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Located in south-central Africa, Angola is an emerging energy- and diamond-producing power aiming to become a regional leader. The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) party has ruled the country since its independence from Portugal in 1975, but has only recently consolidated its control over most of the territory outside the capital. Angola can in some respects be considered a new country, only now emerging from constraints on its capability and reach — constraints the MPLA aims to remove.

Angola was first explored by the Portuguese beginning in the 15th century. By the 19th century, the Portuguese had pushed eastward from port enclaves that included Luanda, Lobito, and Namibe. Their aim was not just to acquire as much territory as possible, but specifically to link Angola up to Mozambique, another Portuguese colony, and thereby control a major block of southern African territory. Competing colonial interests ended that pursuit, however, when the British, led by Cecil Rhodes as prime minister of Cape Colony, established the colonies of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) between Angola and Mozambique. The scramble for African territory that concluded at the Berlin Conference in 1884 ensured that no single European power dominated Africa — let alone southern Africa.

Geographically and economically, Angola is the sixth-largest country in Africa. Its gross domestic product (GDP) in 2007, at $44 billion, places its economy at just over one-third the size of Nigeria’s (which measured $115 billion in 2007) and at less than one-fifth the size of Africa’s largest economy, that of South Africa ($255 billion in 2007). Angola’s resource wealth is fairly well concentrated: the majority of its oil assets are located in the country’s northwest corner in Cabinda province (and offshore from it) as well as offshore between Luanda and the northern town of Soyo. Its diamond centers are located in the central and north-central provinces, with newer fields being opened in the northeast and southeast.

Angola is largely a territory of rolling savannah, apart from a highland area around and to the south of the central province Huambo. It has a number of rivers, but — unlike the Congo River in neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo or the Niger River in West Africa — none can accommodate long-distance transportation. The wide expanse of difficult-to-defend savannah has made the movement of armed groups relatively easy and has made it difficult for the MPLA to exert control over the entire country.

Decades of Civil War

Immediately after independence in 1975, Angola descended into a civil war that did not truly end until after 2002. Demographically, the country was divided into three factions competing against each other for territorial control. The MPLA, a Marxist party backed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, was supported by an urban, Portuguese-speaking population based largely around the capital region of Luanda. Angola’s Bakongo population, in the northern oil-producing regions, supported the opposition National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), which in turn was backed by both Western and Eastern interests during the Cold War. The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) was the third force, a group supported by the United States and South Africa as a bulwark against communist expansion in southern Africa. UNITA found its domestic support base among the country’s rural populations, particularly the Ovimbundu tribe, largely found in the country’s diamond-producing central and eastern provinces.

The MPLA had largely defeated the northern FNLA by 1979, but proved unable to conquer UNITA quickly — leaving the opposition groups a base in the mineral-rich regions that provided them a continued source of independent funding.