Angola

Recent research conducted by French investigators showed that has been inhabited since the Inferior Paleolithic, was subject to many migrations, with successive contingents of Bantu people pushing to the south the aborigines of non-Bantu origin, the khoi-san, today reduced to a population of less than ten thousand people. These migrants continued to arrive at least until the end of the 19th century.

The arrival of the first Europeans began during the end of the 15th century in 1482, when Portuguese navigator Diogo Cão east anchor at the mouth of the Congo River (or Zaire). The milestone that he raised on one of its banks on behalf of King D. João II attests to the first external recognition of the kingdom of Congo. In its capital, the still existing city of Mbanza Congo, in northern Angola, the King received the foreigners as friends and adhered to Christianity, adopting the name of Afonso I.

As it is thoroughly demonstrated in the correspondence exchanged in those times between the kings of Portugal and Congo, this first contact was established between sovereigns with equal rights, being Congolese society open to the operation of a true alliance between organized states.

Only throughout the 16th century, and after continuous and complicated seduction games, intrigues and betrayals, the kingdom of Congo would begin to have stronger bonds of dependence in relation to the Portuguese Crown.

Other smaller kingdoms in the South depended on the kingdom of Congo, such as those of Matamba and Ndongo, whose sovereigns, the Ngola, would give origins to the name of Angola. The resistance of these three kingdoms to the colonial penetration would be practically crushed in the second half of the 17th century, in the space of twenty years: Congo (1665), Ndongo, (1671), and Matamba (1681).

In 1700, according to historian Ravenstein's calculations, the Portuguese dominated an area of 65 thousand square kilometers in Angola, starting from the coast of Luanda and Benguela to 200 kilometers in the respective interior, practically with the only objective of maintaining the slaves' routes open starting from the plateau. In fact, in that period, black slaves were already the main merchandise to dominate the whole trade, being "exported" to Portugal, Brazil, Antilles and Central America.

In the 18th and 19th century, the situation didn't change significantly, except for the enlargement of the area where the slaves were captured, which extended to the central plateau, and for the number of slaves who were sent abroad.

At the end of the 18th century, under the influence of Marques of Pombal, the almighty minister of the King of Portugal, there was a shy attempt to explore some of the wealth of the country. This attempt failed due to the lack of local support, as well as of the metropolis, which was more interested in Brazil's development based on Angolan slaves. Thus, Angola continued maintaining its title of "mines of the slavery" and its role of supplier of slaves for Brazilian plantations.

In a clear contradiction, at the same time that there was a multiplication of revolts against the slaves' trade on the part of some Independent sobas and of African states located on the plateau (that would only be relatively pacified over a century later), an economic elite of African origin was consolidating on the basis of that same trade.

The 19th century was marked by great exploration of the African continent and the colonial partition. The expeditions led by Serpa Pinto, Capelo and Ivens allowed for the elaboration of an accurate cartography of Angola. The Berlin Conference, in 1885, established the colonial public law and treaties among Portugal, France, the Free State of Congo (Belgian), Great Britain and Germany that defined Angola's present borders.

For Angolan population, the abolition of the slave trafficing in 1836 and the official end of the slave's condition in 1878 did not make significant changes, because the colonial power continued exploiting the great Angolan working masses through forced labor under so-called contracts. This situation would worsen with the colonial policy of the Salazar regime, starting from the 30's in the 20th century.

Many of the great African families that had been constituted a century earlier then gradually lost their relative economic power though some of their descendants have been the first ones to take part in the modern phase of liberation fights, starting from the 60's, occupying key positions in the political and economic system that emerged after the proclamation of the Independence on November 11, 1975. Angola managed to get what seems to be essential, that is, it preserved the independence, maintained the territorial integrity, laid the foundations of a Democratic Rule of Law and conquered peace, assuring the unity and conscience of its people around a national project, in spite of all the aggressions and destabilizing actions that it suffered for nearly 30 years of war.

In order to make it, the country had to resist, in 1975, to the simultaneous invasion of two armies, the Zairean in the north and the South African in the south, to the army of Pretoria at the beginning of the 80's, and to a long destabilization caused by an armed party, Jonas Savimbi's UNITA, directly supported by the South African racist regime and, at least until the beginning of the 90's, by successive American administrations.


Meanwhile, Angolan authorities were giving constant support to Namibian combatants who fought for their own independence, just achieved in 1988, and to South African militants who combatted the apartheid and fought for the racial integration and the democratization of the regime.

Later on they prevented, with the intervention of their army, the collapse of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was victim of armed aggressions conducted by two neighboring countries, as well as a larger spreading of the so-called Great Lakes Conflict, continuing to perform a decisive stabilizing role in the whole central and southern region of Africa.

Nowadays, with the advent of peace, with the stability and national reconstruction, Angola entered at last a phase that its president already had the chance to characterize as the one of the "conquest of peace, consolidation of democracy, stabilization of the domestic economy and restoration of dignity and hope to all Angolans".