	In the north the FNLA began a major offensive, their ranks bolstered by hired western mercenaries and Zairian soldiers and artillery. The CIA and China also provided the FNLA with generous military aid in the form of money and arms. The MPLA continued to receive arms shipments from the Soviet Union and in May recruited the fiercely anti-Mobutu Katangese rebels who had previously served the Portuguese as counterinsurgency troops. The FNLA offensive reached the outskirts of Luanda, but was stopped by the arrival of 1,500 Cuban soldiers and additional Soviet weapons in August. The poorly equipped FNLA guerillas, even with Zairian and foreign mercenary support were no match for the highly trained Cuban soldiers that supported the MPLA and were soon routed and forced to retreat into their strongholds in the north and back into Zaire. 
	Further south the MPLA faced attacks from both the FNLA and UNITA and starting in October a massive invasion by the South African Defense Force (SADF) from South-West Africa (modern Namibia). Without Cuban support, the MPLA in the south quickly folded to the SADF and within a month the southern front was only 120 miles from Luanda. 
	By the time November 11 came, battles between the three nationalist movements and their foreign allies raged across Angola. Three separate independence ceremonies were carried out: one in Huambo by UNITA, and in two different neighborhoods of Luanda by the MPLA and FNLA. However, UNITA and the FNLA would soon be defeated and the MPLA acknowledged by most of the world as the legitimate government of Angola. 
	After pacifying the urban podar popular movements, which had been causing internal conflict within the organization, the MPLA focused on neutralizing the FNLA and UNITA threats. In contrast with that of the USSR and Cuba, the American and South African presence in Angola was more clandestine and less popular. Cuba, another poor country with a colonial heritage, was seen as extending Third World solidarity to the Angolans and defending them from a racist South Africa. Both South Africa and the US also had strong ties with the Portuguese, and this association with imperialism made them unpopular with many groups in Angola. Once it became better known that the US was providing arms to the FNLA and that UNITA’s military successes in the south were largely due to the SADF, international and domestic opinion increasingly sided with the MPLA, and South Africa was soon pressured to leave Angola. War-weary from Vietnam and wary of new Third World conflicts, a new Democratic Congress in Washington moved to ban military aid to the FNLA. 
The departure of the South Africans and American aid, together with infighting between UNITA and the FNLA led to the MPLA taking decisive control of the country in 1976. Though the FNLA ceased to be a major political force, UNITA continued to actively oppose MPLA-rule for another twenty-six years. The violence from 1974–1976 cost over 100,000 Angolans their lives and drove tens of thousands of Ovimbundu and Bakongo into Zambia and Zaire. 