Agostinho Neto

António Agostinho Neto was born in Bengo Province, Portuguese Angola, on the seventeenth of September 1922, the son of a Methodist pastor. He took a medical degree at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, becoming one of the first Angolans qualified as a physician. He returned to practice medicine in Luanda in 1959 and was almost immediately arrested by the Portuguese secret police.

He spent the next four years in Portuguese prisons. In 1962 he escaped to Léopoldville and became president of the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) — the principal liberation movement among the three competing for Angolan independence. The Angolan War of Independence ran from 1961 to 1975 and was the longest and most strategically complex of the Portuguese-territory liberation wars.

Angola became independent on the eleventh of November 1975 with Neto as first President — the title contested immediately by the rival movements FNLA and UNITA, which led to a civil war that would last twenty-seven years. The Cuban military intervention at Cuito Cuanavale in 1987 to 1988 — the largest African battle since Tobruk — defended the MPLA's legitimacy and indirectly accelerated the end of South African apartheid.

Neto was a published poet of significant skill. His collection *Sagrada Esperança* (1974) — written in part during his imprisonment — established the post-independence Angolan literary canon. He was the first Lusophone African head of state who was also a major literary figure in his own language.

He died of cancer in Moscow on the tenth of September 1979, age fifty-six. His successor José Eduardo dos Santos would rule for thirty-eight years.

He is honored here as the physician and poet who founded modern Angola.