The history of Angola

Angola, on the Atlantic coast of south-central Africa, was home to San hunter-gatherers before Bantu-speaking farmers and herders settled it and built powerful kingdoms, above all Kongo in the north and Ndongo along the Kwanza River. From the late fifteenth century the Portuguese drew these states into the Atlantic slave trade, and for more than three centuries Angola was the largest single source of enslaved Africans shipped to the Americas, mostly to Brazil. Portugal conquered the interior only in the early twentieth century, then fought a thirteen-year colonial war before independence in 1975. Independence was followed by a civil war, fought with heavy foreign involvement during the Cold War, that lasted until 2002.

Stone tools found near Luanda, in the Congo basin and in the Namib desert show that people lived in Angola during the Stone Age. The earliest known inhabitants were Khoisan-speaking hunter-gatherers, ancestors of the San, small numbers of whose descendants still live in the south-east. Over the first millennium CE, Bantu-speaking peoples arrived from the north as part of the long Bantu expansion, bringing iron-working, pottery, crops and cattle. They absorbed or displaced earlier populations and formed the ancestors of today's main peoples: the Kongo in the north, the Mbundu (Ambundu) around the Kwanza valley, the Ovimbundu of the central highlands, and the Lunda, Chokwe, Ovambo and others to the east and south.

The largest state was the Kingdom of Kongo, founded around 1390 when the ruler Lukeni lua Nimi built a base on a hilltop at Mbanza Kongo, now the capital of Angola's Zaire province. By the fifteenth century the manikongo, or king, ruled a federation of provinces stretching from the Congo River south to the Dande and inland to the Kwango, and received tribute from smaller neighbours. Its wealth rested on farming, weaving of fine raffia cloth, copper and iron, and a currency of nzimbu shells gathered from the island of Luanda. Kings were elected from among eligible noble lineages, and the capital, enlarged by resettled war captives, may have held tens of thousands of people in the sixteenth century.

South of Kongo, the Mbundu kingdom of Ndongo emerged in the sixteenth century under rulers bearing the title ngola, from which the Portuguese took the name Angola. Further east lay Matamba, and on the central plateau a cluster of Ovimbundu kingdoms such as Bailundo and Bié that would later dominate the caravan trade of the interior.

In 1483 the Portuguese navigator Diogo Cão reached the mouth of the Congo River and made contact with Kongo. King Nzinga a Nkuwu welcomed priests and artisans and was baptised as João I in 1491, the year the first stone church was built at Mbanza Kongo. His son Afonso I (reigned 1509 to 1542) made Catholicism the state religion, renamed the capital São Salvador, sent young nobles to study in Lisbon and corresponded with the kings of Portugal and the pope; one of his sons became a bishop. Kongo remained an independent Christian kingdom for centuries, with its own church traditions.

Contact also brought the slave trade. Portuguese planters on the island of São Tomé demanded labour, and merchants bought captives in growing numbers. Afonso wrote to Lisbon in the 1520s complaining that traders were seizing free Kongolese, including relatives of nobles, and tried to regulate rather than end the trade, which the kingdom itself was by then involved in. Invasions by the Jaga in 1568 drove the king from his capital, and he was restored only with Portuguese help. In 1665 a Portuguese army from Luanda defeated Kongo at the Battle of Mbwila, killing King António I and much of the nobility. The kingdom fell into decades of civil war between rival royal houses, during which a young noblewoman, Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, led a religious movement to reunite it before being burned as a heretic in 1706. Kongo survived as a weakened kingdom, increasingly under Portuguese influence in the nineteenth century, until its monarchy was abolished in 1914.

Portugal's colony began when Paulo Dias de Novais founded Luanda in 1575 with settlers and soldiers, aiming at Ndongo's supposed silver mines and its people as captives. Wars against Ndongo followed for most of the next century, and the Portuguese increasingly used Imbangala mercenaries, bands of warriors who lived by raiding. The most famous opponent of Portuguese expansion was Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba. As her brother's envoy to Luanda in 1622 she negotiated a peace treaty and was baptised, and in 1624 she took power in Ndongo herself. When Portugal installed a rival puppet king and drove her out, she allied with the Imbangala, conquered the kingdom of Matamba between 1631 and 1635 and made it her base.

During the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, the Dutch Republic attacked Portugal's empire, and the Dutch West India Company seized Luanda in 1641. Nzinga allied with the Dutch and recovered much of Ndongo, but a fleet from Brazil under Salvador Correia de Sá retook Luanda in 1648. Nzinga continued fighting until a peace treaty in 1656 and ruled Matamba until her death in 1663, aged around eighty. She is now a national heroine in Angola. The Portuguese finally destroyed Ndongo's last stronghold at Pungo Andongo in 1671.

For two and a half centuries the export of people was the core of the colony's economy. Captives taken in wars, raids, judicial punishments and debt were marched from the interior along caravan routes to Luanda and, from the seventeenth century, to Benguela, and shipped across the Atlantic. Most went to Brazil, whose ships and merchants dominated the ports, so that Angola functioned almost as a colony of Colonial Brazil. Historians estimate that several million people were embarked from West Central Africa during the Atlantic slave trade, making it the largest source region in Africa; many died on the march to the coast or in the holding pens before the voyage. Kimbundu and Kikongo-speaking Africans shaped the cultures of Brazil, the Caribbean and North America.

Portugal abolished the export of slaves from Angola in 1836, but the trade continued illegally into the 1860s, and slavery within the colony was formally ended only in the 1870s. It was replaced by systems of forced and contract labour that were often little different. In the interior, the Ovimbundu and Chokwe built thriving long-distance trade in ivory, wax and later wild rubber.

At the Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885, during the Scramble for Africa, the European powers recognised Portuguese claims to Angola on condition of effective occupation, and treaties with local rulers added the enclave of Cabinda. The Portuguese Empire then spent decades conquering the interior against strong resistance: the Ovimbundu kingdom of Bailundo revolted in 1902, the Kwanyama of the south under King Mandume fought until 1917, and Portugal suppressed a Kongo revolt in 1913 and 1914. Effective control of the whole territory was achieved only in the 1920s.

Colonial Angola was run for the benefit of Portugal and its settlers. Africans paid taxes that forced them into wage labour, and many were conscripted for public works, plantations and coffee farms; the system of forced labour was condemned internationally. A tiny minority could become "assimilated" citizens by meeting tests of education and lifestyle. Under António Salazar's Estado Novo, white settlement was encouraged, and the settler population rose from around 44,000 in 1940 to some 170,000 in 1960 and more later. Angola was declared an overseas province of Portugal in 1951, a legal fiction used to resist decolonisation. Coffee, diamonds and, from the 1950s, oil were the main exports, while education for Africans was minimal and there was no university until the 1960s.

Nationalist movements formed in the 1950s, banned at home and organised in exile. In early 1961 cotton workers rose in the Baixa de Cassanje region, attacks were made on Luanda's prisons on 4 February, and in March the UPA, later the FNLA, launched an uprising in the north in which around a thousand settlers and many African contract workers were killed. Portuguese reprisals killed tens of thousands of Africans and sent many more fleeing into the Congo. Three movements fought a guerrilla war over the next thirteen years: the MPLA, led by the poet Agostinho Neto and based among the Mbundu and the urban educated class; the FNLA of Holden Roberto, rooted among the Kongo and backed by Zaire; and UNITA, founded in 1966 by Jonas Savimbi with support among the Ovimbundu. They often fought each other as well as the Portuguese.

The war, together with conflicts in Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, exhausted Portugal. In April 1974 the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon overthrew the dictatorship, and the new government agreed to leave. The Alvor Agreement of January 1975 set up a transitional government of all three movements and fixed independence for 11 November, but fighting broke out within months, and most of the settlers fled.

The struggle for Angola became one of the major proxy wars of the Cold War. The United States and Zaire backed the FNLA and UNITA, and South Africa sent troops north in October 1975. The Soviet Union armed the MPLA, and Fidel Castro sent Cuban combat troops, who helped the MPLA hold Luanda. Neto proclaimed the People's Republic of Angola on 11 November 1975. A purge after an attempted coup within the MPLA in May 1977 killed thousands of people. Neto died in 1979 and was succeeded by José Eduardo dos Santos.

The FNLA faded, but UNITA, supplied by South Africa and from 1986 again by the United States, fought on in the south and east, while South African forces repeatedly invaded to strike at Namibian guerrillas. The Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1987 and 1988, one of the largest in Africa since World War II, ended in stalemate, and the New York accords of December 1988 linked the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola to independence for Namibia. The MPLA abandoned Marxism-Leninism in 1990, and the Bicesse Accords of 1991 led to elections in September 1992. When the MPLA won and Savimbi rejected the result, war resumed; thousands of UNITA supporters were killed in Luanda in the "Halloween massacre" that autumn. The Lusaka Protocol of 1994 brought only a pause, and full war returned in 1998, financed on one side by oil and on the other by diamonds. Government troops killed Savimbi in February 2002, and a ceasefire followed in April. The war had killed perhaps half a million people or more, displaced around four million and left the country strewn with landmines.

Peace and high oil prices brought a construction boom, and Angola became one of Africa's largest oil producers, with Chinese loans funding new roads and railways. Wealth was heavily concentrated among the ruling elite, and much of the population remained poor. A new constitution in 2010 abolished direct presidential elections, making the leader of the winning party president. Dos Santos stepped down in 2017 after 38 years, and his chosen successor, João Lourenço, launched anti-corruption cases against members of the former president's family. Dos Santos died in Spain in 2022. In the August 2022 election the MPLA kept its majority, but UNITA, now a political party, achieved its strongest result, and Lourenço began a second term.

Falling oil revenues and debt led the government to cut fuel subsidies. In July 2025 a taxi strike against a sharp rise in diesel prices turned into riots and looting in Luanda and other provinces; the government said 22 people, including a police officer, were killed and more than 1,200 arrested. Angola reached fifty years of independence on 11 November 2025.