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The African nation of Angola had been a colony of Portugal for many years, populated by increasing numbers of European Portuguese following World War II. Resistance to this domination and the exploitation of the country's natural resources took the form of the establishment of native political parties: the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA). By 1961, these parties, realizing that the Portuguese government had no intention of following other European nations in granting independence to African colonies, engaged in a guerrilla war that was to persist for 13 years. During most of that time, the Portuguese forces had to contend with rebellions in their other African colonies, Mozambique and Guinea, but the fighting was sporadic and contained in limited areas, and the rebels made little headway, despite at one point being secretly supplied with aid from the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

With the death of the Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar in 1970 and the growing disenchantment in Portugal with the conduct of the war, the movement in favor of Angolan independence grew, particularly among leaders in the Portuguese military. The result was a coup in 1974, after which the new military government granted Angola independence. Unfortunately, the new republic was almost immediately plunged into a three-way civil war among the MPLA, FNLA, and the third group, National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), a war intensified by the involvement of foreign nations, including the United States and the Soviet Union, 50,000 Cuban troops, and an invasion by South Africa. In addition to the half-million dead and 4 million refugees, the civil war helped to create a famine that raised the mortality rate of newborn children to an unprecedented level.

After many abortive attempts to reconcile the warring groups, a fragile cease-fire was finally concluded in April 2002.

Antonio Lobo Antunes (1942-), a Portuguese physician-turned-novelist, served in the early 1970s as a doctor with the Portuguese army in Angola. His novel South of Nowhere (1979; trans., 1983) is a graphic, often hallucinatory account of the impact of the war on that desperately poor and oppressed country. The story, whose form borrows heavily from Albert Camus's The Fall (1956; trans., 1957), is a first-person narrative set in a bar in Lisbon. The narrator is a guilt-ridden doctor, haunted by his recollections of the horror of the war and his passive acquiescence in the destruction and suffering it brought on both Portuguese soldiers and the starving masses of Angolan natives. The silent listener to the doctor's story is an anonymous woman he has picked up in the bar. The one-night stand that ensues leaves the narrator in the same joyless, unsatisfied, emotional limbo that he exhibits throughout his narration. . .

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