Complexity, Contradictions, Paradox: Nothing is Simple in Angola

Contents: The Church • The Angolan Context • Living with War; Hoping for Peace • Miscellany • Report as Angola trip as interpreter for United Church Board for World Ministries (UCBWM) delegation. The report says the February 1989 delegation which attended the General Assembly of the Angolan church was the first official delegation from the United Church of Christ to visit since the early 1970s, nearly two decades ago; the task was to re-establish relationships and open conversations about how working partnership might look. The report says the delegation found a highly organized church, with structures, reports, and form that reminded us of stateside churches we know; the American source of the missionaries who first taught them was clear. We found a church in which worship is central and the hymn tunes and liturgical patterns much like our own; it was clear that it was we who had taught them; and it tolas clear that when our last missionaries left Angola during the war for independence from Portugal, local leaders had emerged and kept the church alive. The report says with independence, all protestants in Angola were freer to practice their faith openly and the Angolan leadership had set in motion its own mission work, sending pastors to areas where their church had no previous work; we met the leadership of a national church, founded by the missionaries of the American Board and other ecumenical colleagues, but now operating autonomously; there is no doubt the Evangelical Congregational Church of Angola with its headquarters in Huambo is appropriate for the kind of "partnership in mission" that is the current name for how we in the United Church of Christ try to relate to Christians outside the United States. The report says the Angolan church, however, found "partnership" to be a totally new idea. The delegation members were welcomed as parents finally checking up on children whom they had neglected. The report says and the "children" hoped the "parents" would be pleased and would again "provide for the children." The report says Lloyd Van Vactor of the UCBWM delegation responded to the G€ner.al Secretary of the Angolan church when he openly used this metaphor as a way of introducing a long "wish list" for help. The report says the American Board, one of the predecessors of the UCBWM, sent its first missionaries to Angola over a century ago; the historical realities include persecution by the Portuguese rulers who considered Protestants to be subversives (virtually equal to communists) because they taught Africans self-esteem and that they had God-given abilities and rights. Our missionaries trained carpenters, tailors, nurses, teachers, doctors and raised a generation of Africans with leadership skills; in another part of the country, Methodists did the same; the outcome is that most of the top leadership of the new independent Angola is mission trained; both the first and current presidents since independence - leaders of the governing MPLA - received Methodist training; the 35-year-old Acting Commissioner (equals governor) of Huambo Province, whom we met, grew up and was trained at our Dondi Mission; but the Evangelical Congregational Church of Angola is in a particularly sensitive position in independent Angola because our missions also trained Jonas Savimbi and his followers who form UNITA, the lone remaining opposition force trying militarily to change the government of Angola; this is rather like being Japanese-American in the United States during World War II. The report says in Angola, government people and church people alike long for an end to the destabilization of their country; war against the Portuguese colonial power, which began in 1961, ended in 1975 but three liberation movements pressured by outside forces to form a coalition government in January of that year never trusted or respected each other and within a month there was major fighting between the FNLA (backed by the US and Zaire) and the MPLA (supported by the USSR); South Africa forces engaged the MPLA inside southern Angola by April and in May UNITA, the third movement, resumed its own military attacks on the MPLA and on economic targets such as the Benguela Railway. Foreign mercenaries supplemented efforts by the FNLA to take over but despite major massacres and destruction in Luanda, the capital city, and the presence of South African troops within striking distance of the capital, the MPLA declared the country independent in November and organized a government; to help in defense of this new country, the Angolan government, then led only by the MPLA, invited and received help from Cuba; the relative participation and power of these varied forces has risen or fallen at various times since 1976 but reality for people in both cities and rural areas in Angola is that they have lived with a constant reality of Har to this clay - 28 years without peace. The report says every person in Angola has known something of the effects of war. Scarcity, displacement, physical and emotional wounds, delayed development, insecurity, unreliable electricity, water, transport and trade are part of everyday. The report says in Huambo, where we attended, the Evangelical Congregational Church, the reality of which nobody speaks is that the most educated church leadership followed Jonas Savimbi into the bush at independence, over 13 years ago. The report says Angola reportedly has proportionally more amputees than any other nation because of the widespread use of mines; peasants and children on the way to fetch water, work in fields or en route to school or market or visiting friends have repeatedly been the innocent victims as their step detonated a hidden mine; we watched passersby in the streets of both Luanda and Huambo, and were struck by the many one-legged people, by a homemade wooden wheelchair or a platform on wheels for a double amputee, by children pushing a group of three wheelchairs in the early morning toward a school; we visited a recovery center run by the International Red Cross filled with mostly civilian war-wounded of all ages, and we also visited the government-run center in Huambo that makes prostheses and offers physical and occupational therapy; men, wearing their own artificial legs, now fit and craft legs for new victims. The report says the day before the UCBWM delegation arrived in Angola's capital city, Luanda, saboteurs destroyed two electric pylons and plunged the capital into darkness; the smaller second source of electricity could only provide electricity, in rotation, to one section of town, then another; where there was no electricity, there was usually no water either. The report says peace has not yet come to Angola, although people have hope that things will considerably improve now that accords have been signed and South African troops have withdrawn and Cubans are going; the problem is that UNITA was not a party to the talks and still functions as an anti- government guerrilla force; although the South Africans who supplied and helped them are now further away, the United States has more than picked up the slack with equipment and logistical support; several sources, church and non-church, told us of a shift of activity from the southern part of the country where South Africa helped to northern areas nearer Zaire; they said a lull in October and November when the peace talks began has ended and fighting and sabotage in the north is again on the increase; Dino Matross, the military commander in the zone that includes Huambo (near the center of the country), and a very high-level member of the central committee of the governing party, reminded us that although control of an area may be with the government, and with control the obligation to try to provide services, a very small number (5--6) of saboteurs can wreak havoc to such development efforts, terrorize the countryside, and paralyze land transport. The report says but despite the war, the church had its General Assembly; delegates spent weeks gathering, some having flown in with a Red Cross plane already in January, some risking their lives overland on unsafe stretches of road. The report says to this American visitor, (I speek only for myself), it made no sense that my country is insisting on continuing to keep the war alive in Angola, by declining to recognize the existing government of Angola, and by supplying the UNITA opposition with even better assistance than they had previously from South Africa. The report says in our delegation were Dr. Bonganjalo Goba, the Africa Secretary of the UCBWM, Kate Godspeed, chair of the Africa Committee of the board of the UCBWM, Rev. Lloyd Van Vactor of UCBWM staff, Dr. Kenneth Smith, president of Chicago Theological Seminary, and myself, Ruth B. Minter, who served as translator both to and from Portuguese throughout the visit; official reports will come from those who have decision-making roles in making Board policy toward Angola; these are merely my own impressions and comments. The report says I thank the Central Atlantic Conference for allowing me to serve the United Church Board for World Ministries for the 16 days of this trip; the trip would have faced significant difficulties in communication if the delegation had had only English-speakers on it; I believe it was a very important trip for the UCBWM and for the Angolan partner church and I am pleased to have been able to help. The report discusses the MPLA Workers Party, TB, diarrhea, yellow fever, cholera, displaced people, the Angolan Council of Churches, the United Church of Christ (UCC), Rev. Benjamin Chavis, development, health care services, and schools. [Note: Ruth Minter subsequently changed her name to Ruth Brandon.]