Flag of the Day #4 – Angola

For me, the national flag of Angola is the most stridently revolutionary.  It is elegantly split horizontally into a lower black half signifying mother Africa, and an upper red half signifying the blood of the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola) revolutionaries who wrested the country from Portugal and defeated capitalist proxies in an ensuing civil war.  The center emblem features a yellow half gear wheel crossed by a machete and crowned with a star representing International marxism. The emblem evokes the soviet’s crossed hammer and sickle, but with the badass quotient cranked up to 11.

The flag is a direct decedent of the flag that the MPLA fought under.  In place of the crossed machete emblem, the MPLA flag had a single marxist star in the center.  That flag was an homage to the flag flown by the Viet Cong.  The success of the Vietnamese nationalist, marxist war against western running dogs of imperialism was an inspiration to the MPLA.

The flag came into use when Angola gained independence from Portugal on November 11, 1975 following Portugal’s “Carnation Revolution” which was essentially a military coup that deposed the Salazar regime.

Unlike other colonial powers that saw the self-determination writing on the wall in the 50’s and 60’s, Portugal’s Estado Novo government was a whacked out super right-wing hold out which Wikipedia describes as “opposed to communism, socialism, anarchism, liberalism and anti-colonialism”. That last one is a good.  Portugal under Salazar, it seems,  was more than simply “pro-colonialism” it was “anti-anti-colonialism.”

Angola

MPLA

Viet Cong