At the end of World War II Portugal was the poorest country in western Europe and was ruled by a dictatorship, but it still claimed an immense overseas empire that included Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and Cape Verde. Since the 1920s Portuguese dictator António Salazar (1889–1970) had relied on forced labor in Angola’s diamond mines to finance his regime. To alleviate poverty in Portugal, Salazar also promoted colonial settlement in Angola and Mozambique, where the white population rose from seventy thousand in 1940 to over five hundred thousand in 1970.

Salazar was determined to resist decolonization, insisting that Portuguese territories were “overseas provinces,” whose status he compared to Alaska and Hawaii’s relationship to the United States before statehood. Unlike other European colonial leaders, Salazar refused to consider ending colonial rule. Without government support for independence, nationalists in Portugal’s colonies resorted to armed insurrections. By the early 1970s independence movements in Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique all fought guerrilla wars against the Portuguese army and colonial militias. Angola had three separate guerrilla movements. The human toll was immense, and Portuguese officers returning from the colonies deposed the dictator in 1974. Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde became independent that same year; Angola and Mozambique gained independence a year later. The nationalist movements that took power were all Marxist. Their radicalism was a product of their long struggle against oppression, inequality, and lack of access to their countries’ resources, and Marxism provided a blueprint for building new states, aided by support from other Marxist regimes in Africa, eastern Europe, and Asia.

The end of colonialism in Angola and Mozambique shifted the political landscape of southern Africa. Mozambique helped rebels fighting white-minority rule in Rhodesia, while the South African government saw independent Angola as a threat to apartheid and to its control over Namibia. The bloc of white-minority rule had been shattered. But after more than a decade of war for independence, neither Angola nor Mozambique would soon find peace.

The new government of Mozambique faced a guerrilla movement financed by Rhodesia. As Angola became independent, it faced immediate invasions from Zaire (encouraged by the United States) and South Africa. The new president of Angola, Agostinho Neto (1922–1978), requested military aid from Cuba, which airlifted troops that repelled both invasions and kept the regime in place. Until the late 1980s tens of thousands of Cuban troops faced off with the South African Defense Forces and mercenary armies to defend the government of Angola.

In the British colony of Rhodesia white settlers were a small minority of the population — barely 5 percent — who declared independence on their own in order to avoid sharing power with the black majority. In 1965 they established a white-minority government under farmer and politician Ian Smith. The new Rhodesian state faced international condemnation for its treatment of black citizens, including the first economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations. Under white rule, Rhodesian laws created the illusion that the regime was not racist, though the objective of the legal and political system was to exclude blacks. Blacks and whites voted on separate ballots, with the weight of their vote proportionate to the amount of taxes each group paid. Since whites controlled the economy and the tax base, this meant they controlled the government. The Rhodesian army and police dealt violently with black political activists who challenged white rule.

The Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), a political party that fought for majority rule in Rhodesia, was banned and fought a guerrilla war against the white regime. Rebuffed by the United States and Britain, ZAPU received training and equipment from China and the Soviet Union. When Mozambique gained independence in 1974, its government allowed ZAPU and other guerrilla groups to use neighboring Mozambican territory as a staging ground to launch attacks on Rhodesia, making it impossible for the Ian Smith government to endure. Negotiations between the Rhodesian government, Britain, and the rebel forces fighting for majority rule led to an open election in 1980 that ZAPU leader Robert Mugabe won easily. The transition to majority rule went through an unusual political process: since Britain had never relinquished its colonial rule over Rhodesia, the Smith government ceded control to Britain, which in turn granted independence to the newly elected government in 1980. The new Mugabe government renamed the country Zimbabwe after an ancient city-state that predated colonial rule.

Other peoples and nations in Africa or with historical connections to Africa through the slave trade supported the transition to majority rule. Activists in the United States, Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean had campaigned against the white-minority governments in Rhodesia and South Africa. They now celebrated an important victory. Bob Marley and the Wailers performed at Zimbabwe’s independence festivities.