Angola

Bantu-speaking farmers and ironworkers spread into present-day Angola in the first millennium AD, joining older Khoisan-speaking foragers in the south. By the 14th century the Kingdom of Kongo, with its capital at Mbanza Kongo on a plateau in the north, ruled a wide area either side of the Congo River's mouth.

When Portuguese ships arrived in 1483, Kongo's rulers chose alliance. King Afonso I, baptised a Christian, corresponded with the kings of Portugal and the Pope, sent nobles to study in Lisbon and built churches in his capital. He also complained, in letters that survive, about Portuguese traders kidnapping his subjects for slavery — an early record of the trade that would consume the region.

South of Kongo lay Ndongo, whose kings bore the title ngola — the root of the name Angola. In the 17th century Queen Nzinga Mbande of Ndongo and Matamba fought and negotiated with the Portuguese for four decades, switching alliances with the Dutch and exploiting rivalries to keep her kingdom independent. She is today a national heroine, and her statue stands in Luanda.

Mbanza Kongo, with the ruins of its 16th-century cathedral, became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017, a reminder that a Christian African kingdom stood here more than a century before Luanda was founded.

Paulo Dias de Novais founded São Paulo de Luanda in 1575, and the city became the busiest slave port on the Atlantic. Over three centuries, several million people were shipped from Angolan ports, mostly to Brazil; for long periods Luanda had closer ties to Rio de Janeiro and Salvador than to Lisbon. The Fortaleza de São Miguel, overlooking the bay, was the centre of Portuguese power.

The trade relied on African intermediaries and wars inland that fed captives to the coast. The National Slavery Museum, in a chapel at Morro da Cruz south of Luanda where captives were baptised before shipment, tells this story.

After the slave trade was abolished in the 19th century, Portugal pushed inland in the scramble for Africa, conquering the central plateau and the south by the 1920s. Forced labour, the coffee plantations of the north and a rapidly growing settler population — around 300,000 by the 1970s — defined the late colonial state. The Benguela Railway, completed in 1929, carried copper from the Congo and Zambia to Lobito.

Armed revolt began in 1961: an uprising in Luanda's prisons on 4 February and a violent rebellion in the northern coffee country the following month. Three movements fought Portugal — the MPLA, rooted among the Mbundu and Luanda's mixed urban population; the FNLA, based among the Bakongo; and UNITA, led by Jonas Savimbi among the Ovimbundu of the central plateau.

When Portugal's 1974 revolution ended the empire, the movements turned on each other. The MPLA held Luanda and declared independence on 11 November 1975 with Agostinho Neto as president, backed by Cuban troops and Soviet arms; the FNLA and UNITA were backed by the US, Zaire and apartheid South Africa. The Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1987–88 led to a deal in which South Africa left Angola and Namibia became independent.

Elections in 1992 collapsed back into war when Savimbi rejected the result. The 1990s fighting destroyed cities such as Huambo and Kuito and scattered millions of landmines. The war ended only when Savimbi was killed in February 2002; a peace memorandum followed in April, now marked as Peace Day. Angola has since cleared much of its mined land with international help, but some areas remain contaminated.

Oil from offshore fields made Angola one of Africa's largest producers. After 2002 the money rebuilt roads and railways, often with Chinese loans repaid in oil, and turned Luanda's Marginal into a skyline of glass towers. For a few years around 2014 Luanda was ranked among the most expensive cities in the world for expatriates.

The boom was unequal. José Eduardo dos Santos, president from 1979 to 2017, presided over a system in which his family and allies controlled much of the economy; his daughter Isabel became Africa's richest woman before investigations under his successor, João Lourenço, froze her assets. Diamonds from the Lunda provinces add to exports, but mining areas are restricted and poor.

The oil-price crash of 2014 and later falls pushed Angola to diversify. The kwanza has lost much of its value since 2023, and fuel-subsidy cuts triggered deadly protests in 2025. The visa waiver for about 98 countries, the new airport outside Luanda and the Lobito rail corridor to Zambia and Congo are all part of the push to build a non-oil economy.

Angola has about 38 million people and one of the youngest populations in the world. The Ovimbundu of the central plateau, the Ambundu around Luanda and Malanje, and the Bakongo in the north are the largest groups, alongside the Lunda-Chokwe of the east, and Nyaneka, Herero and other peoples in the south. Portuguese is the mother tongue of a large and growing share, especially in cities.

Music is Angola's great export. Semba, with its rolling guitars and Kimbundu lyrics, was the sound of independence; kizomba, slower and romantic, grew from it in the 1980s and is now danced worldwide; kuduro, fast electronic music from Luanda's musseques (informal neighbourhoods) in the 1990s, gave the city a new voice. Carnival on the Marginal is a semba competition between neighbourhood groups.

The Chokwe of the north-east are famous for carving, and the seated thinker figure, the pensador, has become a national symbol. Most Angolans are Christian, Catholic and Protestant, with fast-growing independent and Pentecostal churches; ancestor beliefs remain strong in rural areas.

Angola's landscapes run from rainforest in Cabinda to the Namib Desert in the south-west. The cold Benguela Current keeps the southern coast almost rainless and foggy, the home of the welwitschia, a plant that can live more than a thousand years. Inland, the land rises to a high plateau at 1,500–2,000 m, broken at its western edge by escarpments such as Tundavala and the Serra da Leba.

Rivers born on the plateau flow in every direction: the Cuanza to the Atlantic, the Zambezi east, and the Cubango (Okavango) south to Botswana's delta. Kalandula Falls on the Lucala is one of the largest in Africa by volume. Wildlife was devastated by war; parks such as Kissama were restocked from 2000, and the south-east now forms part of the KAZA transfrontier area.

Food follows the land. The north eats funge (cassava) with palm-oil stews like muamba de galinha and calulu; the plateau eats maize pirão; the coast grills fish for mufete. Portuguese bread, grilled chicken and custard sweets are everywhere, and Brazilian influences come back across the Atlantic that once carried people the other way.