Agostinho Neto (1922 - 1979)

Sun Sep 17, 1922

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Agostinho Neto, born on this day in 1922, was an Angolan poet, revolutionary, and Marxist politician, elected President of the newly independent People’s Republic of Angola in 1975.

During his youth, Neto was active in several anti-colonial movements in Angola, then a Portuguese colony. In 1947, he moved to Portugal to study, where he would be arrested for participating in political demonstrations. Following protests demanding his release, he was placed under house arrest, which he escaped.

From 1962 to 1974, Neto would move across the world, covertly directing the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola’s (MPLA) guerilla war against the Portuguese colonizers. Following the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, Angola was granted independence, to be led by a coalition of different anti-colonial groups. This coalition quickly fell apart, with Angola erupting into a civil war in 1975.

Declaring a Marxist-Leninist state, Neto was elected President of the People’s Republic of Angola at the MPLA’s first party congress in 1975. He died while undergoing surgery for liver cancer in 1979 at the age of 57.

“Our contribution has to be given not only for the liquidation of the colonial system but also for the liquidation of ignorance, disease and primitive forms of social organization.”

- Agostinho Neto