Angola's culture: how Portuguese became a first language late

Which languages Angolans speak at home

The constitution of 2010 makes Portuguese the official language and binds the state to promote the study, teaching and use of the other Angolan languages. After independence the government designated six African languages for use in education, and Britannica records that widespread teaching in them never followed: Portuguese stayed the language of schools, documents and government. Since the end of the war there has been a renewed effort to teach the national languages in schools and to print civic material in them.

The 2024 census counted first languages.

The census of 2014 measured something different, the language used at home, and found that 71.15% of the population used Portuguese there. Both counts point the same way. In Luanda and much of the country around it Portuguese is often the only language spoken; in other areas African languages are the language of daily life. French and Lingala are understood among the Kongo of the north, and English and Afrikaans are spoken in the south and east by people who worked or took refuge in Namibia and Zambia.

How Kimbundu gave way to Portuguese in Luanda

The Portuguese settled at Luanda in 1575 and built the colony in a belt about 150 kilometres inland. By the middle of the seventeenth century a mixed Mbundu and Portuguese culture had formed there, and in the eighteenth century Kimbundu was the language of the capital's elite. In the nineteenth century that elite valued its blend of the two cultures and both languages, and Kimbundu ceased to be the elite's language only after 1910.

The shift was policy. From 1910, and more strictly after 1926, Portugal ran programmes of assimilation, and from the 1920s colonial policy aimed to make Portuguese the only language spoken in Angola. Africans who met a set of tests could register as assimilados, Portuguese citizens; the tests were abolished in 1961. A class of officials, assimilated Africans and mestiços grew up that was Portuguese in speech and manners, and after 1945 settlers joined it. Mestiços were a little more than 1% of the population in 1960 and perhaps 2% by 1970.

Independence made that inheritance awkward. The nationalist movements praised African culture, yet most educated Angolans, the leaders among them, were more Portuguese than African in their cultural orientation. Portuguese remained the language of the new state, and those who did not speak it were in effect shut out of politics. The civil war did the rest. Britannica judges that recruitment into the armies of the MPLA and UNITA did more than the school system to spread literacy, Portuguese and technical skills, while war drove people into Portuguese-speaking Luanda.

Reading follows the same map as speech. The 2024 census found 71% of people aged fifteen and over able to read and write, from 94% in Luanda province to 40% in Moxico Leste, and 5.0% of adults had completed higher education. Until 1961 most schooling was left to the churches, Catholics teaching settlers and a few Africans and Protestants teaching Africans, often in African languages. Agostinho Neto University dates from 1963; the Catholic University of Angola followed in 1997.

Who the main peoples are

The Ovimbundu, speakers of Umbundu, are the largest group, living on and around the Bié Plateau and along the Benguela Railway. The Mbundu, speakers of Kimbundu, hold Luanda and the Malanje highlands, and the Bakongo, speakers of Kikongo, the far north, where their people also live across the borders in both Congos. Wikipedia gives the three as 29%, 27% and 14% of the population; Britannica gives about a quarter, a quarter and an eighth.

The east belongs to the Lunda, the Chokwe and the Ngangela peoples, scattered thinly across a thinly peopled plateau. The Lunda-Chokwe came to think of themselves as one people only after about 1920, when the long mixing of the two ended. In the south-west the Ovambo and the Herero share their languages with Namibia, and the Nyaneka-Nkhumbi live only in Angola. The southern peoples all kept cattle, and for the Ovambo cattle were the measure of wealth and standing. Isolated bands of !Kung, speakers of a Khoisan click language, still live in the remote south-east, a few of them as nomads.

These identities carried into politics. The Ovimbundu Christian villages of the 1940s, built with help from North American missionaries, produced the generation that followed Jonas Savimbi into UNITA. The Mbundu were the MPLA's strongest supporters from 1956, and Agostinho Neto was the son of a Mbundu Methodist pastor. In March 1961 the rising in the Bakongo north drove about 400,000 Bakongo into Zaire.

What Angolans believe and where

Wikipedia puts Christians at about four-fifths of the population; Britannica divides them into about two-fifths Roman Catholic and two-fifths Protestant, with about a tenth following traditional beliefs or other religions. There are about 1,000 religious communities. The older religion of the region venerated ancestors and territorial spirits under a creator god, often called Nzambi or Suku, and it survives in some form in many places.

The Protestant churches divided the country between them. Baptists worked in the north among the Bakongo, Methodists along the Kimbundu-speaking strip from Luanda to Malanje, and Congregationalists among the Ovimbundu of the central highlands. The Kongo have regarded themselves as Christian since the mid-sixteenth century, and the Portuguese colonial government subsidised Catholic missions and sometimes harassed the Protestants.

After 1975 the Marxist-Leninist MPLA was hostile to religion. It denounced the Catholic Church for its ties to the colonial state and the Baptists and Congregationalists for their place in the leadership of UNITA and the FNLA, and it treated the Methodists, from whom many of its own leaders came, more favourably. The Tocoist church, an African independent church, opposed the government and was briefly banned in the late 1980s. Since the end of Marxism the churches have operated openly, and hundreds of Pentecostal congregations have sprung up in the cities. Muslims, mostly migrants from West Africa and Lebanon, number 80,000 to 90,000 by a 2008 estimate of the US State Department and about 500,000 by the count of the Islamic Community of Angola; the government recognises no Muslim organisation.

How carving and music travelled

Angolan decorative art works in wood, clay, copper, reeds, ivory, shells and the human body. Britannica singles out the wooden sculpture of the Chokwe, the carved ivories of Cabinda and the elaborate hairstyles of the Nyaneka and Nkhumbi peoples. Among the best-known pieces is the Chokwe carving known as the thinker. The Chokwe also carve the female mask Mwana Pwo, worn by male dancers at the rituals of coming of age, and the painted Kalelwa masks of circumcision ceremonies.

The drum is the basic instrument: the ngoma, and the mpwita that came from Kongo. Luanda's hungu and the mbulumbumba of the south-west are gourd-resonated musical bows, and both crossed the Atlantic with enslaved people to Brazil, where they became the berimbau. Capoeira Angola in Brazil is often traced to the same captives.

Semba, a partner dance and a music, grew from the older massemba rhythm along the coast near Luanda and Benguela; its name refers to the umbigada, the touch of the dancers' bellies. The group N'gola Ritmos, founded in 1947 by Liceu Vieira Dias, laid the foundations of modern semba, which under colonial rule carried quiet protest and after 1975 became a music of celebration. Kizomba and kuduro both grew out of it. Since independence the Ministry of Culture has held much of the control over commercial music production, and a great deal of music has lived in the informal sector.

What writers and film-makers made of independence

A group of educated Africans in the towns of the nineteenth century wrote newspaper articles, histories, novels and poems in Portuguese and recorded Mbundu folklore. The Estado Novo drove that writing underground after 1926 without ending it. The best-known poet of the nationalist generation became the first president: in "We Must Return", written in prison in 1956, Agostinho Neto described Angola as "red with coffee / white with cotton / green with maize". His government introduced strict censorship all the same, and the press was nationalised in 1976. Rigorous censorship ended in the 1990s.

Cinema followed the war. Sarah Maldoror's Sambizanga won the Tanit d'Or at the Carthage Film Festival in 1972. The Hero, directed by Zézé Gamboa and shot entirely in Angola, followed a veteran maimed by a landmine, a boy searching for his soldier father and a teacher in postwar Luanda, and won the World Dramatic Cinema Jury Grand Prize at Sundance in 2005. Television arrived in 1975, the year of independence, under state control. State radio broadcasts in Portuguese, English, French and Spanish and in Chokwe, Kikongo, Kimbundu and Umbundu, among other African languages.

Much of what the colony collected was lost. Material in provincial museums was looted or carried to Luanda during the war, and many colonial-era collections were destroyed or dispersed. The National Historical Archive in Luanda holds documents from the seventeenth century onwards, the National Institute for Cultural Heritage works from the capital, and the Kongo Kingdom Museum in Mbanza Kongo keeps objects from the old kingdom. Rebuilding of damaged cultural institutions began after 2002.

What Angolans eat and celebrate

Palm oil goes into many Angolan dishes, and a number of them are built on seafood. The feast of Nganja, usually held in April, is a harvest festival at which children roast maize. The Futungo market near Luanda is where craftsmen sell their work.

Luanda keeps an annual Carnival, and urban Angola, Luanda above all, has been compared to Latin America more than to its African neighbours for its mix of Portuguese and African culture. In 2014 the country revived the National Festival of Angolan Culture after a break of 25 years; it ran for 20 days in every provincial capital. At Mbanza Kongo, inscribed by UNESCO in 2017, the customary court that settles disputes was reinstated after four decades of war, and the royal space in the old capital remains the spiritual centre of its community.

Why basketball stands beside football

Football is the game played at every level of society, and Angolan players of note tend to play professionally in Portugal and elsewhere in Europe. Angola reached the World Cup finals for the first time in 2006, going out after one defeat and two draws, and it hosted the Africa Cup of Nations in 2010. Basketball grew with government support and with the influence of the foreign armies that fought in the country, and the men's team has won the AfroBasket twelve times and played at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. The country has also hosted the Roller Hockey World Cup and sends a women's team to the world handball championship. How these meet a visitor is the subject of travel in Angola.