Holden Roberto

Holden Roberto was an Angolan independence leader who founded the National Liberation Front of Angola, known by its Portuguese acronym FNLA, one of the three main guerrilla movements that fought Portuguese colonial rule and later contested power in the Angolan Civil War.

Born on January 12, 1923, in São Salvador do Congo, now Mbanza Kongo in northern Angola, Holden Álvaro Roberto was the son of Garcia Diasiwa Roberto and Joana Lala Nekaka. His family belonged to the Bakongo ethnic group and had ties to the historic Kingdom of Kongo. The family moved to Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo when he was two, and he was raised and educated by Baptist missionaries.

Roberto worked as an accountant for the Belgian colonial finance ministry before turning to politics. He attended the 1958 All-African Peoples' Conference in Accra under a pseudonym and met Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, and other Pan-Africanist leaders.

He founded the União das Populações de Angola in 1957, which became the FNLA in 1962, and led raids into northern Angola from bases in Zaire, where his brother-in-law Mobutu Sese Seko provided sanctuary. The FNLA received CIA and Chinese support but was militarily defeated by the MPLA at the 1975 Battle of Quifangondo. Roberto lived in exile in France and Senegal until 1991, returned to Luanda after the Bicesse Accords, and ran for president in 1992 and 2002. He died in Luanda on August 2, 2007, aged 84.

His name Holden derives from the Old English elements hol meaning hollow and denu meaning valley. Holden is an uncommon masculine name in English-speaking countries.