Book Review: Death of Dignity

I recently purchased a copy of Victoria Brittain's 1998 book Death of Dignity: Angola's Civil War. The author was a reporter for the Guardian who visited Angola a few times in the 80s and 90s and I was interested to find a perspective about the country from that time period.

The book is slim, numbering only 100 pages plus a 10 page preface. The preface is what I'd hoped the rest of the book would be like - the author's personal experiences as a journalist in Angola, describing what she witnessed and what people told her. But that's not how the other 100 pages were presented; the book is primarily a history of Angola from 1975-1998. It's not really about Angolan society, or even Angolan politics; it's a book about international politics and how Angola was played like a football by various competing nations after it became independent.

The content is fine - I did pick up some interesting details here and there and particular timings of when things were announced versus when they were actually implemented that I hadn't found in other books. Otherwise, the information found in the book could be found in other titles; I was hoping the book would be something more personal and unique.

But while the content is fine, the manner in which it's relayed left me frustrated, and that's what I really want to write about. In the foreword, the author made it clear ther her book would not be "neutral" in tone but rather partisan. The author did not like the rebels and did not use any of its members' interviews in the book because "I have interviewed too many of them and seen too much of their suffering to listen to the lying justifications of those responsible."

She also promised in the foreword that "nor are there interviews with Western diplomats, the normal staple fare of Western journalists." Which is an odd hill to plant one's flag upon. She quoted Western diplomats all the time, featuring public quotes from the likes of Henry Kissinger, Chester Crocker and Margaret Antsee. She also quoted an official from the UN whom she didn't identify; either her source didn't attribute the quote or she contradicted herself? But why make the promise "I won't interview these people, but I will quote extensively from them?"

She emphasized that she did interview many Angolans and quoted them anonymously to protect them, but even there her interviewing is brief; if you added up all the interviews she conducted, it might account for 5 of the 100 pages. She quoted from the rebel's public statements very frequently, but at least she ascribed a portion of agency to them. Contrast that with her treatment of the government in quotes such as this, about the resumption of the civil war in early 1993: "The horror of how life had been reduced to a numb battle for survival in those among the MPLA leadership who never forgot it for a moment paid a heavy psychological prize as they agonised without being able to do anything." The government is written about as though they were, at best, passive.

I suppose what I really wanted was the author's personal experiences and interviews, not an opinionated guide through Angolan history. It's an angry book that is very particular to the time in which it was published (near the end of the war). But as a 1990s work of non-fiction on Angola, I found Karl Maier's book Angola: Promises and Lies - cited in Brittain's bibliography - a much better work.