Thinking Citizen Blog — Angola
Thinking Citizen Blog — Monday is Foreign Policy Day
Today’ s Topic — Africa XVI — Angola — what should every thinking citizen know?
With a population of over 8 million (one-third of Angola’s total), Luanda is the largest Portuguese-speaking capital city in the world! Founded by a Portuguese explorer in 1576, Luanda became the center of the slave to trade to Brazil until its abolition in 1836. The Angola Civil War of 1975 led most of the white population to flee and today whites count for roughly 1% of the population versus 5% then. 70% of the population lives on less than $2 per day. One of the shortest life expectancies and highest infant mortality rates in the world. Eduardo Dos Santos, who ruled from 1979 to 2017 is known as one of the longest-serving and most corrupt dictators of the last half century. Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
GEOGRAPHY, DEMOGRAPHY, ECONOMY
1. Geography: Namibia to the south, Democratic Republic of the Congo to the north and east, Zambia to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the west. A small oil-rich exclave to the northwest (Cabinda) Varied landscape: arid coast, sparsely populated rain forest, rugged southern highlands, and “densely settled towns and cities of the northern coast and north-central river valleys.” (Britannica, second link)
2. Demography: 31 MM up from 5 MM in 1950!!!! Tribal split: Ovimbundu (37%), Ambundu (23%), Bakongo (13%). Languages; Portuguese (71%), Umbundu (23%). Kikongo (8%). Religion: Catholic 50%, Protestant 25%, other Christian 14%, folk (5%). Fertility: 5.4 children per woman. Life expectancy: 60 years. Infant mortality: 67.6 per 1000 live births.
3. Economics: rich in resources (oil and diamonds), chief trading partner: China. The exclave of Cabinda is known as the Kuwait of Africa. But a corrupt regime has expropriated most of the wealth to itself, leaving the general population overwhelmingly impoverished with 85% of the population engaged in subsistence agriculture. Conditions were aggravated by the drought of 2016.
HISTORY: San and Khoi, Bantu invasions, Portuguese Colony, Civil War (1979–2002)
1. The original inhabitants were the San and Khoi, the earliest of homo sapiens. They were hunter-gatherers later driven out by Bantu tribes from the north. This began in about 1000 BC. “Bantu speakers introduced the cultivation of bananas and taro as well as large cattle herds, to Angola’s central highlands and the Luanda plain.” (Wikipedia, first link below)
2. Colonization and Independence: first Portuguese explorers (1484), first settlement (1575), formal incorporation(1655), international recognition (Berlin Conference 1886), but Portuguese control of the interior was minimal and slavery and the slave trade persisted in the interior into the 20th century. Angola was made an overseas province of Portugal in 1951. The war of independence began in 1961 and ended with victory in 1975. Estimated deaths:15,000 military, 40,000 civilians.
3. Angola Civil War, 1975–2002 — a Cold War proxy war with the Soviet Union and Cuba supporting the Marxist-Leninist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (PMLA) and the United States and South Africa supporting the anti-communist National Union for the Total Liberation of Angola (UNITA). Casualties are estimated to have been about 500,000. Displaced: over 1 million. The PMLA prevailed. The first President was Agostinho Neto (1822–1979), the leader of the independence struggle against the Portuguese and of the PMLA during the first stage of the Civil War. He died after cancer surgery in Moscow. Jonas Savimbi (1934–2002), the leader of UNITA, was killed in a gun fight with government troops in 2002.
EDUARDO DOS SANTOS — President and dictator, 1979–2017
1. Known as one of the longest-serving, most corrupt African rulers of last half-century.
2. Formally abandoned Marxist-Leninism for “social democracy” in 1990.
3. Stepped down in 2017 to make way for his hand-picked successor, Joao Lourenco.
NB: “In January 2020, a leak of government documents known as the Luanda Leaks showed that U.S. consulting companies such as Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey and PriceWaterhouseCoopers had helped members of the family of former President Jose Eduardo Dos Santos (especially his daughter Isabel Dos Santos) corruptly run Sonangol for their own personal profit, helping them use the company’s revenues to fund vanity projects in France and Switzerland.” (Wikipedia, first link below)
Angola | Culture, History, & People
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Eduardo_dos_Santos
List of countries by life expectancy
List of countries by infant and under-five mortality rates
YOUR TURN
Please share the coolest or most important thing you learned in the last week, month, or year related to foreign policy. Or, even better, the coolest or most important thing you learned in our life related to foreign policy.
This is your chance to make someone else’s day. And to consolidate in your memory something important you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than otherwise about something dear to your heart. Continuity is the key to depth of thought. The prospect of imminent publication, like hanging and final exams, concentrates the mind. A useful life long habit.
