Activities and affiliations

Political and party leadership Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) 1922–1979 ○ Pancreatic cancer; hepatitis (liver cancer also)

Physician-poet who led Angola's liberation struggle and became its first president

"Our land, our mother / we shall return." Lines from the poem "Havemos de voltar" in the 1974 collection Sacred Hope (Sagrada Esperança).

Physician and poet who led Angola's independence struggle. He was president of the MPLA at its founding in December 1956 and, after imprisonment and exile, was elected its effective chairman at the December 1962 conference, leading the independence war until 1974. He became the first president of the People's Republic of Angola on 11 November 1975, building a one-party socialist state in close alignment with the USSR and Cuba while crushing a 1977 coup attempt and carrying out mass purges.

Military command Angola state institutions 1933–2000 ○ Natural causes

Founder of Angola's People's Armed Forces and its first Defence Minister

After the October 1976 plenum, Carreira officially declared that "for the MPLA, the only socialism that exists is the socialism of Marx, Engels and Lenin, scientific socialism."

First Defence Minister of independent Angola, founder and commander-in-chief of the People's Armed Forces (FAPLA), and the MPLA's military strategist second only to Agostinho Neto. After the October 1976 Central Committee plenum he officially declared that 'for the MPLA, the only socialism that exists is the socialism of Marx, Engels and Lenin, scientific socialism,' marking the party's adoption of Marxism-Leninism. He directed the suppression of the 1977 Nitista uprising and its military tribunals, but lost power after Neto's death in 1979 and spent his last years denouncing Angola's 'savage capitalism.'

Military command Angola state institutions 1939–1977 ✕ Executed after capture; exact date unconfirmed

Angolan political-military leader and co-leader of the Nitista current with Nito Alves

On 20-21 May 1977 the MPLA Central Committee removed him and Nito Alves on fractionism charges; the abortive coup of 27 May followed.

An Angolan soldier, politician and anticolonial ideologue. Influenced by his Marxist-oriented family, he abandoned medical studies for the MPLA, coordinated its clandestine Luanda committee, and was nicknamed 'Filósofo'. In January 1970 he enlisted in the Portuguese colonial army on a military-intelligence mission to seize weapons and was imprisoned until the Carnation Revolution freed him in 1974. Elected the youngest Central Committee member at the July 1974 Lundoji conference, he was named FAPLA national political commissioner and deputy chief of staff in March 1975. He attended the 25th CPSU Congress with Nito Alves and was a leader of the orthodox-communist Nitista current. Removed in May 1977, he was captured and executed.

Economy, finance and planning Angola state institutions 1939–1996 ✕ Suicide in Luanda

Designer of Angolan economic planning and MPLA theorist

Appointed economy minister in November 1975 and, from 1976, minister of the plan and second deputy prime minister, he was a designer of Angolan economic planning. He gave up his government and party posts after the repression of 27 May 1977.

Carlos Alberto da Rocha Oliveira Dilolwa (2 December 1939, Sumbe – 16 November 1996, Luanda) was an Angolan economist, anticolonial activist and university professor, and a theorist of socialist economics counted among the MPLA's leading intellectuals. He joined the MPLA in 1961 under the influence of Viriato da Cruz, adopting the war name Dilolwa, and founded and taught at the 1st Revolutionary Instruction Centre at Dolisie before being sent to East Berlin in 1963 to study economics. In 1974 he entered the MPLA Central Committee and Political Bureau and joined the 'delegation of 26' received in Luanda on 8 November 1974. Appointed economy minister in November 1975, he served from 1976 as minister of the plan and second deputy prime minister. He gave up his government and party posts after the repression of 27 May 1977 and from November 1978 taught at the Faculty of Economics in Luanda.

Military command Angola state institutions 1945–1977 ✕ Executed (failed coup)

The radical MPLA interior minister who sought Soviet backing only to die in a failed coup

At the 1977 Central Committee he declared, 'As for me, I am the revolution incarnate,' demanding the immediate resignation of the leadership.

Nito Alves was the first interior minister of Angola and leader of the radical 'Nitista' faction within the MPLA. A guerrilla commander in the Dembos region during the independence war, he won the interior ministry at independence and used it to plant loyalists throughout the new state apparatus. In March 1976 he led Angola's delegation to the 25th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, presenting himself as head of the 'purely Marxist-Leninist wing' to win Soviet backing, which pushed Neto's leadership to adopt Marxism-Leninism formally. After the failed coup of May 1977 he was captured and shot by firing squad.

Diplomacy and international organization Angola state institutions 1934/1929–2010 ○ Died of illness

MPLA diplomat and Angola's second foreign minister, a leading figure of the party's left wing

Angolan chemical engineer, diplomat and politician. While studying in Lisbon he signed the 'Manifesto de 1956', the MPLA's founding document, was monitored by PIDE from 1961, and left Portugal in 1962 to handle the MPLA's diplomacy from Conakry. He served as representative in Egypt and Algeria, representative-general for Congo-Brazzaville and head of the MPLA's information department, then as foreign minister from 1976 to 1984. A leading figure of the party's left wing, he argued in a 1998 interview that top party and state posts should be filled by Marxist-Leninist vanguard criteria rather than ethno-regional demographic weight. He died in Luanda on 26 June 2010 aged 76.