Angola

The territory of present-day Angola has been inhabited for many thousands of years, with the earliest known populations being San hunter-gatherers whose descendants still survive in small numbers in the south. From the first millennium of the Common Era, Bantu-speaking peoples migrated into the region in successive waves, bringing iron-working, agriculture, and cattle-herding. By the late medieval period these communities had organised themselves into a series of substantial polities, the most prominent of which was the Kingdom of Kongo, founded in the fourteenth century and centred at Mbanza Kongo in the north. Further south, the Kingdom of Ndongo, ruled by a sovereign known as the ngola (a title from which the country takes its modern name), and the inland kingdom of Matamba dominated the regions between the Kwanza and Cuango rivers. Other notable states included the Lunda and Kasanje kingdoms in the east and the Bailundo and Bie polities of the central highlands.

Portuguese contact began in 1483 when the navigator Diogo Cao reached the mouth of the Congo River, and a permanent presence followed with the founding of Luanda in 1575 by Paulo Dias de Novais. For most of the next three centuries Portuguese activity centred on the Atlantic slave trade, which carried millions of Africans, principally to Brazil, and which deeply destabilised the coastal kingdoms. Queen Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba famously resisted Portuguese expansion in the mid-seventeenth century. Effective colonial rule over the interior was only consolidated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after the Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885 fixed Angola's modern borders, and after a long campaign of military pacification that ended around 1920.

Under the Estado Novo regime in Lisbon, Angola was administered as an overseas province and subjected to forced-labour systems and large-scale white settlement. Armed resistance to Portuguese rule erupted in 1961 and grew into a protracted war of independence fought by three rival liberation movements: the MPLA, the FNLA, and UNITA. Following the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, independence was granted on 11 November 1975, with the MPLA proclaiming the People's Republic of Angola in Luanda under Agostinho Neto. Independence segued almost immediately into a civil war that drew in Cuban troops supporting the MPLA government and South African forces backing UNITA, with substantial Soviet and American involvement, making Angola a major Cold War theatre.

The end of the Cold War prompted gradual reform: a new constitution in 1992 abandoned Marxism-Leninism and introduced multi-party politics, though fighting resumed after disputed elections that year. The civil war finally ended in 2002 following the death in combat of UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi. Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who had succeeded Neto in 1979, governed until 2017, presiding over an oil-fuelled reconstruction. He was succeeded by Joao Lourenco of the MPLA, who was re-elected in 2022 in elections the opposition contested but international observers broadly accepted.

Angola today is a unitary presidential republic governed under the constitution of 2010, with an executive president as head of state and government and a unicameral National Assembly elected by proportional representation. The MPLA has held power continuously since independence, while UNITA remains the principal parliamentary opposition.