Angola celebrated Saturday for the first time the anniversary of a 1988 battle that changed the region's political landscape, accelerating Namibian independence and the fall of apartheid in South Africa.
"We salute all combatants who laid down their lives in Cuito Cuanavale and other parts of Angola," Jacob Zuma, leader of South Africa's ruling African National Congress (ANC), told Angolan, Cuban, Namibian and Russian dignitaries in the capital Luanda.
"They paid the ultimate price so that the oppressed people of southern Africa could be free from racism, neo-colonialism, proxy wars and underdevelopment," he said, quoted by the SAPA news agency.
The Battle of Cuito Cuanavale on March 22, 1988 was a key episode in the conflict between the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) rebels.
After Angola's independence from Portugal in 1975, the civil war raged between the ruling MPLA, backed by Cuban troops, and UNITA, backed by South Africa's white minority apartheid government. Pretoria's forces invaded Angola in a bid to prevent it from providing a base for ANC militants battling apartheid as well as fighters for Namibian independence from South African rule.
The opposing camps faced off near the strategically important town of Cuito Canavale in south-eastern Kuando Kubango province. Angola's national assembly president Roberto de Almeida was to lay Saturday the first stone of a monument to those who died in Menongue, the provincial capital of Kuando Kubango.
"At 1800 hours, March 22, the enemy was moving from east to the west side of the river bank where our defences were stationed. Ninety minutes later they engaged us," Angolan Colonel Mele Francisco Camacho said in an interview with AFP, recounting the battle.
"The enemy was pounding us with G-5 (long-range guns) and tanks. The soldiers were shooting. We were also launching our artillery. The battle went on and on throughout the night," Camacho, then a lieutenant, recalled.
Cuito Cuanavale, a town without electricity at the time, was lit from the cannon fire as shells exploded on the ground with a deafening roar. "We couldn't see anything. We were working with our senses only. We knew the enemy was on the other side of the river and that is where we aimed our weapons," he said.
The barrage of ground fire made any air support from either side impossible, said Camacho. "We were so close to each other that any air bombardment would end up hitting our own troops. I think the South Africans realised the same."
After 12 hours of combat, the shelling ceased. The South Africans had pulled back and "we knew it was over," he said. The debate over the human and material cost of the battle went on, however. While the Cuban and Angolan forces claimed victory, South Africa claimed it lost only 31 soldiers against 4,785 who fell on the other side.
But the South African Defence Forces faced a barrage of criticism at home with the media and civil societies condemning the human losses and questioning the troops' involvement in a foreign battle. The MPLA finally agreed to find a negotiated solution to Angola's civil war and sat down with the Americans, Cubans, Russians and South Africans.
At the same time, the South African government also entered into discussions with the ANC and in July 1988 agreed to elections in Namibia in exchange for the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola.
These developments contributed to a chain of other historic events: Namibia's independence in 1990, dismantling of apartheid between 1990 and 1994 in South Africa, and the signing of a cease-fire agreement in Angola in 1991. Fighting resumed in Angola in 1992, however, and was to last another 10 years before peace finally came to the country. Colonel Camacho, who was awarded a medal for his role in Cuito Cuanavale, could not have imagined the implications of the battle he fought. "I'm happy that so much changed in the region," he said.