Angolan agricultural and mining capital benefited from a long-lasting boom until the mid 1950s but afterwards the world market of tropical commodities changed and agricultural capitals entered into a trend of falling profit rates. This paper tries to evaluate this fall and to describe how it was countered by public policies. In fact, during the last two decades before 1974 the colonial State implemented expenditure amounting to more than a 1 billion USD. The State expenditure was funded by the taxation of mineral rents, mainly coming from the diamond and oil sectors. The local reinvestment of mineral rents, as the recent evolution of the petrostates shows, was an exceptional historical experience. In late colonial Angola capital accumulation came to depend on an increasingly smaller number of rent-generating corporations (in fact, two) and so did the State military expenditure, which included a colonial war budget. This situation generated a political flaw: one of those corporations, Cabinda Gulf Oil, was an affiliate of the Gulf Oil Corporation and the visibility of this association led to a public campaign in the US led by a Congregationalist Church. The campaign against the presence of Gulf in Angola was obviously not successful. Still this model of rent-distributing could have hardly last in a capitalist world market and therefore it survived the United Church efforts for only one year more.

Phosphate mining is a key issue in the modern history of both Western Sahara and Morocco. Until 1975 it also affected Spain, as Western Sahara's phosphates were exploited during the colonial period. In the early 1970s, phosphate mining generated super-profits. The Spanish state was the sole owner of the Bucraa deposit and used its ephemeral but significant super profits for two purposes: to subsidize the Spanish fertilizer industry and, for political reasons, to inflate spending in the Saharan budgets. However, Fosbucraa's profit maximization and the "development" of the Sahara quickly came into contradiction. The company employed relatively few workers and discriminated against them. Meanwhile, the multiplier effects of Fosbucraa's investment were rapidly changing the Saharawi way of life. A traditional nomadic society was becoming a peripheral society, dependent on jobs, subsidies and scholarships. The result of these two contradictions resulted in a social blockade: a model of accumulation incompatible with the expectations of young workers, technicians and students. The industrial conflict and anti-colonial action are part of this broader context.

During the 1960's the extension of the capitalist mode of production fastened the disintegration of the Angolan "traditional society". Angola's high-rate growth was made possible because huge oil and diamond rents were taxed and reinvested locally. With these "development polices" which the colonial State expected would support the fading branches of agro-industry and stabilize the political status quo, there was a shift of the main social contradiction. It was no longer a "central" versus "tributary" cleavage but rather labour-capital one within "modern society". Ideologically, although transitional languages expressed by "racial" or cultural phenotypes were still in use, there was now room for different political standings. The nationalist movements, which started as small dissent fractions within the "central society" were therefore forced to change their tactics in order to encompass the support of rising classes and their social mobility aspirations. This paper focuses on UNITA, whose operational circumstances (guerrilla-based operations inside Central Angola) made it easier to fit into the moving social landscape. Some evidences of UNITA ideological stand and of its 1974-1975 electoral behaviour (a period when the guerrilla movements were facing metamorphose into political parties) show that the factor "ethnicity", widely used as a key variable of African politics, needs reviewing, at least in this particular time in Angola.