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Flight Angola

About Angola

Angola, officially the Republic of Angola (Portuguese: República de Angola, pronounced IPA: ['publik? d? 'g?l?] Kongo: Repubilika ya Ngola), is a country in south-central Africa bordering Namibia to the south, Democratic Republic of the Congo to the north, and Zambia to the east, and with a west coast along the Atlantic Ocean. The exclave province Cabinda has a border with the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Angola is a former Portuguese colony and has considerable natural resources, most notably petroleum and diamonds.

History

Khoisan hunter-gatherers are some of the earliest known modern human inhabitants of the area. They were largely replaced by Bantu tribes during Bantu migrations, though small numbers of Khoisan remain in parts of southern Angola to the present day. The geographical areas now designated as Angola first became the subject to incursions by Europeans in the late 15th century. In 1483 Portugal established a base at the river Congo, where the Kongo State, Ndongo and Lunda existed. The Kongo State stretched from modern Gabon in the north to the Kwanza River in the south. In 1575 Portugal established a colony at Cabinda based on slave trade. Before the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, slavery was practiced in Africa by many indigenous peoples. The African slave trade provided a large number of black slaves to Europeans and their African agents. For example, in what is now Angola, the Imbangala had economies which were heavily focused on the slave trade. Within the Portuguese Empire, most black African slaves were traded to Brazilian merchants arrived to Portugal's African ports from other Portuguese colony - Brazil (South America) - seeking cheap workforce for use on Brazilian agricultural plantations. This trade would last until the first half of the 1800s. The Portuguese gradually took control of the coastal strip throughout the sixteenth century by a series of treaties and wars forming the Portuguese colony of Angola. Taking advantage of the Portuguese Restoration War, the Dutch occupied Luanda from 1641 to 1648, where they allied with local peoples to consolidate their colonial rule against the remaining Portuguese resistance.

In 1648, Portugal retook Luanda and initiated a process of reconquest of lost territories, which restored the pre-occupation possessions of Portugal by 1650. Treaties regulated relations with Congo in 1649 and Njinga's Kingdom of Matamba and Ndongo in 1656. The conquest of Pungo Andongo in 1671 was the last great Portuguese expansion, as attempts to invade Congo in 1670 and Matamba in 1681 failed. Portugal expanded its territory behind the colony of Benguela in the eighteenth century, and began the attempt to occupy other regions in the mid-nineteenth century. The process resulted in few gains until the 1880s. Full Portuguese administrative control of the interior didn't occur until the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1951, the colony was designated as an overseas province, called Portuguese West Africa. Portugal had a presence in Angola for nearly five hundred years, and the population's initial reaction to calls for independence was mixed.

Leftist military officers overthrew the Caetano government in Portugal in the Carnation Revolution on April 25, 1974. The transitional government opened negotiations with the three main independentist guerrilla groups: MPLA, FNLA, and UNITA, concluding separate peace agreements with each organization. With Portugal out of the picture, the nationalist movements turned on each other, fighting for control of Luanda and international recognition. Holden Roberto, Agostinho Neto, and Jonas Savimbi met in Bukavu, Zaire in July and agreed to negotiate with the Portuguese as one political entity. They met again in Mombasa, Kenya on January 5, 1975 and agreed to stop fighting each other, further outlining constitutional negotiations with the Portuguese. They met for a third time in Alvor, Portugal from January 10-15.

Roberto, Neto, Savimbi, and the Portuguese government signed the Alvor Agreement on January 15, setting November 11 as the date for independence. Alvor marked Angola's transition from the war for independence to the war for Luanda. Portuguese authorities deliberately excluded the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC) and Eastern Revolt from participating in the negotiations to ensure Angola's territorial integrity, in direct opposition to the de Spínola's plans for Angola. The coalition government the Alvor Agreement established soon fell as nationalist factions, doubting one another's commitment to the peace process, tried to take control of the colony by force.