Accusation and Legitimacy in the Civil War in Angola

Abstract

This article analyses the main categories of accusation found in the speeches of leaders from the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) during the Civil War in Angola (1975-2002). Seeking to understand the entanglements between the global and local dimensions of the conflict, we argue that the accusations made by Agostinho Neto (MPLA), José Eduardo dos Santos (MPLA), and Jonas Savimbi (UNITA) aimed to delegitimize the ‘other’ in the act of claiming legitimacy to occupy the state. This is achieved through the opposition between accusatory categories attributed to the ‘other’ and their inverse, categories attributed to the person making the accusation. We thereby show how the understanding of political conflicts in general, and the conflict in Angola specifically, can be illuminated through the analysis of categories whose linguistic dimension is entangled with historically constituted social positionalities.