Agostinho Neto
António Agostinho Neto (Ícolo e Bengo, 17 September 1922 – Moscow, 10 September 1979) was an Angolan physician, writer and politician, the country’s leading figure in the 20th century.
He was President of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola and in 1975 became the first President of Angola, serving until 1979. In 1975–1976 he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize.
He was part of the generation of African students who would play a decisive role in the independence of their countries in what came to be known as the Portuguese Colonial War. He was arrested by the International and State Defence Police (PIDE), the political police of the Salazar regime then in force in Portugal, and deported to Tarrafal, a political prison in Cape Verde, and was later placed under residence in Portugal, from where he fled into exile. There he took over the leadership of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), of which he had been honorary president since 1960. At the same time, he developed a remarkable literary activity, writing poems in particular.
On 17 September, Angola celebrates National Hero’s Day, commemorating the day Agostinho Neto was born.[5][6]
Biography
Youth (1922–1948)
He was born on 17 September 1922 in Caxicane, parish of São José, municipality of Ícolo e Bengo,[7] in a moderately prosperous colonial community focused on horticulture and fishing.[8] The district, which at the end of the 19th century was the centre of Methodism in Angola, flourished under the Methodist bishop of Luanda, who was a Freemason, and gained favour with the Republican regime in Portugal, governed by Freemasons after 1910.[8] His father, Agostinho Pedro Neto, was a catechist at an American Methodist mission in Luanda, and later a pastor and teacher in the Dembos,[9] and managed to place him on the first rung of the education ladder, which later allowed Agostinho to go to Coimbra and to graduate as a physician from the University of Lisbon;[8] and of Maria da Silva Neto, a primary school teacher in the region.[9]
When Agostinho Neto was four years old, the coup d’état took place that turned Portugal into a military dictatorship; and in 1932 António Salazar was granted dictatorial power. During his regime, government spending, especially in the colonies, was extremely reduced; and it led them to subsidize the metropole.[8] Slavery and the export of slaves had been made illegal in 1910; however, labour regimes akin to slavery continued, such as the system of compulsory labour and violent physical punishment for defaulters.[8] Only 1% of Angola’s Black population was considered “civilized” or “assimilated”, a group to which Agostinho belonged; and, consequently, was exempt from labour obligations and from taxes on wages earned in harsh conditions. Agostinho socialized with his white and mixed-race contemporaries; and later married Maria Eugénia, a white woman, and fathered three mixed-race children.[8] Later, Agostinho’s integration into the Lusophone world led to problems with purist anti-colonialists.[8]
When his parents moved to Luanda, he obtained his primary school certificate on 10 June 1934, and in 1937 began his secondary studies at the Liceu Salvador Correia, completing them in 1944.[9]
After finishing secondary school, he was hired by the governments-general of the State of West Africa to serve as a health services employee, in Malanje and in Bié,[10] during which time his view of the colonial problem broadened.[9]