Cuito Cuanavale: 12 Months of War that Transformed a Continent

By September 1987 Angola’s army – supported by Cuba and a billion dollars of arms from the Soviet Union – had assembled massive forces on the Lomba River, 125 km southeast of the Angolan town of Cuito Cuanavale. Their goal? To capture Jamba, headquarters of the rebel group Unita, supported by the South African Defence Force (SADF) in the so-called Border War. The fighting eventually centred around Cuito Cuanavale after a massive battle on the Lomba, where 3 000 SADF soldiers and 8 000 Unita fighters were up against an Angolan–Cuban force of more than 50 000 men. Thousands died in the fighting, vividly and dramatically retold by Bridgland from interviews with scores of men who were on the front line. Thirty years later the question of who won the war still leads to vigorous debate. The final outcome of the war had an impact far beyond the borders of Angola and Namibia. It spelled the end of the last great neo-colonial attempts at African conquest by Cuba and the former Soviet Union and also made possible the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa.