Neto, Agostinho

(1922–1979)

   Political leader of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA), and first president of independent Angola, Neto was a leading African Marxist. Born in a village near Luanda, Angola, he was one of the fortunate few to receive an education in Angola, which was then a Portuguese colony. He went on to work for the Luanda colonial health service before in 1947 going to Portugal as a recipient of a Methodist scholarship to train as a doctor. In Portugal he joined an anti-Salazar youth movement (the MUD-J), and his political activities led to his arrest in 1951, 1952 and 1955, the last of these resulting in a two-year jail term. He qualified as a doctor in 1958 and returned to Luanda in 1959, where he opened a medical practice and worked secretly for the MPLA. He was again arrested in 1960 and sent to Cape Verde, where he was rearrested in 1961 and sent to prison in Portugal. On his release he escaped from Portugal where he was still subject to residence restrictions and police surveillance, ending up in Kinshasa where he was formally elected president of the MPLA at its first national conference. From 1961 until he died of cancer in 1979, Neto led the MPLA.

   Neto and the MPLA, while on the one hand clearly nationalist in character, were also Marxist. Neto’s Marxism began to develop while a student in Portugal, and although he was careful not to proclaim it while involved in the struggle for independence, his commitment to Marxist socialism became clear with the establishment of the People’s Republic of Angola in 1975. Doctrines of scientific socialism and Marxism–Leninism became explicit, and the MPLA became the MPLAWorkers’ Party based on Marxist–Leninist notions of the vanguard party and democratic centralism.