Protecting the Rear Guard

Angolan Women in the Anti-Colonial Struggle

Abstract

In Angola, in the narratives about the war of independence, there is a common recognition that ordinary women contributed to the anti-colonial struggle, highlighting the countless activities and tasks carried out by these women in the war of national liberation. In this sense, based on oral testimonies and military sources, this article highlights the role of women, based on the work carried out in the liberated zones, in their maintenance and sustainability, and outside these zones, in specific actions, in the different provinces of Angola. I argue that a group of anonymous women, many of them peasants, maintained an “anti-colonial economy”, seeking to maintain a certain autonomy for the struggle, independent of the Portuguese administration. In view of this, I believe that they should be considered “guerrillas” and not just “combatants”, in order to call into question the secondary position to which they were relegated by historiography and by subsequent narratives about the war of liberation.