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Angola Transformation into a Marxist-Leninist Party and Internal Dissent
Although Marxist influences were evident before
independence,
Marxism-Leninism had not been the MPLA's stated ideology.
But
during a plenum of the MPLA Central Committee in October
1976, the
party formally adopted Marxism-Leninism. The plenum also
resulted
in several major organizational decisions, including the
creation
of a secretariat, a commission to direct and control the
Department
of Political Orientation, and the Department of
Information and
Propaganda. The National Party School, founded in February
1977,
trained party cadres to fill national and provincial party
positions, and at the First Party Congress in December
1977, the
MPLA transformed itself into a vanguard Marxist-Leninist
party to
be called the Popular Movement for the Liberation of
AngolaWorkers ' Party (Movimento Popular de Libertação de
Angola-Partido
de Trabalho--MPLA-PT).
The estimated 110,000 members of the MPLA-PT had
widely diverse
backgrounds and political ideas, which made factionalism
inevitable. The Neto regime soon faced problems generated
by
independent left-wing organizations and militant workers.
Neto made
the first public reference to internal dissent on February
6, 1976,
when he denounced a demonstration that had protested the
termination of a popular radio program that had been
critical of
the new government and that had demanded rule by workers
and
peasants. The government arrested some of the
demonstrators and
launched a major crackdown on opposition elements. One of
these was
the so-called Active Revolt, a faction founded in 1973
that
comprised intellectuals of varying political orientation
andincluded the MPLA's first president, Mário de Andrade,
and other
prominent MPLA leaders. Another opposition element was the
Organization of Angolan Communists (Organização dos
Comunistas de
Angola -- OCA), a Maoist movement founded in 1975 that
attacked the
MPLA as a bourgeois party, condemned Soviet imperialism,
and called
for the withdrawal of all Cuban forces.
Data as of February 1989
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