Visit Angola

Visit Angola

Angola /æŋˈɡoʊlə/, officially the Republic of Angola (Portuguese: República de Angola; Kikongo, Kimbundu and Umbundu: Repubilika ya Ngola), is a country in Southern Africa. It is the seventh-largest country in Africa, and is bordered by Namibia to the south, the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the north, Zambia to the east, and the Atlantic Ocean to west. The exclave province of Cabinda has borders with the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The capital and largest city is Luanda.

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Although its territory has been inhabited since the Paleolithic Era, modern Angola originates in Portuguese colonization, which began with, and was for centuries limited to, coastal settlements and trading posts established from the 16th century onwards. In the 19th century, European settlers slowly and hesitantly began to establish themselves in the interior. As a Portuguese colony, Angola did not encompass its present borders until the early 20th century, following resistance by groups such as the Cuamato, the Kwanyama and the Mbunda. Independence was achieved in 1975 after a protracted liberation war. That same year, Angola descended into an intense civil war that lasted until 2002. It has since become a relatively stable unitary presidential republic.

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Angola has vast mineral and petroleum reserves, and its economy is among the fastest growing in the world, especially since the end of the civil war. In spite of this, the standard of living remains low for the majority of the population, and life expectancy and infant mortality rates in Angola are among the worst in the world. Angola's economic growth is highly uneven, with the majority of the nation's wealth concentrated in a disproportionately small sector of the population.

Angola is a member state of the United Nations, OPEC, African Union, the Community of Portuguese Language Countries, the Latin Union and the Southern African Development Community. A highly multiethnic country, Angola's 24.3 million people span various tribal groups, customs, and traditions. Angolan culture reflects centuries of Portuguese rule, namely in the predominance of the Portuguese language and Roman Catholicism, combined with diverse indigenous influences.
The name Angola comes from the Portuguese colonial name Reino de Angola (Kingdom of Angola), appearing as early as Dias de Novais's 1571 charter. The toponym was derived by the Portuguese from the title ngola held by the kings of Ndongo. Ndongo was a kingdom in the highlands, between the Kwanza and Lukala Rivers, nominally tributary to the king of Kongo but which was seeking greater independence during the 16th century.

Khoi and San hunter-gatherers are the earliest known modern human inhabitants of the area. They were largely absorbed or replaced by Bantu peoples during the Bantu migrations, though small numbers remain in parts of southern Angola to the present day. The Bantu came from the north, probably from somewhere near the present-day Republic of Cameroon.
During this time, the Bantu established a number of political units ("kingdoms", "empires") in most parts of what today is Angola. The best known of these is the Kingdom of the Kongo that had its centre in the northwest of contemporary Angola, but included important regions in the west of present-day Democratic Republic and Republic of Congo and in southern Gabon. It established trade routes with other trading cities and civilisations up and down the coast of southwestern and West Africa and even with the Great Zimbabwe Mutapa Empire, but engaged in little or no transoceanic trade. To its south lay the Kingdom of Ndongo, from which the area of the later Portuguese colony was sometimes known as Dongo. Visit Angola
The region now known as Angola was reached by the Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão in 1484. The year before, the Portuguese had established relations with the Kingdom of Kongo, which stretched at the time from modern Gabon in the north to the Kwanza River in the south. The Portuguese established their principal early trading post at Soyo, which now forms the northernmost city in Angola apart from the Cabinda enclave. Paulo Dias de Novais founded São Paulo de Loanda (Luanda) in 1575 with a hundred families of settlers and four hundred soldiers. Benguela was fortified in 1587 and elevated to a township in 1617. Visit Angola

The Portuguese established other several settlements, forts, and trading posts along the Angolan coast, principally trading in Angolan slaves for Brazilian plantations. Local slave dealers provided a large number of slaves for the Portuguese Empire, usually sold in exchange for manufactured goods from Europe. This part of the Atlantic slave trade continued until after Brazil's independence in the 1820s. Visit Angola

Despite Portugal's nominal claims, as late as the 19th century, their control over the interior country of Angola was minimal, but the 16th century saw them gain control of the coast through a series of treaties and wars. Life for European colonists was difficult and progress slow. Iliffe notes that "Portuguese records of Angola from the 16th century show that a great famine occurred on average every seventy years; accompanied by epidemic disease, it might kill one-third or one-half of the population, destroying the demographic growth of a generation and forcing colonists back into the river valleys". Visit Angola

Amid the Portuguese Restoration War, the Dutch occupied Luanda in 1641, using alliances with local peoples against Portuguese holdings elsewhere. A fleet under Salvador de Sá retook Luanda for Portugal in 1648; reconquest of the rest of the territory was completed by 1650. New treaties with Kongo were signed in 1649; others with Njinga's Kingdom of Matamba and Ndongo followed in 1656. The conquest of Pungo Andongo in 1671 was the last major Portuguese expansion from Luanda, as attempts to invade Kongo in 1670 and Matamba in 1681 failed. Portugal also expanded inward from Benguela, but until the late 19th century the inroads from Luanda and Benguela were very limited. Portugal had neither the intention nor the means to carry out a large scale territorial occupation and colonization. Visit Angola

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia