When Jonas Savimbi died this February at the hands of Angolan government forces, I have to admit I was relieved. The civil war in Angola lasted more than 20 years, a conflict that left the nation ranked lowest in the world in virtually every category – including a UNICEF ranking calling the nation the worst place in the world to be a child.

Several years ago I recall listening to a report on the BBC program “Focus on Africa” that included an interview with a 7 year old girl in Luanda, Angola’s capital, who did not know what fruit was and never went outdoors to play. Certainly the formerly Marxist government of Angola and Savimbi’s rebel group, UNITA, were at loggerheads, but in the six weeks since his death, it is amazing to read that already cease-fires and peace agreements have come to fruition even as no grass has grown on Savimbi’s grave.

It appears that perhaps the only person really interested in continuing the civil war was the UNITA leader, who failed in his bid for president in the former Portuguese colony and reignited the fighting in the early 1990s even after the Angolan government he opposed began a transition from communism to democracy, a prudent move for a nation in need of foreign aid after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Corresponding with the new era in Angola, the New York Times reported this weekend on information gleaned from newly declassified CIA documents, casting doubt on the nature and timeline of U.S. involvement in aiding Savimbi and his UNITA forces. When the civil war first flared up in the southwest African nation, it was contemporaneous to the end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. For years, the history books have taught us that any U.S. involvement in Angola was to counter the supply of arms and support channeled through Cuba by the U.S.S.R. and China. However, the declassified documents show that the United States got involved in supporting Savimbi before assistance to the Angolan government arrived from Cuba. For a nation with a foreign policy stance of supporting stability, funding a civil war seems a bit counter to that.

It would be one thing to pour in enough help to mastermind a coup d’etat (see our friend General Pinochet in Chile) to increase stability, but stringing Savimbi along with enough to carry out a 25-year civil war but less than required to actually take over the government seems to be a poor investment of U.S. funds. Especially after no threat of Soviet influence existed after the radical shifts of the early 1990s.

Cuban assistance arrived in Angola in the form of 50,000 troops, in response to U.S.-backed South African “Western mercenaries” on a drive to the capital after a CIA-financed covert invasion in Zaire. Recall that at the time, the South African forces the United States was so closely collaborating with were agents of the brutal apartheid government that was on its way to getting cut off from the world for its treatment of the majority of its population. The newly declassified information gives us a glimpse of a history that has been rewritten and a permissive involvement with one of the largest warmongers in post-colonial Africa.

We also know why it took us so long to cut South Africa off in protest of apartheid. While nothing can be done to undo the damage of a generation of war, it reminds us that often our opinions of involvement in foreign conflict based on different facts and information than are employed by the government. It took the death of Savimbi and a quarter century to bring the nature of the conflict to light.

Hopefully, our turnaround time in understanding will decrease; otherwise our decisions about the future will continue to be clouded by facts in a parallel history.

Rachel Faber Machacha is a graduate student in international development studies from Emmetsburg.