In the historiography of the Angolan Civil War, much emphasis is placed on the Cold War alliances between the MPLA government and Cuba against UNITA and South Africa/USA, which led the conflict to evolve into a ‘classical land war’ in the 1980s, and of UNITA’s state-building efforts in its ‘liberated territories’ during that time. By contrast, the war in the 1990s is scripted as a ‘senseless’ bush war of destruction, fuelled by greed rather than grievances. A closer look at UNITA’s activities in the northern provinces, outside its traditional heartland of the Central Highlands, however, challenges this script. Ad-hoc alliances with former FNLA groups, trade arrangements with Zaire and across enemy lines, contribute to a complex, fluctuating mosaic of territorial control, marked both by coercion with the threat and meting out of violence and the mobilisation of existing structures and repertoires of stateness.