Angola

Although the territory of the modern Republic of Angola has been inhabited by homo sapiens sapiens for tens of thousands of years, Angolan history can be said to begin with the Kongo kingdom. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Kongo was a powerful state, partially Christianized and a Portuguese ally. Following the collapse of Kongo in civil war, however, the Angolan coastline fell to Portugal. Over the centuries, Angola became a major exporter of slaves to the Americas, particularly to Brazil. Following Brazilian independence in 1822 and the Franco-British abolition of the clandestine transatlantic slave trade in the 1840's, Angola began to become more of a burden to Portugal than a benefit. Despite this, Portugal stubbornly retained Angola as a vestige of its former maritime power.

In the 1880's, Portuguese finances deteriorated sharply after a series of civil wars over dynastic succession. As Portuguese indebtedness to French and British lenders grew, Portugal became increasingly desperate for any sources of income. Finally, in 1888, Portugal resorted to selling its colonial empire in continental Africa and Asia to the highest bidders. Britain and France acquired the largest shares of the Portuguese empire, with the British acquisition of East Timor and Goa, and the French acquisition of Portuguese Guinea and the south Chinese enclave of Macau. Perhaps surprisingly, the young Brazilian republic placed a bid for Angola and the adjacent island group of Sao Tomé e Principe, counting on Portuguese sympathy stemming from Brazil's Portuguese heritage and Brazil's cordial ties with both France and Britain. In 1889, Angola became an overseas province of the Federative Republic of Brazil.

With the settlement of the Mato Grosso in the 1870's and 1880's, there was no domestic frontier anywhere in Brazil. The vast territory of Angola provided a convenient substitute for lost French Guyana. Expanding into the interior from the old Portuguese towns on the Atlantic coast, Brazilian officials and private individuals began to look for exploitable resources. Despite occasional resistance by native Angolan polities, by the beginning of the 20th century surveys revealed that in addition to being rich in timber, agricultural land, and oil, Angola had some of the largest concentrations of gold and diamonds in the world. The 1897 and 1901 gold rushes attracted eager immigrants from metropolitan Brazil and southern Europe, and the mass settlement of Angola by Brazilians and Europeans began.

The first half of the 20th century saw the intensive development of Angola as a colony on the mercantilist model. In this period, Brazil's rapid evolution into one of the largest industrial economies in the world created a significant demand for unprocessed resources to fuel Brazilian industries. In Angola, Brazil had an abundant supply of resources. Vast mining compounds were set up in the hinterland to extract mineral resources, while tropical plantations were established in the fertile coastal districts. More than one million immigrants arrived in Angola from metropolitan Brazil, and by 1950 there were a half-million Euro-Brazilians, mainly of middle class origin and residents in various urban areas in Angola. However, almost two-thirds of the total immigrant population in Angola were Afro-Brazilians, immigrants from the poor northeast, who came to make a decent living in their nation's rich colony, and who were clearly a step below Euro-Brazilians. In the meantime, the four-and-a-half million Angolan natives benefitted from Brazilian health care measures and acquired menial jobs in Angolan cities and mines, but were almost completely unrepresented in Angolan provincial government. Just as in Algeria, the native population in Angola was easily disenfranchised by discriminatory laws.

Given Angola's division between a largely white ruling population and an African -- whether native Angolan or Afro-Brazilian -- proletariat and peasantry, Angolan society was essentially untenable. Even in the late 1940's, though, the seeds for a transformation of the Angolan situation existed, in the Brazilian civil rights movement. Appalled by the racism of Nazi Germany as evidenced by the genocides of the Second World War, a broad coalition of the Catholic Church, labour unions, and the various social-democratic political parties of Brazil began to agitate for change. After a decade of struggle, Brazil could claim that it had progressed greatly towards the goal of ensuring that Afro-Brazilians had the same rights as any other Brazilian citizens. The provinces of northeastern Brazil -- mostly Afro-Brazilian in population -- saw the most radical changes, as the elimination of the white oligarchy that had dominated the region for centuries opened the way for radical social and economic transformations for the good in the region.

In Angola, most of the population -- natives, Afro-Brazilians, even some Euro-Brazilians -- was open to the kind of anti-racist politics that encountered such success in metropolitan Brazil. For most of these people, though, an end to racism in Angola necessarily implied that Brazil should withdraw from its colonial possession: What right, after all, did Brazil have to keep a nation with a history and culture quite distinct from that of its own from gaining independence? The first signs of Angolan nationalist separatism appeared in the 1950's among certain sectors in the Angolan capital of Luanda, but by the end of the decade Angolan separatism had become a major force across Angola. That this occurred without any significant violence on the part of separatists or their sympathizers can be attributed largely to the efforts of the Catholic Church in Angola. Under the humanitarian Bishop Joseph Kidjo of Benguela, the Catholic Church in Angola led the Catholic masses among the native and Afro-Brazilian populations in calling upon Brazil to recognize the fundamental humanity of all Angolans, and in so doing, to allow Angola to determine its future peacefully, without interference.

At first the Brazilian colonial administration reacted violently against the Angolan separatists, arresting prominent separatists -- including Bishop Kidjo -- imposing curfews and engaging in massacres in the hinterlands. As time progressed, though, Brazil found it impossible to resist the growth of domestic and international opinion in favour of letting Angola go, particularly after Brazil's test-detonation of its first nuclear warhead in Angola's southern deserts in 1958. In 1960, the government of Brazil and the Angolan separatists initiated a series of conferences on the handover of sovereignty to an independent Angolan state. Unlike in Algeria, these talks were held in a peaceful atmosphere, and proceeded more rapidly. On the 15th of June, 1961, Angola became an independent democratic republic.

In its first two decades of independence, Angola prospered. Despite an exodus of a quarter-million Brazilian colonists, most of the Afro-Brazilians and Euro-Brazilians in Angola stayed on in independent Angola, contributing their skills in maintaining and developing the growing Angolan economy. Remittances of the two million Angolan immigrants in Brazil to their Angolan relatives had contributed to an immensely improved standard of living, while the success of family planning education could be seen in the rapid decline of Angolan birthrates to manageable levels. An effective system of mass education had managed, by 1980, to make 90% of the Angolan adult population literate in Portuguese. By the 20th anniversary of Angolan independence, Angola could legitimately claim to be one of the most advanced and enlightened states of post-colonial Africa.

The Third World War was a tremendous blow to Angolan self-confidence. Angola was unique in most of sub-Saharan Africa in escaping the devastating famines that followed the destruction of the Ukrainian farms, thanks to its near self-sufficiency in food and a trickle of food supplies from Brazil. Despite this, almost a half-million people died as a result of the plagues that came to Angola along with a million Congolais refugees who had fled the murderous collapse of the Congolese state. The general depression in mineral and oil prices produced by the Third World War led to a long-term decline in the mining industry, and consequently hampered the Angolan economy. At the same time, the tremendous disruption of Angolan society caused by the Third World War encouraged the advance of the Portuguese language at the expense of the Bantu languages spoken by the indigenous population; by 1990, Portuguese was the main language of more than half of the Angolan population.

For a decade after the Third World War, Angola struggled to regain its pre-war standard of living. In the 1990's, Angola has again resumed the progress that marked its first generation of independence. To an extent, Angola's special relationship with Brazil has been cause for this -- as the only Lusophone state in the world aside from Brazil and Portugal itself, and as a former colony that even now plays an important symbolic role in Brazilian culture, Angola has been cultivated by Brazil as its protégé in Africa. Despite this aid, most of Angola's recent progress can be put down to the enlightened policies of its leadership and their success in creating a prosperous, modern, yet distinctly African society. Along with the East African Community, the Republic of South Africa, Yorubaland, and the West African Federation, the Republic of Angola is one of the leaders of an increasingly prosperous and self-confident African continent.