The night Luanda's prisons were attacked: 4 February 1961

The first trouble came half an hour early, in Casablanca, a poor district on the edge of Luanda. According to the news agency report printed in Lisbon the next day, it was a feint, meant to draw the police away. At about three in the morning on Saturday 4 February 1961, small groups of men moved on their real targets: the city's prisons.1 source1 source

There were about 200 of them, and they came from the musseques, the poor neighbourhoods that ringed the colonial city. Most carried machetes and knives; a few had pistols. They attacked the Casa de Reclusão Militar, the army's prison, the barracks of the mobile company of the PSP, the city police, and the São Paulo prison run by the civil administration. The Museu do Aljube adds a fourth target, the Companhia Indígena. They wanted to free the nationalists jailed in 1959 and 1960 and to seize guns and ammunition.2 sources2 sources

They freed no one. By daylight seven Portuguese policemen and soldiers were dead, along with dozens of the attackers, and more than a hundred people were in the hands of PIDE, the political police, and the PSP. Plans to hit the airport and the post office had come to nothing.1 source1 source

The city was getting ready for Carnival. That afternoon the Diário de Luanda ran a short note on its front page: the government had known for some days of “a plan of agitation organised from outside”. The phrase set the line the authorities would hold for the rest of the war. The revolt, in their telling, was never Angolan.2 sources2 sources

Luanda was also full of foreign reporters. They had come in case Henrique Galvão, who had seized the Portuguese liner Santa Maria in the Caribbean, sailed her to Angola. By the account Lusa gave in 2005, the timing was deliberate: when it became clear the ship would not come and the reporters began to leave, the organisers struck before they had all gone. Their presence is one reason the Luanda attacks reached the world's papers while a far larger peasant revolt inland, then at its height, did not.2 sources2 sources

On paper, Angola was not a colony. In 1951 the Estado Novo, the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar, folded its Colonial Act into a revised constitution and renamed the colonies “overseas provinces”, and an Organic Law of the Overseas followed in 1953. Portugal now presented itself as a single nation spread over several continents. The historian Fernando Tavares Pimenta calls the change mostly one of terminology.2 sources2 sources

In practice, race still decided who was a citizen. Under the Estatuto do Indigenato, whites were citizens automatically. Black Angolans had to prove they lived by European customs to become assimilados. When the statute was finally repealed in September 1961, legal assimilados were no more than 1% of the Black population.1 source1 source

Luanda itself was split between the “city of asphalt”, almost entirely white, and the musseques around it. Many musseques were mixed, with poor Portuguese immigrants living among Black residents, but not on equal terms. Europeans were 14.6% of the city's people in the 1950s and 26.3% by 1970, by the sociologist Ramiro Monteiro's figures.1 source1 source

PIDE opened in Angola in 1957 and within a few years broke up the clandestine nationalist cells that had formed in Luanda during the 1950s. Between March 1959 and June 1960 it arrested the leaders the new MPLA had inside the country. Agostinho Neto, one of its founders, was arrested on 8 June 1960.2 sources2 sources

The trials that followed, known as the Processo dos 50, reached more than two hundred people, Black, mixed-race and white. On 21 December 1960 a military court in Luanda sentenced 20 Angolan nationalists to between 3 and 10 years in prison. The men arrested in this sweep were the prisoners the attackers of 4 February set out to free.2 sources2 sources

Inland, the cotton growers of the Baixa de Cassanje, in Malanje district, had stopped work in the last months of 1960. When the Luanda attacks came, troops and aircraft were putting down their revolt. Lisbon kept that story out of the papers at home and abroad.1 source1 source

The plan had been far bigger. Participants, especially those linked to the MPLA, later said preparations began in October 1960, with night-time training at Cacuaco and then in Cazenga, where a monument to 4 February now stands. Some 2,100 people were meant to take part, by the account Lusa gave in 2005, but arrests after several denunciations in the days before cut that to just over two hundred.1 source1 source

Accounts of the night still differ. The Angolan official version has four groups, led by Neves Bendinha, Paiva Domingos da Silva, Domingos Manuel Mateus and Imperial Santana. It adds an ambush of a military police patrol, the jail of the 7th police station and an attempt on the official radio station; other versions add the post office. Ver Angola, reporting on the anniversary in 2023, noted that the competing versions still did not allow a clear story.1 source1 source

The first figures appeared in the censored Lisbon press. The Diário de Notícias reported on 5 February that six PSP guards and one soldier had died and that the attackers had lost nine. A day later O Século put the attackers' dead at 13 or 14. The Angolan official version now gives 40 guerrillas, six policemen and one army corporal. Fernando Martins, writing in 2014, settles for “some dozens” dead and wounded on both sides.3 sources3 sources

The Lisbon press filled the gaps with the regime's story. The agency Lusitânia said most of the attackers were foreigners who “cannot even speak Portuguese”, with three white men from Portugal among them who had blackened their faces. O Século said they were drunk. An agency report claimed witch doctors had sold them amulets against bullets for thirty escudos. All of it pointed one way: the revolt had to come from outside.2 sources2 sources

On 5 February the MPLA issued a communiqué in Conakry claiming the attacks. Its president, Mário Pinto de Andrade, and its secretary-general, Viriato da Cruz, were in exile, and the claim has been argued over ever since. The movement later made 4 February the starting point of its revolution.2 sources2 sources

The MPLA's own papers suggest its leaders were taken by surprise. In a communiqué reproduced in Lúcio Lara's collection of MPLA documents, Lara, a member of the leadership in Conakry, admitted they had taken the attacks for a reply to the appeal that nationalist leaders from Portugal's colonies had made to Salazar in London two months earlier, asking him to negotiate self-determination.1 source1 source

Since the late 1990s the historian Carlos Pacheco has argued, on the testimony of Mário de Andrade and the priest Joaquim Pinto de Andrade, that the movement had little or nothing to do with the night.2 sources2 sources

Other historians offer other organisers. Marcelo Bittencourt describes a constellation of small groups without much political structure, orchestrated by Canon Manuel Joaquim Mendes das Neves, vicar-general of the archdiocese of Luanda. Dalila Cabrita Mateus and Álvaro Mateus see an action launched outside the movements by an improvised leadership, pushed by prisoners who faced transfer to other jails.2 sources2 sources

Canon das Neves was one of the best-known voices of Angolan nationalism until PIDE arrested him in the spring of 1961: in March, according to a 2017 Lusa report on his biography, or in April, according to the historian Anabela Silveira. That February, with the Cassanje revolt at its height, he wrote to UPA leaders in Léopoldville about the killings there.2 sources2 sources

Lino Ucaca, who leads the veterans' association of the FNLA, the movement that grew out of the UPA, says the canon gave the order for 4 February as a UPA militant, and that its aim was to draw attention to the planned transfer of prisoners to Cape Verde and São Tomé, not to start a war.1 source1 source

Valentim Alexandre, whose 2021 history of the Angolan revolts rests on Salazar's own archive, finds no single command centre behind the night. In Pedro Aires Oliveira's reading of the book, the attackers' loyalties were fluid, and they were driven largely by a mix of despair and messianic belief. Many of them later joined the MPLA, which helped the claim stick.2 sources2 sources

On 5 February Luanda buried its dead policemen. Large crowds lined the route. After the burial shots were fired near the cemetery. The ANI agency counted four more dead and seven wounded, and O Século's man in Luanda blamed surviving attackers who had hidden in a sawmill and fired into the crowd.1 source1 source

Foreign reporters saw something else. George Clay of The Guardian, filing from Johannesburg to escape the censors, described the riot as racial hatred by a white crowd against Black people. Daniel McGeachie of the Daily Express wrote that white Portuguese had beaten Africans to death. The Paris-Presse headline on 7 February read “20 dead, 7 wounded in Angola”.1 source1 source

The killing did not stop at the cemetery. Gangs of whites went into the musseques; the police, keen to avenge their colleagues, at first went along with it. Fernando Tavares Pimenta, drawing on the American historian John Marcum, writes that the murders in the poor districts, mostly of Black and mixed-race people by far-right whites organised by PIDE men, began in February 1961 as revenge for the policemen and continued after the March rising.2 sources2 sources

There is no reliable count of the dead. The Museu do Aljube speaks of hundreds of people dead and injured among the Black population in the days after 4 February, in raids and attacks on the musseques by soldiers, police and white militias. The Governor-General, Álvaro Silva Tavares, reported to the Minister of the Overseas on 6 February that the city was calm, then described an African population “terrified” of the whites and whites rushing to the gun shops.3 sources3 sources

Lisbon's answer to the foreign reports was to remove the reporters. Within days four British journalists were expelled from Angola, Clay and McGeachie among them. The correspondent of The Daily Telegraph, friendlier to the regime, was allowed to stay. Reports from the district governor and the PSP commander to the ministry called the city a “powder keg”.1 source1 source

A few days later, men who had escaped the police tried again to break into the São Paulo prison, and failed again. Arrests went on. Abroad, papers reported that Portugal was sending a company of paratroopers trained in guerrilla techniques, and that Portuguese officials were confiscating reporters' film of the riots.1 source1 source

On 15 March the war moved north. UPA fighters from the Congo led a rising in the coffee districts. By the Museu do Aljube's account, they killed hundreds of white settlers and thousands of mixed-race people and Black Angolans who were not Bakongo, the main people of the north, and the Portuguese army and settler militias answered with a counter-terror of their own. That rising, and the April crisis in Lisbon over how to respond, belong to separate stories.3 sources3 sources

In Luanda the attacks hardened the colour line. Police files read by Bosslet show residents in the months that followed reporting Black employees who missed work, or Black neighbours seen coming and going, as possible “bandits”. Police raids on the musseques, called “clean-up operations” in the papers, became more frequent, and most of those held had no papers allowing them to live in the capital.1 source1 source

The regime also moved on paper. In September 1961 it repealed the Estatuto do Indigenato, ending the legal split between “natives” and citizens. Bosslet argues the repeal made racial discrimination illegal without ending it, and counts it among the first results of the war and of the attention the 1961 revolts drew abroad.1 source1 source

For Portugal the night began a war. Tânia Alves argues that the military response the Luanda attacks set off makes it plausible to see them as the beginning of the end of the Portuguese empire in Africa. Alexandre, in Oliveira's account, adds that the violence of 1961 delayed the growth of anti-colonial thinking inside Portugal.2 sources2 sources

Independent Angola wrote the date into its founding text. Agostinho Neto's proclamation of independence, read in Luanda on 11 November 1975, named 4 February as the moment the MPLA set the country's war in motion.1 source1 source

Angola's law on holidays of 16 February 2011 made 4 February the Dia do Início da Luta Armada de Libertação Nacional, the Day of the Start of the National Liberation Armed Struggle, and a public holiday. The 2018 revision kept it. The UPA's 15 March is the Day of the Expansion of the Armed Struggle, and 4 January, for the Baixa de Cassanje, the Day of the Martyrs of Colonial Repression; both are dates of national celebration, not holidays.2 sources2 sources

The state holds a central ceremony every year. In 2023, the 62nd anniversary, it was in Mbanza Congo, capital of Zaire province, under the local motto “Preserving the Values of the Homeland, We Will Honour Our Heroes”. In 2005, Lusa reported, the programme in Luanda included a pilgrimage to the graves of the attack's main organisers.2 sources2 sources

The ranking of the dates is political. Angolan historians such as Maria da Conceição Neto have argued that official commemorations centre on the MPLA's 4 February and leave the UPA's 15 March and the revolts in the north in the shadow. The head of the FNLA veterans' association still says the war began on 15 March, and that the order for 4 February came from a UPA militant.2 sources2 sources

In Portugal, memories of the UPA's massacres in March long crowded out the reprisals. Pedro Aires Oliveira credits recent work, Alexandre's book and Joaquim Furtado's television series A Guerra (2007 to 2012) among it, with giving the colonial counter-terror of 1961 the weight it lacked in Portuguese memory and history writing.2 sources2 sources