49 Fun Facts About Angola

Angola is the second-largest Portuguese-speaking country in the world after which nation?

Brazil. The two are bound by more than language: for centuries Angola's ports shipped enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, more than a million of them to Brazil.

Which Angolan province is an exclave separated from the rest of the country by DR Congo?

Cabinda. A strip of DR Congo cuts it off from the rest of Angola, yet much of the country's oil wealth lies off its shore, which helps explain why a separatist conflict has simmered there for decades.

Captives seized in Angola in 1619 became the first recorded Africans in which English colony?

Virginia. English privateers attacked a Portuguese slave ship at sea and sold 'twenty and odd' of its captives, people taken from the kingdom of Ndongo, at Point Comfort in August 1619.

Which kingdom, dominant in northern Angola from the 14th century, first met the Portuguese in 1483?

Kongo. Its rulers welcomed the newcomers and turned Christian, but King Afonso I, who took the throne in 1506, was soon at odds with Portuguese traders who were carrying his own subjects off as slaves.

Which Portuguese explorer was the first to reach the Angolan coast, in the 1480s?

Diogo Cão. He carried stone pillars called padrões, carved with the arms of Portugal, and set one up at each new landfall to claim the coast for his king, years before da Gama or Dias sailed.

Which dictator, Portugal's prime minister from 1932 to 1968, sent the army to crush Angola's independence rising in 1961?

António Salazar. An economics professor who ran Portugal for 36 years, he poured troops into Angola rather than let the colony go, and the African wars he left behind led the army to overthrow his successors in 1974.

Which queen ruled Ndongo from 1624 and Matamba from 1631, resisting the Portuguese for decades?

Nzinga. Her dynasty's royal title, ngola, is the word the Portuguese turned into the name Angola, and she spent some forty years outmanoeuvring them by treaty, alliance and war until her death in 1663.

Which European power occupied Luanda in 1641 during the Portuguese Restoration War?

The Dutch. Their seven-year occupation cut off the supply of enslaved labour to Portugal's plantations across the Atlantic, so the colonists there paid for the fleet that won the port back in 1648.

Before Portuguese rule, the royal currency of northern Angola was gathered on Luanda Island in the form of what?

Shells. The small sea-snail shells called nzimbu were harvested off the island, so whoever held it controlled the money supply, which is one reason the Portuguese later demanded the island for themselves.

The 1884-85 conference that fixed the borders of Portugal's Angolan claims was held in which city?

Berlin. Portugal itself had pressed for the conference to protect its old claims, but Bismarck took over the idea, and by 1890 a British ultimatum had ended the dream of joining Angola to Mozambique across the continent.

Which 1974 revolution in Lisbon opened the way to Angola's independence?

Carnation Revolution. Officers worn down by the African wars toppled the dictatorship almost without a fight, and the carnations people handed the soldiers ended up in the muzzles of their rifles.

Which US president welcomed Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi to the White House and predicted a victory that would 'electrify the world'?

Ronald Reagan. The 1986 visit marked Savimbi's heyday as an ally of Washington and of apartheid South Africa; a decade later, after he went back to war over a lost election, his movement was under international sanctions.

Who was independent Angola's first president, also regarded as its preeminent poet?

Agostinho Neto. A physician jailed for years for his politics, he escaped from detention in Portugal to lead the MPLA, and died in a Moscow hospital in 1979, less than four years after taking office.

Which country's troops backed the MPLA against South African and Zairean intervention from 1975?

Cuba. Havana's airlift of combat troops, code-named Operation Carlota, began just before independence, and its soldiers stayed for sixteen years, leaving only in 1991 under a deal struck with South Africa.

Jonas Savimbi founded which rebel movement in 1966?

UNITA. Savimbi walked out of a rival movement to found it and took his first military training from Maoist instructors abroad, yet he ended up as the favoured ally of Washington and apartheid South Africa.

The 1987-88 Battle of Cuito Cuanavale is called Africa's biggest conventional battle since what?

The Second World War. Both sides claimed victory after months of fighting, but the stalemate pushed the foreign armies on both sides into the 1988 accords under which they agreed to go home.

Rebels in Angola's civil war kept fighting through the 1990s by mining and smuggling what, in defiance of UN sanctions?

Diamonds. A UN investigation in 2000 named the dealers and governments that helped the rebels sell their gems, and its findings led to the Kimberley Process for certifying where rough stones come from.

Which US president became the first to visit Angola while in office, promoting a US-backed railway to the Atlantic?

Joe Biden. He flew to Luanda in the last weeks of his presidency, in December 2024, spoke at the National Museum of Slavery and toured the rail corridor built to carry Central Africa's minerals to the coast.

Which state company did Isabel dos Santos head until João Lourenço removed her?

Sonangol. She was handed the state oil company while her father was president and lost it within months of his leaving office; the 2020 Luanda Leaks then accused her of enriching herself at Angola's expense, which she denies.

Angola quit which organisation in December 2023, after 16 years as a member?

OPEC. Angola objected when the cartel cut its output quota, and its oil minister said the country 'gains nothing by remaining', so it walked out.

What is Angola's currency, named after a river?

The kwanza. It replaced the colonial escudo in 1977 and borrowed the name of the Kwanza River, but inflation has hit it so hard that the currency has had to be relaunched three times since.

Angola's flag shows a machete crossed with what, beneath a five-pointed star?

A half cogwheel. The cog stands for workers and industry and the machete for peasants and the armed struggle, an echo of the hammer and sickle set on the red and black of the ruling MPLA's flag.

After the civil war ended in 2002, which country lent Angola billions to rebuild, repaid in oil?

China. Its credit lines, worth billions of dollars, paid Chinese firms to build housing and other infrastructure, and China went on to become the biggest buyer of Angola's exports.

The Cubango River rises in Angola's highlands and, instead of reaching the sea, spreads out into which famous inland delta?

The Okavango Delta. The river fans out across the Kalahari sands of Botswana and simply evaporates there, making this one of the very few great deltas in the world that never reach a sea.

Which people, whose heartland is the plateau inland from Benguela, form Angola's largest ethnic group?

Ovimbundu. Speakers of Umbundu, they built a string of kingdoms on the high plateau and made themselves the great caravan traders of the interior, carrying ivory and beeswax down to the coast.

Which martial art has a traditional style called 'Angola'?

Capoeira. Some scholars trace it to engolo, a fighting tradition of Angola carried across the Atlantic by enslaved people, and the style named Angola is the one that claims to preserve the art's older form.

Luanda holds what distinction among the world's Portuguese-speaking capitals?

The most populous. Luanda holds several million people, swollen during the long civil war by refugees who poured in from the countryside.

Which pope celebrated Mass before a crowd of about a million people in Luanda in 2009?

Benedict XVI. It was his first visit to Africa as pope, and it opened in uproar after he told reporters on the way that handing out condoms was not the answer to the continent's AIDS epidemic.

The Benguela Railway runs from the Congolese border to which Atlantic port?

Lobito. A London-based company built the line to carry Copperbelt ore to the Atlantic, but the civil war shut it down for decades, forcing the mines to send their metal the long way round through South Africa.

The giant sable antelope, Angola's national symbol, is endemic to which region?

The central highlands. Feared extinct after decades of civil war, the antelope was found alive there in the early 2000s, and it lends its name, Palancas Negras, to Angola's national football team.

Operation Noah's Ark flew which animals from Botswana and South Africa into Angola's war-emptied Kissama National Park?

Elephants. Poaching during decades of war had all but wiped out the park's big game, so conservationists began flying replacement herds in.

Which two-leaved plant of Angola's coastal desert can live for well over a thousand years?

Welwitschia. Its two leaves are the same pair it sprouted as a seedling: they are never shed, just keep growing from the base and fray into ribbons, on plants thought to reach 2,000 years old.

Funge, the smooth, stretchy staple served with Angolan stews, is classically made from the flour of which crop?

Cassava. The flour is whisked into boiling water until it thickens, and the plant behind this most Angolan of dishes is not African at all: Portuguese traders brought it over from South America in the 16th century.

Which slow, romantic partner dance from Angola takes its name from a Kimbundu word for 'party'?

Kizomba. It grew out of the faster semba around 1980, slowed under the influence of Caribbean zouk, and moved from family parties and weddings in Luanda into nightclubs and dance schools.

Which frenetic electronic dance music came out of Luanda's poor districts in the late 1980s?

Kuduro. Its first producers laid samples of Caribbean soca and hard zouk over fast drum-machine beats, and the lyrics that followed spoke for the capital's unpaved shanty districts in the last years of the war.

Angola reached its only World Cup, in 2006, by edging out which African football giant in qualifying?

Nigeria. The two finished level on points, but Angola had the better head-to-head record, and captain Akwá's late header in Kigali settled it while Nigeria were winning 5-1 elsewhere in vain.

Which sport is Angola's second most popular, with a national team that dominates African championships?

Basketball. Angola's men hold the record for African titles, eleven of them won in thirteen tournaments up to 2013, and at the 1992 Olympics they were the first team to face the American 'Dream Team'.

Angola hosted which international football tournament in 2010?

The Africa Cup of Nations. Just before it began, gunmen ambushed Togo's team bus in the far north of the country, killing three people, and Togo's government called its players home.

Under Angola's 2010 constitution, who automatically becomes the country's president?

The winning party's leader. Angolans no longer vote for a president at all: they elect a parliament, and whoever heads the list of the party that wins takes the top job with it.

Which US state's vast maximum-security prison is nicknamed 'Angola', after the plantation that once stood there?

Louisiana. The plantation is said to have been named for the homeland of many of the people enslaved on it, and the prison farm that replaced it after the Civil War has been known as Angola ever since.

Angola's women have won the African championship more than a dozen times in which team sport?

Handball. Angola's women, sixteen times African champions by 2024, so dominate the continent that they played at all eight Olympic Games from Atlanta 1996 to Paris 2024.

The MPLA abandoned which ideology as the Cold War ended, adopting social democracy in its place?

Marxism-Leninism. After fifteen years of one-party rule and central planning, the MPLA dropped the doctrine, and a peace deal soon afterwards opened the way to Angola's first multiparty elections in 1992.

Which France midfielder, who joined Real Madrid in 2021, was born in Angola in 2002 to parents living there as refugees?

Eduardo Camavinga. His family moved on to France when he was a toddler, and after their home there burned down, his father told the boy he was the one who would lift the family up.

Which Ebola-like virus killed hundreds of people in an outbreak in northern Angola in 2005?

Marburg. The virus is named after the German town where laboratory staff first caught it in 1967 from monkeys imported from Uganda, and it causes an illness so like Ebola that the two are hard to tell apart.

Angola's area of about 1.25 million sq km makes it roughly twice the size of which US state?

Texas. At about 1.25 million sq km Angola is nearly double the size of Texas, and Portugal, the small country that ruled it for centuries, would fit inside it more than thirteen times.

Which country borders Angola to the south?

Namibia. For years that border was a front line: South Africa, which then ruled Namibia, sent its army across it into Angola, and it agreed to Namibian independence only as part of the 1988 deal that sent the foreign armies home.

Angola's first satellite, AngoSat-1, fell silent days after its launch in 2017; which country's space industry had built it?

Russia. The Russian firm RSC Energia built the satellite, but it lost contact within hours of reaching orbit, came back only briefly and was later written off as lost.

Which American oil company did Angola fine in 2002 after leaking pipes fouled its beaches, a first for the country?

Chevron. A government investigation blamed poorly maintained pipes at the company's offshore platforms for a spill that blackened beaches and stopped fishermen going out to work.

The family of Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi sued the makers of which video game series in 2016 over his portrayal?

Call of Duty. Black Ops II shows Savimbi leading a charge, and his children said it made him a 'barbarian' and asked a French court for a million euros; the publisher called the portrait rather favourable, and the family lost.