South Africa therefore threw its support to Unita and FNLA. Savimbi, Unita's president, was sympathetic. He told the South African Financial Mail in May 1975 that he hopes "future leaders of Angola will cooperate with South Africa" and that apartheid "is a South African problem" and much misunderstood. By contrast, the MPLA has already provided a base for the operations of SWAPO of Namibia, the Namibian liberation movement.

Thus, the U.S. role in southern Africa becomes painfully clear. Explicitly to prevent "racial war" in southern Africa (the South African government's synonym for revolution) the U.S. government decided to help South Africa set up a nice black government which would be sympathetic to apartheid and foreign investors and hopefully wouldn't let wages rise too much. What they didn't count on was the response of the Angolan people and the solidarity of the socialist countries.

1. Minter, W., Portuguese Africa and the West, 1972.

2. Times of London, Feb. 16, 1976.

3. See also the contrasting reports of Huambo and Luanda in The New York Times; also Southern Africa magazine, February 1976.

4. CIS, Business as Usual: International Banking in South Africa, 1972.

5. Brian Bunting, Rise of the South African Reich, 2nd. ed., 1970.

6. Ruth First, Christable Gurney and Jonathan Steele, The South African Connection, 1973.

7. Figures on U.S. investment from U.S. Department of Commerce, Survey of Current Business, October 1969 and August 1974.

8. See, for example, the rabidly pro-South Africa article in Barron's, January 1976.

Neva Seidman '78 has spent seven years in Africa, including two in Zambia, and is coauthor of "U.S. Multinationals in South Africa," forthcoming.