Angola, officially the Republic of Angola, is a country on the western coast of Southern Africa. It is the second-largest Portuguese-speaking (Lusophone) country after Brazil in both total area and population and is the seventh-largest country in Africa. It is bordered by Namibia to the south, the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the north, Zambia to the east, and the Atlantic Ocean to the west. The Angolan province of Cabinda is an exclave on the Atlantic coast, bordering the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The capital and most populous city is Luanda.
Angola has been inhabited since the Palaeolithic Age. After the Bantu expansion reached the region, states were formed by the 13th century and organised into confederations. The Kingdom of Kongo ascended to achieve hegemony among the other kingdoms from the 14th century. Portuguese explorers established relations with Kongo in 1483. To the south were the kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba, with the Ovimbundu kingdoms further south, and the Mbunda Kingdom in the east.
The Portuguese began colonising the coast in the 16th century. Kongo fought three wars against the Portuguese, ending in the Portuguese conquest of Ndongo. The banning of the slave trade in the 19th century disrupted Kongo's undiversified economic system and European settlers gradually began to establish their presence in the interior of the region. The Portuguese colony that became Angola did not achieve its present borders until the early 20th century and experienced strong resistance from native groups such as the Cuamato, the Kwanyama, and the Mbunda.
After a protracted anti-colonial struggle (1961–1974), Angola achieved independence in 1975 as a one-party Republic, but the country descended into a devastating civil war the same year, between the ruling People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba; the insurgent National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, an originally Maoist and later anti-communist group supported by the United States and South Africa; the militant organisation National Liberation Front of Angola, backed by Zaire; and the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda seeking the independence of the Cabinda exclave, also backed by Zaire.
Since the end of the civil war in 2002, Angola has emerged as a relatively stable constitutional republic, and its economy is among the fastest-growing in the world, with China, the European Union, and the United States being the country's largest investment and trade partners. However, the economic growth is highly uneven, with most of the nation's wealth concentrated in a disproportionately small part of the population as most Angolans have a low standard of living; life expectancy is among the lowest in the world, while infant mortality is among the highest.
Angola is a member of the United Nations, African Union, the Community of Portuguese Language Countries, and the Southern African Development Community. As of 2024, the Angolan population is estimated at 36.6 million. Angolan culture reflects centuries of Portuguese influence, namely the predominance of the Portuguese language and of the Catholic Church, intermingled with a variety of indigenous customs and traditions.
Etymology
The name Angola is based on the Portuguese colonial name Reino de Angola ('Kingdom of Angola'), which appeared as early as Paulo Dias de Novais's 1571 charter. The toponym was derived by the Portuguese from the title ngola, held by the kings of Ndongo and Matamba. Ndongo in the highlands, between the Kwanza and Lucala rivers, was nominally a possession of the Kingdom of Kongo.
History
Early migrations and political units
Modern Angola was populated predominantly by nomadic Khoi and San peoples prior to the first Bantu migrations. The Khoi and San peoples were hunter-gatherers, rather than practising pastoralism or cultivation of crops.
In the first millennium BC, they were displaced by Bantu peoples arriving from the north, most of whom likely originated in what is today northwestern Nigeria and southern Niger. Bantu speakers introduced the cultivation of bananas and taro, as well as maintenance of large cattle herds, to Angola's central highlands and the Luanda plain. Due to a number of inhibiting geographic factors throughout the territory of Angola, namely harshly traversable land, hot/humid climate, and a plethora of deadly diseases, intermingling of pre-colonial tribes in Angola had been rare.
After settlement of the migrants, a number of political entities developed. The best-known of these was the Kingdom of Kongo, based in Angola. It extended northward to what are now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, and Gabon. It established trade routes with other city-states and civilisations up and down the coast of southwestern and western Africa. Its traders even reached Great Zimbabwe and the Mutapa Empire, although the kingdom engaged in little or no trans-oceanic trade. To its south lay the Kingdom of Ndongo, from which the area of the later Portuguese colony was sometimes known as Dongo. Next to that was the Kingdom of Matamba. The lesser Kingdom of Kakongo to the north was later a vassal of the Kingdom of Kongo. The people in all of these states spoke Kikongo as a common language.
Portuguese colonisation
Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão reached the area in 1484. The previous year, the Portuguese had established relations with the Kingdom of Kongo, which stretched at the time from modern Gabon in the north to the Kwanza River in the south. The Portuguese established their primary early trading post at Soyo, which is now the northernmost city in Angola apart from the Cabinda exclave.
Paulo Dias de Novais founded São Paulo de Loanda (Luanda) in 1575 with a hundred families of settlers and four hundred soldiers. Benguela was fortified in 1587 and became a township in 1617. An authoritarian state, the Kingdom of Kongo was highly centralised around its monarch and controlled neighbouring states as vassals. It had a strong economy, based on the industries of copper, ivory, salt, hides, and, to a lesser extent, slaves. The transition from a feudal system of slavery to a capitalist one with Portugal would prove crucial to the history of the Kingdom of Kongo.
As relations between Kongo and Portugal grew in the early 16th century, trade between the kingdoms also increased. Most of the trade was in palm cloth, copper, and ivory, but also increasing numbers of slaves. Kongo exported few slaves, and its slave market had remained internal. But, following the development of a successful sugar-growing colony after Portuguese settlement of São Tomé, Kongo became a major source of slaves for the island's traders and plantations. Correspondence by King Afonso documents the purchase and sale of slaves within the country. His accounts also detail which slaves captured in war were given or sold to Portuguese merchants.
Afonso continued to expand the kingdom of Kongo into the 1540s, expanding its borders to the south and east. The expansion of Kongo's population, coupled with Afonso's earlier religious reforms, allowed the ruler to centralize power in his capital and increase the power of the monarchy. He also established a royal monopoly on some trade. To govern the growing slave trade, Afonso and several Portuguese kings claimed a joint monopoly on the external slave trade.
The slave trade increasingly became Kongo's primary, and arguably sole, economic sector. A major obstacle for the Kingdom of Kongo was that slaves were the only commodity for which the European powers were willing to trade. Kongo lacked an effective international currency. Kongolese nobles could buy slaves with the national currency of nzimbu shells, which could be traded for slaves. These could be sold to gain international currency.
As the slave trade was the only commodity in which Europeans were interested in the region during the 16th and 17th centuries, the Kongo economy was unable to diversify or later industrialise outside of sectors in which slavery was involved, such as the arms industry. The increased production and sale of guns within the kingdom was due to the salient issue of the slave trade, which had become an increasingly violent struggle. There was a constant need for slaves for the kings and queens to sell in exchange for foreign commodities, the absence of which would prevent them from having any influence with European powers such as Portugal and eventually the Dutch Republic.
Kongolese kings needed this influence to garner support from European powers for quelling internal rebellions. The situation became increasingly complicated during the rule of Garcia II, who needed the assistance of the Dutch military to drive out the Portuguese from Luanda, in spite of the fact that Portugal was Kongo's primary slave trading partner.
By the early 17th century, the supply of foreign slaves captured by the Kongolese externally was waning. The government began to approve the enslavement of freeborn Kongolese citizens for relatively minor infractions, nearly any disobeying of the authoritarian system and the aristocracy. If several villagers were deemed guilty of a crime, it became relatively common for the whole village to be enslaved. The resulting chaos and internal conflict from Garcia II's reign would lead into that of his son and successor, António I. He was killed in 1665 by Portuguese at the Battle of Mbwila 1665, together with a substantial proportion of the aristocracy. The colonists were expanding their power.
War broke out more widely in the Kingdom of Kongo after the death of António I. Much of the stability and access to iron ore and charcoal necessary for gunsmiths to maintain the arms industry was disrupted. From then on, in this period almost every Kongolese citizen was in danger of being enslaved. Many Kongolese subjects were adroit in making guns, and they were enslaved to have their skills available to colonists in the New World, where they worked as blacksmiths, ironworkers, and charcoal makers.
The Portuguese established several other settlements, forts and trading posts along the Angolan coast, principally trading in Angolan slaves for plantations. Local slave dealers provided a large number of slaves for the Portuguese Empire, usually in exchange for manufactured goods from Europe. This part of the Atlantic slave trade continued until after Brazil's independence in the 1820s.
Despite Portugal's territorial claims in Angola, its control over much of the country's vast interior was minimal. In the 16th century Portugal gained control of the coast through a series of treaties and wars. Life for European colonists was difficult and progress was slow. John Iliffe notes that "Portuguese records of Angola from the 16th century show that a great famine occurred on average every seventy years; accompanied by epidemic disease, it might kill one-third or one-half of the population, destroying the demographic growth of a generation and forcing colonists back into the river valleys".
During the Portuguese Restoration War, the Dutch West India Company occupied the principal settlement of Luanda in 1641, using alliances with local peoples to carry out attacks against Portuguese holdings elsewhere. A fleet under Salvador de Sá retook Luanda in 1648; reconquest of the rest of the territory was completed by 1650. New treaties with the Kongo were signed in 1649; others with Njinga's Kingdom of Matamba and Ndongo followed in 1656. The conquest of Pungo Andongo in 1671 was the last major Portuguese expansion from Luanda, as attempts to invade Kongo in 1670 and Matamba in 1681 failed. Colonial outposts also expanded inward from Benguela, but until the late 19th century the inroads from Luanda and Benguela were very limited. Hamstrung by a series of political upheavals in the early 1800s, Portugal was slow to mount a large scale annexation of Angolan territory.
The slave trade was abolished in Angola in 1836, and in 1854 the colonial government freed all its existing slaves. Four years later, a more progressive administration appointed by Portugal abolished slavery altogether. However, these decrees remained largely unenforceable, and the Portuguese depended on assistance from the British Royal Navy and what became known as the Blockade of Africa to enforce their ban on the slave trade. This coincided with a series of renewed military expeditions into the bush.
By the mid-nineteenth century Portugal had established its dominion as far north as the Congo River and as far south as Mossâmedes. Until the late 1880s, Portugal entertained proposals to link Angola with its colony in Mozambique but was blocked by British and Belgian opposition. In this period, the Portuguese came up against different forms of armed resistance from various peoples in Angola.
The Berlin Conference in 1884–1885 set the colony's borders, delineating the boundaries of Portuguese claims in Angola, although many details were unresolved until the 1920s. Trade between Portugal and its African territories rapidly increased as a result of protective tariffs, leading to increased development, and a wave of new Portuguese immigrants.
In 1925, an expedition to Angola was conducted by English-born American naturalist explorer Arthur Stannard Vernay. Between 1939 and 1943, Portuguese army operations against the Mucubal, whom they accused of rebellion and cattle-thieving, resulted in hundreds of Mucubal killed. During the campaign, 3,529 were taken prisoner, 20% of whom were women and children, and imprisoned in concentration camps. Many died in captivity from undernourishment, violence and forced labour. Around 600 were sent to Sao Tome and Principe. Hundreds were also sent to a camp in Damba, where 26% died.
Angolan War of Independence
Under Portuguese colonial law, black Angolans were forbidden from forming political parties or labour unions. The first nationalist movements did not take root until after World War II, spearheaded by a largely Westernised and Portuguese-speaking urban class, which included many mestiços. During the early 1960s they were joined by other associations stemming from ad hoc labour activism in the rural workforce. Portugal's refusal to address increasing Angolan demands for self-determination provoked an armed conflict, which erupted in 1961 with the Baixa de Cassanje revolt and gradually evolved into a protracted war of independence that persisted for the next twelve years. Throughout the conflict, three militant nationalist movements with their own partisan guerrilla wings emerged from the fighting between the Portuguese government and local forces, supported to varying degrees by the Portuguese Communist Party.