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Marques, a no-nonsense administrator whose older brother is a member of the junta back in Lisbon, has made the guerrillas a remarkable offer: complete amnesty and an immediate place in his government at high level if they will lay down their arms. "I would welcome the assistance of the emancipation movements in preparing the people for future elections," he told TIME Correspondent Lee Griggs. "I have less than a year in which to prepare the population for self-determination, and that is hardly enough." U.N.I.T.A. has already accepted a ceasefire, and Marques' offer will put pressure on the other groups to do the same. But the guerrillas are in a dilemma: they reject the referendum because each group knows that it alone cannot win power that way. The Popular Movement is simply not popular enough, and the National Liberation Front is not national enough.
No Sellout. So far, most of Angola's 500,000 whites and 250,000 people of mixed blood seem willing to stay on and take their chances. President António de Spínola's assurances that there will be an orderly transfer of power have helped, and so has the moderate tone of most black political pronouncements within Angola. "Money is basically cowardly," observes a Portuguese banker in Luanda, the Angolan capital. "At present it is staying here, but unless confidence continues, it will flee." In the central plateau city of Nova Lisboa, an insurance executive told Griggs: "I am Angolan, born here. My skin is white, but I am not Portuguese in my heart. There are good people in this country, many of them mulatto or black. If they get control here after independence, all will be well. But if the wild ones get in and turn the masses against the rest of us, then I will have to go."
Having fought in Angola against F.N.L.A. guerrillas in the early '60s, General Spínola is well known and respected there. "When he makes his long-awaited visit, probably this week," reports Correspondent Griggs, "he will be expected to provide a sort of wholesale reassurance to the entire population: to the black poor, that economic racism is finished and a better life awaits them; to the black politicians, that the power will be theirs as promised; and to the whites, that there will be no sellout to extremism when, after 500 years, the Portuguese go home at last."