Angola

Overview

Angola is a large country on the Atlantic coast of southwestern Africa, covering 1,246,700 square kilometres — including the oil-rich Cabinda exclave separated from the mainland by a strip of DR Congo — with about 36.6 million people (2024 census) and its capital at Luanda. Before European contact the region hosted powerful Bantu states, above all the Kingdom of Kongo, whose hegemony stretched across the northwest from the 14th century, and the kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba to the south; the country's name derives from "ngola," the title of Ndongo's kings.

History

Portuguese sailors reached the Kongo in 1483, and Luanda was founded in 1575. For the next three centuries Angola functioned chiefly as the Atlantic slave trade's largest source, sending millions to Brazil until abolition in 1836. Effective colonial occupation of the interior only followed the Berlin Conference borders of the 1880s, and the brutal contract-labour regime that replaced slavery fuelled rising nationalism.

The war of independence erupted in 1961, fought by three rival movements: the Marxist, Ambundu-led MPLA; the Zaire-backed, Bakongo-based FNLA; and Jonas Savimbi's UNITA, rooted among the Ovimbundu. After Portugal's 1974 revolution, the Alvor Agreement set independence for 11 November 1975, but the coalition collapsed and civil war began the same day — MPLA, armed by the USSR and Cuba, against UNITA and the FNLA, backed by the US and South Africa. The FNLA was destroyed at Quifangondo, but the MPLA–UNITA war became one of the Cold War's bloodiest proxy conflicts. Agostinho Neto and then José Eduardo dos Santos (1979–2017) ruled a one-party Marxist state. The 1991 Bicesse Accords brought a 1992 election whose result UNITA rejected, restarting the war at even greater intensity; it finally ended when Savimbi was killed in February 2002 and the Luena Memorandum followed weeks later.

Later history and present status

Since 2002 Angola has been an MPLA dominant-party system: João Lourenço succeeded dos Santos in 2017 and won the country's tightest-ever election in 2022. The economy rests on oil — Angola is one of Africa's largest producers — and diamonds, generating immense wealth alongside severe inequality and corruption. Portuguese is the official language; the population is roughly 29% Ovimbundu, 27% Ambundu and 14% Bakongo, and about 79% Christian. Angola today is a regional diplomatic and military power, though still grappling with poverty, drought in the south and demands for deeper democratisation.