The Portuguese are calling it the greatest exodus in the history of Africa, and they are right. Not even the Congo, where in 1960 the white population fell from 110,000 to 20,000 between January and July, was like what is happening in Angola now. Angola's 500,000 or so white people, nearly all of them Portuguese, have had enough. Although the bitter fighting between rival nationalist groups has had little or no racial overtone as yet, the whites expect to be turned on at any time. The result is that just about anyone who can get out is trying to.

A similar number of Angola's 5½m blacks are also on the move—or would like to be. The Red Cross estimates that more than 500,000 Africans have been displaced by the fighting. Because of the tribal basis of the three main nationalist movements, most of those caught in the wrong tribal area have resorted to flight. The Ovibundu who worked in the coffee plantations and diamond mines of the north have all gone home to their homelands on the central plateau.

In the capital, Luanda, the Cape Verdians were first turned on by the National Front. Cape Verde politicians have close links with the marxist Popular Movement; the National Front therefore assumed that Cape Verdians on the mainland must all be communists and Popular Movement supporters. Today more than 20,000 of these people are living on Luanda's beaches, some in tents, some without; their native islands of Cape Verde have had an eight-year drought and are not interested in taking them home.

The next to suffer were the southerners, mainly National Front supporters, who found themselves caught in the crossfire between the National Front and the Popular Movement; about 20,000 have left for the south, and others have taken refuge in empty buildings in the centre of the city. Then it was the turn of the Bakongo northerners, also supporters of the National Front. Once their movement had been smashed in Luanda they were exposed to Popular Movement reprisals. Last month about 15,000 of them gathered in front of the government palace with their possessions demanding repatriation to the north; they are now being provided with ferries and aircraft to transport them there.

But the half-million whites have nowhere in Angola to go and a haven outside is hard to find. South Africa does not exactly offer a welcoming face to thousands of non-Protestant, non-Afrikaans-or-English-speaking immigrants who, despite their years in Africa, “do not understand the South African way of life”. Brazil is in theory a better prospect but only the middle class can afford to go so far; and in July the Brazilian airline, Varig, ceased its flights through Luanda to Rio, which were already fully booked to mid-October.

So Portugal, if anywhere, it has to be for most of them. But this is not a happy prospect for the riot-beset and unemployment-haunted Portuguese junta. The whites of Angola have no love for the army which, they say, has sold them out. The majority of them are conservative by instinct and a large proportion come from the north of Portugal, the present stronghold of the anti-Communist opposition. When a returning white was asked recently what he would do when he got back to Portugal he replied matter of factly that if he couldn't get a job he'd join up with the ELP—the underground fascist army.

For a long time the Portuguese government delayed any substantial help for the refugees. But with the launching of “Operation Air Bridge” on Monday it has now recognised its responsibility to its citizens in Angola. Portuguese officials say they plan to bring home between 250,000 and 300,000 people by the end of October. Up to 200,000 have left Angola already; in June and early July more than 6,000 a week were taking scheduled commercial flights on the Portuguese airline, TAP, and another 3,500 were flown home on military aircraft. Since then the Portuguese airline has been chartering whatever jets it can obtain.

The Portuguese government has also chartered two ships, one to carry passengers and the other to carry the refugees' luggage and cars. But some whites, fed up with the huge queues at shipping and airline offices and the up-to-four-month delay in getting a reservation, have taken matters into their own hands. At one time there was talk that a convoy of 1,500 trucks was being organised to drive 6,000 miles across Africa to reach Portugal; this arduous journey proved too much even for the most desperate. But several hundred refugees had reached South West Africa by last week, and a convoy of 300 vehicles was allowed across the border there by the South African authorities this week. A similar convoy is in prospect from the eastern town of Henrique de Carvalho, which is also being abandoned by the whites.

The exodus has a devastating effect on Angola's economy and administration. The whites had the prerogative of all the skilled and many of the semi-skilled jobs in the country. Only Cabinda's off-shore oil, which requires very little labour, is unaffected. Local government has collapsed, and those essential services which continue do so more or less by inertia. Much of the coffee crop, which made Angola the world's fourth biggest coffee exporter, is going unpicked and is hit by disease. Diamond mining has stopped completely; sisal and cotton stand uncut and unpicked.

The absence of the whites is striking. The coffee towns of Carmona and Malange have been abandoned and even in Luanda only a few white women can still be seen. Teachers, taxi drivers, civil servants, bank clerks, secretaries and doctors have gone or are going. The only whites sitting it out for the moment are the businessmen and some shopkeepers.

And the fighting escalates. The third nationalist movement, Unita, which had previously managed to stay more or less out of the war between the National Front and the Popular Movement, is at last getting drawn in. Its men have been in action against the Popular Movement in two towns, even though stories of armed clashes between Unita and the Popular Movement near the far southern border with South West Africa are improbable, since the Popular Movement has almost no troops there. But according to a report in a Lisbon newspaper a new and powerful force has now entered the battle in this area: the South African army is reported to have marched into Angola and occupied the strategic Cunene dam and its immediate environs. South African defence officials in Pretoria, asked about this on Wednesday, would not confirm the reports—but neither would they deny them.

If South Africa has indeed entered the region, the tales of nationalist fighting in the border area could have been invented by South Africans to create a pretext for their invasion—and maybe their eventual annexation of the dam. The Cunene dam is part of a complex South African investment designed to irrigate and provide power for large areas of South West Africa. Having resigned themselves to the eventual loss of the Cabora Bassa dam in Mozambique as a source of hydroelectric power, the South Africans may well be determined not to lose out twice.