Angola: Day of the Beginning of the National Liberation Armed Struggle

4 February 1961 was the beginning of the Angolan War of Independence, called the “Dia do Início da Luta Armada de Libertação Nacional” (Day of the Beginning of the National Liberation Armed Struggle). It began as an uprising against forced cultivation of cotton, and it became a multi-faction struggle for the control of Portugal’s overseas province of Angola among three nationalist movements: the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA); the National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA); the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA); and a separatist movement, the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC). It was a guerrilla war in which the Portuguese security forces waged a counter-insurgency campaign against armed guerrilla groups mostly dispersed across sparsely populated areas of a sizable Angolan countryside. The conflict is usually approached as a branch or a theatre of the wider Portuguese Colonial War, which also included the independence wars of Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. On the early morning of 4 February 1961, a number of African militants, mostly armed with machetes, ambushed a Public Security Police (PSP) patrol-car and stormed the Civil Jail of São Paulo, the Military Detection House and the PSP Mobile Company Barracks, with the apparent objective of freeing political prisoners that were being held in those facilities. The militants were able to kill the crew of the patrol-car, taking their weapons, b