Angola
Capital: Luanda · Southern Africa
Land of the Ndongo and Kongo kingdoms and Queen Njinga's resistance, whose Ovimbundu, Chokwe and Mbundu cultures shaped both Africa and the Americas.
Ethnic communities
- OvimbunduCentral highlands traders and farmers
- Mbundu (Ambundu)Ndongo kingdom; Queen Njinga's people
- Kongo (Bakongo)Northern provinces of the old Kongo Kingdom
- ChokweMaster carvers; sand-drawing (sona) mathematics
More communities of Angola
- Lunda — Mwant Yav's southern tributary courts
- Ganguela peoples — Eastern rivers' farming cluster
- Nyaneka-Nkhumbi — Southwestern cattle cultures of huila highlands
- Ovambo (Kwanyama) — Border kingdom shared with Namibia
- Herero (Mucubal) — Namibe's pastoral kin of the desert edge
- Himba (Angolan) — Kunene-crossing herder communities (full profile)
- San (!Kung) — Southeastern first-people communities
- Luvale & Mbunda — Eastern makishi masquerade nations
- Songo & Minungo — Central-east farming communities
- Mayombe Bakongo — Cabinda's forest kin
- Muxiluanda — Luanda island's fisher first-families
Languages
Major languages: Portuguese, Umbundu, Kimbundu, Kikongo, Chokwe
Language families: Niger-Congo (Bantu)
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Kingdom of Kongo
- • Ndongo
- • Matamba
- • Lunda sphere
- • Kingdom of Benguela
Heritage sites
- • Mbanza Kongo (UNESCO)
- • Fortress of São Miguel
Cultural highlights
Deep-dive community profiles
Chokwe
The master carvers and hunters of the Angolan plateau — whose Chihongo and Pwo masks, sand-drawn sona mathematics and the epic of Chibinda Ilunga made a once-small hunting people the great art-civilization of three borders.
Open deep profile →Himba
Pastoralists of the Kunene — famed for the otjize ochre-and-butter that colors skin and braids red, a dual-descent kinship system counted through both mother and father, and the sacred ancestral fire that must never die.
Open deep profile →Kongo (Bakongo)
Builders of the Kingdom of Kongo — a centralized Atlantic-African state with six centuries of recorded history, its own Christianity, minkisi power objects and a cosmology of the crossroads that profoundly shaped African-American religion and art.
Open deep profile →Lunda
The empire of the Mwant Yav — heirs of Ruwej and Chibinda Ilunga's marriage whose 'perpetual kinship' statecraft ruled a three-nation web of tributaries, and whose Mutomboko festival still crowns the eastern kingdom's year.
Open deep profile →Ovambo (Aawambo)
The nation of the oshana floodlands — Namibia's largest people, whose millet-and-marula kingdoms between seasonal channels bred the efundula bride-festivals, the sacred fire of kingship, and the backbone of the liberation struggle.
Open deep profile →Ovimbundu
Angola's largest people — the Bailundo and Bié highland kingdoms whose ovimbali caravans carried the interior's wax, ivory and rubber to the Atlantic for two centuries, and whose plateau became the heart of a long civil war.
Open deep profile →Yaka
The people of the Kwango — whose upturned-nose kholuka masks close the n-khanda initiation with satire and acrobatics, whose slit-drums and healing statuettes are famous, and whose kings traced power to the Lunda empire.
Open deep profile →