Angola

From the kingdoms of Kongo, Ndongo and Matamba and Queen Njinga's long resistance, through centuries as a heartland of the Atlantic slave trade and a slow colonial conquest, to a hard-won independence and an oil-rich modern republic forged out of decades of war.

The land that became Angola was home to powerful Central African polities long before European arrival: the great Kingdom of Kongo, whose influence reached the northern reaches of present-day Angola, and the Kimbundu-speaking kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba, where in the seventeenth century Queen Njinga (Nzinga) Mbande waged a celebrated decades-long resistance against Portuguese encroachment. Further inland lay the Ovimbundu kingdoms of the central highlands and the Lunda states of the east. After Paulo Dias de Novais founded Luanda in 1576, Angola became, over the following centuries, one of the principal sources of enslaved Africans for the Atlantic trade, above all to Portuguese Brazil. The Portuguese conquest of the interior was slow and bloody, completed only in the early twentieth century. Anti-colonial revolt broke out in 1961, fought by the rival movements MPLA, FNLA and UNITA, and Angola won independence on 11 November 1975 under the MPLA's Agostinho Neto. That triumph gave way at once to a long Cold War-era civil war between the MPLA and Jonas Savimbi's UNITA, drawing in Cuban, Soviet, South African and United States forces, which ended only with Savimbi's death in 2002. Modern Angola, rebuilt on its vast oil wealth, has remained under MPLA rule.