WATCH: Unit 8 Overview

It was the summer of 1987. Madonna sat atop the  Billboard 100. The Cold War was almost over. Ronald   Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev had shaken hands in  Iceland. No one knew it yet, but the Soviet Union   would collapse just a few years later. And almost  every country in Africa had won its independence   from colonial rule. And yet, in Cuito Cuanavale— a small, sleepy farming town in southern Angola—   two armies converged. Well, I say two armies, but  it was more like nine or ten. Several factions   of Angolan nationalists, Cuban, South African, and  other soldiers from around Africa, faced off in the   small town. But there were only two sides: the one  secretly supported by the United States and the   one secretly supported by the Soviet Union. This  seven-month battle was the largest in Angola's Civil   War and it was the last battle in a decades-long  struggle for independence. It was perhaps the final   "hot" battle of the Cold War between the U.S. and  the Soviet Union. What can the battle of Cuito   Cuanavale teach us about the entangled histories  of the Cold War and decolonization? Let's find out. Hi, I'm John Arthur, and this is Unit 8: Cold  War and Decolonization 1900 to Present.   Two global struggles dominated the  second half of the 20th century.   One struggle was the clash between two alliances—  one led by the United States and the other by   the Soviet Union—in what is known as the  Cold War. The other struggle was a conflict   between the remaining global empires and  their colonized peoples, who were fighting   for independence. This is known as decolonization.  These two struggles are often studied separately,   but the Cold War and decolonization are best  understood together. When the Second World War   ended with an Allied victory, the world paused  to take a deep breath. But almost immediately, new   challenges emerged. The first was a confrontation  between the United States and the Soviet Union.   The two countries made stronger, rather than  weaker, by the war. The United States and the   Soviet Union emerged as the two new superpowers.  But they had vastly different interests and   values. These two governments distrusted each other  and they competed for influence around the world,   though they mostly avoided a direct conflict with  each other—that's why we call it a "cold" war. The   Cold War was entangled with decolonization  struggles. You see, after World War II,   colonized peoples wondered why they shouldn't  benefit from the struggle for freedom. After   fighting to preserve the world from fascism, they  demanded their own independent nation-states. These   feelings drove a flood of anti-colonial movements  that brought down weakened European empires.   Dozens of new independent nation- states rose all around the world. The Cold War and decolonization were both  continuations of some of the trends you saw at the   end of Unit 7. And we can better understand the  ways these two post-war struggles were entangled   by looking at continuity and change through the  course themes. On the surface, the Cold War was   a confrontation between the two most powerful  states in the late 20th century as they sought   to dominate international politics. Yet, this  was also a struggle of economics and ideology,  the United States was deeply supportive of  a free-market capitalist world economy, while   the Soviet Union championed communism and ran  the world's largest centralized, command economy.   But these ideologies extended beyond simple  economics. Capitalism and communism developed   as competing ideologies with very different  understandings of the world and human morality.   They each developed distinct ideas  about how society ought to be ordered   and who should control resources. And these  weren't the only two ideologies in the world.   Some decolonized nations created the non-aligned  movement—a promise to remain neutral in the Cold   War—to chart their own course and preserve their  own cultural and economic preferences in the face   of superpower pressure. Capitalism and communism  each had their own strengths and weaknesses.   But they also had similar needs. One of those needs  was for raw materials. The battles to control the   raw materials of former colonies helped draw  both superpowers into decolonization conflicts.   Both the United States and the Soviet Union saw  decolonization conflicts as opportunities in   their struggle against each other. They supported  leaders who sided with them and targeted those   who favored their enemies. Nuclear weapons made  direct conflict between the Soviets and Americans   unimaginably risky. And so the two superpowers  often engaged in proxy wars. In the Angolan Civil   War, we can see one example of this strategy as  the armies converged on Cuito Cuanavale in 1987. Angola is a country in Southern Africa, and  it was a Portuguese colony from the mid-16th   century until 1975. You'll remember from Unit  6 the stories of European empires using forced   labor to extract resources from their colonies. The  private companies that Portugal allowed to operate   in Angola also use forest labor as they mined land  for oil, diamonds, and other resources. Portugal was   a dictatorship until 1975, and its colonial rule  was brutally repressive. Nationalist resistance movements arose   in Angola in the 1960s as people began demanding  independence and an end to oppression. In 1975, the   dictatorship was overthrown, and the new government  announced their plans to withdraw from Angola. As   the Portuguese withdrew, several of the nationalist  factions battled each other for control of   Angola's future. The socialist MPLA party prevailed  and led the new government of Angola. They aligned   themselves with the Soviet Union, who had helped  fund the Angolan struggle against the Portuguese.   In reply, the United States and its allies,  including the government of South Africa,   supported an Angolan rebel group called UNITA.  Throughout the 1970s, the Angolan government   was backed by Soviet advisers and volunteers  from other communist countries such as Cuba.   They battled UNITA and its supporters,  particularly South Africa. In late 1987,   Angolan government forces finally closed in  on the UNITA strongholds in southern Angola.   The South African military quickly sent aid  to the UNITA forces trapped there. In response   to that move, Cuba sent tens of thousands of  volunteers to aid the Angolan government forces.   As a result, the small town of Cuito Cuanavale  turned into a massive battlefield as Cold War   and decolonization conflicts collided. Throughout  February and March 1988, Cuban and Angolan forces   battled the UNITA rebels and troops from South  Africa, eventually driving them off. Neither the   United States nor the Soviet Union were directly  involved. Instead, their conflict was fought through   their allies and local forces. But this was  definitely a Cold War confrontation between the   capitalist and communist worlds. And it was also  the last battle for the decolonization of Angola.   The battle of Cuito Cuanavale is only one  example of the ways in which the Cold War   and decolonization overlapped. In this unit,  you'll encounter many more as the superpowers   challenge each other for dominance and emerging  nations struggle against the forces of colonialism.