Angola - Minority Rights Group https://minorityrights.org/country/angola/ Minorities and indigenous peoples Current issues Background Contacts Resources Main languages: according to the 2014 Census, while the majority (71 per cent) of Angolans speak Portuguese – the only official language – at home, other languages spoken include Umbundu (23 per cent), Kikongo (8 per cent), Kimbundu (8 per cent), Chokwe (7 per cent), Nhaneca (3 per cent), Nganguela (3 per cent), Fiote (2 per cent), Kwanhama (2 per cent), Muhumbi (2 per cent), Luvale (1 per cent), others (4 per cent) Main religions: indigenous beliefs, Christianity Angola’s 2014 Census, the first since 1970, included information on language most used in the home, but not on ethnicity. Other sources indicate that Angola’s ethnic groups include Ovimbundu (37 per cent), Mbundu (25 per cent), Bakongo (13 per cent) and mestiço (2 per cent), Lunda-Chokwe (8 per cent), Nyaneka-Nkumbi (3 per cent), Ambo (2 per cent), Herero (up to 0.5 per cent), San 3,600 and Kwisi (up to 0.5 per cent). However, the international indigenous peoples’ rights organization IWGIA puts the number of indigenous people including San, Himba, Kwepe, Kuvale and Zwemba at around 25,000, amounting to 0.1 per cent of the total population, with San alone numbering between 5,000 and 14,000. The majority of today’s Angolans are Bantu peoples, including Ovimbundu, Mbundu and Bakongo, while the San belong to the indigenous Khoisan people. Traditionally a largely rural people of the central highlands, Ovimbundu migrated to the cities in large numbers in search of employment in the twentieth century. The Mbundu are concentrated around Angola’s capital, Luanda, and the north- central provinces. While some Mbundu still speak kiMbundu, many among this minority speak Portuguese as a first language. Spanning both sides of the Congo River, Bakongo people predominate in Angola’s impoverished but oil-rich north-west, including the Atlantic enclave of Cabinda. Bakongo are known for being organizers of businesses, syncretic churches or political movements. In south-western provinces are semi-nomadic cattle-keeping peoples, most of whom are Ambo, Nyaneka-Nkumbi (also known as Nyaneka-Humbe) or Herero. Scattered communities of San and Kwisi peoples, which live chiefly by hunting, gathering and small-scale trade, continue their nomadic existence in the southernmost provinces. Some have settled in rural areas and taken up farming, while others can be found in urban areas. The legacy of colonial rule is also reflected in the existence of 1 of 7 5/14/2020, 1:22 PM Angola - Minority Rights Group https://minorityrights.org/country/angola/ Europeanized assimilados (those Africans classified as Westernized) including mestiços (people of mixed African and European ancestry). These different classifications played a role in Angola’s civil conflict: while the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) was assembled under mestiço and assimilado leadership and the Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola (FNLA) was formed under traditional and assimilado leadership, for example, União para a Independencia Total de Angola (UNITA) was formed as an anti-mestiço movement with some younger assimilado leadership. Updated May 2020 Decades of conflict in Angola, first in the form of the anti-colonial insurgency beginning in the 1960s and then the brutal civil conflict that consumed the country from independence in 1975 until 2002, have left a legacy of poverty, inequality and political factionalism. While the violence was rooted in a range of factors, ethnic and regional divisions played a significant role, with the three main factions – the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA), the Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola (FNLA) and União para a Independencia Total de Angola (UNITA) – all drawing on varying degrees of support and leadership from different regions and communities in the country. With a diverse population that includes Ovimbundu, Mbundu, Bakongo and a variety of other communities, including a mixed Portuguese- Angolan mestiço population and indigenous San, identity and geography continue to play a role in Angola’s politics. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the MPLA’s continued dominance of the government and increasing repression against human rights activists, journalists and political opposition members, the country has managed to avoid a return to civil conflict. Angola also struggles with persistent corruption in its oil sector, a situation that has contributed to its governance challenges and entrenched the majority of Angolans in deep poverty, despite the billions of dollars in revenue generated every year through its extractive industries. This has had particularly negative impacts in Cabinda region, an area that comprises just a small fraction of Angolan territory but contains the majority of its oil. Despite this, however, the local Cabindan population have little in the way of development opportunities and like other Angolans have not benefitted from the country’s oil revenue. This has contributed to the continued insecurity in the area, even after the end of the civil conflict in 2002. Separatist violence has spiked on a number of occasions in recent years, including 2010 and 2016/17, when thousands of Angolan troops were brought into the region after a series of attacks on Angolan soldiers and the abduction of Chinese workers by armed separatists. Angola does not officially recognize the indigenous peoples living in its territory, and as a result the discrimination these communities frequently experience in accessing health care, education and basic needs such as food and water remains unaddressed. Its indigenous population, including San, Himba, Kwepe, Kuvale and Zwemba, together are estimated at around 25,000 (0.1 per cent of the total population) and given their dependence on their traditional lands are especially vulnerable to environmental stresses such as drought. In addition, however, they also contend with the dispossession of their ancestral territory to accommodate tourism, logging and other developments, in the process devastating their way of life. Many were displaced to neighbouring countries such as Namibia, South Africa and Zambia during the civil conflict and have yet to return. 2 of 7 5/14/2020, 1:22 PM Angola - Minority Rights Group https://minorityrights.org/country/angola/ Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have in the past carried out repeated tit-for-tat violent expulsions of thousands of each other’s nationals. Concern over Angola’s treatment of undocumented migrants has continued in recent years, with the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants calling in 2016 for a national strategy to promote and protect their rights in the face of discrimination, harassment, intimidation, arbitrary detention and other abuses after expressing concerns at the detention and expulsion of foreigners, including refugees and asylum seekers. Beginning in October 2018, following an expulsion order by the Angolan government, at least 360,000 Congolese nationals crossed back into DRC, with many reportedly being subjected to violence, extortion and other human rights abuses. Updated May 2020 Environment South of the equator on Africa’s Atlantic coastline, Angola borders the Republic of Congo in the north, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in the north and east, Zambia in the east, and Namibia in the south. Angola’s climate ranges from the tropical north, to its dry central plateaus and desert in the south. Angola’s tiny Cabinda province, in the northwest, is separated from the rest of Angola by a sliver of the DRC that follows the Congo River’s run to the sea. Cabinda is predominantly home to the Bakongo minority and is also where the preponderance of the country’s oil wealth lies. In its northern and central areas, Angola has high quality diamonds: both easily accessible alluvial diamonds (found in riverbeds) and kimberlite pipes, exploitation of which requires industrial equipment. Desertification and deforestation have worsened soil erosion in the country, but Angola still has large swathes of arable land, much of which remains unused as a result of the long civil war, even though an estimated 70 per cent of Angolans are farmers. History It is thought that over 2,000 years ago Bantu peoples migrating from the north largely displaced the original Khoisan hunter-gatherer population in what is today Angola. The country takes its name from the head of the former Mbundu kingdom of Ndongo that dates back at least as far as the sixteenth century, and whose king carried the title ‘Ngola’. Greed and violence, often inspired by outside interests, have driven the history of Angola since Portuguese colonists first arrived in the area in 1483. Slaves, land, oil and diamonds have generated streams of wealth, enriching foreign and domestic elites, and provoking bloody conflicts. The manipulation of racial and ethnic fears and resentments helped to mobilize and direct the armed forces behind the violence. At the bottom were the indigenous communities, as well as the officially undifferentiated mass of non-Westernized Africans. Above them, together with the white colonialists were thin strata of Europeanized assimilados (those Africans certified as Westernized) including mestiços (people of mixed African and European ancestry). Living mainly in cities, they fulfilled intermediate roles in an economy based largely on the cheap labour of a rural unskilled lower class. The Europeanized assimilados