Youth and War in Angola

Abstract

This chapter was presented in absentia to a Paris conference entitled Les Jeunes en Afrique and subsequently published in 1992 by Harmattan in the two stout volumes of transactions. The year 1992 was Angola’s first — and last — year of peace since the great rebellions of 1961. A whole generation had grown to adulthood knowing nothing but the insecurities of war in which boy-soldiers were conscripted as colonial auxiliaries while girl-children lived in constant fear of the brutal lust of expeditionary regiments from overseas. Some youth escaped the colonial nexus to join the irregular forces of the nationalists and lived for years in the lands at the end of the earth, or in foreign exile, before returning to war-torn cities in search of a new life.