The war for Africa: Twelve months that transformed a continent

Before southern Africa's peace there came the war. Between August 1987 and July 1988 Fidel Castro's Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces, the south African Defence Force, Angolan government forces directed by Soviet officers and an Angolan opposition guerrilla army trained by Red China, France and the United States clashed in the biggest land battles in the history of black Africa. It was a fierce collision of ideologies and of modern warplanes, missiles and tanks across one of the world's most remote and undeveloped terrains known to Angola's former Portuguese colonial rulers as the Land at the End of the Earth. Thousands of men died and thousands more were terribly maimed. Weapons and ammunition worth billions of collars were destroyed and expended. The Angolan economy was crippled. The budgets of Cuba, South Africa and the Soviet Union were subjected to terrible strains. It was a War for Africa's very soul. It culminated in a peace agreement, the New York Accords, signed on 22 December 1988,. The reader will learn what it is like to encounter an advanced Soviet MiG fighter in a French Mirage warplane 30,000 feet above the forests of Africa; what emotion grip a reconnaissance commando lying unseen inside Cuban lines within feet of enemy soldiers; how it feels in an armoured car to face a Soviet T-55 tank at just 30 feet in burning bush and swirling dust and smoke. This is, however, far more than just an account of men in battle. Woven through are details of the political background to the conflict and the diplomatic initiatives which governed the lives and deaths of young Cuban, South African and Angolan men at the front. It is, all in all, a story of African fighting on an unprecedented scale, the international intrigue spanning several continents, and the new opportunities it opened up for democracy to 100 million people in five countries.

Hardback. English. Ashanti. 1990. Used.