Daniel Chipenda

Daniel Chipenda (15 May 1931, Lobito - 28 February 1996) fought in the Angolan War of Independence, serving as the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola's (MPLA) field commander in the Eastern Front before founding and leading the Eastern Revolt, a faction of the MPLA. He later joined the National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA),[1] but left, rejoined the MPLA, and left again in July 1992.[2] He was an Ovimbundu.[3]

Chipenda, then a member of the MPLA, established the Eastern Front, significantly expanding the MPLA's reach, in May 1966. When the EF collapsed, Chipenda and MPLA leader Agostinho Neto each blamed the other. In 1972 the Soviet Union allied with Chipenda's faction, giving him aid. Following the Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974, Joaquim Pinto de Andrade, the President of the MPLA, organized an MPLA congress in Lusaka. Neto and Chipenda attended with 165 delegates respectively and Mário Pinto de Andrade's Active Revolt faction had 70 delegates present. After several days of negotiations Neto's faction quit the congress, so that the MPLA remained split into three factions.[4] Chipenda left the MPLA, although he arguably left it before the coup in Portugal,[5] founding the Eastern Revolt with 1,500 former MPLA followers.[6] He opposed the MPLA's leadership which he accused of being "creole" and was wary of the Soviet Union, despite its support.[7]

In 1973 the government of the Soviet Union invited Neto to Moscow and told him Chipenda planned to assassinate him. The USSR resumed aid to the MPLA, Neto again firmly in control, in 1974. In September Chipenda joined the FNLA again, and returned to the MPLA only after the multiparty elections of 1992.

References
  1. Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola-Workers' Party Country-data
  2. Kalley, Jacqueline Audrey. Southern African Political History: A Chronology of Key Political Events from Independence to Mid-1997, 1999. Page 59.
  3. Bennett, Andrew. Condemned to Repetition?: The Rise, Fall, and Reprise of Soviet-Russian Military Interventionism, 1999. Page 152.
  4. Stewart Lloyd-Jones and António Costa Pinto. The Last Empire: Thirty Years of Portuguese Decolonisation, 2003. Page 27.
  5. Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja and Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein. The Crisis in Zaire, 1986. Page 193.
  6. George, Edward. The Cuban Intervention In Angola, 1965-1991: from Che Guevara to Cuito Cuanavale, 2005. Page 46.
  7. John Marcum, The Angolan Revolution, vol. II, Exile Politics and Guerrilla Warfare (1962-1976), Cambridge/Mass. & London, MIT Press, 1978, passim
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