Portuguese Angola

Portuguese Angola began as coastal trading posts founded from 1575 at Luanda and Benguela, and for its first three centuries it was primarily an apparatus for buying and shipping people. Something in the order of five million captives were carried from Angolan ports across the Atlantic, most of them to Brazil, in the largest single stream of the trade. Portuguese control inland remained thin until the late nineteenth century, when the scramble for Africa forced an occupation of the interior that was not completed until the 1920s. Under Salazar's New State the colony was reclassified an overseas province in 1951, a change of vocabulary meant to defeat United Nations pressure, and forced cotton and coffee cultivation was imposed on African cultivators while white settlement rose above three hundred thousand. Revolt broke out in 1961 in the north and in Luanda, and the war that followed ran for thirteen years against three separate liberation movements divided by region, ethnicity and Cold War patronage. It ended not in Angola but in Lisbon, where the cost of holding three African wars produced the Carnation Revolution of April 1974 and a new government that wanted out. Independence came on 11 November 1975 amid a Portuguese withdrawal so rapid that the settlers left in weeks, taking or destroying what they could. The three movements were already fighting each other, with Cuban troops on one side and South African on the other, and that civil war lasted until 2002. Portugal held Angola longer than any other European power held any African territory - four hundred years from the founding of Luanda to independence. The oil discovered offshore in Cabinda in the 1960s funded the colonial war and then every side of the civil one. Roughly a third of a million settlers left in 1975.

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