by Ondjaki
In 1975, when the MPLA declared Angola’s independence, white-ruled South Africa responded by unleashing Africa’s most potent army to invade Angola and overthrow the new government. As the South African invasion force approached the capital, Fidel Castro rushed to save his close friend, Angolan president Agostinho Neto, by dispatching troops to Angola. This personal initiative of Castro’s, of which the Soviet Union was informed, but which, according to most reliable research, Moscow neither approved nor committed itself to support, proved decisive. A combined Cuban-Angolan army turned back the South Africans 200 kilometres from Luanda, eventually obliging the over-extended invasion force to retreat to Namibia. From this point on, the Cuban commitment to Angola grew. Cuban doctors and teachers flooded into the country, while the Cuban military became an essential part of the Angolan government’s defence against UNITA and continued incursions by the South African military. Once established in Angola, Cuban commanders, such as Rafael Moracén, made decisions which put local interests ahead of promoting Moscow’s Cold War agenda, often intervening in ways that marginalized politicians or military commanders who promoted closer coordination with the Soviet Union. Many Cubans saw themselves as sharing with Angolans a Creolized, Third World revolutionary culture; large numbers of Afro-Cubans traced their ancestry to the Angolan slave trade.
The Cubans’ pivotal triumph occurred during the five-month battle of Cuito Cuanavale (November 1987-March 1988) when a South African-UNITA invasion was repelled by a combined Cuban-Angolan army. The last major battle of the Cold War, and the largest military engagement in the history of southern Africa, Cuito Cuanavale wreaked horrendous suffering on all sides. The number of soldiers who participated in this battle has been estimated variously at between 60,000 and 100,000 men. Fidel Castro personally directed the defence of the city in meticulous detail from his war-room in Havana. The failure of four successive South African assaults on Cuito Cuanavale, the defeat of the technologically superior South African military, the death of many white South African soldiers and the subsequent shooting down of South African Mirage jets by Cuban MiGs, changed the history of southern Africa forever. The battle of Cuito Cuanavale has been erased from history as it is taught in Western nations; yet this battle forced the Western world to accept Angola’s present boundaries, caused the fall from power of South African president P.W. Botha, and led to the independence of Namibia and the end of apartheid in South Africa. In many parts of the world, Cuban soldiers, rather than tepid sanctions by Western nations, are credited with having dealt the apartheid system its death blow. But the battle of Cuito Cuanavale also set the stage for the end of the Cold War, and Cuba’s eventual withdrawal from Africa.
This is the world inhabited by Ndalu and his friends in Good Morning Comrades: the world of a besieged Marxist regime whose physical integrity has been secured by the Cuban military in a war which, in spite of being geographically distant, remains present in the young people’s imaginations. The Cubans are an inevitable presence; their departure, at the novel’s close, foreshadows the disappearance of many familiar features of the pupils’ daily lives: mass rallies, socialist holidays, school assignments on the worker-peasant alliance, and ration cards. The young people themselves are a cross-section of Angolan society typical of inner-city Luanda public schools of the 1980s. They belong to all racial groups, although, in an echo of MPLA multi-racialism, the students’ races are never mentioned. There are Blacks, Creoles, mestiços (such as the author and his fictional alter-ego, Ndalu), East Indians and whites. The pupils at Ndalu’s school also belong to all social classes. Many of these children are sufficiently well off to own watches or travel abroad; others, such as Murtala, live in houses so poor that the roof is not wide enough to protect the entire family when it rains. The integration of different levels of society is an important aspect of Luanda life of the 1980s recovered by the novel. Today, when many middle- and upper-class Angolans have moved out of the centre of Luanda to new suburbs south of the city, and more than 100 private primary schools offer elite tuition to those who can afford it, few Luanda schools would include among their pupils such a broad cross-section of society.
Young people of Ndalu’s generation are both blessed and cursed. They live privileged lives by comparison with the violence experienced by rural Angolans, and they are able to lavish their adolescent energy on the idealistic early stages of a nationalist revolution. The petroleum-fed corruption that dominates contemporary Angola was less evident in the late 1980s; in a country at war, the absence of a democratic culture was a less pressing concern. But these young people are also cursed in being a generation that was destined not to complete secondary school together. Good Morning Comrades ends with the Cubans announcing their withdrawal from Angola and with plans for negotiations between the MPLA and Jonas Savimbi of UNITA. On June 14, 1991 the last Cubans left Angola. Around the globe, from El Salvador to Mozambique, local conflicts which had been exacerbated by the Cold War gave way to peace agreements and multi-party elections. Angola’s tragedy is that its post-Cold War peace agreement failed. On September 29-30, 1992, elections convened by the United Nations gave two-thirds of the parliamentary seats to the MPLA; in the presidential election, Eduardo Dos Santos of the MPLA polled 49.5% and Jonas Savimbi of UNITA received 40.07%. An enraged Savimbi refused to accept the results. As David Birmingham writes, the United States “had promised him that if he stopped the war and went to the polls, he would undoubtedly win the election.” Unfortunately, the United States had also assisted Savimbi in stockpiling weapons for his eventual ascension to the presidency. On November 12, Savimbi went back to war. Caught off guard, the MPLA reeled as Savimbi took over every other city in the country, then blasted his way into the outskirts of Luanda. Over the next decade, 300,000 people would die in an endless war of attrition. The fighting ended only in 2002, when Savimbi, who by this time had alienated nearly all of his international supporters, was tracked down and killed. The moment Savimbi died, UNITA dissolved as a military force.
In the mid-1990s, when Savimbi appeared poised to fulfill his promise to “drive the bastard children of the Portuguese Empire into the sea,” Luanda parents who had the means to do so began sending their children out of the country to be educated. (Bruno Viola’s departure for Portugal at the novel’s close foreshadows this trend.) Classmates scattered and lost touch with each other. The Angolan reader, knowing the future that awaits the adolescents of Good Morning Comrades, is not surprised by the bittersweet nostalgia and “the smell of goodbyes” which descends on Ndalu in the novel’s final pages. During his last extended conversation with his friend Romina, Ndalu says, “When the goodbyes start, they never stop again.” This is both an insight into the nature of growing up – into adulthood as a succession of losses – and an almost morose foreshadowing of the fate of a generation destined to be scattered by the return of war to an Angola stripped of its Cuban protectors.
While Nelson Mandela and Ronald Reagan each receive passing mentions in Good Morning Comrades, the two poles of the children’s understanding of the outside world are Cuba and Portugal.
Both Cuban teachers and residents of Portugal, such as Ndalu’s Aunt Dada, who used to live in Angola when it was a Portuguese colony, misconstrue the realities of life in Luanda. The Cubans misunderstand the country because of their relentless revolutionary rhetoric. “I didn’t even like to wake up early,” Ndalu thinks in horror when Comrade Teacher Ángel proclaims the children’s spirit to be revolucionario. The Portuguese misunderstand Angola because, like Aunt Dada, they cling to a colonial vision of Angolan history that excludes African heroes such as Ngangula; yet, in one of the novel’s more critical threads, Aunt Dada also fails to grasp the nature of Angolan reality because, coming from a European democracy, she remains innocent of the harshness of life in an African dictatorship. The conflicting misapprehensions of local reality by Cubans and Portuguese enable the children to perceive what their country is not, and, by opposition, to begin to understand what it is
and who they are. Good Morning Comrades recounts the coming of age of both a group of adolescents and a nation.
—Stephen Henighan
FURTHER READING
Patrick Chabal et. al., A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa. London: Hurst & Company, 2002.
Edward George, The Cuban Intervention in Angola, 1965-1991: From Che Guevara to Cuito Cuanavale. London: Frank Cass, 2005.
Ryszard Kapuściński, Another Day of Life. Translated by William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand. New York: Harcourt Brace Johanovich, 1987.
Ondjaki, The Whistler. Translated by Richard Bartlett. Laverstock, U.K.: Aflame Books, 2008.
Pepetela, Mayombe. Translated by Michael Wolfers. London: Heine-mann, 1996.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The publisher and translator thank the Instituto Português do Livro e da Biblioteca for support, and David Brookshaw for his careful critical reading of the translation. The translator thanks Ondjaki for his encouragement and willingness to be consulted, and Daniel Wells for his editorial guidance.
An excerpt from this translation appeared in Words Without Borders, September 2007.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ondjaki was born in Angola in 1977. He studied sociology in Lisbon and attended film school in New York. He is the author of three novels and three short story collections, in addition to two collections of poems and a book for children. Ondjaki’s novels and stories have been translated into English, French, Spanish, German and Italian. His novel The Whistler appeared in English from Aflame Books in the U.K. He lives in Luanda and has made a documentary film about his native city.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Stephen Henighan is the author of A Grave in the Air, The Streets of Winter, North of Tourism, A Report on the Afterlife of Culture and many other books. He teaches in the School of Languages and Literatures, University of Guelph, Ontario. (photo by Lorena Leija)
1 UNITA: National Union for the Total Independence of Angola. Dissident independence movement which, supported for many years by South Africa and the United States, waged war against the Angolan government.
2 FAPLA: People’s Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola. The military wing of the governing MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola).
3 Maria da Fonte: Literally “Maria of the Fountain.” Leader of a peasant uprising in Portugal in 1846.
4 OPA: Organization of Angolan Pioneers. Government-sponsored movement for boys and girls.
5 OMA: Organization of Angolan Women (government-sponsored).
6 JMPLA: Youth of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola.
7 José Martí (1853-1895): Cuban poet, essayist and independence hero.
8 Kifangondo: Site of a decisive battle, fought November 11, 1975, in which FAPLA soldiers, with Cuban support, defeated Holden Roberto’s Western-backed FNLA (Angolan National Liberation Front).
Copyright © Ondjaki, 2001, 2008
Translation © Stephen Henighan, 2008
Originally published as bom dia camaradas, copyright © Editorial Caminho, SA, Lisboa, 2003, by arrangement with Literarische Agentur Dr. Ray-Gude Mertin Inh. Nicole Witt e. K., Germany
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Ondjaki, 1977-
Good morning comrades / Ondjaki ; translated by Stephen Henighan.
(Biblioasis international translation series)
Translation of Bom dia camaradas.
eISBN : 978-1-926-84569-2
1. Angola—History—Civil War, 1975-2002—Children—Fiction. 2. Angola—History—Civil War, 1975-2002—Fiction. I. Henighan, Stephen, 1960- II. Title. III. Series.
PQ9929.O53.B6413
2008 869.3’5
C2007-907443-X
Edited by Daniel Wells
A work supported by the Instituto
Português do Livro e da Biblioteca
PRINTED AND BOUND IN THE USA
