Ndongo, Kongo, and the name
The country is named for a title. The rulers of the Ndongo kingdom held the style ngola, and the Portuguese who arrived in the sixteenth century took it for the name of the place. To the north the Kingdom of Kongo reached across what is now northern Angola and the two Congos; its king converted to Christianity and corresponded with Lisbon and Rome as a sovereign, not a subject.
Njinga Mbande — Queen Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba — spent the middle of the seventeenth century keeping the Portuguese out by every means available: war, alliance with the Dutch, diplomacy conducted on her own terms. She is the figure the modern state chose to put at the centre of its own founding story, and for once the choice is earned.
The Atlantic, and the length of it
Luanda was founded in 1576 and became the busiest slaving port on the African coast. The traffic ran overwhelmingly to Brazil, and the link between the two Portuguese colonies was so direct that Brazilian sugar money helped govern Angola. The trade did not taper off until the nineteenth century, and forced labour under other names continued into the twentieth.
Portugal held on longer than any other European power in Africa. It declared Angola an overseas province rather than a colony, refused decolonisation, and fought for it. The war of independence began in 1961 and was still going when a coup in Lisbon in 1974 ended the empire from the inside.
Independence into proxy war
Three movements had fought the Portuguese and did not agree on much else. When independence came on 11 November 1975 the MPLA held Luanda with Soviet arms and Cuban troops; UNITA, under Jonas Savimbi, and the FNLA were backed by the United States, Zaire and apartheid South Africa. The country became a Cold War battlefield within days of ceasing to be a colony.
The war ran, with pauses, until 2002. Its largest set-piece, Cuito Cuanavale in 1987 to 1988, pitted Cuban and Angolan forces against the South African army and is credited across the region with helping to force the settlement that ended apartheid rule in Namibia. Estimates of the Angolan dead over the whole war run to half a million and beyond; the country was left among the most heavily mined on earth. It ended only when Savimbi was killed in the field.
Oil, and who it reached
Angola is one of sub-Saharan Africa's largest oil producers, and for a stretch after the war Luanda was reckoned one of the most expensive cities in the world for expatriates while most Angolans lived on very little. José Eduardo dos Santos ruled from 1979 to 2017; his daughter Isabel was for a time called Africa's richest woman before Angolan and foreign courts began unpicking how the fortune was assembled.
His successor, João Lourenço, made anti-corruption the theme of his first term and pursued members of the old first family. Whether that is a clean-up or a reshuffle is the question Angolans actually argue about. Sonangol, the state oil company, was for decades a state within the state, bankrolling the government and audited by almost no one; reforming it, and weaning the budget off a single barrel, is the real test of the new era.