The Portuguese garrison withdrawal from Luanda took place on Monday, 10 November 1975, when its last platoon boarded a ship and sailed away. The departure marked a decisive change in the city’s immediate political and military circumstances, but it did not settle the crisis around Luanda: the city remained isolated, and the transition from Portuguese rule was still precarious.

A city under pressure

By the time the garrison left, Portuguese residents from across Angola had converged on Luanda, many hoping to escape by air. The city’s flight-bound crowds and growing emptiness were part of a wider breakdown in ordinary life. The departure of public workers and the closure of services left the remaining population facing mounting disorder, while fear of an attack and uncertainty about the front shaped daily conversation.

The military situation made the Portuguese presence at the airport and harbour consequential beyond the garrison itself. Help was waiting in Brazzaville and Cabinda, but could not reach Luanda while those facilities remained under Portuguese control. Angola was still formally an overseas province of Portugal, and the MPLA feared that Portuguese units might abandon neutrality and act independently. With little reliable information from the southern front, rumors that Agostinho Neto had been arrested added to the city’s alarm.

The departure

The final platoon climbed the gangplank that Monday morning. Rysiek knew some of the officers and went to say goodbye. The contrast in how the departure was viewed was stark: local residents wanted the garrison gone as quickly as possible after years of colonial war, while Rysiek remembered officers who had behaved loyally and had treated him with sympathy and generosity. He considered that personal solidarity worth preserving rather than discarding through dry political calculation.

His account also distinguishes the officers he valued from the garrison as an institution. He did not claim that all had acted well; he acknowledged a debt to many, but not all. He also noted that the officers had not attacked the Cuban personnel who had arrived in Angola while the territory was still formally Portuguese. The farewell therefore registers neither an absolution of colonial rule nor a simple rejection of every personal relationship formed under it.

A contested transition

The garrison’s departure coincided with other visible changes in Luanda. A truck carried statues of Portuguese conquerors down from their pedestals and assembled them in two rows outside the citadel, leaving the plazas and squares emptier. Foreign delegations arrived by air that afternoon, though only a few came. Reports that a squadron from Zaïre might bomb the airport discouraged many others from travelling; the decision to destroy it, the account notes, was reversed only at the last minute.

The military withdrawal thus occurred alongside the removal of colonial symbols and a hesitant international presence, but under the continuing threat of isolation and attack. The city’s fate still depended on access to its airport and harbour, the arrival of outside support, and events on fronts from which Luanda had little information. The garrison’s sailing away was a clear ending to one presence, not an end to the uncertainty surrounding the new state.