Angola's history: a slaving coast that took its interior last

Who ruled the land before Luanda was founded

Farming communities appeared in what is now Angola between about 1000 and 500 BCE, and by the first centuries CE they were working iron. Britannica's historians take these people to be the ancestors of most of the present population and the speakers of early forms of its languages. Before them the land belonged to Khoi and San hunter-gatherers, a few of whom, among them the !Kung, still live in the remote south-east.

By 1500 several kingdoms held the territory. Kongo, south of the Congo River in the north, emerged in the fourteenth century, and Wikipedia's account of the kingdom dates it as an independent state from about 1390 to 1862. Its capital, Mbanza Kongo, stands on a plateau at 570 metres, and the town's historic core grew around the royal residence, the customary court, the holy tree and the royal burial places. In the sixteenth century it counted more than fifty thousand people. UNESCO inscribed the vestiges of the capital on the World Heritage List in 2017.

South of Kongo, in the highlands between the Cuanza and Lukala rivers, lay Ndongo, whose kings carried the title ngola. The Portuguese took the country's name from that title: a charter granted to Paulo Dias de Novais in 1571 already speaks of the Reino de Angola. On the Bié Plateau further south stood the kingdom of Benguela, with smaller states such as Bailundu, Ciyaka and Kwanhama between the larger ones. The Chokwe of the north-east had no central government and still built a cultural centre there.

Portuguese navigators reached Kongo in 1483. The first stone and mortar building in the capital, a church, was raised on 1 June 1491, and in 1509 Mvemba a Nzinga became king as Afonso I. Under him Christianity was established permanently in Kongo, together with literacy in Portuguese. Afonso's own letters record the sale of captives taken in war to Portuguese merchants.

How the slave trade built a colony at Luanda

Quarrels with Kongo over the trade in captives sent the Portuguese looking for other partners, Ndongo above all. Paulo Dias de Novais founded Luanda in 1575 with a hundred families of settlers and 400 soldiers, Benguela was fortified in 1587, and Luanda received the status of a city in 1605. From the first, the colony faced west across the Atlantic. Brazilian ships outnumbered all others in the ports of Luanda and Benguela, and Wikipedia's history of the colony describes Angola in this period as in effect a colony of Brazil.

Enslaved people were the colony's principal export, and Portuguese involvement in taking them grew from the late seventeenth century. Captives also came out of wars between African states: the civil wars in Kongo that followed the Battle of Mbwila in 1665, where the Portuguese killed King António I and much of his nobility; the rise of the Lunda empire after 1750; and fighting in the Dembos hills and on the Bié Plateau. Britannica puts the number exported between 1500 and 1850 at no fewer than five million people. Censuses from the late eighteenth century counted twice as many adult women as men.

The export of enslaved people was banned in 1836, and the trade went on until the Brazilian market closed in the early 1850s. Britannica dates the legal abolition of slavery across the Portuguese empire to 1875 and records that it continued in thinly disguised forms until 1911, and in many cases into the 1960s.

Why Nzinga held the Portuguese back for decades

Wars between the colony and Ndongo intensified after 1617, and the ruler who resisted them longest was Nzinga, also known as Njinga Mbande. Born about 1583 into Ndongo's ruling family, she first dealt with the Portuguese as her brother's ambassador and made a treaty with them in 1621. After his death in 1624 she took power in Ndongo. The Portuguese declared war on her in 1626, and by 1628 her army was so depleted that she went into exile.

What followed was a rebuilding by alliance. Nzinga married the Imbangala warlord Kasanje, and with his forces she conquered the neighbouring kingdom of Matamba between 1631 and 1635. When the Dutch West India Company seized Luanda in 1641 she joined it, and between 1641 and 1644 she recovered large parts of Ndongo, although the Portuguese fortress at Massangano held out. A fleet from Brazil under Salvador Correia de Sá retook Luanda in 1648, and the Dutch left. Nzinga fought on until a peace treaty in 1656 and died on 17 December 1663.

The conquest of Pungo Andongo in 1671, the year Ndongo submitted to the Portuguese Crown, was the last major advance from Luanda, and Portuguese attacks on Kongo in 1670 and on Matamba in 1681 failed. Britannica considers Portuguese expansion largely over by 1670. Until the late nineteenth century the inroads from Luanda and Benguela stayed very limited.

How Portugal conquered the interior after the Berlin Conference

From the 1850s the interior's exports changed from people to goods hunted or gathered by Africans: ivory and wax, and later wild rubber. Ovimbundu caravans from the highlands travelled as far as the East African coast, and Chokwe hunters used the firearms they had accumulated to overthrow the Lunda empire in the 1880s.

The Berlin Conference of 1884 and 1885 obliged Portugal to occupy what it claimed. The Treaty of Simulambuko of 1885 with the princes of Cabinda brought that territory north of the Congo under the Portuguese Crown, and the colony's borders were finally fixed by negotiations in Europe in 1891. Systematic taxation of Africans began only in 1906. Construction of the Benguela Railway from the port of Lobito started in 1902; Britannica has the line reaching the border of the Belgian Congo in 1928, and the Lobito Corridor's own history gives 1929 for the border and 1931 for completion.

Conquest proper followed the proclamation of the Portuguese republic in 1910 and the creation of the authoritarian Estado Novo in 1926. By 1920 all but the remote south-east was firmly under Portuguese control. Portugal abolished the Kongo monarchy in 1914 after suppressing a revolt, and the Ovambo of the south were made fully subject only in 1915. Kingdoms were dissolved and Africans classed as natives were taxed and put to forced labour and forced cultivation, with strict tests for the few who applied for assimilated status. In a campaign against the Mucubal between 1939 and 1943, the army took 3,529 prisoners, 20% of them women and children. In 1951 Angola was declared an overseas province of Portugal, and by 1974 the European population had risen to about 330,000.

Why the independence war split three ways

Three risings in the first months of 1961 began the war. In the Baixa de Cassanje in Malanje, the cotton country, a strike by the workers of the Cotonang company that began in December 1960 turned into a rising in January. On 4 February militants armed mostly with machetes attacked a prison and police barracks in Luanda. On 15 March the Union of Angolan Peoples crossed from Congo-Léopoldville into the north with 4,000 to 5,000 fighters and attacked farms and posts, killing officials and civilians, most of them Ovimbundu contract workers from the highlands.

Out of these risings came three movements with three different bases, and they fought each other as well as Portugal.

The first MPLA fighters sent into Angola were ambushed and killed by Holden Roberto's partisans, and Wikipedia's account treats that ambush as the precedent for the civil war to come. Portugal answered the rebellion with troops and strategic hamlets, and at the same time abolished forced cultivation, forced labour and the assimilation tests. The economy entered a sustained boom of industry and oil, and by April 1974 Britannica judges that all three movements had been almost entirely expelled from Angolan soil.

How independence arrived without a handover

The Carnation Revolution in Lisbon on 25 April 1974 ended Portugal's colonial wars. The three leaders met in Mombasa on 5 January 1975, and on 15 January they signed the Alvor Agreement with Portugal, which set up a transitional government and fixed independence for 11 November. The Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda was not a party to it.

The coalition did not hold. The FNLA attacked the MPLA's headquarters in Luanda in March 1975, and fighting spread through the capital in April and May. The MPLA held Luanda, and Zaire and South Africa sent troops in support of the FNLA and UNITA. Cuba sent nearly five hundred combat personnel in late September, and by independence more than a thousand Cuban soldiers were in the country. By then the South Africans had come within 200 kilometres of the capital and the FNLA to Kifangondo, 30 kilometres away, where the FNLA was largely destroyed.

The Portuguese army refused to supervise elections, and Portugal withdrew in November 1975 without formally handing power to any movement. More than 300,000 Portuguese left. The MPLA proclaimed the People's Republic of Angola in Luanda on 11 November 1975 with Agostinho Neto as president, and the FNLA and UNITA set up a rival government in Huambo on 24 November, which the MPLA's offensive dissolved on 11 February 1976. On 27 May 1977 a faction around Nito Alves attempted a coup; the reprisals killed thousands, and afterwards the MPLA declared itself a Marxist-Leninist party.

How the civil war outlasted the Cold War

UNITA regrouped in the south-east with South African support, and from 1985 with military aid from the United States. The Cuban force in Angola eventually numbered 40,000 to 50,000 soldiers. Between 14 August 1987 and 23 March 1988 the government's army and Cuba fought South Africa and UNITA south and east of Cuito Cuanavale, and both sides claimed victory: the South Africans stopped the offensive on Mavinga, and the Angolan and Cuban forces held their lines by the town. Angola placed Cuito Cuanavale on its UNESCO Tentative List in 2017 as a site of liberation and independence.

The Tripartite Accord of 22 December 1988 linked the departure of Cuban troops to South Africa's withdrawal from Angola and Namibia. The MPLA abandoned the one-party state in 1990 and signed the Bicesse Accords with UNITA in May 1991, and elections followed in September 1992 under United Nations supervision. The MPLA won the first round with 49% of the vote against 40% for UNITA, and UNITA rejected the result and returned to war. Between 30 October and 1 November 1992 thousands of UNITA supporters were killed in Luanda. Wikipedia attributes the killings to MPLA troops; Britannica describes a popular uprising that many believe had government backing.

By the end of 1992 UNITA held about two-thirds of the country, and the diamond fields paid for its war. The United Nations imposed sanctions on it in September 1993, and the Lusaka Protocol of 20 November 1994 brought UNITA into a national unity government, installed in April 1997. Serious fighting resumed late in 1998. Government troops killed Jonas Savimbi in Moxico on 22 February 2002, and the Luena memorandum of 4 April 2002 ended the war. In August UNITA demobilised its forces and became a political party.

What the peace has looked like since the war

Britannica estimates that the fighting killed about half a million people and that famine and disease made worse by it killed another half million. The war displaced about four million people, a third of the population, and Wikipedia's account puts the landmines laid by 2002 at about 15 million. In Cabinda the separatists signed a peace agreement with the government in 2006, and attacks rose again in 2016.

The MPLA won about four-fifths of the vote in the parliamentary election of September 2008, the first since 1992, and the constitution of 2010 replaced the direct election of the president with the head of the winning party list. José Eduardo dos Santos, president since 1979, stepped down in September 2017 after 38 years. His daughter Isabel was dismissed from the state oil company Sonangol in November 2017, and his son José Filomeno was convicted of fraud in 2020. In the election of 24 August 2022 the MPLA took 51.17% of the vote and UNITA 43.95%, its best result, and both the electoral commission and the Constitutional Court dismissed UNITA's complaints. The politics article follows that system from 2010.