,
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1851720162/?tag=2022091-20
1987
Born on September 17, 1922, in a village near Catete, 60 miles south-east of Luanda.
He died in a hospital in Moscow during complications during a liver cancer operation he suffered a few days before he was 57 years old. He was replaced in the presidency of Angola and the MPLA by José Eduardo dos Santos.
Educated at Luanda, where he was one of the first mulattos to come out on top at the Salvador Correia High School. Was a physician trained at the Universities of Coimbra and Lisbon.
After resuming his medical studies at the University of Porto he graduated in 1958 and returned as a doctor to Angola in 1959.
At the reconciliation meeting with Holden Roberto in December 1972 he let the titular leadership of the Supreme Council for Liberation go to his rival while retaining effective control 36 of the revolutionary struggle as president of the United Military Command.
In his spare time he was personal secretary to a Methodist Bishop, the Reverend Ralph Dodge, who arranged for a crusade scholarship to enable him to study medicine, first at the University of Lisbon then at the University of Coimbra. His political agitation and his nationalist poems resulted in his arrest and then rustication from February 1955 to June 1957.
On June 8, 1960, he was arrested in his consulting room in front of patients. Villagers who went to protest at Catete were fired on by Portuguese police, who killed 30 people and injured 200. After being held for three months he was taken to Cape Verde.
On October 17, 1961, he was taken to Portugal and gaoled at Aljube prison at Lisbon. Later he was allowed out under house arrest. In July 1962 he escaped and went by boat to Morocco. One of his first acts after his escape was to attend the reconciliation negotiations at Kinshasa on August 5, 1962, between the MPLA and FNLA. Two days later talks broke down. From December 1 to 3, 1962, the MPLA held its first national conference at Kinshasa and elected a new 10-member party executive and replaced Mario de Andrade with Neto as president.
After a visit to Russia in March 1964 he was assured of Soviet financial help.
His position was strengthened as Angola’s delegate to the Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference at Khartoum in 1969 and in Rome in 1970. He was granted an audience with the Pope on July 1, 1970, alongside Amilcar Cabral and Marcellino dos Santos.
Following a visit to China in 1971 he attended various OAU meetings, including the summit at Rabat in June 1972. That meeting urged reconciliation among liberation movements and he shook hands with his rival Roberto at the Kinshasa ceremony on December 13, 1972, when the agreement on a united front was reached. Although it was a marriage of convenience, Neto gave proof of his willingness to fulfil his part of the bargain at a meeting with Roberto on February 26, 1973, to begin implementing the agreement.
He developed a literary activity, writing poems in particular.
Quotations: On March 21, 1961, he wrote: “The authorities here put out rumours that I am trying to escape by Russian submarine. At any time the police can kill me and announce that I have escaped.”
An assimilated accepted as a brilliant pupil alongside Whites, he established himself as the principal nationalist leader accepted on all sides—in Rome by the Pope, in Peking by the Chinese Premier. Not a rousing platform orator, this mild bespectacled man with laughing eyes is at his best as a persuader in political committees or small guerrilla squads.
The son of a Methodist pastor at Bengo
