Angola

Before the Portuguese arrived, the region was organised into African states, the best known being the Kingdom of Kongo in the north and the Ndongo and Matamba kingdoms inland, the latter defended for decades in the seventeenth century by Queen Njinga, still a national symbol. Portugal founded Luanda in 1576 and, over three centuries, made Angola the largest single source of enslaved Africans shipped across the Atlantic, above all to Brazil.

Effective Portuguese control of the interior came only in the twentieth century and rested on forced labour and a settler economy. An armed independence struggle began in 1961, and when Portugal's own dictatorship fell in 1974 the colonial government collapsed. Independence on 11 November 1975 came with the Portuguese population fleeing almost overnight and three rival liberation movements already fighting each other.

The civil war that followed lasted until 2002 and became a Cold War proxy conflict: the Soviet- and Cuban-backed MPLA government against the US- and South-Africa-backed UNITA rebels. It killed hundreds of thousands of people, displaced millions, and left the countryside heavily mined. Peace came after the UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi was killed in 2002. An oil boom funded a decade of Chinese-financed reconstruction under President José Eduardo dos Santos, in power from 1979 to 2017; his successor João Lourenço has run on anti-corruption and economic diversification.

Angolan culture layers Bantu roots with a strong Lusophone overlay — the Portuguese language, Catholicism, and a shared world with Brazil, Mozambique, and Cape Verde. Most Angolans are Christian, Catholic or Protestant, often alongside older beliefs, and the church is a central social institution.

Music is the country's great export. Semba, the swaying Luanda dance music, is an ancestor of Brazilian samba; kizomba is its slow, romantic cousin, now danced worldwide; and kuduro, fast and electronic, came straight out of Luanda's working-class musseques (shantytowns) in the 1990s. Carnival in Luanda, with competing neighbourhood groups, is the biggest annual celebration.

Everyday life places heavy weight on extended family, respect for elders, and hospitality, with a visitor always offered food and drink. Decades of war and displacement shaped a resilient, improvisational urban culture, and a large diaspora in Portugal and Brazil keeps money and ideas flowing back.

Angola is young and rapidly urbanising, and about a third of the population now lives in Greater Luanda, a crowded, expensive city of gleaming oil-money towers ringed by vast informal settlements. The economy still runs on oil, and the wealth it produces is very unevenly shared; power cuts and water shortages are routine even in the capital.

Much of daily economic life is informal. Zungueiras — women carrying goods on their heads — sell everything on the streets, and sprawling markets handle most retail trade. Getting around town means the packed blue candongueiro minibuses and long waits in traffic.

Outside Luanda the pace is rural and slower: farming cassava, maize, bananas, and coffee, herding cattle on the southern plateau, and fishing along the coast. Benguela and Lobito on the coast, and Lubango and Huambo in the highlands, are the other main cities, each with its own character and a stock of faded Portuguese architecture.

The national dish is muamba de galinha — chicken stewed in red palm oil with okra, garlic, and jindungo chilli — served over funge, a smooth porridge of cassava or maize flour that is the staple across most of the country. Calulu, a stew of fresh and dried fish or meat cooked with greens, tomato, and palm oil, is the other classic.

Other everyday dishes include moamba de ginguba (a peanut version of the palm-oil stew), beans, grilled fish and chicken with piri-piri, and, on the coast, excellent seafood. The Portuguese legacy is strong in the bread, the coffee, the grilled-meat churrasco, and pastries like pastéis de nata.

Fruit is abundant and cheap — mango, banana, papaya, pineapple, and the small sweet local bananas — and street vendors sell grilled corn, cassava chips, and kitaba, a spiced ground-peanut paste. Angola was once a major coffee exporter, and the industry is slowly recovering.

Angola's landscapes are its strongest draw, if you have the time and patience to reach them. Kalandula Falls in Malanje Province is one of Africa's biggest waterfalls by volume, a wide horseshoe on the Lucala River; nearby stand the Pungo Andongo "Black Rocks," a cluster of huge dark monoliths on the plain.

In the south, near Lubango, the Tundavala Gap (Fenda da Tundavala) is a sheer break in the escarpment with a drop of over a kilometre and enormous views, and the hairpin Serra da Leba pass below it is a photographed feat of road engineering. The Namib Desert reaches the country's southwest, where Iona National Park runs down to the Atlantic and the bizarre, ancient welwitschia plant grows.

Closer to the capital, Kissama (Quiçama) National Park was restocked with elephants and other animals airlifted in after the war and is the easiest place to see wildlife, while the "Miradouro da Lua," an eroded badland of ochre cliffs, is a short drive south of Luanda. The capital itself keeps a colonial old town, a seafront promenade, the hilltop Fortaleza de São Miguel, and the National Museum of Slavery on the site where captives were once baptised before being shipped out.