All around the world, the fighting of wars is a starkly gendered phenomenon. The large majority of frontline fighting is done by men, and even when women make up a significant proportion of fighting forces, how this is constructed and interpreted is quite distinct for men compared to women. During the Angolan civil war, almost entire generations of men were targeted for conscription into the army of the MPLA (the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola) or of UNITA (the National Union of the Total Independence of Angola), their life courses abruptly, and for the most part involuntarily, rerouted through military institutions. Upon demobilisation, they returned to civilian lives in a context that was drastically changed by a hugely destructive civil war that was still ongoing. This book focuses on a group of men in the city of Huambo (see Map 1) who fought for the MPLA government from the mid-1970s until the early 1990s, in the Forcas Armadas Populares de Libertacao de Angola (FAPLA), looking specifically at how the experience of military service and the social transformations of war affected the models of manhood that they sought to live up to and their struggles in doing so throughout their lives and particularly in middle age. As such it is the first in-depth study of the lives of FAPLA veterans, and the first monograph on the masculinities of any group of men in Angola.

While most of the literature on Angola and, arguably, on veterans in Africa more generally, has focused on issues associated with power and political economy, the veterans I worked with very often spoke of their experiences in terms of morality. While certainly preoccupied by politics, through war and peace, and by questions of economic accumulation and distribution, they viewed all of these aspects of social life principally through a moral lens. This was true in two main senses: first, in terms of how they narrated their experiences in the military and the vexed questions of moral responsibility while under the duress of military hierarchy and the stress of combat; and second, in how they sought to build civilian lives as respected senior men whilst navigating a series of social, political and economic changes brought on by the war that they judged negatively in moral terms.