Geography
Angola differs from most other African states in that it allows for a fairly high level of freedom of movement within its borders, containing few natural barriers that could serve as serious impediments to internal migration. It is a country that lacks things such as impassable mountains, rivers and jungles within its border, which makes it an exception by African standards. Africa is a continent almost entirely consisting of countries whose borders were decided upon by European powers during the 19th century; these borders paid scant attention to any sort of geographic logic. As such, the majority of African countries were doomed to start with, as they almost all lack defensible borders surrounding a coherent core. Angola, however, is different.
Angola is bounded to the west by the Atlantic Ocean, to the south by the Cunene River and the extremely arid Namib Desert, and to the north, at least initially, by the first BLANK miles of the Congo River, which then turns northeastwards into the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Angola’s eastern border does not follow as clear of a geographic logic as the other three, but does follow the Kasai River for a certain portion. The three countries which border mainland Angola are the DRC (formerly known as Zaire), Zambia and Namibia.
Angola contains an arid strip of coastline stretching from the country’s southern border with Namibia to its capital city of Luanda, though rainfall increases slightly the further north one travels along the coast. The width of this coastal strip ranges from 125 miles in the Cuanza River valley, just south of Luanda, to only 15 miles across further south at Benguela. Moving inland, however, one quickly runs into an escarpment that soon gives way to Angola’s vast plateau region.
The fact that this escarpment varies in relative steepness – (the area north of the Cuanza River valley is less steep than the area to its south) -- has had a direct impact on the history of Angola. The earliest Portuguese settlers to arrive in this part of Africa landed at the mouths of the Congo and Cuanza Rivers, roughly a century before they were to establish settlements further south along the coastline. Expeditions made into the interior, however, took place significantly earlier in the north than they did in the south, where the trek inland faced a less hospitable terrain. The rise in elevation between the coastal strip and plateau is not completely insurmountable anywhere in the country, however, and once overcome, there are no further serious natural barriers within Angola's borders. The majority of the country's geography is defined by this vast chunk of plateau. Though more heavily wooded areas exist in its northern provinces near the DRC border, Angola is predominately a country of elevated savannah.
The most elevated portion of Angola is the central highlands, located just west of the physical center of the country. The central highlands, with an average elevation range between 3,000 and 5,400 feet, peak at a level of 8,596 feet. A large reason that the most densely populated province in Angola rests in a region with no access to the coast (unlike Angola’s most populated city, Luanda), is because, in addition to representing the strategic high ground of the country, its adequate levels of rainfall and fertile soil provide the largest amount of high quality arable land. Though just under half of Angola’s land is suitable for agriculture, it is atop the central highlands that crops fare the best, giving way to extensive maize-farming, in addition to cattle rearing.
The great majority of Angola’s population resides in the western half of the country, from the Atlantic to the central highlands. Arid savannah is found to the south and east of this region, on the Namibian, Zambian and Congolese borders. Northeastern Angola is a flat savannah that also holds the highest concentration of diamond deposits in the country. The one portion of mainland Angola which is covered by forest or light jungle (as well as patches of savannah) is in the northwest, a result of the relatively high levels of precipitation that fall in this area, which also make possible the cultivation of coffee and cotton.
While the northern provinces receive the most rainfall in the country, those in the south – especially on the coast -- receive the least. Southwestern Angola is nothing but a northern extension of the Namib Desert, which was formed as a result of a cold stream of ocean water known as the Benguela Current, which flows northward alongside Angola's Atlantic coastline. Though rainfall picks up the further north one travels, as the current weakens, the Benguela Current continues to disrupt precipitation systems all the way up to Luanda, where it is not uncommon for the rains to fail altogether.
NEED SOME SORT OF TERRAIN/CLIMATE MAP IN THIS SECTION, ALSO A POP MAP RIGHT NEXT TO IT
As Angola is a relatively dry country, it is ironic that the vast majority of its borders are defined by water. All but 810 miles of its 3,800 miles of combined borders are set by either the Atlantic Ocean or a series of rivers.
One chunk of its territory, however, is separated not only by water (the Congo River), but also by a strip of land that belongs to two other countries, the Republic of the Congo and the DRC. The oil-rich exclave of Cabinda -- which resembles Russia’s Kaliningrad in that it represents a strip of territory cut off from the mainland by a nation or nations not always seen as historically friendly to the mother country – contains the densest forests in Angola, and runs about 50 miles along the coast and 75 miles inland.
Why they left Portugal
The Portuguese were the torch bearers of the European Age of Discovery. It was these adventurous seafarers from the western edge of the Iberian Peninsula who first set off to explore the west coast of Africa in the first half of the 15th century, prompted by the grand geopolitical designs of their monarch, Henry the Navigator.
The three main commercial motivations of these early Portuguese explorers were:
1) Gold
2) Slaves
3) A direct sea route for trade in the East.
Gold, slaves and trade – it is impossible to discuss the first century of Portuguese exploration in Africa without mention of all.
Gold – or rather, the Portuguese thirst for it -- was what really drove the first stirrings of the Age of Exploration. For centuries, the trans-Sahara gold trade had brought the riches of Timbuktu to the North African coast and the bazaars of Cairo, from which European traders would purchase it, paying a premium to the middlemen who had made the long trek across the desert. Henry the Navigator wanted to eliminate this extra cost, and so embarked upon a program as ambitious in 15th century Europe as the race to the moon was in 20th century America: round the western tip of Africa, find the source of the gold, and outflank the trans-Saharan traders. The fact that this would remove Catholic Portugal’s dependence on the Muslim middlemen who controlled the flow of gold from Africa to Europe was an added bonus.
The Portuguese named the different regions of West Africa according to the products with which each area became associated, as the waves of explorers and traders slowly made their east along the coast over the decades. Spanning the gap from modern day Liberia to Nigeria, the original Portuguese terms used for the four main regions of West Africa were the Grain Coast, the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast, and the Slave Coast.
Portuguese explorers made landfall on the Gold Coast, in present day Ghana, in 1472. Twelve years after Henry the Navigator’s death, his dream of outflanking the trans-Sahara gold trade had been realized.
The commodity most desired by the African kingdom which controlled the largest gold deposits in the region, ironically, was slaves. This was how the Slave Coast (modern day Benin, Togo and Nigeria’s Niger Delta), which lay directly to the east of the Gold Coast, got its name. Portuguese vessels began to tap into this market by purchasing slaves from local rulers in exchange for European finished goods, so that they could return to the Gold Coast and exchange their cargo for gold.
As demand began to outstrip the available supply of slaves, however, the Portuguese began were forced to keep pushing south.
Diogo Cao – who was the first European to make landfall in what was to become Angola – was dispatched to Africa by King John II as a part of the expedition sent to construct a fort on the Gold Coast in 1482. His mini-expedition, which broke off from the larger one after making landfall at El Mina, was charged with surveying the coast south of Cape Santa Caterina (modern day Gabon), which was the farthest south any Portuguese explorer had reached thus far in the Age of Exploration. Cao’s instructions, as dictated by John II, were to assess the potential of this region as an additional source of slaves, as well as to be on the lookout for any shortcut across Africa to the silk and spice markets of China and India – as it was not known how far south the continent stretched until six years later, when Bartholomeu Dias reached the Cape of Good Hope.
The Dark Continent
Maps of Africa which attempted to describe the regions beyond Cape Santa Caterina at this point in history were essentially the product of guess work, as the entire African coastline south of this point was unexplored. All intelligence related to African exploration was thus extremely valuable and tightly guarded by the Portuguese crown as a matter of national security. In addition to searching for slaves, the Portuguese were interested in mapping out the unexplored coast of Africa. They had gotten a head start on the other European naval powers – Great Britain, France, Spain and the Netherlands – in trying to fill in the gaps, and Lisbon intended to keep it that way.
In 1483, Cao’s expedition made landfall at the mouth of the Congo River, hoping that they might have found the much sought after maritime highway to the East. They had not. What they did encounter was a powerful entity known as the Kongo kingdom, the most dominant force in the region in the late 15th century. Cao’s first contact with the Bakongo – as the subjects of the Kongo kingdom were known – laid the groundwork for extensive Portuguese involvement in what was the become the colony of Angola, whose colonial economy would become defined by the slave trade. But whereas the primary purpose of earlier Portuguese slave trading in Africa had been driven by the aim of obtaining gold, the Portuguese would harness the labor of slaves from Angola to drive the cultivation of their own sugar plantations.
There were three principal ways in which the Portuguese obtained slaves from the coast of west and central Africa. One was to commission small raiding parties into the interior, while another was to engage in direct warfare. Neither option was used extensively during this early period. Initially, the Portuguese relied on middlemen – coastal African rulers and their subjects – to obtain slaves. Eliminating the need to actually venture into the interior – something no European had much desire to do, due largely in part to the tropical diseases against which white explorers held no immunities -- this was the cheapest and easiest solution, so long as there remained a willing partner able to ensure a continuous flow of trade.
The result this strategy had upon the colonial development of Angola during the first few centuries of the Portuguese presence was to leave its coastline peppered with a series of small settlements, supply depots and trading posts, while the interior was left almost completely unexplored. This is how Africa came to be known as the “Dark Continent.”
The Bakongo and the era of brother kings
While European style kingdoms did not exist in Africa at the time of first contact with white explorers, it is sufficient to describe the Bakongo – who all shared a similar language and culture, and who paid allegiance to a supreme ruler (known as the Manikongo) at his inland capital of Mbanza Kongo – as being subjects of the Kongo kingdom.
The Bakongo were a Bantu people who had migrated to the area less than two centuries prior to the Portuguese arrival, from the region surrounding the capitals of modern day Democratic Republic of the Congo (Kinshasa) and Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville). The Portuguese king Manuel II was able to form an alliance with the Bakongo ruler -- the Manikongo, who was baptized by Portuguese friars in 1491, before rising to the seat of power in the Kongo kingdom as King Afonso I in 1506 -- based upon shared commercial interests (the slave trade).
The period of Portuguese-Bakongo cooperation that began in this period was thus known as the era of brother kings.
The basis of this relationship was the monopoly of the slave trade held by these two rulers. The Mpinda port at the mouth of the Congo River became the epicenter of this new industry. It served as an excellent excuse for the Manikongo to enrich himself while simultaneously weakening potential enemies in his kingdom’s near abroad; Bakongo raiding parties were now given ample incentive to raid those neighboring tribes which could pose as threats to the Kongo kingdom. Once captured, these slaves would be exchanged with Portuguese traders for finished goods from Europe, which quickly became highly sought after by the Bakongo living near Mbanza Kongo.
While Afonso was able to enrich himself in the short term, and build the strength of the Bakongo to unprecedented levels, his relationship with the Portuguese also planted the seeds of the Kongo kingdom’s demise. Depopulation of Afonso’s kingdom quickly became a serious problem the Manikongo, for soon after Portuguese arrived, they began to enslave Bakongo citizens as well, not even sparing the Manikongo’s own relatives at times. Afonso’s pleas to his Portuguese counterpart to end such practices fell upon deaf ears.