The story remains both complex and contradictory but calculations of US advantage deriving from the Cold War have been regularly and repeatedly at the heart of the Angolan catastrophe.
Across much of the country, chaos and misery followed the outbreak of a disastrous civil war encouraged and promoted in large part by the policies and interventions of the United States at the time of Reagan and his associates. In Africa, where the Lusophone territories won their independence in 1975, reasons for rejoicing were much reduced by the grim aftermath of Portugal’s departure in Angola, the largest and, in many ways, the most important of her African possessions. The formal ending of that far-flung empire will be marked in December 1999 with the restoration to China of the port of Macau. Above all, perhaps, it comes most appropriately for the winding up of Portugal’s empire, five hundred years after da Gama’s departure and four hundred since The Lusiads were first published. This is admirably done, being neither rumbustious nor boastful but shrewdly suited to the spirit of a modern readership. Now, in our happily inglorious days, we have them again, in Landeg White’s new English version of Os Lusíadas. What conquests and processions? What glories? What fame do you promise them? What stories?
What perils, what deaths have you in store, Your heroes! What pains you inflict on them!. To what deaths, what miseries you condemn That hollow conceit which puffs itself up Solemnly, if fruitlessly, he warns against their enterprise of imperialist piracy: In Canto Four of Camões’s 16th-century epic, as Vasco da Gama and the men of his fleet prepare to embark on their conquest of the Golden East, ‘an old man of venerable appearance’ steps down to the quayside of Belem.
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