Flight from Angola

The Portuguese are calling it the greatest exodus in the history of Africa, and they are right. Not even the Congo, where in 1960 the white population fell from 110,000 to 20,000 between January and July, was like what is happening in Angola now. Angola's 500,000 or so white people, nearly all of them Portuguese, have had enough. Although the bitter fighting between rival nationalist groups has had little or no racial overtone as yet, the whites expect to be turned on at any time. The result is that just about anyone who can get out is trying to.

A similar number of Angola's 5½m blacks are also on the move—or would like to be. The Red Cross estimates that more than 500,000 Africans have been displaced by the fighting. Because of the tribal basis of the three main nationalist movements, most of those caught in the wrong tribal area have resorted to flight. The Ovibundu who worked in the coffee plantations and diamond mines of the north have all gone home to their homelands on the central plateau.