Border War
By 1966, SWAPO launched guerilla raids from neighbouring countries against South Africa's occupation of South-West Africa/Namibia. Initially South Africa fought a counter-insurgency war against SWAPO. But this conflict deepened after Angola gained its independence in 1975 under Communist leadership, the MPLA, and South Africa promptly challenged them, allying with the Angolan rival party, UNITA. By the end of the 1970s, Cuba had joined the fray, in one of several late Cold War flashpoints throughout Southern Africa. This developed into a conventional war between South Africa and UNITA on one side against the Angolan government, the Cubans, the Soviets and SWAPO on the other side.
Read more about this topic: Foreign Relations Of South Africa During Apartheid
Famous quotes containing the words border and/or war:
““Although our love is waning, let us stand
By the lone border of the lake once more,
Together in that hour of gentleness
When the poor tired child, Passion, falls asleep....””
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to “feel good” about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)