Further south in the central highlands, the primary commercial crop was cotton, and British and Portuguese cotton plantations displaced the native Ovimbundu. Unlike the Bakongo farmers of the north who largely stayed together and settled in Zaire, the Ovimbundu dispersed in all directions, some remained in the area to work the cotton fields, while others migrated north to work on the coffee plantations or south to less populated areas. The employment of Ovimbundu on land formerly occupied by Bakongo farmers created tensions between the two groups. Furthermore as they were largely employed in lowly paid plantation work, the Ovimbundu occupied the low end of the economic scale, being scorned by both the Bakongo and Mbundu as crude and subservient.  The animosity displayed by the other ethnic groups toward the Ovimbundu caused many of them to reject the two dominant nationalist groups, the FNLA and MPLA, during the liberation war, in favor of UNITA, an explicitly Ovimbundu-based organization.
The continued fragmentation of its nationalist movements set Angola apart from other Portuguese colonies. In Mozambique Julius Nyerere united the various factions under the banner of FRELIMO, and Amílcar Cabral convinced the assimilados of Cape Verde and the peasants of Guinea-Bissau to unite as PAIGC. In both of these situations, the rebel groups fought successful united campaigns against the Portuguese and were on the verge of victory at the time of independence.  By contrast, no single nationalist movement in Angola was able to unite the various rebel factions in the struggle against Portugal for independence, and the three major groups that came to dominate the fourteen-year liberation war often fought each other as much as the Portuguese.
	The Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) was initially formed in the late 1950s by a young group of Angolans studying in Lisbon and Paris, including Lúcio Lara, Agostinho Neto, Mário de Andrade, and José Eduardo dos Santos (Neto’s successor and the current president of Angola). Counting urban mestiços and assimilados, in addition to some liberal whites among its ranks, the MPLA was explicitly inclusive and set out to unite Angolans of different ethnic, religious, and regional backgrounds into one independence movement. Many of the founders had been members of the Communist Party of Angola (PCA) and a Marxist class-based ideology was adopted by the movement, partially as a uniting force for a group without a strong ethnic or regional base. Despite this, the MPLA initially struggled to build popular support. Many Angolans were suspicious of the MPLA, which represented the old mestiço and assimilado elite of the coastal cities and had a history of dominating the largely rural populations of the interior. Rival groups like the FNLA highlighted this distrust by publicly condemning the MPLA as out of touch with the peasants that made up 93% of the Angolan population. They further stated that an independent Angola under the MPLA would be dominated by urban mestiços and assimilados, effectively transferring power from one class of colonial masters to another. 