On 21 March 2022, we celebrated our 32nd anniversary as an independent nation. However, many historical factors contributed to the birth of Namibia as a nation. One country that bore the brunt of military aggression at the hands of the Apartheid South African regime because of their commitment to support our struggle for independence was Angola. Although the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) has always been, to a large extent, a collective, there were individuals who stood head above shoulders over others in that collective – one such an individual was Lucio Lara. 27th February 2022 – one month short of our independence anniversary – marked the 26th anniversary of his death, and I therefore have decided to dedicate this piece to the story of his life. As fate would have it, an Angolan friend who knew that I was writing a piece on the life of this Angolan icon sent me word to say that General Paulo Pfluger Barreto de Lara had passed away on 22 March 2022 – one day after our 32nd independence anniversary. He was Lucio Lara’s first-born son and a general in the Angolan army. May his soul rest in peace.
Lúcio Rodrigo Leite Barreto de Lara (9 April 1929 – 27 February 2016), also known by the pseudonym Tchiweka, was one of the founding members of the MPLA. He was born in the city of Caála, in the province of Huambo. Between 1949 and 1952, he studied for a degree in mathematics at the University of Lisbon. During this period, he became a resident of the House of Students of the Empire, a student body that served as a centre for anti-colonial discussions in Lisbon. It was in this discussion centre that he became friends with Antonio Agostino Neto (who was to become the first president of Angola). The two would be responsible for the formation of the ideological nucleus of MPLA. While participating in political party activities in Lisbon, he met Ruth Pflüger, a young Lisbon-born Portuguese Jew of German ancestry, whom he married in 1955.
Lara and Neto embodied the optimism and moral tone of the Portuguese-speaking African colonies’ struggle, following Cabral’s assassination in 1973. He began his political life in the late 1940s, and as a member of the African Studies Centre in Lisbon, soon met some of the other African activists who were fighting for independence from Portugal, including Amilca Cabral (Guinea-Bissau) and Marcelino dos Santos (Mozambique). He founded, together with several anti-colonial students and workers, the Clube Marítimo Africano in Lisbon, a recreational and sports entity that also served as a centre for debates about colonialism. In 1957, he joined the MPLA (founded the previous year), becoming its main ideologue, being even attributed to him the elaboration of the Marxist ideology of the movement, which would become the dominant current.
After being elected as secretary general of the movement in 1964, he moved permanently with his family to Congo Brazzaville, after having helped to establish the MPLA’s first international office in Guinea-Conakry a few years early while serving as a professor of chemistry there. In Brazzaville, he worked as a teacher of mathematics and chemistry in the party’s schools and organised the MPLA’s department of education and culture, responsible for preparing teachers and maintaining a vast library.
On the date of Angola’s independence (11 November 1975), Lara was elected president of the Constituent Assembly, and swore in Neto as the first President of Angola. Lara remained president of parliament until 1977. In the purge of factionalism that followed the Nito Alves abortive coup of 1977, which purge was ordered by Agostinho Neto, “an undisclosed number of people were executed”. Though the work of arresting, jailing, torturing and killing dissidents, real or imagined, was ordered by Neto, and carried out by lower-level cadres, it is generally accepted that the operation was directed by Lara, Minister of Defence Iko Carreira and others who were part of the MPLA inner circle at that point in time. Both Lara and Iko Carreira were Mulattoes or Angolan Coloureds, and the internal power struggle within the MPLA has always had an ideological as well as a racial dimension. The involvement of Lara in that purge, in a way, dented his reputation. On 10 December 1977, Lara was elected vice-president of the MPLA, a position only second to that of Neto in terms of seniority.
When Neto died (10 September 1979), Lara was the highest member of the political bureau and vice-president of the MPLA. With this, he assumed, on an interim basis, the functions of president of the party, and by extension president of the country for 10 days (10 September to 20 September 1979). He urgently convened the 2nd MPLA Congress on 11 September 1979, working hard for the election of Jose Eduardo dos Santos, which occurred on 20 September of that same year – he declined the offer to take over the leadership of the country. In 1985, Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos removed him from the MPLA’s political bureau, remaining only on the party’s central committee, in what was seen as an internal political purge against adversaries.
He was a member of the Angolan parliament from independence until 1992 when he left public life. After leaving a political career, Lara dedicated himself to organising the historical and documental collection about the independence process and the formation of Angola, through the Tchiweka Documentation Association (ATD). Shortly before his passing, he released his memoir “For a broad movement…”, with a preface by his wife Ruth. He died in the Angolan capital on 27 February 2016, aged 86 years. Lucio Lara’s leftist theoretical thoughts and inquiries were piercing and embraceable. If at the beginning of the Angolan revolution the MPLA was regarded as a radical leftist movement, then Lucio Lara was dfinetely its chief ideologue and theoretical architect – he was the movement’s ideological moral guardian. The German philosopher Nietzsche was to remark: “Many die too late, and a few die too early…therefore die at the right time (italics mine).” Lucio Lara lived and died for “…a broad movement…” to borrow a phrase from the title of his memoir.