The front is everywhere and nowhere

The front is everywhere and nowhere describes a war without a stable boundary: in southern Angola, scattered units and the possibility of sudden contact make almost any road or location a potential battlefield. The expression joins a material fact of the fighting—vast distances and scarce water—to a problem of perception, as official accounts and observations from Luanda offer sharply different measures of how the war is going.

Definition and Material Conditions

The expression is set out by Comandante Farrusco while travelling near Humbe, where a road ran toward Ruacana along a possible route of South African advance. He contrasts the front he had learned to expect in Europe—a distinct line of trenches or other positions that could be traced on a map—with the Angolan war’s dispersed and uncertain geography. The land is too large and the population too sparse for a continuous line to hold across it. Water makes that discontinuity concrete. A unit can remain only where it can secure a source; at the point where Comandante Farrusco and the narrator stand, water is available, but the next source is a hundred kilometres away. The intervening space is effectively unoccupied. Control therefore gathers around isolated points rather than extending evenly across the terrain, and each point is constrained by the need to survive there.

Moving Points and Sudden Contact

In this account, every unit is a potential front. When opposing units meet, two separate points become an actual battle; until then, each may be travelling through territory with no continuous line to mark where combat begins. Comandante Farrusco describes their own three-person party as a potential front moving north. An ambush could turn it into a real one, while the same journey might pass without incident. The front is thus not simply hidden: it is temporary, produced by contact, and liable to appear anywhere along a road. That logic makes the war difficult to predict or map. Comandante Farrusco calls it a war of ambushes in which a traveller might cross the country and return safely, or die close to the place where he had been standing. At Humbe he sees how little a small force can do against an armoured vehicle and says that his unit lacks anti-tank weapons. The episode gives the expression a practical edge: uncertainty is not an abstraction but a condition shaped by equipment, distance, and exposure to an encounter that may come too late to avoid.

Reports from a Distant Front

The uncertainty of location is echoed by uncertainty about the war’s course. From Luanda, Comandante Ju-Ju’s radio communiqués relay events at widely separated places. He reports, for instance, that Comandante Ndozi’s unit has taken Caxito from the FNLA. The bulletins grow brief and calm when matters are going well; when events turn against the MPLA, they become longer and more heavily laden with self-praise and denunciations of the enemy. The narrator cannot make out the words as he walks through Luanda, but learns to treat the duration of the broadcast as a sign: a short report suggests a success or a position holding, while a drawn-out one suggests trouble at the front. Other messages compete with these reports. In September, a black plane without lights or markings drops leaflets over Luanda announcing that Holden Roberto’s army is outside the capital and urging the population to attack Eastern European personnel said to command MPLA units. Rumours of an imminent uprising add to the city’s fear, without identifying what uprising is meant. The claims turn the city itself into an object of wartime messaging, even as the military situation being described remains beyond its residents’ direct view.

The Front as a Problem of Judgment

The gap between messages and conditions becomes especially sharp when Holden Roberto announces that he will enter Luanda and artillery fire continues from dawn toward noon. The fighting is close enough to provoke panic in the city, but its outcome is still uncertain: residents are told to remain calm while the possibility of an attack appears immediate. The front is geographically near yet not fully knowable from where people wait. Later, Ju-Ju’s optimistic communiqué sits against the narrator’s assessment that half the country is in enemy hands. The contradiction matters because reassurance can discourage action as readily as panic can overwhelm it: if the reports make victory seem imminent, people may see no reason to mobilize; when the appeal to defend the city conflicts with claims of success, confidence in the messages erodes. The expression therefore describes more than a battlefield without a line. It also names the difficulty of knowing where danger lies, what is happening there, and which account can be trusted.