V o L u m e I : a d

security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, claimed that the invasion was launched

with Moscow’s blessing. The Carter administration believed that it had to

respond to aggressive Soviet/Cuban penetration of Africa (15,000 Cuban

troops and Soviet advisors were already in Ethiopia). By the end of May 1978,

the second Shaba invasion was all but over. Belgian forces began to with-

draw, leaving a battalion in Kamina, and the French Foreign Legion departed

by the end of May.

Southern Africa was the third African hot spot during the Cold War. The

epicenter of American-Soviet conflict was Angola, but Namibia, Mozam-

bique, Zimbabwe, and South Africa also featured prominently in the latter

years of the Cold War. Each of these countries, with the notable exception of

South Africa, was seen as aligned with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Namibia, under tight South African control, was linked to the Angolan civil

war. Mozambique, which gained independence on 25 June 1974, was a self-

designated Marxist-Leninist regime led by Samora Machel, chairman of the

Frente Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo) and president of the People’s

Republic of Mozambique, and joined the Soviet-led Council of Mutual Eco-

nomic Assistance. In turn, Frelimo, with the backing of the Soviet Union

and other communist states, supported Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African

National Union (ZANU) and its armed wing, the Zimbabwe African National

Liberation Army (ZANLA), in the Rhodesia/Zimbabwe national liberation

struggle against the settler regime of Ian Smith, leader of the Rhodesian

Front (RF).

The RF had declared Rhodesia’s independence from Great Britain in

1965, triggering a fifteen-year-long civil war. A second insurgency group

in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe led by Joshua Nkoma’s Zimbabwe African Peoples

Union (ZAPU) along with its armed wing, the Zimbabwe People’s Revolu-

tionary Army (ZIPRA), was supported by the Soviet-aligned Popular Move-

ment for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). In an important subplot during

the era, the United States was almost completely dependent on southern

Africa for its uranium supply and was willing to go to great lengths to secure

the critical fuel for its nuclear arsenal.

In March 1975, a civil war broke out in Angola. The United States ini-

tially supported the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA)

as a counter to the Marxist MPLA. After the FNLA fell apart, America

switched its support to the National Union for the Total Independence of

Angola (UNITA). The United States refused to support the de jure MPLA

government, and what followed was a quarter century of civil war. The So-

viets and Cubans intervened in Angola in support of the Marxist MPLA

regime, which subsequently developed close military ties with the South

West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO, Namibia) and the socialist

regime in Mozambique as well as with Zambia and the African National

Congress in South Africa. American involvement in Angola was seriously

inhibited by the U.S. Congress’s Clark Amendment of 1975, which banned

military aid to any Angolan party. For a decade, direct U.S. involvement in

southern Africa was minimal. The election of President Ronald Reagan, how-

ever, changed that.

72

Africa

The United States

was almost

completely

dependent on

southern Africa for

its uranium supply

and was willing to 

go to great lengths 

to secure the critical

fuel for its nuclear

arsenal.

---

In July 1985, Congress repealed the Clark Amendment. Thus, the leader

of UNITA, Jonas Savimbi, became a primary recipient of U.S. paramilitary

aid under the Reagan Doctrine, which argued that the USSR should not only

be contained but that its influence and gains abroad (such as in Angola)

should be rolled back. Zaire was a major conduit (along with South Africa)

for U.S. covert assistance. At the peak of America’s clandestine operations,

Reagan labeled Savimbi a “combatant for liberty.”

In 1981, under the stewardship of Chester Crocker, assistant secretary of

state for African affairs, the United States announced a policy of constructive

engagement for southern Africa. This was the endgame for U.S.-Soviet com-

petition in the region. Crocker linked the independence of Namibia (from

South Africa) to the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola. This entailed

a quasi-alliance with South Africa’s apartheid government but not support for

the regime in Pretoria per se. To some, this disinterred what was called the

Tar Baby Option, President Richard Nixon’s secret policy of rapprochement

with Smith’s white minority regime in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe embodied in

Option Two of the National Security Study Memorandum 39, a review of

U.S. African policy ordered by National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger.

The United States became one of three UN members (along with Portugal

and South Africa) that allowed trade with Rhodesia from 1971 to 1977 under

Africa

73

Jonas Savimbi, leader of the [União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola] (UNITA, [National Union for the

Total Independence of Angola]), one of the chief forces in the Angolan Civil War, which began in 1975. (Patrick Chauvel/

Sygma/Corbis)

---

the Byrd Amendment, which circumvented UN sanctions against Rhodesia

by permitting importation of Rhodesian chrome.

Nevertheless, following eight long years of negotiations, constructive

engagement led to the 1998 New York Accords and the subsequent exit from

Angola of Cuban and South African forces aligned, respectively, with the

MPLA and UNITA. The Cold War in southern Africa was over.

James J. Hentz

See also

Africa, Soviet Interventions in; Africa, U.S. Interventions in; Barre, Mohammed

Siyad; Congo, Democratic Republic of the; Constructive Engagement; Eritrea;

Ethiopia; Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia; Lumumba, Patrice Emery;

Mobutu Sese Seko; Mozambique; Namibia; Savimbi, Jonas Malheiro; Somalia;

South Africa; Zimbabwe

References

Borstelmann, Thomas. Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern

Africa in the Early Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press. 1993.

Copson, Raymond. Africa’s War and Prospects for Peace. Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1994.

Crocker, Chester A. High Noon in Southern Africa: Making Peace in a Rough Neighbor-

hood. New York: Norton, 1992.

Fatton, Robert. “The Reagan Foreign Policy toward South Africa: The Ideology of

the New Cold War.” African Studies Review 27(1) (1984): 57–82.

Howe, Herbert. Military Forces in African States: Ambiguous Order. Boulder, CO:

Lynne Rienner, 2001.

Lake, Anthony. The “Tar Baby” Option: American Policy towards Southern Rhodesia.

New York: Columbia University Press, 1976.

Lyman, Princeton. Partner to History: The U.S. Role in South Africa’s Transition to Demo-

cracy. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2002.

Schraeder, Peter. African Politics and Society: A Mosaic in Transformation. New York: St.

Martin’s, 2000.

———. United States Foreign Policy toward Africa: Incrementalism, Crisis and Change.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Soviet interventions in Africa, mostly by military means, were largely a prod-

uct of its Cold War rivalry with the United States. Africa received relatively

little attention from Soviet foreign policymakers until the advent of wide-

spread decolonization in the early 1960s. The growing number of newly

independent states in Africa attracted the attention of Soviet Premier Nikita

Khrushchev, who was anxious to extend Soviet influence in the region. New

and independent African nations such as Ghana and Guinea turned to the

Soviet Union to help balance Western influence and, in some cases, to

strengthen their regimes.

Soviet military intervention in Africa began on a modest scale in the

Congo (formerly Zaire) in 1960. But in January 1961 Soviet aid to the Congo

74

Africa, Soviet Interventions in

Africa, Soviet 

Interventions in

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