Word: peasant
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...FNLA) each received less than 25 per cent of the electorate's support, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) consistently pulled over 50 per cent support. UNITA was at a clear political advantage, being a rurally-based party in a 90 per cent peasant country, But without superpower hookups, it could not neutralize the fighting which broke out between the Soviet-backed MPLA and the western-backed FNLA, both intent on stalling the possibility of humiliation through electoral defeat...
...neighboring countries, MPLA in Zambia, FNLA in Zaire. The tactic of occasional forays across the border into Angola, followed by a quick retreat to a foreign base, began in both cases to seriously alienate the peasantry and created an obstacle to further development of the resistance movement. The peasant population resented the technique whereby roving guerrilla bands moved in and out of combat zones while the peasantry, who remained on the terrain, often suffered vicious Portuguese reprisals...
...peasants are large. They fill the foreground. They make it uncomfortable to be the traditional audience of salon painting, the middle-class observer. They are also deliberately iconic. Herbert points out that in Millet's Going to Work, 1850, the young peasant couple striding through the fields is based on Masaccio's fresco of Adam and Eve, expelled from Eden and condemned to labor. This resonance is deepened by the potato basket on the wife's head and by the thong she carries like the attribute of a martyr...
Reality Grasped. Millet's sympathies were republican. His whole conception of peasant realism was in tune with, and fortified by, the political experiences of 1848: to grasp plebeian reality was to engage in a revolutionary act. But he was no militant. As Herbert is careful to show, Millet's imagination was fatalistic and conservative: the peasants, in his view, could never escape their cycle of toil but were bound like weary oxen to the mill of earth and seasons. That was the root experience of his own peasant childhood...
...also important not to forget that Pasqualini is mostly Chinese, with a Chinese name, Bao Ruo-want and oriental feature. From a historical point of view, his country had stood up after being humiliated by the Western powers and Japan. The effort was a collective one, and equality between peasant, inmate, intellectual and warder was enforced, even if it was a wretched plight to share. As he says, "We didn't have any illusions about flying the coop." Things were pretty much the same outside the walls...