Angola

By: Eric Young

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Angola

Few African countries have seen their natural and human potential as underutilized and thoroughly ravaged by violence as Angola. Precolonial southern Africa was home to some of the continent's richest kingdoms, which welcomed European merchants and missionaries in the fifteenth century, only to be corrupted and ultimately destroyed by the transatlantic slave trade in the sixteenth century. The abolition of the trade—a politically and economically destabilizing event—was followed by the repressive taxation and forced labor regimes of Portuguese colonialism. Although much of the rest of the continent underwent rapid decolonization in the 1960s, the armed struggle for independence in Angola took nearly fifteen years and perpetuated internal divisions that turned into a decades-long, ongoing civil war. Although Angola's vast natural resources hold great promise, immense obstacles to development remain, particularly landmines and a shattered infrastructure.

Precolonial Kingdoms and the Slave Trade

Small groups of hunter-gatherer Khoikhoi people were the first to inhabit the region of present-day Angola. Late in the first millennium Bantu-speaking people migrated to the area from the north, pushing some Khoikhoi farther south and incorporating others. The Bantu speakers brought with them iron-smelting skills, agricultural practices, and cattle, all of which they used to establish some of the largest and most centralized kingdoms in Central Africa. In the mid-thirteenth or fourteenth century, Kongo kings organized the mostly matrilineal agricultural settlements surrounding the mouth of the Congo River into provinces, collected taxes, and established an official currency of shells. South of the Kongo, in the early sixteenth century, the centralized Ndongo controlled the trade in salt and iron. Later in the century the Lunda formed a kingdom in the grasslands of the upper Kasai River.

Angola

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Ironwork, weaving, and extensive trade took place in these and other inland kingdoms, especially the Matamba and Kasanje to the east, the Bié, Bailundu, and Ciyanda on the eastern plateau, and the Kwanhama in the south. Most of the kings held divine powers. The coastal kingdoms tended to be centralized and agricultural, capturing slaves and extracting people and natural resources, including ivory and gold, from the interior. The interior kingdoms, by contrast, were less centralized, more heterogeneous, and supported themselves through hunting and fishing. Over time, patterns of migration among the kingdoms produced the major ethnolinguistic groups of Angola—including the Bakongo, Mbundu, and Ovimbundu—as well as smaller groups such as the Nganguela, Lunda-Chokwe, Herero, Nyaneka-Humbe, and Ambo.

Portuguese explorer Diogo Cam (also spelled Cão), the first European to visit the region, sailed into the mouth of the Congo River in 1482. Portuguese missionaries soon followed and some kingdoms, including the Kongo, adopted Catholicism as the official religion. The Portuguese initially maintained peaceful relations with the Kongo, trading goods with such leaders as King Afonso I in exchange for slaves. But as they moved farther south into the Ndongo kingdom, Portuguese slave-traders became more intrusive and violent, while Africans, such as Queen Nzinga, resisted. When they began to meet resistance from the Bakongo—many of whom considered the trade contradictory to Christianity—the Portuguese monarchy sent troops to Angola.

During the first major military campaign (1574–1594), conquistadores established forts and a system of vassalage, setting a pattern that would be replicated throughout the region. The Portuguese recognized African chiefs, or sobas, in exchange for their subservience. In their effort to move into the interior of Angola, the Portuguese found tropical diseases, African hostility, and land unsuitable for agriculture. It was not until the middle of the seventeenth century that the major coastal kingdoms had been subjugated. Portuguese officials taxed the African kings in the use of porters and ivory, but predominately in slaves.

Slavery and a local trade in slaves existed in some form in most of Angola's kingdoms. The transatlantic slave trade, however, was unsurpassed in scale and impact. It is estimated that between the late sixteenth century and 1836, when Portugal officially abolished slave trafficking, four million people from the region were captured for the slave trade. Only about two million of these people survived the march to the coast, confinement, and the journey across the Atlantic. As many as one million slaves were transported to Brazil, and the rest went to plantations in the Caribbean. Slave trading agents, or pombeiros—some Portuguese, most African or Afro-Portuguese (mestiços)—bought slaves from local chiefs in exchange for cloth, guns, and other European goods.

The slave trade made some chiefs enormously wealthy, but it ultimately undermined local economies and political stability as villages’ vital labor forces were shipped overseas and slave raids and civil wars became commonplace. Demand for slaves was slowed, but not stopped, by the official ban on the trade. The transatlantic trade had made slavery an integral part of the economy and social structure in Angola that continued after Portugal abolished slavery there in 1858. Portuguese settlers in Angola sustained labor laws that forced Africans to work on agricultural estates.

Portuguese Settlers and the Overseas Province

After the official slave trade ended, Portugal sought other means to exact revenue and labor from Angola. In addition to raising port customs and imposing a higher hut tax, beginning in the 1830s Portugal launched a military expansion into the Angolan interior. These costly campaigns met opposition from both Africans and other European powers, especially the British and Afrikaners. Eventually the Portuguese retreated to their coastal settlements at Luanda and Benguela, where they mixed with the local African population, creating a class of mestiços. Although there was little racial segregation, whites clearly dominated the social and economic hierarchy, despite the fact that many of these Portuguese emigrants were social outcasts, deserters, and criminals.

Portuguese plantation owners had perennial problems retaining African workers, even with the imposition of labor conscription laws. Laws passed in 1878 and 1899 upheld the status of liberto, or freed slave, but introduced vagrancy laws that enabled Portuguese officials to force Africans to work on government projects and plantations in need of labor. Despite a growth in agriculture production—particularly of coffee, sugar, and, later, rubber—that generated significant revenue, Angola's economy stagnated from a lack of capital to develop the infrastructure. For most Africans, the Sertanejo, or trader, was the most visible evidence of Portuguese presence. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, the European expansionism that preceded the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 led Portugal to occupy more of Angola. Portuguese soldiers and settlers, unsuccessful in acquiring the Shire River highlands (in present-day Malawi) and the south bank of the Congo River, did retain Cabinda, a small enclave on the north bank of the river. At the turn of the century Portugal occupied one-tenth of the land that today comprises Angola.

Throughout the nineteenth century and until the military campaigns ended in 1930, many sectors of Angolan society resisted domination by the Portuguese monarchy. Kings, especially the well-educated leaders of the Kongo, invoked historical treaties to resist Portuguese dictates. Protestant and Catholic missionaries often sided with Africans against the Portuguese governor general in Angola. European settlers, soldiers, and businessmen periodically took advantage of the weak government in Lisbon to attempt secession from Portugal or unification with Brazil. Other vocal critics of Portuguese rule included assimilados—those Africans who had assimilated Portuguese education and culture—and mestiços, many of whom held positions in the civil service and military.

The introduction of the Estado Novo, or New State, to Portugal in 1926 led to the suppression of indigenous Angolan resistance and institutionalized Angola's social stratification. New legislation made assimilado a legal rather than social status and suppressed many rights of Africans, with the claim that they were not “advanced” and had to be “civilized” through education and religion. In 1950, thirty-one thousand out of four million Angolans held assimilado status. The Estado Novo also changed the status of Angola itself from a colony to an even less autonomous “overseas province.” The economy of the province boomed after World War II, when the completion of the Benguela Railway linked the fertile, mineral-rich Belgian Congo to the coast. Diamond mining and coffee production expanded rapidly, and the Portuguese government encouraged emigration to Angola and the purchase of land. But this new prosperity was fragile, dependent on a cheap and increasingly volatile African labor force.

African Nationalism and the War for Independence

The postwar era saw an explosion of nationalist political activity. Although heavily censored by colonial authorities, more than sixty parties and associations formed in the 1940s and 1950s to protest Portuguese policies. These groups represented a variety of interests, including the old assimilado associations, militant Africans, ethnic separatists, and Europeans. Many cultural associations, prophets, and separatist religious groups also opposed Portuguese colonialism, but little unity existed among them. Resentment of assimilation policies and white immigration, especially in urban centers, led to the creation of several nationalist political parties, though they remained divided by ethnicity and class. In 1953 urban intellectuals formed the Party of the United Struggle of Africans of Angola, which later joined with other organizations to form the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, or MPLA, under the leadership of Agostinho Neto. Meanwhile, Bakongo nationalists formed the Union of Angolan People, or UPA, which later became the National Front for the Liberation of Angola, or FNLA.

In 1961 rebellions in the north were joined by MPLA actions in Luanda. Colonial policemen crushed the rebellions, massacring thousands of civilians: in response, UPA insurgents in the north massacred settlers and mestiços. These atrocities roused the opposition groups, but did not unite them. Throughout the early and mid-1960s, the FNLA and MPLA disagreed over ideology, strategy, and leadership. Because both movements faced overwhelming Portuguese military superiority, each concentrated on building their fighting forces in camps in neighboring countries. Instability in the Congo reinvigorated the war as the superpowers competed for influence in the region. The Eastern Bloc supported the Mbundu-dominated and socialist-leaning MPLA. The West backed the Bakongo-dominated and populist FNLA. China, and later the United States and South Africa, supported the Ovimbundu-dominated National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), a breakaway faction led by Jonas Savimbi that professed little coherent ideology.

The war for independence continued until 1975. It became increasingly conventional as the militaries grew, but the nationalist groups fought each other as much as they did the Portuguese, while the civilian population suffered. Ultimately it was the effort of simultaneously fighting three insurgency wars—in Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, as well as in Angola—that sapped the strength of the Portuguese military and helped precipitate the overthrow of the Caetano government in Lisbon in April 1974. A month before Angolan independence, South Africa invaded on the pretext of assisting the FNLA-UNITA, and in response the MPLA received additional military aid from the Soviet Union and assistance from Cuba. This international involvement did not, however, produce a clear victor, and on November 11 1975, Portugal ceded independence to the people of Angola. The MPLA declared victory and the MPLA leader became president, though in fact the party controlled little of the country and fighting between the factions continued.

Civil War and a Fragile Peace

The South African invasion, Cuban intervention, and Soviet and American assistance internationalized the Angolan conflict. The FNLA and UNITA allied to form an alternative government based in the southern town of Huambo. Although the FNLA ceased to exist in 1976, UNITA, benefiting from extensive South African military assistance as well as United States aid and a lucrative diamond smuggling industry, built a formidable fighting force of around 40,000 soldiers.

The MPLA, a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party since 1977, expanded educational opportunities and the health care system, and nationalized industries deserted by Portuguese settlers and foreign corporations. But its state-owned farms and inefficient bureaucracies only made life more difficult in the countryside, where roads deteriorated and small farmers were left without access to markets or agricultural inputs. President Neto and José Eduardo dos Santos, who succeeded Neto in 1979, both pursued pragmatic economic policies, permitting private ownership and cooperating with western oil companies in exploiting Angola's rich reserves off the coast of Cabinda. The enclave had in fact become one of the largest oil-producing regions in Africa, and Cabinda separatists continue to fight the Angolan government for their independence. Much—if not all—of the $400 million annual oil revenues were spent on the war effort, as defense accounted for 40 percent of annual government expenditures.

Not until the end of the Cold War were genuine international efforts made to stop the fighting in Angola. In 1988 negotiations between the warring factions and their international sponsors resulted in the withdrawal of Cuban and South African troops from Angola. This slow and uneven peace process culminated in a ceasefire, in 1991, and the outline of a plan for military demobilization and elections. Refusing to participate in runoff elections, Savimbi and UNITA withdrew from the peace process, and fighting resumed. In 1994 the international community pressured Savimbi into a second peace accord that resulted in UNITA representatives assuming several posts and parliamentary seats in a government of national unity. In 1997 the Angolan military supported Laurent-Désiré Kabila in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Denis Sassou-Nguesso in the Republic of the Congo and may have backed a coup attempt in Zambia.

Angola, a country devastated by war, desperately needed economic recovery in the 1990s. The country needed to rebuild its infrastructure to benefit from its rich natural resources, including gold, diamonds, timber, fish, and agricultural products. More than 100,000 active landmines hidden throughout the countryside, however, continued to impede economic development. Angola also faced the burden of rehabilitating the approximately 70,000 landmine victims.

In September 1998 UNITA representatives were expelled from the Angolan unity government on the grounds that UNITA had not disarmed, as required by the 1994 peace accords. By the end of 1998 escalating political and military tension between the Angolan government and UNITA erupted into a full-scale resumption of civil war. UNITA’s alliance with Tutsi-led rebels seeking to oust President Laurent-Désiré Kabila of the Democratic Republic of the Congo prompted the Angolan government to intervene in support of Kabila. Meanwhile, there was consensus building within the fourteen-nation Southern African Development Community (SADC) that UNITA posed a threat to regional stability and should be crushed. The Angolan military launched a major offensive in 1999 that destroyed UNITA’s conventional military power and recaptured the cities held by UNITA forces. Savimbi then resumed guerrilla warfare against the government, but fighting ended after he died in combat in February 2002.

In April 2002, the government and UNITA signed a formal cease-fire, and in August UNITA demobilized all of its military personnel. On November 21 2002, the two sides declared that all outstanding issues between them had been resolved and that both parties agreed to accept the conditions laid out in the 1994 peace accords. National elections were at last held in September 2008—sixteen years after the most recent—with the promise of a presidential election in 2009. The major challenges facing Angola at this time are healing the divisions created during the long civil war and resettling some four million Angolans displaced by the decades of conflict.

See also Colonial rule; Decolonization in Africa: An Interpretation; Slavery in Africa.

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