Nito Alves

After attending the 25th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Alves shifted his loyalties towards the Soviet Union, becoming known in the Western press as "Moscow's man in Luanda".

Alves used his position as Interior Minister to appoint his followers - known as Nitistas - to offices within the new government.

Alves held premature elections for the Popular Bairro Committees (CPBs), resulting in a low turnout of roughly 10%, with Nitistas coming to dominate the organs of "Popular Power".

Nito Alves (1945–1977) was an Angolan revolutionary and politician who served as the first interior minister of Angola.

In 1945, Nito Alves was born in the Northern Angolan town of Piri.

He started his education at an evangelical mission near his hometown, before moving to the Angolan capital of Luanda in 1960 to continue his education.

In 1965, he joined the anti-colonial movement, while in his sixth year at school.

After a number of his fellow activists were arrested and imprisoned in 1966, he left the capital and joined the MPLA in the forests of Dembos, where anti-colonial guerrillas had been fighting since the outbreak of the Angolan War of Independence.

In 1967, Alves was put in command of the Centre of Revolutionary Instruction, and by 1971, he had joined the regional leadership under the command of Jacob Caetano.

Encouraged by Alves, the Dembos guerrillas began to develop a "certain regionalism" which centred Dembos as the main theatre in the war for national liberation.

Already by 1969, they were taking greater casualties than other regions, with the defeat of their southern front resulting in them being cut off from the rest of the anti-colonial movement.

The situation moved Caetano to seek aid in Cabinda, leaving Alves as the regional supreme commander.

After the overthrow of the Estado Novo in the Carnation Revolution, in 1974, Alves returned to the Angolan capital.

In Luanda, he made contact with other anti-colonial figures, such as José Van-Dúnem, and the Portuguese Communist Party, who came to see him as a "genuine revolutionary leader".

By this time, the MPLA was beset by factional infighting, with a Congress being held in Lusaka to resolve the conflict through an organisational solution.

Alves was delegated to the Congress, where he gave the impression of being an instransigent Maoist, violently denouncing the factional leader Daniel Chipenda for his Eastern Revolt.

Although his interjections won the support of MPLA leader Agostinho Neto, Alves' speeches also lay the foundations of his own divergence from the movement's leadership, as he vocally expressed his desire for the Angolan Revolution to be one of black power.

At the subsequent Inter-Regional Conference of Militants, held in the liberated territories of Eastern Angola, Alves called for a "struggle against the bourgeoisie", which he identified in racial terms as White Angolans.

Alves' anti-White policies were rejected by the MPLA majority, which upheld multiracialism.

Alves then returned to Luanda, where he set about reorganising the movement, establishing a network of mass organisations according to the principles of "Popular Power".

These organisations were often spontaenously self-organised by the grassroots, with inhabitants of the Luanda musseques organising themselves to defend against terrorist attacks by white supremacists and the right-wing National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA).

With the independence of Angola in 1975, Alves was appointed to head the Ministry of Interior (Angola).

He used the position to place his loyal followers - known as Nitistas - into positions of power in the new state.

But the Nitistas ended up causing a supply chain crisis after stockpiling food, prompting the government to dissolve Alves' ministry.

Alves supported fractionism, opposing Neto's foreign policy of nonalignment, evolutionary socialism, and multiracialism.

Alves encouraged the development of these neighbourhood organisations, which culminated in July 1975, when the forces of "Popular Power" expelled the FNLA from Luanda.

The success of his organisational efforts earned him the role of Interior Minister in the new People's Republic of Angola, which was established on 11 November 1975.

As Interior Minister, Alves continued the work he had started in the Luandan anti-colonial network.

In opposition to what he saw as a class collaborationist tendency in the MPLA, he declared himself a "partisan of unflinching class struggle", attracting support from anti-colonial activists in the bairros, radical student circles and Portuguese Communists.

During this period, his friends noted him to have regularly stated that "history has reserved for me the heavy task of leading the working class to power", while often quoting from "the immortal Lenin, whose work I intend to continue".

His ultra-left positions often aligned with the Communist Organization of Angola (OCA), a Maoist organisation which often denounced the MPLA as "bourgeois" and which was hostile to the "social imperialist" intervention of Soviet and Cuban forces in the Angolan Civil War.

But despite their ideological similarities, Alves was a key figure in the suppression of the OCA, which likewise denounced him as a "social-fascist".

Alves himself was heavily inspired by the works of Enver Hoxha and Mao Zedong, but had been forced to renounce Maoism after the People's Republic of China backed UNITA.

A hardline member of the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), Alves is best known for his failed 1977 coup attempt against the government of Agostinho Neto.

During the Angolan War of Independence, Alves fought for the MPLA as a guerrilla in the forests of Dembos, rising through the ranks to become regional commander in the country's north.

He developed a reputation as an intransigent Marxist-Leninist, gaining the support of Neto and the MPLA leadership after he vocally denounced Daniel Chipenda's' Eastern Revolt.

In May 1977, the MPLA expelled him from the party.

He and his supporters broke into a prison, freeing other supporters, and took control of the radio station in Luanda in an attempted coup.

Forces loyal to Neto took back the radio and arrested those involved in the coup attempt, with Cuban soldiers actively helping Neto put down the coup.

After the failed coup the MPLA undertook a purge designed to eliminate factionalism, during which Alves and several of his supporters were killed.