seeking to avoid such service. By the end of the Portuguese colonial war in 1974, black African participation had become crucial due to declining numbers of recruits available from Portugal itself. Native African troops, although widely deployed, were initially used in subordinate roles as enlisted troops or noncommissioned officers. Portuguese colonial administrators were handicapped by their policies in education, which largely barred indigenous Africans from adequate education until well after the outbreak of the insurgency. With illiteracy rates approaching 99% and almost no African enrollment in secondary schools, few African candidates could qualify for Portugal's officer candidate programs; most African officers obtained their commission as the result of individual competence and valour on the battlefield. As the war went on, an increasing number of native Africans served as noncommissioned or commissioned officers by the 1970s, including such officers as Captain (later Lt. Colonel) Marcelino da Mata, a Portuguese citizen born of native Guinean parents who rose to command from a first sergeant in a road engineering unit to a commander in the elite all-African Comandos Africanos, where he eventually became one of the most decorated soldiers in the Portuguese Army. Many native Angolans rose to positions of command, though of junior rank. By the early 1970s, the Portuguese authorities had fully perceived racial discriminatory policies and lack of investment in education as wrong and contrary to their overseas ambitions in Portuguese Africa, and willingly accepted a true color blindness policy with more spending in education and training opportunities, which started to produce a larger number of black high ranked professionals, including military personnel. Intervention by Cold War powers After the World War II, as communist and anticolonial ideologies spread across Africa, many clandestine political movements were established in support of independence using various interpretations of Marxist revolutionary ideology. These new movements seized on anti-Portuguese and anti-colonial sentiment to advocate the complete overthrow of existing governmental structures in Portuguese Africa. These movements alleged that Portuguese policies and development plans were primarily designed by the ruling authorities for the benefit of the territories' ethnic Portuguese population at the expense of local tribal control, the development of native communities, and the majority of the indigenous population, who suffered both state-sponsored discrimination and enormous social pressure to comply with government policies largely imposed from Lisbon. Many felt they had received too little opportunity or resources to upgrade their skills and improve their economic and