This article explores the place of ideology and what I call "analytic allegiances" in the nascent higher education domain in Angola. Based on ethnographic research, it considers the post-War emergence of the sector and its implications for global higher education. Focusing primarily on two institutions, one state, one private, it probes how contesting cold war ideologies continue to manifest through the pedagogic, curricula, and campus-based decisions of higher education leaders in the country. It develops Jonathan Jansen's notion of "political symbolism" to give attention to individual faculty member's personal scholarly trajectories that result in analytic allegiances within domains of friendship and influence. It argues that exposure to political and social systems and symbols at formative times of individual faculty's biographies radically inform the ways in which the emergent sector is being approached and molded today. It demonstrates how the existence of pluralistic knowledge traditions maintained through analytic allegiance and political symbolism have equipped Angola well for the transformative processes required in contemporary higher education.