User:BuckyAdopt/Mario Albano

Mario Albano (Pescara, August 11, 1948 - Montepulciano, January 11, 2020) was an Italian politician, journalist and historian.

Biography
He was born into a Piedmontese family with socialist beliefs. His father, Domenico Albano, participated in the Garibaldi International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War and had a deep friendship with W.H. Auden, his driver, and with George Orwell, both met during the Battle of Guadalajara. His grandfather, Giacomo, led the Italian anti-colonial movement at the beginning of the 20th century with the socialist deputy Andrea Costa. He was married to Daniela, a high-end jewelry designer; in 1979 he was married to Isabella Rossellini, who left him after a few months, having fallen in love with Martin Scorsese.

In 1966, he founded the ARMAL (Association for Relations with African Liberation Movements), after some talks with Ernesto "Che" Guevara in Houargla (Algeria) and in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania). In 1969 he translated some works of Amílcar Cabral, leader of the PAIGC (liberation movement of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde); in 1970 he edited an anthology of writings by Neto, Mondlane, Cabral, and De Andrade at Tricontinental Editions (Cuba), translated into 12 languages. That same year, he published in Giovane Critica the essay "African socialism and Amilcar Cabral's ideology" which sparked an international debate on a possible non-aligned path to African socialism.

In 1972, commissioned by the president of the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), Agostinho Neto, he published a comprehensive anthology on the anti-colonial struggle. That same year, he gave a series of lectures at the University of Havana's Faculty of History, which were published in Italy. Also in 1972, he became the national secretary of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Party of Proletarian Unity; at the Florence Congress of the PdUP in 1974, representatives from almost all Third World liberation movements were present in Europe for the first time. That same year, he also published a book on the liberation struggle in the Western Sahara (where he spent five months with a group of guerrillas from the Polisario Front) and in the Canary Islands. In 1974, he became the director of the magazine Afrika, specializing in analyses of the strategies of African liberation movements. Between 1972 and 1975, he traveled several times to Angola, especially to the Eastern Front (the southern part) where he participated in the anti-colonial liberation struggle and against the South African invasion.

In 1975, he published a book on the "liberated zones" in Angola and a socio-economic essay on South African apartheid and, with Amilcar Cabral and Basil Davidson, a book on imperialist penetration in Africa. In 1976, following Angola's independence (1975), he was appointed director of research for the Ministry of Culture, director of the Historical Documentation Center of the National Culture Council, and professor of history at the Cadre School in the African country. In addition to teaching, his task is to recover historical documentation on the history of Angola. He managed to microfilm thousands of unpublished documents on the ancient Kingdoms of Congo and Queen Nzinga Mbemba, who in the 17th century opposed Portuguese penetration. Much of the documentation is the result of painstaking research at the Vatican Secret Archives, Propaganda Fide, and the reserved archives of the Jesuit and Franciscan Orders. Access to these archives was granted by the Secretary of State, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, in exchange for a more lenient treatment of the Angolan Catholic Church, after a series of unofficial talks with Mario Albano and Ambassador Venancio da Silva Moura. It should also be remembered that a part of the Angolan Catholic Church (from Cardinal Alexandro Do Nascimento to Joaquim Pinto de Andrade, canon of the Cathedral of Luanda and honorary president of MPLA) sided in favor of the liberation struggle, particularly after the audience granted in 1971 by Pope Paul VI.

He also devoted himself, until 1981, to writing over 500 articles and essays published in various Italian newspapers and magazines (Problems of Socialism, New World, Evening Country, Young Critique, The Left, The Espresso, Politics & Economy, The Republic, Renaissance and others). He wrote for CeSPI (Center for International Political Studies of the PCI) the dossier Southern Africa today (1980). As a visiting professor, he taught African history and anthropology at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, Havana, Luanda, Liège and others. In 1986 he won the Mystfest award for the best European espionage story (The Papal Bubble) which was published in the Top Secret series in Paul Kenny's volume, The Exquisite Smell of the Dollar (Mondadori, 1986). From 1992 he retired to his farmhouse on the border between Umbria and Tuscany where he began to "restudy everything from scratch". In 2010 the Agostinho Neto Foundation named him honorary member with the motivation: ...he stood out for his unwavering support, for the communion of objectives and vision with Neto, for the tenacious decision to achieve the freedom and independence of the Angolan people and the world in general.

He died on January 11, 2020, after an illness.