In a small furniture factory in Luanda, a black man and a white man sit beside each other doing identical labor making the legs of a chair. The black is paid 70 cents a day; the white gets $3.

The white man does not say he is more skilled. Instead, he explains the unequal pay by saying. "This is not my country. I am from Portugal These people were born here They don't deserve as much as I do".

Two waiters work side by side in a small restaurant in Melange a diamond mining area. One is black one white. The white says he is paid $50 a month the Nack $25. When asked why he gets less the black responds. You know why.

THE FEELING of powerlessness and economic discrimination reached a head in 1961 as a wave of nationalism swept across the African continent. A year before the Belgians had fled the neighboring Congo after only a brief uprising. Independence-minded Angolans now had a base in which they could safely plan their revolution.

At the same time, a number of peculiar circumstances combined to turn the early months of 1961 into the bloodbath that would inaugurate the Angolan revolution.

The most bizarre occurrence, one which forced the rebels to move before they had planned, took place some 7000 miles away in the Carribean. Henrique Malta Galvao, a former colonial High Inspector and a staunch opponent of the then dictator Antonio de Oliveria Salazar, seized the Portuguese luxury liner Santa Maria," the second largest ship in the nation's merchant navy. Along with 68 men armed with machine guns. Galvao hijacked the ship after leaving Curacao with 600 passengers and 300 crew members aboard.

The incident caused an international uproar. The boat disappeared on he high seas until three days later, when a joint U.S. English Portuguese search effort finally tracked it down in mid- Atlantic heading south towards Africa. Gaivao announced his intention of sailing to Angola, not to free it, but to set up a rebel Portuguese government there, opposed to the Salazar regime.

Galvao never made it. He had engine trouble and problems with the 900 captive traveling companions he had brought along. He was forced to land at Recife, Brazil, where the government gave him anylum, but returned the ship to the Portuguese.

Nonetheless, Galvao's announced plans brought dozens of journalists to Luanda for the first time. Eager to display their case before a watching foreign audience, a small group of mostly mulatoo intellectuals decided to launch an attack on Luanda main political prison.

In a predawn raid on Feb. 4, 1961, several hundred Africans and mulattos staged the attack. Armed with only knives and clubs the said was suicidal. Seven police were killed, and 40 Africans were machine gunned. The walls of the prison were scarcely scratched.

The following weeks saw wholesale rioting throughout the city. The whites, better armed, inflicted, the most casualties. One missionary personally counted 300 dead in the first three days. By the end of the month, the fighting subside, and Luanda lapsed into a state of anxious tension.

Many of the rebel leaders, coming from a group called the MPLA, or People's Movement for he Liberation of Angola, escaped the capital and went north to the coffee-growing regions of the Dembos, where trouble was brewing 100 miles away.

Already another rebel group had been working in the North. This group, the UPA or the Union of the Populations of Angola, had called for massive destruction of property and crops on the coffee plantations timed to coincide with the opening of U.N. debate on the Portuguese colonies in March 1961.

At the same time, an economic decline had resulted in white coffee planters not paying their African conscript laborers their normal $7 monthly wage. Beginning on March 15, the plantation workers, armed mostly withcatanas or African machettes, and garden tools, attacked the planters and their families, burned crops, pillaged houses and wrecked bridges. Accounts of the atrocities of the time have filled hundreds of Portuguese pamphlets and speeches. Hatcheting of farmers and disemboweling of their families no doubt occured. But the violence of the whites far outside that of the blacks.

Reliable estimates hold that in the first six months about 800 whites were killed. In the same period, 20,000 blacks died.