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
National heroes of Angola
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Politics & liberation1922–1979
Agostinho Neto
Independence
Physician and poet who led the MPLA through the war against Portuguese rule and became Angola's first president in 1975.
- Music & the artsb. 1942
Bonga
Semba
Athlete turned singer whose 1972 album Angola 72, recorded in exile, was banned at home and became an anthem of independence.
- Sportb. 1965
Jean-Jacques Conceição
Basketball
Centrepiece of the Angolan side that dominated the AfroBasket championship for two decades, winning nine continental titles.
- Music & the artsb. 1941
Pepetela
Literature
Fought as an MPLA guerrilla and wrote Mayombe, then turned a satirist's eye on the elite that the revolution produced.
Deep-dive community profiles
Ambundu (Mbundu)
The people of the Kwanza valley and Luanda's hinterland — the Ndongo kingdom whose ruler's title, ngola, gave Angola its name, whose Queen Njinga fought Portugal for four decades, and whose language carries the vocabulary that crossed to Brazil.
Open deep profile →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 →Hambukushu
The rainmakers of the Okavango panhandle — farmers and fishers whose chiefs were sought across the region for their control of rain, and whose baskets, coiled from palm and dyed with bark, are among southern Africa's most collected craft.
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 →Kavango peoples
The five river nations of Namibia's north-east — Kwangali, Mbunza, Shambyu, Gciriku and Mbukushu — farmers and fishers of a green strip along the Okavango, and the country's woodcarvers.
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 →Luvale (Lwena)
The people of the upper Zambezi headwaters — matrilineal cultivators and fishers whose makishi masqueraders emerge from the boys' initiation camps, a tradition inscribed by UNESCO and shared across three countries.
Open deep profile →Nganguela
The peoples of Angola's eastern woodlands — a cluster of communities named collectively by outsiders, whose hunting and beekeeping country became UNITA's base, and whose land is among the most heavily mined on earth.
Open deep profile →Nyaneka-Nkhumbi
The cattle people of Angola's south-west — Huíla plateau herders whose women build their hair into ochre-and-butter nontombi ropes, whose age grades still govern the herds, and whose land has been taken repeatedly for commercial farms.
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 →Salampasu
Forest and savannah people of the Kasai-Angola border whose warrior societies graded their members by heads taken, whose copper-sheathed and raffia-bearded masks are among the most fearsome objects in African art, and who held off the Lunda empire for two centuries.
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 →