal) baptism of fire in situations of civil strife in Colombia, Bolivia, Morocco and Chile. More seriously, the comment that UNAVEM 'voted with its feet' after the battle of Luanda (referring to the fact that UNAVEM military observers were among those leaving on the first plane) is inaccurate and grossly unfair. It implies that they went of their own volition (an impossibility) out of cowardice and a spirit of self-preservation. It also overlooks that fact that UNAVEM's main mandate ran out on 31 October 1992, coincidentally the day the fighting broke out. While the Security Council had authorized the retention of a smaller mission until the end of the year, several contingents were to leave at the end of October and their routine departure had been held up by the closure of the airport. Contrary to the impression given, UNAVEM was still clinging tenaciously to its 67 team sites all over the country, admittedly in an increasingly thin blue line, but all its members were working tirelessly