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Angola PRECOLONIAL ANGOLA AND THE ARRIVAL OF THE PORTUGUESE
Although the precolonial history of many parts of
Africa has
been carefully researched and preserved, there is
relatively little
information on the region that forms contemporary Angola
as it was
before the arrival of the Europeans in the late 1400s. The
colonizers of Angola, the Portuguese, did not study the
area as
thoroughly as British, French, and German scholars
researched their
colonial empires. The Portuguese, in fact, were more
concerned with
recording the past of their own people in Angola than with
the
history of the indigenous populations.
The limited information that is available indicates
that the
original inhabitants of present-day Angola were hunters
and
gatherers. Their descendants, called Bushmen by the
Europeans,
still inhabit portions of southern Africa, and small
numbers of
them may still be found in southern Angola. These Khoisan
speakers
lost their predominance in southern Africa as a result of
the
southward expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples during the
first
millennium A.D.
The Bantu speakers were a Negroid people, adept at
farming,
hunting, and gathering, who probably began their
migrations from
the rain forest near what is now the Nigeria-Cameroon
border. Bantu
expansion was carried out by small groups that made a
series of
short relocations over time in response to economic or
political
conditions. Some historians believe that the Khoisan
speakers were
peacefully assimilated rather than conquered by the Bantu.
Others
contend that the Khoisan, because of their passive nature,
simply
vacated the area and moved south, away from the newcomers.
In either case, the Bantu settled in Angola between
1300 and
1600, and some may have arrived even earlier. The Bantu
formed a
number of historically important kingdoms. The earliest
and perhaps
most important of these was the Kongo Kingdom, which arose
between
the mid-1300s and the mid-1400s in an area overlapping the
presentday border between Angola and Zaire
(see
fig. 2). Other
important
kingdoms were Ndongo, located to the south of Kongo;
Matamba,
Kasanje, and Lunda, located east of Ndongo; Bié, Bailundu,
and
Ciyaka, located on the plateau east of Benguela; and
Kwanhama (also
spelled Kwanyama), located near what is now the border
between
Angola and Namibia. Although they did not develop a strong
central
government, the Chokwe (also spelled Cokwe) established a
significant cultural center in the northeast of
present-day Angola.
The precolonial kingdoms differed in area and the
number of
subjects who owed allegiance, however nominal, to a
central
authority. The kings might not directly control more land
or people
than a local ruler, but they were generally acknowledged
as
paramount. Kings were offered tribute and were believed to
possess
substantial religious power and authority. A king's actual
secular
power, however, was determined as much by his own personal
abilities as by institutional arrangements.
The African kingdoms tended to extend their lines of
communication inland, away from the Atlantic Ocean. Until
the
arrival of the Europeans, Africans regarded the sea as a
barrier to
trade. Although the sea might supply salt or shells that
could be
used as currency, the interior held the promise of better
hunting,
farming, mining, and trade.
Data as of February 1989
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