Cassinga
Cassinga or Kassinga is a town and commune in the municipality of Jamba, province of Huíla, Angola. It is situated on an old and important two-track road from Jamba to Huambo. Established as an ore mine and during the Civil War allegedly used as Namibian guerrilla training site and refugee camp, the place was the scene of the Battle of Cassinga, an airborne raid by the South African Defence Force against the People's Liberation Army of Namibia on 4 May 1978 that killed several hundred SWAPO fighters, Cuban soldiers and Namibian refugees. The settlement is a place of reverence and pilgrimage by both belligerents of the battle. Namibians celebrate Cassinga Day as a national holiday. SWAPO and the MPLA claimed the battle was a massacre of a refugee camp. The battle is thus regarded the turning point in the fight for Namibian independence, which then started drawing support from a wider segment of the population. Some South Africans, mostly those who fought in the battle, and their families, celebrate a "jewel of military craftmanship". These people pay respect to those who died in the battle, by visiting the town. No major commemorations or celebrations are held by the general South African public, of all races. History Before Independence One of the exploratory travels of the Dorsland Trek crossed Cassinga in 1874. There is still a monument remembering those trekboere that died during that trip. Located near the site is an old iron mine constructed by Krupp engineers working in concert with the colonial administration. Between 1966 and 1967, a second terminal for extracting the ore was completed at Saco, a bay just 12 kilometres north of Moçâmedes by Compania Mineira do Lobito, the Lobito Mining Company. Cassinga's product would eventually be channeled to Saco under direction of Portuguese authorities. Development of the installation was trusted to Krupp and SETH, a Portuguese subsidiary of Denmark's Højgaard & Schultz. Moçâmedes housed expatriate workers, the foreign engineers, and their families for two years until the first 250,000 tons of ore were shipped out in 1967. At that time Cassinga had about twenty buildings serving as warehouses, accommodation and offices. During the Civil War Cassinga continued to thrive until Angola's independence from Portugal in 1975. Abandoned by its European supervisors, the mine and the settlement quickly fell into neglect during the ensuing Angolan Civil War. It is located about halfway from Huambo to the South-West African border where the People's Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), the military wing of the South West African People's Organization (SWAPO), launched guerrilla attacks. After using the ghost town as a stopover point for a few weeks, a PLAN squad led by Dimo Hamaambo occupied the place. Not long after the establishment of the PLAN camp at Cassinga, it began to function also as a transit camp for Namibian exiles. The Angolan government allocated the abandoned village to SWAPO in 1976 to cope with the influx of thousands of refugees from South-West Africa, estimated in May 1978 to total