Angola

Angola stretches down Africa’s south-western Atlantic coast, with the enclave of Cabinda lying separately to the north. A narrow coastal plain, dry in the south where the Namib desert begins, rises steeply to the high central plateau of Huambo and Bié, the source of rivers flowing in every direction: the Cuanza to the Atlantic, the Cubango towards the Okavango Delta, and tributaries of the Zambezi eastwards. The north is forested and wet, the south-east dry savannah.

The kingdoms of Kongo and Ndongo ruled the north when Portuguese ships arrived in the 1480s. Luanda, founded in 1576, became one of the main ports of the Atlantic slave trade, which carried several million people from this coast to Brazil and the Caribbean. Queen Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba resisted the Portuguese for decades in the seventeenth century. A war for independence began in 1961; Portugal withdrew in 1975, and a civil war followed that lasted, with pauses, until 2002.

Semba and its slower, close-held offspring kizomba travelled from Luanda’s neighbourhoods to Lisbon and dance halls far beyond. Muamba de galinha, chicken stewed in palm oil with okra, is served with funge, a stiff cassava porridge. Oil pumped from deep water off the coast earns the bulk of export income, diamonds come from the Lunda provinces in the north-east, and the Benguela railway runs inland from the port of Lobito, while farming households grow cassava, maize and beans.