Who ruled Luanda?

Luanda stands on a bay of the Atlantic coast of west-central Africa, sheltered by a long, narrow sandbar island. Founded by the Portuguese in 1576, it is one of the oldest European-founded cities in sub-Saharan Africa. For almost three centuries its main business was the export of enslaved Africans, above all to Brazil, and it was one of the largest slaving ports in the Atlantic world. In the twentieth century it became the colonial capital of Angola, then the capital of an independent country shaped by long civil war and oil wealth.

Before the Portuguese arrived, the island off Luanda belonged to the Kingdom of Kongo, whose kings collected the small nzimbu shells found there and used them as currency. The mainland behind the bay was home to Mbundu people, whose kingdom of Ndongo lay inland along the Kwanza river. In 1576 Paulo Dias de Novais, who held a royal grant to conquer and settle the region, built a fort and founded São Paulo de Loanda on the shore.

From Luanda the Portuguese waged a long series of wars against Ndongo, partly for land and silver that never materialised but mostly for captives. In 1622 the future queen Nzinga came to Luanda as her brother's envoy to negotiate with the governor, and she later became the colony's most determined enemy. In 1641, while Portugal and the Dutch Republic were at war over the sugar and slave trades, a Dutch fleet seized the city. A fleet sent from Brazil under Salvador Correia de Sá recaptured it in 1648.

Luanda's economy rested on the Atlantic slave trade. Captives taken in wars and raids in the interior were marched to the coast, held in the town and shipped across the ocean, most of them to the plantations and mines of colonial Brazil. Merchants from Brazil were so prominent that the city was at times closer to Rio de Janeiro than to Lisbon in its trade and politics. Portugal formally banned the export of slaves from its African colonies in 1836, though an illegal trade continued for years, and Luanda turned slowly to exporting goods such as ivory, wax, coffee and palm oil.

Luanda had been the seat of the Portuguese governors from early on, and as the Portuguese Empire extended its control over the interior in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it became the capital of a colony with fixed borders. Tens of thousands of Portuguese settlers arrived after the Second World War, and the city acquired modernist avenues and apartment blocks, while most African residents lived in the sprawling informal neighbourhoods called musseques.

On 4 February 1961 armed men attacked a prison and police posts in Luanda, an event Angola commemorates as the start of its war of independence. After the 1974 revolution in Lisbon, Portugal agreed to withdraw, and most of the settler population fled. Fighting between the rival liberation movements broke out in the city in 1975, and the MPLA, holding Luanda with Cuban and Soviet backing, proclaimed independence there on 11 November 1975. The civil war that followed, a front of the Cold War, lasted until 2002 and drove hundreds of thousands of refugees into the capital.

Peace and offshore oil brought a building boom, new towers on the bay front and a reputation as one of the costliest places on earth for expatriates, alongside deep poverty. Greater Luanda now has close to 9 million people, roughly a quarter of the population of Angola, and is the country's capital and chief port.