Like other cultures, Angolan humor is often tied to the farcical events of everyday life. See an example of a daily comic page from Journal de Angola, a daily Angolan newspaper. Translation: "Sir, is this in a hurry?" "No, I have only waited here three hours!"

A Strategic Alliance in Africa Highlighting US-Africa Partnership During his recent visit to Angola, Secretary of State Antony Blinken emphasized the growing

Angola travel blog highlighting a few interesting sights in this country slowly recovering from a long and tragic civil war.

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Bakongo (also known as Mkongo or Mukongo). In one of the Bantu languages, Kongo, the word “Ba” means “People” while “Kongo” according to an adventure means “Hunter” while according to others it means “Gathering” or “Mountains”. There is yet to a decisive context for it. Even the term “Congo” was a term used to refer to

Angola is renowned for being one of the most diverse countries in the world. With rolling rock formations, beautiful white sandy beaches an...

In 1482 the portuguese explorer Diego Cao discovered river Congo's mouth. What is now Angola first became subject to incursions by the Portuguese in the late 15th century. In 1483, when Portugal established relations with the Kongo State, Ndongo and Lunda already existed. The Kongo State stretched from modern Gabon in the north to the Kwanza River in the south. Angola became a link in European trade with India and Southeast Asia. The Portuguese explorer Paulo Dias de Novais founded Luanda in 1575 as "S„o Paulo de Loanda", with a hundred families of settlers and four hundred soldiers. Portuguese established several settlements, forts and trading posts along the coastal strip of what is now Angola like Benguela for example. This fort was founded in 1587 (and became a town in 1617). which relied on slave trade, commerce in raw materials, and exchange of goods for survival. The slave trade became the basis of the local economy, with raids carried ever further inland to procure captives. More than a million men, women and children were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean. Most of the slaves were sent to Brazil. The Portuguese gradually took control of the coastal strip during the 16th century by a series of treaties and wars. Taking advantage of the Portuguese Restoration War, the Dutch occupied Luanda from 1641 to 1648, where they allied with local peoples, consolidating their colonial rule against the remaining Portuguese resistance. In 1648, a fleet under the command of Salvador de S· retook Luanda for Portugal and the other lost territories, which restored Portugal to its former possessions by 1650. Treaties regulated relations with Kongo 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. Portugal expanded its territory behind the colony of Benguela in the 18th century, and began the attempt to occupy other regions in the mid-19th century. During the 19th century the western embargo on the slave trade brought Angola's main export to an end. The shipping of slaves from Angola was banned in 1836, but slavery remained legal in the Portuguese empire until 1875. Slaves could no longer be sold abroad but remained used in the colony. Settlers came and were granted with lands inland from Luanda. Plantations were established, with coffee, cotton and sugar as the main crops. But this encroachment led to continual outbreaks of warfare with local rulers of the Kongo, Mbundu and Ovambo peoples. Angola was mostly unsettled when the European scramble for Africa began in the 1880s. Development of the hinterland began after the Berlin Conference in 1885, which fixed the colony's borders, and British and Portuguese investment fostered mining, railways, and agriculture based on various forced labour systems. Full Portuguese administrative control over the hinterland did not occur until the beginning of the 20th century. © Eric Lafforgue www.ericlafforgue.com